[c-nsp] Tabo Topic? Third party Maintenance

[Charles Sprickman]

> On Jan 23, 2017, at 3:05 PM, Jared Mauch <jared at puck.nether.net> wrote:
> 
> On Mon, Jan 23, 2017 at 02:28:37PM -0500, Shawn L wrote:
>> I guess it all depends on what you utilize support for.  We tend to have
>> in-house spares, etc. that we can swap in in the event of a failure.  But,
>> there are times when you need to talk to someone at TAC to get the bottom
>> of an issue.
> 
> 	These types of issues if not solved by the obligatory
> upgrade to the latest software are the big value of direct vendor support.
> 
> 	If you're doing vanilla IP routing features (and I do mean that,
> anything that says MPLS/VPN/VRF, etc.. are not vanilla) you should be fine.
> 
> 	If you have anything more complex, don't expect it to be easy.
> They presume you're doing it wrong, and you must be open to that as a
> concept.  Remember the KISS principle.

I have to say, I haven’t been impressed with their support in a long
time.  We have smartnet really just for hardware, and recently I figured
that since we have support, I’d actually try and offload a task that I
hate - picking a stable version of IOS that has all the security issues
resolved.

It was really frustrating.  I just wanted to say that "I run this
hardware, these modules, and we rely strongly on features A, B and C and
I don’t want to upgrade until there’s another security issue, what
should I run?” - and that was just too much to ask.  I just ended up in
some offshore bottom-tier support loop.  The guy would email me a
suggestion which was some bleeding-edge version, I’d say again that I
want a long term support release and I don’t do anything fancy, then
he’d send me essentially the same suggestion.  I stopped replying and
then must have triggered some “customer happiness engineer” to chime in,
also overseas and useless, but good at spamming me in an attempt to
close out the ticket.

Total crap, IMHO.  I mean, I could use the software navigator to find
*A* release that’s appropriate for my hardware, I wanted someone that
knows more than I do to steer me in the right direction.  This concept
seemed totally foreign to these guys.  I’m sure if you’re
all-networking, all-cisco all the time (I’m not), there’s some way
through this maze, but damn.

Charles

> 
> 	- Jared
> 
> -- 
> Jared Mauch  | pgp key available via finger from jared at puck.nether.net
> clue++;      | http://puck.nether.net/~jared/  My statements are only mine.
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