router platforms

[sara sh]

Hello,
I want to know does all of the routers have an Operating system like Linux, or is there any router which has a windows platform?

 

[dave_the_nerd]

Hello,
I want to know does all of the routers have an Operating system like Linux, or is there any router which has a windows platform?

A router is a computer that manages traffic between multiple networks. They all have an operating system, usually referred to as firmware.

You can certainly take a computer with Windows and use it as a Router. But license costs mean most routers don't run Windows.

Most routers made for home use run some variation of Linux, which may be or less visible. The ASUS RT-AC66U I have, for instance, actually allows telnet access and configuration. The netgear wifi bridge I had for my old printer also ran Linux, but didn't have CLI access.

High end routers for Enterprise use (like Cisco or Juniper) usually run a custom operating system. (Cisco's run iOS, for example.)

Aftermarket router "firmware" like dd-wrt and Tomato are, at their core, Linux systems. You can even run dd-wrt on a "normal" computer with dd-wrt-x86.

 

[JackMDS]

This is an example to a Windows Router.

http://virtualrouter.codeplex.com/

Since it is running on a Windows Computer No lic. fee involves.

Otherwise, as Dave said above' "license costs mean most routers don't run Windows".

 

[alkemyst]

A router is a computer that manages traffic between multiple networks. They all have an operating system, usually referred to as firmware.

You can certainly take a computer with Windows and use it as a Router. But license costs mean most routers don't run Windows.

Most routers made for home use run some variation of Linux, which may be or less visible. The ASUS RT-AC66U I have, for instance, actually allows telnet access and configuration. The netgear wifi bridge I had for my old printer also ran Linux, but didn't have CLI access.

High end routers for Enterprise use (like Cisco or Juniper) usually run a custom operating system. (Cisco's run iOS, for example.)

Aftermarket router "firmware" like dd-wrt and Tomato are, at their core, Linux systems. You can even run dd-wrt on a "normal" computer with dd-wrt-x86.

Cisco IOS and NX-OS are linux based.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

Cisco IOS and NX-OS are linux based.

Yeah but the commands are all different.

Is there a way to get an exposed bash shell on a Cisco router? Because that would be cool.

 

[sara sh]

Thank you so much guys, They were very good notes.....

 

[Gryz]

Cisco IOS and NX-OS are linux based.

Not really true.
NX-OS uses partially Linux. That means, the kernel is taken from Linux. Most of the tools are just Linux. But you can bet lots of stuff in the kernel is proprietary. Routing protocols are proprietary. (The Routing Protocols code, URIB and other router-related code came from Procket Networks, a startup that was bought by cisco).

Classic IOS is an operating system that grew from scratch inside cisco, starting in 1984. There's no Linux or Unix or any code inside. It's a monolitic blob of code. Of course when you look from the outside, lots of stuff resembles Linux or Unix or other OSs. But IOS grew from its own roots. IOS is zero linux-based. (Nor unix-based).

Cisco also has a few other OSs. I'm out of the loop, so I can't tell you anything current. But many of those OSs did not start with Linux. E.g. IOS XR is the OS that runs on cisco's high-end routers. That OS was written from scratch, tailor-made for the hardware it runs on. It was not based on Linux. I believe the kernel was licensed from a RealTime OS. Catalyst Switches used to run their own OS as well, not based on Linux or Unix either.

Using Linux as the base for any machine, from DVD-player to thermostat to laundry-machine to cheap-ass router, is something that happened during the last 10 years. Now that processors and memory are cheap, fast and large enough to deal with all the overhead of a full-blown OS, there is no reason to not use Linux as a base for your product's software. But 10-20 years ago, it wasn't that easy.

 

[alkemyst]

Not really true.
NX-OS uses partially Linux. That means, the kernel is taken from Linux. Most of the tools are just Linux. But you can bet lots of stuff in the kernel is proprietary. Routing protocols are proprietary. (The Routing Protocols code, URIB and other router-related code came from Procket Networks, a startup that was bought by cisco).

Classic IOS is an operating system that grew from scratch inside cisco, starting in 1984. There's no Linux or Unix or any code inside. It's a monolitic blob of code. Of course when you look from the outside, lots of stuff resembles Linux or Unix or other OSs. But IOS grew from its own roots. IOS is zero linux-based. (Nor unix-based).

Cisco also has a few other OSs. I'm out of the loop, so I can't tell you anything current. But many of those OSs did not start with Linux. E.g. IOS XR is the OS that runs on cisco's high-end routers. That OS was written from scratch, tailor-made for the hardware it runs on. It was not based on Linux. I believe the kernel was licensed from a RealTime OS. Catalyst Switches used to run their own OS as well, not based on Linux or Unix either.

Using Linux as the base for any machine, from DVD-player to thermostat to laundry-machine to cheap-ass router, is something that happened during the last 10 years. Now that processors and memory are cheap, fast and large enough to deal with all the overhead of a full-blown OS, there is no reason to not use Linux as a base for your product's software. But 10-20 years ago, it wasn't that easy.

Under the covers both are really based on *nix regardless if IOS was coded in C from scratch.

IOS XE is based on a modern Linux build (which Cisco is not sharing)

IOS XR is an OS from QNX

NX-OS is based on MontaVista Linux (HardHat Linux) which is probably the modern build IOS XE is using. I know this for a fact as my brother decrypted and got into the code. His website is down (and with my mother passing away this week not on his priority list to fix), but www.feeny.org as a lot of information on this (not the methods to hack, but what was discovered).

He is a pretty smart guy, dual CCIE among other high end certs and a 4.0 GPA Grad Student at Harvard while working full time.

 

[Gryz]

You say IOS XR is based on QNX. Correct, I couldn't recall the name, and was too lazy to google it. From the QNX wiki page:

QNX is a commercial Unix-like real-time operating system, aimed primarily at the embedded systems market. The product was originally developed in the early 1980s

So QNX is not Linux-based for sure. It might be Unix-like, but it isn't Unix in a stricter sense of the word. The whole focus of the OS is on real-time stuff. Like scheduling, concurrency, message-passing, etc. So its users can make effective distributed systems. Its roots are also older than Linux or most other modern Unix-flavors. I don't know enough about QNX to go into further detail.
I guess we can say we were both right.

I don't know about IOS XE. Sorry.

I did say that NX-OS is running on top of a Linux-variant. I agree with you. I only wanted to say that a lot of software that runs inside NX-OS is not standard linux-software. It has been specifically developed by cisco Development-engineers. Those parts are not open source. And they are not shared. You can assume that any critical network-related code in NX-OS has been written by cisco itself, and is not part of standard Linux. That includes stuff like the maintenance of the routing table (URIB), the routing protocols (BGP, IS-IS, OSPF, etc), interface drivers, etc.

IOS Classic has nothing to do with Unix. Absolutely nothing. There is not even a kernel inside classic, let alone it resembles Unix. There aren't even systemcalls. The process that you see with "show proc" are not even real processes. (They are more like threads). Scheduling between those threads is non-pre-emptive. It's all programmed in C, so "unix-style programmers" should pick up stuff quickly if they get to program inside IOS classic. But IOS is just not Unix.

(I've done some programming on two of those platforms, a long long time ago).

I'm sorry to hear about your mother.

 

[alkemyst]

Got it. I was speaking more to like *nix's in all the cases than I guess real *nix.

Interesting history. Check out that website when you get a chance and it's back up, it's very technical.

 

[Gryz]

I'll have a look at the website when it's back up.