The network engineers thread

Felon

Felon

Felon

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So who here is a network eng? I assume we must have more than a few on here, thought it would be nice to have a friendly thread dedicated to the craft :)

Whether it's work related, studying certifications, or just curious - thought it would be a good place to chat.
 
Passed CCNA by accident about 4 years ago, never saw the need to go further or renew but I’ve done CCNP and above stuff in work for a few years. Mostly work in the virtual space specifically NSX now. I get surprised and saddened by the lack of fundamental knowledge by ‘network engineers’ these days.
 
ChrisD. said:
I get surprised and saddened by the lack of fundamental knowledge by ‘network engineers’ these days.
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Yeah, it's hard work trying to find good people at the moment, I have 2x roles for senior data centre engineers open in my team at the moment (lots of Mellanox/Nvidia), but to be fair - I'm looking for fundamental knowledge more than specific vendor experience, and finding good candidates at the moment seems almost impossible.

I have a long history or service-provider, but now I mostly do Data Centre network engineering these days and it's a lot more challenging than I though it would be, modern switches have gotten so much more efficient in power, so they're much more limited in features and have no buffers - yet what I'm asked to do with them by the business is a constant challenge:

"Can we plz stretch layer-2 vlans across 20x sites?"

"Why do the switches each cost $12000, can we not just buy netgear ones from Currys?"

"The network sucks, if I run my 25G ports at 100%, I get packet loss, omg fix it"
 
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Screeeech said:
Yeah, it's hard work trying to find good people at the moment, I have 2x roles for senior data centre engineers open in my team at the moment (lots of Mellanox/Nvidia), but to be fair - I'm looking for fundamental knowledge more than specific vendor experience, and finding good candidates at the moment seems almost impossible.

I have a long history or service-provider, but now I mostly do Data Centre network engineering these days and it's a lot more challenging than I though it would be, modern switches have gotten so much more efficient in power, so they're much more limited in features and have no buffers - yet what I'm asked to do with them by the business is a constant challenge:

"Can we plz stretch layer-2 vlans across 20x sites?"

"Why do the switches each cost $12000, can we not just buy netgear ones from Currys?"

"The network sucks, if I run my 25G ports at 100%, I get packet loss, omg fix it"
Click to expand...
It's never the network.
 
Screeeech said:
I have 2x roles for senior data centre engineers open in my team at the moment (lots of Mellanox/Nvidia), but to be fair - I'm looking for fundamental knowledge more than specific vendor experience
Click to expand...
Sorry, it doesn’t say Cisco on it, I can’t help.

But you said you’re a network engineer.

…

BTW don’t get me started on L2 stretches!
 
ChrisD. said:
But you said you’re a network engineer.
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Around, 25 years now? 2x CCIEs (RS/SP) and a whole load of other expired crap (lots of Juniper, but couldn't be arsed to do a JNCIE)..

If you can do Cisco, you can do like 95% of everything else - especially Cumulus (which I think has one of the best BGP implementations ever), it uses FRR (Free range routing) which has an IOS cloned CLI. The only one I'd say Cisco-centric engineers struggle with, is Nokia - I remember first working on Nokia and feeling like I was in some other alternate reality of pain - I've never used a more horrid interface. That said - Nokia stuff is really meant to be used with their full automation ecosystem - at which point it's great.

ChrisD. said:
BTW don’t get me started on L2 stretches!
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Application team be like; "We hard coded the IP addresses into the application we wrote, and we can't change it, why is the network so crap?"
 
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Not officially qualified in any shape or form but I've done crap loads of Cisco starting at PIX and moved to ASAs, PaloAltos were the next natural step at Cisco didn't really muster anything decent at layer 7 at the time.

Extreme networks switches are on my CV too (not sure how that happened as literally no-one uses them) but I kinda liked EXOS.

I also did a little on the Brocade fibre channel side before the Broadcom acquisition (everyone hated Broadcom even in 2016/17, even more reasons now!)
 
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spoon said:
(everyone hated Broadcom even in 2016/17, even more reasons now!)
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Yeah the situation with VMware is mad right now, we’re ditching them - so many others are too…

I think our price went up by 4x or something? I’m not really sure what they’re doing…

Although Broadcom’s newer ASICS are decent, I’m just on the tube headed to the DC to find a large pallet of Arista 7060X5 eval kit, based on Tomahawk 4,
 
Network Engineer here too, 15+ years working at various ISPs on a wide variety of different vendors kit, strangely I’ve mostly managed to avoid Cisco stuff in production networks and kept it more to using their training material for study (especially earlier on in the journey)

Plenty of Linux experience too and some coding/automation/devops knowledge to help out with network related tasks
 
Took a delivery of a huge load of eval kit today around $1M worth (list price), including a large delivery of 400G-OSFP-DD DAC cables, they're absolutely huge.

Standard 25G SFP on the left, 400G-OSFP on the right, it's like pushing something the size of a mars-bar into the the router :D

sInVOog.png
 
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Used to be. I ran the Cisco LAN and WAN infrastructure for Europe's first Application Service Provider company just before the dotcom crash. Cut my teeth on Catalyst 6509 switches and 7206Vxr routers. Apart from the Cisco switch I have running my home network now, I would struggle to conf t any cisco kit nowadays I think.
 
Moley said:
Cut my teeth on Catalyst 6509 switches and 7206Vxr routers.
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7206VXR.... Now there's a good box!

There was a point in time - would have been what, sometime around 2001-2005? where those things were literally everywhere, with an NPE-G1 you could do literally anything with them.
 
paradigm said:
Raises hand. I work for an MSP/ISP who is a Fortinet Expert level partner.

Also got a ruck of experience with Cisco kit, but my qualifications are all expired now as I simply have no reason or incentive to keep on top of them. Previously was a CCNP R&S with CCNA Voice and CCNA wireless qualifications as well.
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Me Too!

Although my CCNP Sec is still valid, then dome some Forti certs mainly moving to more cloud stuff lately, its been cool :)
 
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