agreed. i see the most benefit from these boxes geared towards networks with critical apps that are latency intensive and more than a handful of transit providers than i do for a smaller provider..
depending on how many upstreams you're juggling, its not that hard to create some traffic engineering policies that can easily be modified, (whether by hand or you use a script with a front end that can push the changes for you) in order to re-route traffic in the event of issues with an SP network in your end to end path.. personally i think manual traffic engineering and re-routing is one of the more fun parts of engineering.. -christian On Thu, Jul 3, 2008 at 12:50 PM, Robert E. Seastrom <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Eric Van Tol <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > > I'd like to hire that engineer, please. Can you send me his resume? > > Here's the job description: > > > > - Required to works 24x7x365. > > - Must monitor all network egress points to examine latency, > retransmissions, packet loss, link utilization, and link cost. > > - Required to "tweak localpref" on an average of 5000 prefixes per day, > based upon a combination of the above criteria. > > - Required to write up a daily, weekly, and monthly report to be sent to > all managers on said schedule. > > - Must not require health or dental care. > > > > These devices are not a replacement for an actual engineer. They > > are a supplement to the network to assist the engineer in doing what > > he should be doing - engineering and planning as opposed to > > resolving some other network's packet loss/blackhole/peering > > dispute/latency problem. > > You can certainly get close to the requirements stated above by > offering a decent salary and hiring a reasonably clued engineer with > an SP background. You may have to settle for IRC, WoW, or SecondLife > as daily recreational activity that doesn't buy you much (expressed in > your requirements list as "tweaking localpref"). > > My general experience with such boxes is that they're awfully good at > impressing the PHBs, but not something you can really defend from a > cost/benefit perspective. I really do need to go into the "custom > painted boxes with LCD screens on the front" business. I could make > "melons", like Tom Vu. > > ---Rob > > > -- ^christian$
