You’re gonna need a license for that

Can’t share networking stories, because am software engineer, but well, that’s where my personal horror story begins.

Did an apprenticeship, but the school didn’t have enough software engineers to form a class, so we got thrown into a class of networking folks. With mostly a networking curriculum. That would be bad enough, but jeez, having to sit through all the Sponsored By Cisco™ segments gets old really quick.

I may want to have a passing understanding what VLANs are, but I don’t need to know how to manage them, how to route between them etc… And I especially do not need to know the precise commands on Cisco fucking IOS™.

I’ve had my fair share of issues with Cisco, but my horror story comes from a pair of Dell EMC switches.

During a datacentre migration, the 2 aforementioned switches just would not communicate with each other. They were stacked together using virtual link trunking. There was nothing in the logs to suggest there was a problem, and everything was reported as up.

After nearly 24 hours of panic and scouring nearly every resource I could find, I came across an offhand comment in a reddit post about a certificate. This lead me down a rabbit hole where I eventually found the answer. Turns out the Dell CA certificate had expired and we needed to use a dodgy looking python script to replace the certificate. Boy was I relieved when everything kicked back into life again.

I once updated an ACE for an ACL that was used for a PBR. It crashed the 4500-X VSS about 20 second later, brought down client access into our Data Center. Fun times!

I’m also not looking forward to anything DNA Center. I’ve played with it and it’s so much hot garbage I can’t even begin to describe how much I don’t like the product already.

Fun fact: us courts are holding Cisco liable for human rights violations in China (actually its any company that assisted China but Cisco made boogo bucks helping the Chinese government identify dissidents, journalists and racial and religious groups that needed to be “removed”)

You just hurt Huawei & Arista’s feelings. /s