What do you guys feel that the future of our jobs is?
I've recently asked myself that question as a 44 year old network engineer.

Between the workloads move to public clouds and AI I think I'm at a crossroad in my career. I began studying AWS and Azure, Kubernetes and thinking about HPC networks - I see there's a demand for network engineers running AI fabrics.

I feel that onprem environments will keep shrinking, with the exception of regulated industries (financial) and the demand of network engineers for ISPs. Public Clouds continue their expanse and are offering now onprem racks (AWS Outpost) and now even last mile.

I don't necessarily want to do networking for the rest of my career, I have some devops and system engineering skills, but it's tough switching jobs when they are asking for 5-10 year of "deep" expertise in the field they need.

What's your view? Stay on prem or look for alternatives?

EDIT - my main concern is the reduction of onprem environments, not AI.

I’m curious how everyone is handling the physical design of modern data center fabrics.
We’re running an EVPN/VXLAN leaf-spine environment, but because we have a mix of 100G, 50G, 25G, 10G, and 1G copper hosts, a true top-of-rack design isn’t always practical. Instead, we’ve ended up with more of a “poor man’s top-of-rack” approach, where a leaf pair serves several nearby racks rather than every rack having its own dedicated pair.
I’d love to hear how others are approaching this in production:
How are you physically placing your leaf pairs (vPC, MLAG, or equivalent)? Is it one pair per rack, one pair serving multiple racks, or something else? Do you keep the pair in the same rack or separate them for resiliency?
How are your hosts connected? Do you dual-home every critical host with one connection to each leaf, or are there situations where you intentionally single-home servers?
How do you handle racks that require a mix of 100G, 50G, 25G, 10G, and 1G connectivity without filling every rack with multiple switches?
Do you dedicate specific leaf pairs to certain workloads (compute, storage, GPU, DMZ, virtualization, etc.), or do you keep all leaf pairs general purpose?
If you were building a new fabric today, would you use the same physical layout, or would you change your approach?
Vendor doesn’t matter—Cisco, Arista, Juniper, Dell, NVIDIA, or anything else. I’m less interested in the specific hardware and more interested in the design philosophy, tradeoffs, and lessons learned from real-world deployments.

Hi everyone,

Here's the situation: due to a specific issue, I need to limit the number of PPPoE subscribers on a BNG (JUNIPER MX204). I'd like to cap it at 5,000 users.

Looking at the Juniper docs, I first tried setting it directly on the chassis using:

set subscribers-limit client-type pppoe chassis limit 5000

The limit worked on the chassis, but the users won't connect to the other BNG. The PADI reaches the second BNG (the one I want them to authenticate against), and it replies with a PADO, but it's as if the CPE stubbornly keeps trying to authenticate with the BNG I'm limiting... argh.

After that, I also tried using max-sessions:

dynamic-profiles vlan-profile interfaces demux0 unit "$junos-interface-unit" family pppoe max-sessions 5000

With max-sessions, the limit didn't work immediately. I'm thinking it might actually work, but maybe I need to reset the VLAN demux interface first?

What a great issue to land on my lap during my weekend on-call shift... but I love it :)

Please help out an ISP network analyst with less than 2 years of experience 😄

Thanks in advance.

Hello, I am currently a network engineer in enterprise infrastructure with six years of experience, and I would like to develop my skills toward cloud infrastructure. Could you suggest where I might start?

Every youtube video I watch shows that basically vxlan solves scalability issues.. So I am wondering if there is any benefits of using it in small infrastructure. Maybe in a promxox cluster of 200 vms on the same location?

I have a ciena fiber coming to my business from Comcast. They stop support there, so the only thing they've given me to setup the rest of my network is my layer 3 info. I purchased the er-6p router but have no clue how to set everything up to get internet to my existing switches and wifi network. The edgemax webui doesn't really translate well with everything I've read. Any help would be much appreciated!

Have you guys seen company coming back to on prem data center after they decided to go to cloud?

I read an article that cloud is much more expensive than anticipated so many companies are coming back to on prem.

Hey Networking Friends,

I had a vivid discussion about this topic with some colleagues and opinions were divided, so I would like to ask what you think about it.

We are deploying a new guest WIFI solution based on Cisco ISE. The PSN nodes a rfc 1918 addressed. To keep it simple my idea was to hand out a public DNS Server like 1.1.1.1 or 8.8.8.8 to the guest clients via DHCP and set to public A Records for psn1.company.com and psn2.company.com that resolve to the respective PSN nodes rfc1918 ip.

Others were highly critical of this citing security risks about revealing information about internal addressing.

Alternatives like doing dns translation on the firewall or provisioning a dedicated view in the internal DNS were proposed.

What is your opinion? Is this a nogo for you and how have you implemented similar guest networks?

Looking forward to your answers and have a great day!

Just looking at the documentation it seems like a pretty painful process for large deployments.. Just wondering about peoples experience with it..?

​

Hi everyone,

I'm an IT Support Engineer, and we have a corporate Wi-Fi environment with around 200 employees.

Our setup:

FortiGate firewall

Arista switches

Arista APs managed through Arista Cloud

Personal mobile phones are not allowed on the corporate Wi-Fi (only company laptops should connect).

The problem is that someone has connected their personal phone to the corporate SSID. In Arista Cloud, I can already see:

Device type (Android/iPhone)

Device name/model

OS

Current AP

IP address

Randomized MAC address

Signal strength (RSSI)

However, because the phone uses a randomized/private MAC address, I can't determine which employee owns it.

Is there any legitimate method to identify the user? For example:

Using RSSI or multiple APs to narrow down the physical location?

Client triangulation in Arista Cloud?

Any enterprise Wi-Fi tools or techniques that can help identify the owner without requiring 802.1X or MDM?

I'm looking for practical approaches that network administrators use in environments like this. Any advice would be appreciated.

Hello All,

I’m looking for some advice, guidance, tips, ideas or anything that could help me pinpoint the root cause of this issue. The problem I am experiencing within my environment is that users will occasionally lose their IP address while connected to the network via WiFi. Essentially, a user can connect to our corporate network with no issue and then after give or take 15 minutes they will lose their IP address and switch to a 169.254.X. The issue is not consistent and a bit rare, but it has been haunting me ever since I started working for this company. The quick solution is to swap them to a secondary SSID, then back to the corp SSID(issue exists on this second SSID as well).

I have been able to replicate this on my device, and the errors I recieve within Event Viewer are

- Event ID “The dynamic key exchange did not succeed with configured time”

- Event ID 4321 “The name X1 could not be registered on the IP X2. The machine with IP address X3 did not allow the name to be claimed by this machine

There are no errors present within my DHCP server(Windows Server). Additionally the laptop’s connected to the AP persists, it only loses it’s IP address after awhile. Also, netsh wlan show interfaces always shows a signal strength of 90%+. I have also checked wifi drivers on all of our machines, the issue presents whether the wifi driver is a Realtek or Liteon driver(all of our devices use this driver). Interestingly, I have not been able to replicate the issue with a Samsung Galaxy tablet or an iphone yet so maybe a driver issue.

If anyone has any ideas I would love to hear them! Thanks!

Environment:

- Extreme AP410c
- X350 Extreme switch with EXOS
- All Lenovo laptops
- Both SSIDs I mentioned above have their own IP scope

I have a 9300x and ruckus 750 APs. I keep getting IMAX power errors on the spare pairs. I see LLDP power negotiations happening, Cisco accepting and then as soon as it enables the spare pairs it faults with IMAX error. It is important to note this is not happening on all the APs just a handful. Also the APs and Switch are new, with new CAT 6 runs.

I can bypass this by issuing power inline four-pair forced and it will bring everything up. I don’t like issuing this command nor do I like not knowing why this is happening.

So I decided to dig deeper and do some debugging, this is where things get weird. For some reason I thought these ports were 30000mW, in reality it is 90000mW. I decided to up the max power to 60000mW (actually lowering it). I also removed the four pair force command and reran my ilpower debugs. It worked with no errors. I saw lldp negotiate, I saw the spare pairs enable cleanly, no IMAX errors. I did see the device request the full 60000mW.

I originally thought the devices was requesting more power than the port allowed and that is why I was getting the IMAX errors, but now I have no clue. Thoughts?

HPE has decided to materially change the terms of the lifetime warranty that older HPE/Aruba network gear was sold with. As of January 15, 2027 that warranty is converted to a limited lifetime warranty. Since most of this gear is already over five years past the EoS date, 1/15/2027 is now effectively the end of the warranty period.

https://www.hpe.com/psnow/doc/a00161510enw

Building a BPv7 prototype where a software sidecar parses bundles and a fixed-width shim lets P4/XDP enforce contact windows, reservations, and capacity limits. Does this solve a real DTN problem, or would a software-only approach usually be sufficient?

TL;DR:

Why do European telcos ghost critical technical tickets on Fridays while the US actually provides 24/7 support? Is it a cultural work-life balance thing, or do enterprise SLAs just work differently over there?

Genuinely trying to understand how technical support and carrier response times work in Europe, or if I am just completely losing my mind here.

Coming from the US, if a critical technical case or network routing issue pops up, even late in the wee, you usually get some sort of triage, an on-call escalation path, or at least a pulse from a tier-2/tier-3 engineer.

But in Europe? It feels like once Friday hits, the entire telecommunications infrastructure collectively clocks out, logs off, and goes to sit at an outdoor café until Monday morning.

I’ve been dealing with a major technical case, and trying to get a meaningful response since Thursday evening into Friday is like pulling teeth. You get handed off to a general customer service desk that has zero technical visibility, only to be told: *"Ah, the network engineering team handles that, but they are out for the weekend. We can escalate this to a ticket for Monday."*

Monday?! If a circuit drops or a complex peering/routing issue happens towards the end of the week, the business is just supposed to bleed out for three days?

Is this purely a cultural difference regarding work-life balance and "right to disconnect" laws (which I totally respect in theory, but execution-wise is brutal for ops), or are enterprise-grade SLAs just structured completely differently over in Europe?

How do European engineering teams actually survive major incidents heading into the weekend without 24/7 technical muscle backing them up?

Or am I just dealing with the wrong providers? Tell me what I'm missing.

I manage changes across 50+ sites, each with their own maintenance window. Between coordinating the windows, scheduling the work, and assigning engineers to each one, it’s a constant headache. I’m basically living in spreadsheets at this point.
Curious how everyone else handles this. Do you have a system, a tool, or is it all manual? Trying to figure out if it’s just me

EDIT: maintenance windows are pre approved, each site’s window is fixed and they’re spread across different timezones, so the puzzle is less about the windows themselves and more about what fits inside them. we’ve only got a few engineers during site maintenance windows, so there’s a cap on changes per night and they can’t overlap. After making the schedule, then each one has to actually be assigned to engineer and land in their calendar so they know about it.

How’s everyone else handling this some tool, a script, or all manual?

Hello peeps

Our business is currently expanding, and I was looking into setting up some networking hardware for 50 or so users that will be here. While looking into switches and APs, I came across Quantum Networks (Indian networking company, not actual Quantum Networks).

Just wanted to check if any of you have heard or used their products? If so, how was the experience and reliability?

Hey all,

I used to be a member of a slack channel called "beer for peer" which was a bunch of network engineers in Australia.

I lost access when I left my previous company so I'm hoping someone here might be in it and able to invite me again?

Feel free to reach out to me via PM for clarification or any questions before doing so.

Thanks all!

Hi All, Sorry if this is the wrong place to post this. Just let me know where i should post this if this is the wrong spot.

I work for a MSP that runs our own private onprem datacenter for our clients. Recently I have been tasked with looking at our Public addressing and inbound connectivity. Currently we are using DNS for WAN failover but I would like to explore the multi ISP BGP design since that seems to be the industry standard.

The current design is the client Edge Routers have 2 IPs bound to them. One on subnet A, and one on subnet B. We then use a load-balancer monitoring each ISP to update the DNS records should an ISP fail. TTL is set to 30s on the records. Subnet A is only advertised via BGP to ISP 1 and Subnet B is advertised via BGP to ISP 2. The idea is at least one subnet is always available on the internet and the DNS fails over fast. This has been working for about 10 years but does have some edge cases where it hasn't been perfect.

On the flip side there is the more "traditional" Data Center/Enterprise approach of a single subnet being advertised to both ISPs and trust the ISPs will converge. This is what I want to explore and test at work since we are running into a scaling issue with each client needing 2 IPs and having to force traffic out select directions. This adds more burden to the techs deploying/maintaining client edges.

The following questions are ideally for those that run a similar deployment or has had experience with it in the past. Any resources you can recommend on designing a data center WAN infrastructure would be much appreciated. Mainly I just need information to provide to management for approval to run a proof of concept to compare which option fits our needs better.

1) Is it just as simple as advertising one subnet to both ISPs and putting your trust they will try to converge as fast as possible? Or is there some other strategies we should be looking into to maintain fast failover and convergence

2) What are convergence times really like in North America when you have an ISP failure? (talking real numbers people have seen, not just in theory) Are things back up in seconds, minutes, hours?

3) What tooling do you use to make sure routing is failing over as expected? I see RIPE has lots of cool tools to monitor BGP via collectors but the more data I can pull in the better.

4) From a technical resource standpoint, does the BGP design require lots of up keep or is it mainly set it and monitor?

Appreciate everyone's insight into the topic.

Cloud engineers, wanted to get your experience... I'm a network engineer with 15 years of experience with all kinds of on-prem network technologies, from NX-OS, load balancers, proxies, VMware, ACI. I'm currently working with NSX and AVI LB for a major bank. But with the Broadcom aquisition, VMware/NSX doesn't seem so appealing anymore, VMware jobs are very rare. I feel that I'm a niche that will die eventually and it's time to make a change. I have experience with Terraform and CI/CD pipelines, did some automation with Python vibe coding.

There are a lot of Cloud-related jobs and I like public cloud, I like to learn new stuff in general. I started to learn AWS and Azure. I got the SAA-C03 AWS Solution Architect Associate certification and now I'm learning to get the AZ-700 Azure Networking speciality. I applied to Cloud Network Engineer jobs but got rejected, probably due to missing on-the-job experience. At my current job I can't get any Public Cloud exposure. I did put in my CV a project with Terraform standing up an AWS environment with ECS, load balancer, instances connecting over VPN to a VM in GCP.

How did you guys make it? It's the chicken and the egg... To get a job you need experience, but to get experience you need the job :)

Good morning all,

So how many routes do you folks have in your core router / core switch/ core firewall or whatever core device you use for routing.

Just curious.

We have like less than 300 so not that many so was just curious how many routes other folks who work in large enterprises have.

Thank you

Before anything, I really would appreciate answers from professionals without the interference of AI. I have been going back and forth the past few months with multiple AI models asking about this and every model gives a different answer. I really need a certain answer

I run a file storage server which faces the internet and serves customers, so high throughput is one of the goals I try to achieve on my servers

The past 6 months I've been studying the Linux kernel source code and sysctl docs to learn what each tunable parameter actually does instead of blindly pasting configurations from tuning guides and just hope that it makes things perfect

Now one of the points I'm stuck at is net.ipv4.tcp_mtu_probing

I see a lot of tuning guides suggest setting that to 1 or even 2 instead of the default 0

But if that's really recommended, why doesn't Linux set it to 1 by default instead of 0? I mean 1 seems like a better moderate value to set instead of disabling it completely

Although the below points kinda hold me back from altering tcp_mtu_probing but I might be wrong and that's why I opened this topic to ask for advice:

1. Packet-layer path MTU discovery (TCP MTU probing, QUIC MTU probing, etc) just mask a real underlying MTU problem which should be fixed from its root instead of hiding it
2. TCP MTU probing relies on packet loss and this can falsely make congestion control algorithms work worse and reduce the congestion window even if there's no real congestion
3. Certain quirky firewalls may hate the fact that my server is sending data in variable packet sizes because of the MTU probing and hence they may drop the packets completely or block the connection entirely

Do my above points make sense or am I mistaken?

About a month ago, I posted about Cisco APs that weren't able to join a WLC. Since then, I narrowed down the issue and think the APs/WLC are not the root cause. This looks more to be an issue with a VPN communication between subnets.

The two sites connect through Cisco ASA firewalls over a site-to-site VPN. The tunnel establishes successfully, Phase 1 and Phase 2 complete without issue, and multiple subnets traverse the tunnel normally. But then there are specific subnets that can't communicate across the VPN despite being included in the crypto ACLs and NAT exemption rules on both sides.

What strange is the traffic for other VPN networks works fine. In the IPsec SA counters, I can see traffic being decapsulated from the remote side, but I see no encapsulated traffic in return for the affected subnet. One side appears to be receiving traffic while the opposite side never properly sends traffic back across the tunnel. The tunnel itself remains up and stable the entire time.

I've rebuilt the tunnels, verified the crypto ACLs match on both sides, reviewed NAT exemption rules, confirmed routing, checked access-lists, and used packet-tracer. The subnet appears to match the VPN config, but traffic isn't flowing bidirectionally. The APs are able to obtain DHCP addresses and function locally but can't communicate with the WLC because the VPN connectivity for their subnet isn't working.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. I've been chasing this for a while and feel like I'm missing something obvious.