I was just looking up some Juniper gear I saw in a local auction… and discovered that the wheels of progress are indeed rolling along.

According to the Hardware EOS Milestone page, the NetScreen 5XT and 5GT, cute little firewall/vpn boxes that seem to be all over the place, reach their end of support life on June 30th and December 31st, 2013, respectively. Considering they were announced as EOL about 5 years ago, this isn’t a big surprise.

I was a bit concerned when the same page reported that the replacement products, the SSG-5 and SSG-20, had their EOL announced in December 2011, and their “Last Date to Convert Warranty” and “Same Day Support Discontinued” date is April 29th of this year (4 weeks away). But it looks like this only applies to the Japan, Korea, and Taiwan versions. Whew.

However, some further digging… and I see ScreenOS is on its own End Of Life path… 6.1 is gone, 6.2 has through the end of 2013, and 6.3 is gone at the end of 2015.

I actually use an SSG-20 with the ADSL2+ PIM for my store’s Internet connection… and while it’s not under warranty and I don’t expect to need support, this did make me wonder what I should consider for my next CPE need.

I’d be tempted to put together an SRX240 with DOCSIS and ADSL2+, but best price I can imagine for that is $2k or so, which is more than I want to spend on this project. So maybe I’ll drive the SSG-20 into the ground, and deal with the problem when it arises. There’s always a spare ADSL2+ modem in the cabinet just in case…

Why so blue, panda bear?

I’m not all that sad, to be honest. But I have a habit of going with old technology until it no longer does what I need. Or until it’s cheaper to replace than to maintain, which can be the same thing.

Heck, I have actually installed Windows XP in the past month… and it stops getting updates any day now. And I’m used to far worse support prognoses–I’m looking at you, Cisco Linksys, with the “it’s a year old? Oh, no updates for you!” policies on a lot of your home network gear (wouldn’t be so bad if it was stuff that can run DD-WRT or OpenWRT… but RV042 and the like aren’t a fit there).

Anyway, this gear has had a good run, in the market and in my own environment. So I’ll keep an eye out for new and better gear within a minimal budget, and see where the world takes my networks.