An ISP of their own (was RE: [rescue] Being jobless)

[N.Miller]

On Wednesday, July 30, 2003, at 08:31 AM, Curtis H. Wilbar Jr. wrote:

>> From: "Jonathan C. Patschke" <jp at celestrion.net>
>>
>> On Tue, 29 Jul 2003, Devin L. Ganger wrote:
>>
>> After using shit like that and 3com's various interfaces, IOS is a
>> -joy-.
>
> I like IOS, but it is inconsistent... especially some of the IOS 
> versions
> for switches, which seem like they were something else, and had an IOS
> like interface grafted on to them after the fact.... so concessions had
> to be made about how to do various things to match up to whatever way
> the software was originally doing things (sorry, no specific examples).

Having worked at said networking giant, you are correct in your
assumption.  Cisco bought good switch technology by buying Kalpana
and Crescendo.  Catalyst OS is still available on the switches (or,
it was last I knew), but IOS was hacked to work on the switches
for "continuity" purposes.

I'm no network expert, but my network admin buddies @ Cisco tend
to prefer Catalyst OS, if they were around to use it in house before
the company converted all the internal networks to IOS for the
switches.

The whole thing is complicated by the fact that Cisco later bought
Granite systems to get good gigabit switching technology, and
integrated them into the Enterprise group (i.e. Kalpana/Crescendo).

You would probably see similar kinds of interface compromises on other
hardware products that Cisco has acquired and put IOS on.  Cisco
is a "buy your R&D" company--it allows others to take the risks.
Of course, this strategy sometimes backfires, as well Cisco bought
Stratacom (number 2 in voice switching behind Lucent) and their
product was not nearly what it was made out to be.  Cisco did not
want to pay the big bucks for Lucent at the time.

> Well, not any CCNAs that got their cert more than a couple of years ago
> or so... (as there were really hardly any questions that had anything 
> to
> do with Cisco commands.... it was all OSI model and network knowledge).
>
> I've heard they have redone it and there is more Cisco router stuff in
> there now than general network stuff.... don't know if that is true
> or not though.

I dunno about that, but I kind of wonder how tough it is if a 17-yo
can get a CCNA.  I had a 3-digit CCNA from So San Fran High School
working for me in the lab at Cisco--he was one of the first ones
out of the HS training programs, back before they were using CBT.
CBT is what would kick my butt, I think.

=Nadine=