Cisco did provide updates via CCO and anonymous ftp server. They quite openly told that just download new image and test in your lab, and then if feature set did require licensing, please do it before deploying production. Trust was put on customers and they did very little to check and verify if customers did comply. Which is quite contrary to what for example Oracle practise is been.
>If history has taught us anything. It’s that the measure of a successful product is usually more to do with its sales people.
As someone who worked Cisco gear over thirty years I still remember why us networking did want cisco instead of many other brand devices and it hadn't anything to do with marketing and sales people did.
The Cisco IOS text based configuration was in early days of internet which made it so popular.
Many other manufacturers like HP, 3Com, Cabletron, Madge (IBM), Bridge, etc. did not get why we wanted and complained “give us textual configuration format like IOS has”.
With a plain text based configuration it was easy to adapt configuration from one model to have ready made templates for each model, upgrades and migration to new models were easier, you could use version controls (rcs,cvs, svn,... long before git) and then when RANCiD came it was easy to automate config backups, revert and rollback changes, pass audit with human readable configs and what was in production even long time after etc. In short text based configs made it possible to build large network scale configurations management tools.
IOS has compact, but quite easy to read config snippets made it much easier emailing others, posting examples newsgroups, opening TAC at Cisco CCO, books with examples, learning and teaching etc.
It took quite long before for example HP understood and switched text formats right after turn of century. Juniper seemed to understood right from beginning. But some like Fore, Nortel, Alcatel (ATM-switch makers) and many others did not understand before going out of business. Most of these others had either menus (3Com, HP) or a lousy CLI with obscure unique for just that device model and quite often not even option to print config or if they had not just with changes from default config but printing everything and providing no means to drop showing default. This made it manually while online very hard without external version control to even know what is current status and what had been changes.
BTW, this is still an issue with some manufacturers haven't understood and makes their devices much worse than they understand. Fortigate firewalls CLI is still like this. You can select a subsection of config to print, but it will no indication what differs from default configs. And the whole firewall config is hundreds of kilobytes. Good luck finding what's been changed unless you had saved default config when you started using that device!
When you have thousands to even tens of thousands of network devices in use as many were working you need to be rely that even when you encounter device failure and you don’t have same model any more available, you are able to adapt and find working fix configuring something else doing what is needed.
Binary and any non textual configurations may fit the purpose SOHO category devices, but when network grows even bit larger and configurations more complex there isn’t anything better than text base configs as far as us humans will need to configure and maintain those devices.
Cisco have had issues with software quality for sure, but it was Cisco IOS that was the reason it became so popular and we wanted to use it.
And we did put more weigh on manageability which that IOS text based configuration provided than for example speed some manufacturers got with their devices (Madge, etc.) and even when some Cisco switches dropped some Network World tests more packets we still wanted that manageability more and relied Cisco will fix those issues with software upgrades which it often did.
Juniper when it came end of 90's did understand this and made even better configuration system for Junos than IOS was and still is. Cisco have improved things with IOS-XR, but it's still not up to what Junos is currently.
e: fixed few typos and added that manageability chapter near end. Places where I did work none were always everything Cisco places. No, but either so called ABC (Anything But Cisco) places either. Cisco was and is still popular for those reasons mentioned above.
> Juniper when it came end of 90's did understand this and made even better configuration system for Junos than IOS was and still is.
"even better" is an understatement ! I was working on a dual-vendor network at the time, we ran Cisco and Juniper in parallel.
Working on Cisco always just felt like going back to the 18th century, I mean the whole candidate and active config thing alone in Junos was insanely valuable:
show | compare # diff the config
commit check # lint it
commit confirmed 10 # apply it, but don't persist unless confirmed
commit # confirm
Meanwhile, back in 18th century iOS land, a fat finger on the ACL would leave you with a bad day in the office until you rebooted the box via OOB.
This is very true, and it's easy to forget that it often has nothing to do with how good/great the product is, unless it is self-evident and thus self-promoting (which for most non-trivial things is simply not the case).
Or perhaps the lack thereof if you are one of the unsuccessful companies. In the 90s, I worked for a company that competed with Cisco I worked for a company that competed with Cisco. story was in the mid 80s an executive went to Silicon Valley. His report was that Cisco was a bunch of nobodies that would never go anywhere, which they'd go down the street and buy Vitalink instead. You have heard of Cisco and not Vitalink for a reason.
It doesn't, but Cisco was great and they've just evolved into a laughing stock. Their stuff is really bad these days.
And they've overstretched their product line to too many things, trying to be the "be all" company. Fortinet is making the same mistake, but they're earlier in that process.
I mean, it's not really a mistake on their parts, their primary goal is to get rich and they are succeeding.
Citation: I've been working with Cisco technologies since the mid-1990s. At my current job, we are a few weeks away from phasing out the last of our Cisco junk. And since people will ask: to Juniper/Mist and Arista.
True. There were few (no other?) options for routers back then. I have fond memories of locking myself out of an ISP's core router then having to power cycle it.
Funnily enough that isn’t too far from where Cisco themselves started.
When they started making smallish dedicated routers I remember opening one to see a dodgy backplane and a number of big boards plugged in held up only by minimal slides. The minute it got hot (which it did because no air management) those boards sagged in the middle and it just looked slapdash. The 3Com equivalents were always better built but Cisco had such mindshare it didn’t matter the products were a bit crap
Yep! I remember one of the ISPs I worked for paying like $15K for a Cisco 4500 router with 8 synchronous serial ports and a couple of 10 megabit ethernets. We'd laugh at the sorta bandwidth today. We had a bunch of T1s and a couple of Ascend boxes off of the ethernet.
Back then they only really did routing and switching, and those are still the only things that Cisco kind-of does well.
Almost every new product of theirs I’ve touched in the last 20 years has been trash, and even the R&S golden goose is being dragged in that direction with customer-hostile functionality like Smart Licensing and a general decline in quality.
So was Oracle and Microsoft Windows.
If history has taught us anything. It’s that the measure of a successful product is usually more to do with its sales people.
>So was Oracle and Microsoft Windows.
Cisco did provide updates via CCO and anonymous ftp server. They quite openly told that just download new image and test in your lab, and then if feature set did require licensing, please do it before deploying production. Trust was put on customers and they did very little to check and verify if customers did comply. Which is quite contrary to what for example Oracle practise is been.
>If history has taught us anything. It’s that the measure of a successful product is usually more to do with its sales people.
As someone who worked Cisco gear over thirty years I still remember why us networking did want cisco instead of many other brand devices and it hadn't anything to do with marketing and sales people did.
The Cisco IOS text based configuration was in early days of internet which made it so popular.
Many other manufacturers like HP, 3Com, Cabletron, Madge (IBM), Bridge, etc. did not get why we wanted and complained “give us textual configuration format like IOS has”.
With a plain text based configuration it was easy to adapt configuration from one model to have ready made templates for each model, upgrades and migration to new models were easier, you could use version controls (rcs,cvs, svn,... long before git) and then when RANCiD came it was easy to automate config backups, revert and rollback changes, pass audit with human readable configs and what was in production even long time after etc. In short text based configs made it possible to build large network scale configurations management tools.
IOS has compact, but quite easy to read config snippets made it much easier emailing others, posting examples newsgroups, opening TAC at Cisco CCO, books with examples, learning and teaching etc.
It took quite long before for example HP understood and switched text formats right after turn of century. Juniper seemed to understood right from beginning. But some like Fore, Nortel, Alcatel (ATM-switch makers) and many others did not understand before going out of business. Most of these others had either menus (3Com, HP) or a lousy CLI with obscure unique for just that device model and quite often not even option to print config or if they had not just with changes from default config but printing everything and providing no means to drop showing default. This made it manually while online very hard without external version control to even know what is current status and what had been changes.
BTW, this is still an issue with some manufacturers haven't understood and makes their devices much worse than they understand. Fortigate firewalls CLI is still like this. You can select a subsection of config to print, but it will no indication what differs from default configs. And the whole firewall config is hundreds of kilobytes. Good luck finding what's been changed unless you had saved default config when you started using that device!
When you have thousands to even tens of thousands of network devices in use as many were working you need to be rely that even when you encounter device failure and you don’t have same model any more available, you are able to adapt and find working fix configuring something else doing what is needed.
Binary and any non textual configurations may fit the purpose SOHO category devices, but when network grows even bit larger and configurations more complex there isn’t anything better than text base configs as far as us humans will need to configure and maintain those devices.
Cisco have had issues with software quality for sure, but it was Cisco IOS that was the reason it became so popular and we wanted to use it.
And we did put more weigh on manageability which that IOS text based configuration provided than for example speed some manufacturers got with their devices (Madge, etc.) and even when some Cisco switches dropped some Network World tests more packets we still wanted that manageability more and relied Cisco will fix those issues with software upgrades which it often did.
Juniper when it came end of 90's did understand this and made even better configuration system for Junos than IOS was and still is. Cisco have improved things with IOS-XR, but it's still not up to what Junos is currently.
e: fixed few typos and added that manageability chapter near end. Places where I did work none were always everything Cisco places. No, but either so called ABC (Anything But Cisco) places either. Cisco was and is still popular for those reasons mentioned above.
> Juniper when it came end of 90's did understand this and made even better configuration system for Junos than IOS was and still is.
"even better" is an understatement ! I was working on a dual-vendor network at the time, we ran Cisco and Juniper in parallel.
Working on Cisco always just felt like going back to the 18th century, I mean the whole candidate and active config thing alone in Junos was insanely valuable:
Meanwhile, back in 18th century iOS land, a fat finger on the ACL would leave you with a bad day in the office until you rebooted the box via OOB.This is very true, and it's easy to forget that it often has nothing to do with how good/great the product is, unless it is self-evident and thus self-promoting (which for most non-trivial things is simply not the case).
Or perhaps the lack thereof if you are one of the unsuccessful companies. In the 90s, I worked for a company that competed with Cisco I worked for a company that competed with Cisco. story was in the mid 80s an executive went to Silicon Valley. His report was that Cisco was a bunch of nobodies that would never go anywhere, which they'd go down the street and buy Vitalink instead. You have heard of Cisco and not Vitalink for a reason.
Just because something is/was widely deployed does not mean it was good
It doesn't, but Cisco was great and they've just evolved into a laughing stock. Their stuff is really bad these days.
And they've overstretched their product line to too many things, trying to be the "be all" company. Fortinet is making the same mistake, but they're earlier in that process.
I mean, it's not really a mistake on their parts, their primary goal is to get rich and they are succeeding.
Citation: I've been working with Cisco technologies since the mid-1990s. At my current job, we are a few weeks away from phasing out the last of our Cisco junk. And since people will ask: to Juniper/Mist and Arista.
I was curious but wasn't going to ask, so thank you for adding it!
Cisco was never great, their stuff was overpriced and their OS was a joke.
True. There were few (no other?) options for routers back then. I have fond memories of locking myself out of an ISP's core router then having to power cycle it.
I remember routers being Very Expensive and so realizing you could route 10mb/s with an old Pc and some 3com cards and BSD was a big deal.
Funnily enough that isn’t too far from where Cisco themselves started.
When they started making smallish dedicated routers I remember opening one to see a dodgy backplane and a number of big boards plugged in held up only by minimal slides. The minute it got hot (which it did because no air management) those boards sagged in the middle and it just looked slapdash. The 3Com equivalents were always better built but Cisco had such mindshare it didn’t matter the products were a bit crap
Yep! I remember one of the ISPs I worked for paying like $15K for a Cisco 4500 router with 8 synchronous serial ports and a couple of 10 megabit ethernets. We'd laugh at the sorta bandwidth today. We had a bunch of T1s and a couple of Ascend boxes off of the ethernet.
Back then they only really did routing and switching, and those are still the only things that Cisco kind-of does well.
Almost every new product of theirs I’ve touched in the last 20 years has been trash, and even the R&S golden goose is being dragged in that direction with customer-hostile functionality like Smart Licensing and a general decline in quality.