[c-nsp] Tabo Topic? Third party Maintenance

[James Bensley]

On 24 January 2017 at 10:04,  <adamv0025 at netconsultings.com> wrote:
>> Simon Lockhart
>> Sent: Tuesday, January 24, 2017 8:09 AM
>>
>> 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.
>>
>> 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...
>>
> How it works is ....
...
> It's a long and tedious process and it costs a small fortune, but I think
> it's worth it.
> At least you get a more detailed map of the minefield.

In the case of Cisco a bug scrub comes from Cisco AS. I could have
bought a house for the amount we spent with AS and not only that, we
could have just rented all the kit we need, done this ourselves in the
lab and probably had change for beer at the end.

Also a month or two after our bug scrub was completed the new major
milestone/stable versions of code for the devices we had tested was
released (our scrub was finished when "X" was the stable recommend
version) so we said to our AS engineer "now that X+1 is out, and you
recommended X, do you think we should go for X" and they obviously
said "yes".

If you have the resources then I'm not such a fan of this service.

Cheers,
James.