Security quote of the week [LWN.net]

Security quote of the week

Posted Oct 12, 2023 14:33 UTC (Thu) by Gotchfutchian (guest, #167310)
Parent article: Security quote of the week

Absolutely awful. My father used to be a network engineer, and somehow prefers Cisco hardware.

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Security quote of the week

Posted Oct 23, 2023 20:51 UTC (Mon) by musicon (guest, #4739) [Link] (1 responses)

Cisco does decent hardware but atrocious software. Borderline incompetent on so many levels that I won't be remotely surprised to see the same hardcoded password issue from them ten years from now.

Security quote of the week

Posted Oct 26, 2023 4:57 UTC (Thu) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link]

Sane software development practices are definitely not in their DNA, they still copy/pasta the whole OS for each product line AFAIK, hack on it until it boots, then forever have to patch and backport features between variants at great expense and with great fragilty. Basically the Android development model, but all within competing business units of one company. And that's just for IOS/IOS-XE, NXOS is a wholly different beast but with many of the same pathologies, let alone IOS-XR which is different again, and not including PIX/ASA/Firepower which is different again. Very different than Juniper where they have _one_ OS image that runs the same userspace across the vast majority of their hardware, just with different drivers for different hardware, based on something that's recognizable as FreeBSD, all Cisco stuff is based on Linux but setup in a very strange way and often tucked away behind a facade of IOS-like CLI.

On the hardware front they are just trying to stay relevant as off the shelf OEM chips from Broadcom and Intel can do all the important stuff that used to require custom ASICs and differentiated vendors, so they have to find proprietary add-ons, or the warm embrace of legacy compatibility, or support, to keep people from just buying no-name, reference-design gear fresh off the boat.