Author: Shirl Kennedy
Vyatta has announced the availability of its 2.2 beta, codenamed “Camarillo.” This release includes a number of enhancements, new features, and more than 100 bug fixes for Vyatta’s commercially supported open, flexible router (OFR) distribution.
The beta release of Vyatta — which is essentially a Debian-based Linux distribution focused on networking — includes Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) enhancements, Network Address Translation (NAT) usability enhancements, improvements to the Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) server and DHCP relay, and new options for the “show version” command.
Vyatta, started by a group of networking industry veterans in 2005, began to generate considerable buzz the following year when it launched its online community and posted an early beta of its OFR software on its website.
It is widely regarded as a viable open source alternative to commercial products from companies like Juniper and, especially, Cisco.
Matt Asay blogged about Vyatta in September 2006, saying that Vyatta had an easy shot at gaining market share. “All it has to do is work reasonably well (and it apparently does), and it will have an early adopter market. As it gets better and better, Cisco will have to seriously upgrade the customer experience (and downgrade its price) to keep its 80% market share.”
Vyatta is not the first company to offer an open source router solution; ImageStream Internet Solutions has been selling Linux routers since 1995. These routers run on ImageStream Linux, a distribution that does include some proprietary code.
The 2.2 beta development release can be downloaded from Vyatta’s testing repository. Existing installs can be upgraded to 2.2 by following instructions on the wiki.
Vyatta’s Web site offers full release notes and documentation. The release announcement says bugs should be reported via the vyatta-users mailing list or through its Bugzilla database.
Category:
- Networking
