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A comment on Multiple Severe Vulnerabilities Reported in Juniper Networks Hardware. Parent comment

Re:Multiple Severe Vulnerabilities Reported in Juniper Netwo... by SEJeff on Wednesday October 10, 2018 @05:27PM (#18189078)
Fun fact, Arista switches are very lightly modified minimal Fedora installs with some fancy hardware. The entire userspace (literally all of it) is written in well done python and the magic is all in their asics. I got to RE their entire firmware as part of R&D at one of my previous employers.
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Re:Multiple Severe Vulnerabilities Reported in Juniper Netwo... by intorio on Wednesday October 10, 2018 @08:34PM (#18190144)
Arista uses commodity ASICs which are programmed from specialized binary blobs running in a linux based userspace. This is the same thing linux whitebox switches do.
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Re:Multiple Severe Vulnerabilities Reported in Juniper Netwo... by SEJeff on Thursday October 11, 2018 @09:28AM (#18193333)
Sorry I should have better specified. The magic is in the asics that are programmed with their own proprietary magic, but most of the userspace is written in python, and it is relatively well written python.
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Re:Multiple Severe Vulnerabilities Reported in Juniper Netwo... by nwlieb on Wednesday October 10, 2018 @10:36PM (#18190646)
The majority of the userspace is not in python, but binaries. None of the magic is in the asics (which are commodity Broadcom).
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Re:Multiple Severe Vulnerabilities Reported in Juniper Netwo... by SEJeff on Thursday October 11, 2018 @09:27AM (#18193327)
Sorry the majority of the troubleshooting and management bits are all in python. You can even get a bash shell on an Arista if you want. Quite nice hardware.
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Re:Multiple Severe Vulnerabilities Reported in Juniper Netwo... by xvf22 on Wednesday October 10, 2018 @05:31PM (#18189105)
Don't they run on commodity Broadcom ASICs?
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Re:Multiple Severe Vulnerabilities Reported in Juniper Netwo... by mcpherrinm on Thursday October 11, 2018 @12:49AM (#18191028)
Modern network ASICs are highly-programmable devices. So you can implement a lot of magic on the same hardware as competitors.

It's really not one way or the other, but the software and hardware working together that's important.

[disclaimer: I am a former Arista employee. I did some of the "light" Fedora modifications.]

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Re:Multiple Severe Vulnerabilities Reported in Juniper Netwo... by SEJeff on Thursday October 11, 2018 @09:31AM (#18193347)
Did I get it wrong? One thing we found interesting is that we could run unmodified software directly on the switches so long as we built it for the AMD Athlons running on them.
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Re:Multiple Severe Vulnerabilities Reported in Juniper Netwo... by cgh on Wednesday October 10, 2018 @06:05PM (#18189346)
Yes but then again, so do some Cisco switches nowadays. Arista's management team is former Cisco as well. There is a tangled legal history between the two companies, with Cisco claiming various patent infringements. So far as I know, none of the claims are hardware-related.
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Re:Multiple Severe Vulnerabilities Reported in Juniper Netwo... by xvf22 on Wednesday October 10, 2018 @08:04PM (#18190015)
Previous poster claimed that all of the magic was hardware but I've always been told that it was in the software. HPE now seems to have some agreement with Arista.
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Re:Multiple Severe Vulnerabilities Reported in Juniper Netwo... by itomato on Wednesday October 17, 2018 @02:17PM (#18241911)
Precisely my point. Cumulus, Canonical, Fedora - take your pick.
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Re:Multiple Severe Vulnerabilities Reported in Juniper Netwo... by isostatic on Wednesday October 10, 2018 @11:32PM (#18190819)
Ariana impressed me with their automated testing. Prices are very reasonable too.
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Re:Multiple Severe Vulnerabilities Reported in Juniper Netwo... by e-m-p on Thursday October 11, 2018 @01:16AM (#18191102)
Everyone has automated testing. What Arista doesn’t have is 20+ years of features (bloat).
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Re:Multiple Severe Vulnerabilities Reported in Juniper Netwo... by isostatic on Friday October 12, 2018 @12:46AM (#18199280)
I'd like to think they do, but Cisco and Juniper sales guys have been rather cagey on the scale of their testing.
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Re:Multiple Severe Vulnerabilities Reported in Juniper Netwo... by tatersolid on Friday October 12, 2018 @06:19AM (#18200416)
As a customer of both Cisco and juniper for many years, I can surmise based on experience of their software quality that Cisco has terrible automated testing, and Juniper has less terrible but still terrible automated testing.

Both vendors have a lot of legacy code, so this is somewhat expected. Arista started with modern kernels and used modern development practices from the start.

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Re:Multiple Severe Vulnerabilities Reported in Juniper Netwo... by anon49124 on Wednesday October 10, 2018 @06:38PM (#18189576)
Barracuda firewalls are similar: mostly vanilla Linux with a little magic.
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Re:Multiple Severe Vulnerabilities Reported in Juniper Netwo... by intorio on Wednesday October 10, 2018 @08:35PM (#18190148)
That 'little' magic being specialized hardware packet processors that are programmed from proprietary programs running in Linux.
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