On 15 Apr 2011, at 08:45, Adrian Kennard <[email protected]> wrote: > I know that! What has actually surprised us (and I am not going to name > names) is that there seem to be ISPs out there that just buy boxes and plug > them together and cross their fingers. To me it seems odd not to understand > the workings in detail, and some say we go a tad far making our own routers, > but at least understanding basics like this is generally quite important.
In the early days at Demon and Easynet we used to get the same astonishment with building our own routers and in the completely organic radius server that Jim and his team created at Demon. But it was a very good way of really making sure you understood the protocols and be able to use that to advantage. Even some big vendors struggle with this, I think Lucent and Ascend should have been paying royalties for some of the fixes they put into PPP! But the challenges with todays network though are much more difficult to address in that way, when you need significant capability to drive millions of queues and profiles, doing this in software whilst not impossible is incredibly difficult. > Certain people in BT have my direct number when they need to ask me for help > :-) And I would encourage more people to do that, finding good contacts at vendors who sell kit is an invaluable resource and sadly can be quite hard to find the people who really understand how stuff may react in different circumstances. > It is one thing to understand the principles and another to be able to > actually make sense of packet dumps. I think for even some of the more > technical ISPs the latter is not quite as easy... If they dont understand packet dumps then they aren't a technical ISP and they certainly dont understand the principals and one day something bad will happen in their networks. I learned from a crazy malaysian that being able to read hex without looking up the values was a vital skill to master! One also needs to understand protocol interactions, how traffic flows through the network, how chipsets work and for those that provide features in software how the scheduling works is also vitally important. The best engineers I've found usually have a good electronics and software (i.e have written code and designed chipsets) background - these people though are rare and hard to find but a pleasure to work with. I strongly recommend attending Adrian's session I'm sure it will be very useful. Regards, Neil
