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Re: [Misc][Rant] Internet router

  • From: Warren Kumari
  • Date: Thu Sep 29 16:38:26 2005 
On Sep 29, 2005, at 12:56 PM, Elmar K. Bins wrote:


[email protected] (Elmar K. Bins) wrote:



That somehow sums it up quite good.
Folks, I'm taking this back, seeing that the original poster is not alone.

Makes me wonder as to what current "network engineers" do know about the
world they do networking in. I - please forgive me if this seems far-fetched -
would have thought everybody doing "real" networking (as in "interconnecting
with other networks") would know where and how to look for that information
and how to interpret the usual tools' output.

Am I wrong?
Yes, sadly you are...

Part of the problem is that during "dot-com boom" (shudder) a large number of people heard that network engineering was easy money and took a class at the local community college. They don't like networks, they don't care about connectivity, its just a job to them. They don't want to learn anything and so they don't.

Unlike some other engineering fields (I think that civil engineers are an example of this), you don't have to get any sort of certification / license to claim that you are a network *engineer*. I have met "Senior Network Engineers" who don't understand longest match rule ("The traffic will take 10/8 instead of 10.0.0.0/24 because it has a better admin distance", "I can override these 300 OSPF routes with a single static supernet", etc), who believe that routers will not route between directly connected interfaces without putting them into a routing protocol, that transit networks don't need a full mesh of iBGP[1] because "you can just redistribute BGP into [OSPF/IS-IS/IGP of choice], that ICMP uses TCP as a transport, etc. These are not simple brain-farts, there were all examples of deeply held beliefs that needed example networks built to convince the person otherwise (and the person who thought that routers would not route between directly connected networks without having the networks in a routing protocol still thinks that the example device was misfunctioning :-( ).

I am sure that there are other, much more scary examples out there, feel free to send me (humorous) examples, I need a laugh today...

Warren "Bitter today" Kumari
[1] Yeah, yeah, or route reflectors, or confeds, or.. or... or...

* Please note, this is not directed at Ronald at all, who I am assuming is clue-full but hadn't had coffee yet...


Puzzled,
Elmar.

--

"Begehe nur nicht den Fehler, Meinung durch Sachverstand zu substituieren."
(PLemken, <[email protected] berlin.de>)

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