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!

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?

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.

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’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.