This is a very busy list, and there's a lot of traffic to go through
if one wants to make meaningful responses. It doesn't help that many
subject lines are not meaningful.
Since we always have newcomers, let me throw out a few reminders.
Perhaps these should be in a bold FAQ at the entry, the first rule
being "READ THE FAQ."
1. This is an education and certification issues group. It is not a
substitute for the TAC or other paid technical support resources.
Personally, when I see a post beginning "my customer," I tend to
delete it immediately. While I actively give my time to help people
progress in our mutual profession, I get paid to do customer support,
and don't have much time for it anyway.
If you must ask a support question, at least phrase it so it somehow
relates to certification and study for it.
Seriously, understanding how to request Cisco support is a test objective.
Whatever people say about Cisco, it has superb support. If your production
routers are not covered by maintenance agreements, you have a disaster
waiting to happen. There's detailed IOS and platform information, and
bug fixes, that really need to come from Cisco.
2. There are a lot of questions where people describe (sometimes vaguely)
two protocol mechanisms and want a comparison. When this is asked
abstractly, the answer may be very abstract. Personally, I have a
tendency to answer in formal computer science terms.
Always try to explain what problem you are trying to solve, or what
you are studying for. On a list like this, and in Cisco classes,
it's often rather futile to say "what if OSPF did this rather than
what it does?" In the certification context, that's irrelevant. That's
a question for a protocol design forum, rather than one that MUST
focus on what the protocols, as implemented, actually do.
3. Yes, there are gurus on the list. See #1 above. In general, they are
happy to answer questions such that the list as a whole can benefit
from the answer -- if they have time to answer. They are not private
resources for free support. Email to someone you don't know, asking
for help on a customer problem, is rarely a good idea. Several "elders"
on this list have stopped answering such messages, because they would
otherwise be overwhelmed.
On the other hand, the elders may choose to respond to followups from
people they've gotten to know as active participants.
4. I, at least, am far more willing to answer a question when the person
asking the question also identifies the resources they've tried to
use and not gotten an answer. It's one thing for me to clarify something
obscure in an RFC, but it's another for me to have to copy or type out
the language in an RFC.
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