Is Cisco equpiment de facto for you?

[jbates at brightok.net (Jack Bates)]

On 1/13/2011 8:46 AM, Brandon Kim wrote:
>
> For ISL, I know they are trying to phase that out. For the exams, they are based on dot1q.....
>
> Even if I had all cisco equipment, I'd try to go with standards because you never know down the road where you may
> need to use another vendor.
>
> I wouldn't use EIGRP if given a choice, I'd go with OSPF or RIPv2.
>

Grrr, IS-IS. SP protocol of choice. Don't believe me, look at some 
juniper licensing (you'll need to pay us more for IS-IS, but OSPF is 
available on this cheap enterprise switch for freeeeeeee). Has an 
annoyance factor of not every vendor supporting it, but lack of IS-IS or 
some of it's features often shows the caliber of gear you are dealing 
with or it's current maturity (Brocade MLX had IS-IS v6 support, but 
didn't support multitopology when I last tested, which gives me an idea 
of their v6 support compared to vendors such as C/J).

OT: Learned my first hard lesson on playing with routing protocols on 
production network in non-standard ways. MLX was interconnected using 
single topology to the cisco which was using multitopology. I didn't 
expect the v6 side to work naturally. Upon upgrading the MLX to a later 
code, the Juniper isolated by 2 cisco's from the MLX core dumped the 
routing process repeatedly. Unplugged the MLX, the Juniper stabilized. 
Gotta love them nasty bugs. Of course, I suspect the bug was related to 
interconnecting a single topology into a multi-topology, which you 
really aren't supposed to do. :)


Jack