Tore Anderson <tore.anderson@redpill-linpro.com> wrote:
Juniper. If you want to run OSPFv3 on their layer 3 switches, you need a quite expensive "advanced" licence. OSPFv2, on the other hand, is included in the base licence.
Really? My level of respect for Juniper has just dropped a few notches after reading this NANOG post - I didn't know that they were engaged in such DRM-like feature blocking practices. Where can I find more information about Juniper's stance on such practices (having some feature X present in both HW and SW, but artificially blocked until one buys an unlock key from them) and the exact degree to which they engage in such? The reason I ask is because I've been considering building my own PIM for their J-series, a PIM that would terminate Nokia/Covad's flavor of SDSL/2B1Q at the physical layer and present an ATM interface to JunOS, optionally supporting NxSDSL bonding with MLPPPoA. I have no love for routers that aren't 100% FOSS, but I couldn't find any other existing router platform which could be extended with 3rd-party physical interface modules, and designing and building my own base router chassis is not a viable option if I want to actually have something built before the Sun swells into a red giant and engulfs the Earth. So I thought that even though it isn't 100% FOSS, JunOS ought to be at least tolerable given that it appears to be based on FreeBSD and I've heard that it even allows the user to get direct access to the underlying Unix shell (does it really?) - but hearing about DRM-like artificial feature blocking seems to negate that. I mean, how could their disabled-until-you-pay blocking of "premium features" be effective if a user can get to the underlying Unix OS, shell, file system, processes, etc? Wouldn't such access allow smart users to unblock whatever feature is artificially blocked? Someone please educate me... MS