Jonathon Exley (Jonathon.Exley) writes:
However vendors of low cost routers/switches/muxes
Hi Jonathon, have you ever tried to work with a Catalyst Express 500 ? A good example of a fully functional IOS device, where the vendor went out of their way to disable Telnet/SSH, and force one to run CLI commands via the a Web UI. You can do everything, but even "vty 0 x" and "transport input telnet" won't give access.
seem to take a stab in the dark and produce some really nasty stuff.
Cisco isn't exactly low cost, but the point here is exactly that: take away CLI and tools that make automation easier, so that customers will feel compelled to buy the more expensive stuff if they want the fancy stuff (which, in this case, is actually LESS fancy). It's not incompetence, it's called crippleware, and it's a business model :)
Maybe the vendors need some sort of best practices guide for what manageability features their kit needs to support to make them acceptable to the market. Does anyone know if there is anything along these lines?
Yes, don't buy the cheap stuff :) Phil