Juniper Kit

wij · 22 Oct 2009 at 10:49

Thinking of picking up one of their entry level devices for a bit of hands on experience at home, would something like an old Netscreen be worth buying or should I be looking at the newer SSG series stuff?

bigredshark · 22 Oct 2009 at 11:04

Well the command line is the same and unless you need the extra features or performance there's no good reason to get the SSG (and I have an SSG at home as my primary router). The new SRX boxes are the top of the line kit now (well, maybe not for all businesses, but they run JUNOS and are hence far superior to the screenos based kit...)

wij · 22 Oct 2009 at 11:57

Thanks

Is there any advantage to learning on the newer Junos kit over the older stuff running ScreenOS?

You say they are far superior - anything in particular in relation to the operation of the software or is it more a performance thing?

Sorry if those are really trivial questions, but I'm not overly familiar with Juniper stuff so just looking to expand my knowledge and if that means I'd be better off spending £350 on a little SRX100 than buying an old NS/SSG from the online flea market so be it

atomiser · 22 Oct 2009 at 12:54

if you've got the dosh for an srx100 then go for it, but netscreen/ssg kit is still out there and can be had very cheaply on the 'bay, so why not learn both, and how to migrate between? we've still got a ha pair of ns50's, two standalone ns25's and scores of 5gt-adsl devices still out there working as well as the first day we installed them. we also have an ssg5, a couple of ssg20's, and a ha pair of ssg140's too. our biggest devices are a ha pair of isg2000 devices. i can work on all of those devices without blinking an eyelid they are so similar. might have to get the mgmt to purchase some of the newer srx devices to play with though

good luck with whatever you buy!

bigredshark · 22 Oct 2009 at 13:36

wij said:
Thanks

Is there any advantage to learning on the newer Junos kit over the older stuff running ScreenOS?

You say they are far superior - anything in particular in relation to the operation of the software or is it more a performance thing?

Sorry if those are really trivial questions, but I'm not overly familiar with Juniper stuff so just looking to expand my knowledge and if that means I'd be better off spending £350 on a little SRX100 than buying an old NS/SSG from the online flea market so be it

JUNOS is the future for all juniper devices, the million pound internet core routers (TX-Matrix etc) run JUNOS with the same command line as the £300 SRX100. ScreenOS isn't dead yet and it won't die quickly but eventually die it will.

Depends on what you want to learn to do with it...