Hey guys, We generally do most of our networking in-house like many of you but when we get stuck, we call someone who is much more experienced in BGP than we are. I like to figure things out when I have the time but time is quickly becoming a scarce resource as our business grows.
Anyway, there was a Zayo fiber cut and it affected an IP Block we had reassigned to us and our local telco was refusing to help us advertise that block out their other provider which was up. Zayo also had no ETR on the fiber and it ended taking 39.5 hours to repair!!! I had to find a way to readvertise our block out another provider, either through our telco, who refused to do so, or our other circuit. I tried to figure it out for an hour and had a few ideas but wasn't sure on any of them completely so I figured I'd call LinkTechs and see if they could help us out in this emergency. Dennis picked up and after explaining to him our network setup and what we wanted to accomplish, he started telling me how he could fix it and what I needed to do. I followed his steps to get our block advertised out our working carrier, he called Zayo and our other provider's NOC to speed up the process as they have contacts within many large carriers, and he got it done all in a little over an hour not including the time I spent on hold with our telco waiting to speak to their network engineer. What he did would have likely taken me 4-5 hours and I would have been much more stressed and have had a migraine by the time it was working. I don't normally praise people or companies unless they go above and beyond and I felt that Dennis understood the urgency of our predicament and did a great job in resolving the issue in a timely manner. I am impressed and the money spent was well worth it considering what my time is worth as well. After this experience, I will not hesitate to have LinkTechs configure and support our network changes if I think it'll take me more than an hour to figure out a complicated change. Of course, we'll keep doing easy stuff like OSPF ourselves since we've learned it but for future network changes and BGP questions or MPLS/VPLS, it will be much easier for us to outsource that to the experts and let us focus on growing our business. This was absolutely not solicited at all and I just had to post it myself because we rarely have paid for consultants but this experience was so worth it and easy to do. A huge burden was lifted off my shoulders when Dennis fixed the problem and knew exactly what to do. Thank you Dennis! http://www.linktechs.net -- Darin Steffl Minnesota WiFi www.mnwifi.com 507-634-WiFi <http://www.facebook.com/minnesotawifi> Like us on Facebook <http://www.facebook.com/minnesotawifi>
