Comment by halbritt | Hacker News Reader

Comment by halbritt | Hacker News Reader

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Cisco has been fighting second hand sales of their hardware for well over two decades now. There was a flood of surplus gear after the first dotcom crash. Lots of folks, myself included took advantage of those circumstances.

Eventually reputable vendors began to pop up. I recall doing a great deal of business (>$1m) with a company called "Network Hardware Resale". They're still in business as "Curvature" and I believe still moving second hand network and server gear as well as providing support.

There have been times that I recall when lead times for Cisco gear have exceeded 8 weeks, when I didn't have any other options other than using refurbished gear.

From my perspective, Cisco is nothing more than a company looking to extract as much money as possible out of Enterprise IT shops. They pretty much gave up the service provider market. IOS has gone a million different directions, and they've been slow to embrace IAC.

Back when I was buying refurb gear, I was also buying some new and some officially re-marketed gear. I'd get support for the chassis and supervisor modules (Cat 6500) so that I could get reliable software updates.

My sales rep's regional manager sent a threatening letter to the VP of my department with some dire warning about how we were in violation of the law or some such. We all ended up in a meeting in which they produced a list of serial numbers of gear that we'd sought support on that were supposedly grey-market. We produced the same list of serial numbers on invoices for legit Cisco certified re-marketed equipment. They'd just failed at record-keeping. My VP was livid and threw them out of his office. Pretty sure they got fired after.

Anyway, this is all just a tactic to extract the most money possible. It'd be irrational to choose Cisco for any new network deployment these days.

> Cat 6500

My first job was writing drivers for chips on that switch. My recent experience is with younger tech companies, so I'm sure recruiters get some false positives when they search for resumes with "ios."

Do you recall which ASICs? I was way more familiar with the guts of the 6500 than an end user should ever be.

Wow, it's been a while. Pretty much anything you could poke with "test platform firmware," but r2d2 and tiangang come to mind.

Any of this ring a bell?

https://null.53bits.co.uk/index.php?page=7600-forwarding-asi...

Got a little PTSD just looking at that page.

> It'd be irrational to choose Cisco for any new network deployment these days

I'm interested what you would buy instead? In the UK SME space I see mostly HP, Watchguard, Unifi. Lease lines still often come with Cisco gear (supplied by the provider). Otherwise I only see Cisco at the bigger entities.

Mikrotik has recently made bridging much saner, which makes their portfolio complete for datacenter use and pretty close on bridging users in the access layer.

Their CCR-series is very much bang per buck if L4-filtering is enough, which should be enough in today's world of end-to-end encrypted communications.

The CRS3xx-series as stated has become much saner with changes to bridging and with most features implemented are also worth the cost.

The upside with affordable devices and the licensing model they have, make it possible to keep cold spares available in case of disaster.

It does however make sense to study the management interfaces and disable all but SSH and HTTPS in order to minimize attack surface.

I have a phobia of MikroTik, especially in the hands of general IT people. Amazing bang per-buck, but I took over a network with 6 sites all with Mikrotik routers and there were some staggering config mistakes. The more I dug the more I became convinced that the OS was, if not to blame, but certainly was a major factor.

I used to test changes (when duties allowed) with nmap, and several times I showed experienced engineers that they had left a service open to the WAN by mistake! When a network is in the hands of general engineers, like it often is in the SME space, I like Watchguard firewalls. Very good defaults, helpful os.

I can imagine in a datacenter where you have network specialists, and robust working procedures Mikrotik could work well.

I use Unifi for Wifi, and have used their routers for a dedicated guest wifi network. For switches I know nothing other than HP, but don't see a lot of issues, especially with the Aruba kit.

I again have phobias regarding Watchguard and other products that have the consumer style special WAN-ports and related configuration restraints. Many Mikrotik-devices come preconfigured like consumer devices but the recent CCR-series does not.

The firewall in Mikrotik-devices is among the cleanest I've seen and very hard to miss-configure as long as the firewall is otherwise configured to not let unauthorized traffic through.

And yes, people are people and this is why we educate people when needed.

Depends on the type of network element required.

If I were doing data center switching, I'd buy something Broadcom based on which I could run something like Cumulus Linux.

For wifi, I like Unifi. For routers, Juniper is fine. Arista seems to be well-regarded in the switching space as well. Basically anything but Cisco.

That said, I haven't had to think about network elements for quite a few years.

UniFi is great for home, small to medium businesses, and anything up to a massive church or stadium. I use it at home and I know a few local installers who swear by it.

If you have a small network team UniFi would be a perfect fit. It’s very manageable and support is great.

Backing this. I use Unifi extensively and like it. There are some quirks, but I've had better experiences with it than Meraki.

in the service provider market juniper and arista seem to be king. There is very little on the market that beats an MX series router when looking for a network core for example.

in the enterprise, ubiquiti and HP seem to still be quite relevant. The amount of HP procurve gear in use is rather large.

I learned MX and JunOS mid-career. Routing protocols are solid and I much preferred the configuration over Cisco IOS especially for things like BGP, ISIS, routing policy, prefix lists, etc.

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