Luke S Crawford wrote:
>
>> in a lot of scenarios there are several choices, each with a different
>> set of bugs that you won't know about unless you open a TAC case and
>> tell an engineer exactly what features have to work for you.
>
> Yeah, but at the used prices for 100M kit, I can buy two or three, and test
> it out to my heart's content. I mean, my experience with support
> (working for clients who can afford such things) is that you have to
> understand the problem to get someone else to fix it anyhow, and usually
> understanding the problem is the hard part. Once you understand the problem,
> fixing it is trivial.
"Fixing it" isn't trivial when the problem is knowing which of several
IOS images have exactly the features you need and no bugs that will
affect what you are trying to do.
> So I don't usually think it makes sense to pay for
> support, especially when the equipment cost is such that I have a few spares
> laying about in the lab.
I'm inclined to agree with switches as long as yours are new enough to
be past the auto-negotiation bugs. But it's more complicated with
routers if you do anything unusual with multicast, vlans, tunnels,
multiple routing protocols, etc. And service on anything normally gets
you access to download any update image.
--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell at gmail.com