[c-nsp] Tabo Topic? Third party Maintenance

[Lee]

On 1/24/17, James Bensley <jwbensley at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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".

Interesting..  I'd get an offer for a bug scrub on the new version.

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

On the other hand, when Cisco does a bug scrub they see _all_ the
bugs, not just the publicly visible ones.  There's been a couple of
times I've gone back & forth with our AS engineer about the details of
some bug that had no public description & a time or two when he
suggested we hold off on an upgrade until after the psirt
announcement.

Regards,
Lee