Tuesday, November 18, 2008

ScreenOS vs JUNOS

Hi all,

You all know i am a big fan of the Juniper FW/VPN appliances (Old Netscreen firewalls/vpn). This was because of the very powerfull ScreenOS. it is a very easy and power full OS, which had unbelievable debug features.

But 2 years ago i came in contact with a even more nice and powerfull OS: JUNOS.

This was like a new world that had been opened for me ...

The first years of my career i have been working with IOS and after 1,5 year i saw the netscreen products and was sure this is one of the finest OS's out there. But this was because i never saw JUNOS before.

Some examples of what JUNOS has and ScreenOS doesn't:

Cons ScreenOS:

- bindings (objects are bind to eachother so you can't edit or change them)
> This is something i really hate about screenOS
- working directly in running config.
>this is also a big pain of IOS.
- only one active and one saved config.

Pro's ScreenOS:

- Debugging
> this is one of the best debugging engines i have ever seen.
- Vrouters/SBR/SIBR/PBR
- Route based VPN's

Con's JUNOS:

This is really a hard one.
- Debugging (and this is because i still find the screenOS based debugging engine the best i worked with. BUT Juniper is putting a lot of effort in this, and the last release 9.2 was almost the same then the screenos debug output)

Pro's JUNOS:

- Candidate config.
> When you change the config, you work in a candidate config. This is copy of the active config, which means when i change something in this config it isn't active yet.
- commit confirm
> this command will activate your changes, but will ask you to confirm it after a given time. If you don't confirm, he will do a automatic rollback to the previous config version. AND this without a reboot!!
- rename
> you are able to change a config from one interface to other with one one command (just rename the interface name for example.
- macro's
> you are able to make your own macro's. one example is: if your company has a config policy (like always place discription when configuring a interface / when you do a save of a config you need to give comments / etc...). this is all possible with JUNOS.

Because of all these nice features, i can only say one thing.... I love JUNOS!!

For all engineers out there, just try this OS and you will see how powerfull it is.

I will try to give some example later on.

Cu all later