Network operating system Dent 2.0 targets smaller firms

The Dent Project has released version 2.0 of its open source network operating system, carving out features designed to make it easier for small or mid-sized enterprises to support edge deployments. Dent OS is a Linux Foundation project that provides a platform for disaggregated network switches running on white-box hardware, …

[Anonymous Coward]

please

Promise me that if you ever install the Marvin version of the software, you'll also replace all the diodes on the left side of the hardware.

[David 132]

Re: please

I heard that the first release, "Arthur", was delayed. As in, "the late Dent Arthur Dent".

"It's a sort of threat you see. I've never been very good at them myself, but I'm told they can be very effective."

Icon because you need to drink six of them. The world's about to end.

[Roland6]

Re: please

I see they are undecided what to call the next release, currently it is pagemarked as 'C', but it perhaps it should Caveman or Colin.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll take some, thank you.

I work in education, our needs are not extravagant. What I need are basic mid market switches that boot up reasonably quickly, push packets, and I can patch and update without a ton of fuss. During Covid times, we have found new and exiting ways to stretch our budgets, time and resources, so something that also supported long EOL windows and reasonable support costs would also be ideal. A functional GUI would be nice.

Instead we have Cisco crap everywhere. It's all stuck in the late 90's. Our core stack takes upwards of half an hour to restart, and doesn't even have a power switch. An yes, due to the buggy crap that Switchzilla passes off as firmware, we have had to literally pull all the power cords out of the interlinked and dual redundant power supplies because the OS locked up and had to be hard dumped. We then had to roll back firmware and reboot it again in the middle of the day. That punched about a 2.5 hour window out in the middle of a workday. Management was not pleased. We also found out the Call Manager flipped out and crashed because it wasn't able to reach the network. They also want almost the cost of the hardware in support fees every year. Management isn't fond of that either. But for all that budget it hogs up, I am still stuck with crap documentation, a crippled GUI(even years on after the Meraki acquisition), and having to jump on a command line and fight a system that still REALLY wants to operate on TFTP in 2022.

I was hoping Ubiquity would get there act together, but they fell apart just as they were standing on the threshold. Their hardware was decent enough but the software and cloud crap was toxic. Seems like most of the other big players have similar problems, that you either get a Cloud only solution that costs a fourtune every year and paralyses your whole organization if their bach end

So yeah, I'd love to be able to run a stable open source OS like a BSD or Linux on my switches.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: I'll take some, thank you.

Thank you very much for such a detailed comment and good feedback! In addition to DentOS, make sure to look into Replica.one NOS. Feel free to reach out and I can help you with the setup & testing on the hardware that is already supported.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: I'll take some, thank you.

Thank you very much for such a detailed comment and good feedback! In addition to DentOS, make sure to look into Replica.one NOS (https://github.com/sartura/replica). Feel free to reach out and I can help you with the setup & testing on the hardware that is already supported.

[Hazmoid]

Can't wait for the Slartibartfast version :)

As a longtime DNA fan, I have to admit that I am happy HHGTTG should finally be used in this way.

However I think that even small businesses may be worried about something like their infrastructure relying on that small bowl of petunias.

[David 132]

Re: Can't wait for the Slartibartfast version :)

Disappointing though it was in some other ways, I did think there was at least one good line in the 2005 film.

Arthur: Normality, right. We can talk about "normality" till the cows come home.

Ford: What is normal...

Trillian: What's home...

Zaphod: What are "cows"??

Ah well. It made me smile.

[Down not across]

Re: Can't wait for the Slartibartfast version :)

And a cup of tea to get entropy for the crypto?

[Roland6]

Is it really an "Operating System" or is it just another targeted Linux "Distribution"?

Whilst the Linux kernel offers a quick start, is it really the best kernel to start from for this application domain?

So I wonder just how much this really has deviated from desktop Linux.

[VoiceOfTruth]

YALD

Yet Another Linux Distribution, with slightly different bells and different sounding whistles.

-> I would imagine that the Dent community will promote cost savings, certainly on the Capex side

On the capex side, probably true. But going forward how many people are there familiar with dentOS (let's copy Apple, eh?) out there? I can find any number of Cisco bods. But dentOS? Ohhh, will screech the penguins. It's Linux, so any Linux person can do it.

While Cisco has a well known path to learning and understanding and being certified on Cisco, Linux starts off with homilies about free as in speech and not as in beer, and lectures about GPL, and it should be called GNU/Linux, and there are 500,000 distributions to try, and more coming along all the time some of which don't have systemd.

Oh, the horrors of systemd. How to really bamboozle any would-be Linux user. Then there are the myriad package managers. You can spend your whole life looking for the one true distro with the unique combination of not-systemd, not-yum, not-this, not-that, with-x, with-y. This is the mad world of Linux distributions. And Dent is part of it.