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North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical Re: Cisco's CNR vs ISC Bind/DHCP
On Mon, 20 Mar 2000 19:44:28 -0500 Thomas Novak wrote: > > If you are looking at CNR and are running in a cable modem > > Have you inquired/looked at the Cisco CSRC product for provisioning it? > > You might want to look at CNR as it is part of the CSRC solution for > provisioning/managing not only Cisco but any DOCSIS compliant cable modem Thanks for your suggestion Thomas! We have tested, evaluated and used CSRC in production. We think that tftp still works pretty well. Different applications need different tools. The right tool for a large business which is not an ISP is not necessarily the right tool for an ISP. It can be a high quality tool for a non-ISP, and not be right for an ISP. I have noticed over the last 15 years, the rise of the assumption that GUIs (or in the last 7 the web interface) are useful under a wide variety of circumstances and are always better than command line or API interfaces. For some set of high value clients, a GUI or web interface, if it adds bugs, is actually a negative. For people like us, we want efficient, reliable service components with clean, clearly documented APIs. Our job is to build reliable systems with high performance integration with other system components, such as metering, monitoring and billing systems. In general, GUIs are for untrained and casual users. I like these for things like Visio and Spreadsheets which are not core applications for me. If you are working with tens of thousands of simultaneous connections, you better not be maintaining your DHCP records and DOCSIS configurations with a GUI! Once again, I would draw the analogy with Cisco's (or Livingston,Xyzel,Bay,etc,etc,insert router vendor here) "router configuration GUI". If router configuration is tangential to your core business, you probably use one of these. If router configuration is your core business, I bet you dream in IOS command line syntax from time to time. Any how, I sincerely appreciate all the input I have recieved from all of you. It has been generally high quality yet colorful, like most NANOG discussions. I am sorry if my initial request for feedback seemed flippant. While I do hope the bug count for CSRC/CNR goes down, I would guess that for a large market segment, it is the best tool. For us, we will stick with the ISC DNS/DHCP/tftp suite. regards, fletcher
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