[c-nsp] Tabo Topic? Third party Maintenance

[Simon Lockhart]

On Tue Jan 24, 2017 at 09:02:18AM +0100, Gert Doering wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 23, 2017 at 07:33:08PM -0500, Charles Sprickman via cisco-nsp wrote:
> > 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.
> 
> Bwahahaha.  Sorry.  

Quite :)

Recommending software versions is one thing TAC cannot do - either by policy,
or by demonstrated skillset.

We did a big upgrade programme on some Cisco devices over the Christmas period
to fix a number of bugs that had been raised to TAC. We upgraded to the version
that TAC recommended to fix these bugs. We hit other bugs after the upgrade. We
spoke to our Cisco SE about this, and he instantly responded to say that TAC
should never have recommended that particular version, and that it's documented
on CCO which version we should have used.

We were also told that if we wanted Cisco to do a 'bug scrub', to see if we
would be affected by any known bugs, then they offer this as a seperately
chargeable service. Yes, really, they want us to pay them more money to find 
out how buggy their code releases are...

Simon