It’s impossible to count how many people at my college wanted to be “writers”. So many early-twenty-somethings here in the US think they are going to spend their lives as screenwriters or novelists. My colleagues from India tell me most people there want to be doctors or engineers, which tells you something about the decline […]
Tag: gsr
TAC Tales #20: Crash, burn, and exit
I’ve mentioned before that, despite being on the Routing Protocols team, I spent a lot of time handling crash cases in TAC. At the time, my queue was just a dumping ground for cases that didn’t fit into any other bucket in the High Touch structure. Backbone TAC had a much more granular division of […]
TAC Tales #18: All at once
The case came into the routing protocols queue, even though it was simply a line card crash. The RP queue in HTTS was the dumping ground for anything that did not fit into one of the few other specialized queues we had. A large US service provider had a Packet over SONET (PoS) line card […]
TAC Tales #13: All Zeros
A common approach for TAC engineers and customers working on a tough case is to just “throw hardware at it.” Sometimes this can be laziness: why troubleshoot a complex problem when you can send an RMA, swap out a line card, and hope it works? Other times it’s a legitimate step in a complex process […]
TAC Tales #11: Full up
No customer is happy if they have to reboot one of their Internet-facing routers periodically, and this was one of our biggest customers. (At HTTS, they were all big customers.) This customer had a GSR connecting to the Internet, with partial BGP routes, and he kept getting this error: %RP-3-ENCAP: Failure to allocate encap table entry, […]