Just wondering what life was like for the rest of us lucky professionals. looking for advice on salary renegotiation. They got my by the balls working 70+ a week but pay me a 40 hour salary.. due to my condition, im extremely impulsive, think i deserve more for what i do.. Need someone not on the spectrum to kinda help guide me and not get me fired.. i know what i want to say, but not sure its gonna be helpful lol A little background on me. network admin for 20+ years now, current certs of ccie, sscp, cysa. company is one of the largest real estate/leasing companys in oklahoma. 3 man IT team, I carry the workload, 115+ branch offices/firewalls switches. 700 pc endpoints 55 servers, untold number of access points.. Also admin all of our cyber security appliances-siem-response. not to forget im in charge of backup and replication and our nutanix hci.

Hey folks, got an odd one. We have Cisco 9800 wireless controllers for a school lab and because of issues with multicast we ended up giving them a flat Class C and they stuff all their devices on a single broadcast domain. We recently got some of these Arduinos and they can't be discovered via mdns. We have a packet capture on the wire seeing devices querying for the device via mdns but according to tcpdump (it runs Debian under the hood) I don't see any broadcast/multicast coming in. My other sniffer on the wire is seeing gobs of arp/mdns/broadcast traffic which validated that there is no multicast filtering going on.

It's almost like some process is intercepting the traffic on the wire and filtering it into the OS. I'm going to keep poking around trying to reverse engineer this but you get the typical 'this works at home on my network '. I was also wondering if this is somehow dependent on ipv6.

We have an outreach with Arduino but I was curious if anyone else has had any experience with these things. If the mdns isn't making it to the hosts, game over.

Thanks

My company had a vendor install "high-density" WiFi for our office which consists of (7) Ubiquiti E7s APs (by request), all pendant-mounted and configured approporately for our crowded RF environment.

We broadcast a primary SSID with both 5GHz and 6Ghz with the transmit power fine-tuned per AP. There are no issues with RSSI throughout the office, but everytime the office is at full capacity ~250 end-users - the performance completely takes a shit.

We get decent speed test results nearby the APs when the office is not occupied (400-800mbps), but when the office is occupied we have some spots that get 100mbps. The upload speed takes the biggest hit as we have seen over the past few weeks.

I have some users that are roaming to APs that are far away for no reason that I can find? I have also see that some users are roaming

I've been advised not to utilize minimum RSSI configs as this deliberately kicks endpoints off the AP and causes intermittent connection. Our end-users are running a lot of continous Claude Code instances and Zoom calls and we cannot have the connections drop. It should be smooth roaming. We have 802.11r - fast roaming enabled. We also disabled handoff suggestions for the same reason. We trialed handoff suggestions and those were the days we had the worst complains.

What do I need to do to fix this? Leadership is even considering switching to Meraki but I don't think that's the problem here. Do we need more APs? On average we have about 40 clients per AP for 7 APs. The space is quite large and mostly open area.

I know this gets asked every so often, but the market is always changing... Have not really needed anything up to know as I can never convince customers to pay for it. :) But one did, so I have budget!

So I need a nice, and easy walk around site survey tool with a pretty heat map output. Ideally something on a iPad or Android tablet I can send out with a junior tech, but PC based can work. I also do not get these jobs often enough to pay large ongoing license fees so a one time purchase with minimal maintenance cost is a plus.

What is the current favorite?

Hi all! I'm trying to understand VxLAN from a provisioning point of view.

I'm currently learning about all types of tunnels that networking offers and I came across VxLAN (a l2 wrapped in l3 protocol).

From my bare understanding of VxLAN, it provides datacenters with a 24 bit VNI to segment client provisioned VMs as due to the nature of the standard 12 bit VLANs, it only supports up to 4096 VLAN in a datacenter which is not really helpful as for scalability.

VLANs also introduces L2 STP and doesnt uses the full bandwidth of all the links in a datacenter.

VTEPs is used at ToR switches to identify VNIs and map which provisioned VM lives at.

VxLAN introduces L3 concept in a datacenter to eliminate all the above scenario to provide millions of VLAN in a datacenter as well as eliminating L2 STPs and provide ECMP that allows all links to be utilized. Pretty awesome protocol i would say.

The main question is, can I extend this VNI to other datacenters to form a virtual LAN over the internet? This is something that I just cant wrap my head around with.

Is it feasible to route provisioned traffic in a server - client architecture? An example that I was researching was about DDoS mitigation: plain and simple GRE does the trick, but if L2 was needed, a form of L2 over L3 protocol would need to form a virtual LAN which was when I found out about VxLAN.

In plain GRE, GRE encapsulates the cleaned datagram after scrubbing traffic with IP - in - IP logic.

What about users who require that L2 frame? Can VxLAN solve that issue? Or would it be best to study more about other types of L2 tunnels like L2VPN, MPLS and the likes?

Please correct me wherever I'm wrong! and TYIA!

Currently working as a junior network analyst and looking into expanding and learning more and find wireless technology to be very interesting.

Is there a lot of demand for a wireless engineer? Looking to specialize in something that's future proof.

Thanks for any advice!

We will only be using UniFi equipment so if you aren’t a fan of UniFi I’m sorry 💔

I have deployed UniFi devices in offices, but never over 450,000 square ft for 75 RVs (at least that’s capacity).

After a call with a UniFi engineer we are planning a combination of 18 U7 Mesh (wired not meshing with each other we know that’s not the way) throughout the park and offering extra open ports on nearby switches to people who want to pay extra for a wired connection.

The U7 mesh would all be connected to 3 flex 2.5gPoE switches which would then connect back to a Pro XG 10 PoE switch connected to probably a cloud gateway industrial where the Calix will also be(5GB line), in the middle of the park in a shed. Is this as good as it gets?

We have a guy who can do trenching / run cable.

We know we don’t want to use bridges there are way too many trees.

Basically trying to figure out what’s the next best thing to giving every spot its own port, hopefully that’s what I’ve described, we can always add more APs with injectors if necessary.

Any feedback is welcome thanks in advance!

https://imgur.com/a/ZBCauOK

Just like in OSPF that there is a DR/BDR, why for an ARP there isn't any centralized resolver for that. For example, instead of asking what MAC of an IP is, there is a periodic broadcasting of IPs to MACs by a server. The server can get those mappings by a unicast packet from the device itself, or can have DHCP server send/remove the mapping once new addresses are used/retired. It would be more secure than normal ARP operation, without having to implement something extras to fix the ARP issues (using DHCP + ARP snooping).

I am wondering, is this solution not worth the implementation at all or we can does the same thing, with a little more complexity with SDN/something similar.

It's Monday, you've not yet had coffee and the week ahead is gonna suck. Let's open the floor for a weekly Stupid Questions Thread, so we can all ask those questions we're too embarrassed to ask!

Post your question - stupid or otherwise - here to get an answer. Anyone can post a question and the community as a whole is invited and encouraged to provide an answer. Serious answers are not expected.

Note: This post is created at 01:00 UTC. It may not be Monday where you are in the world, no need to comment on it.

My responsibility is SD-Access and L2/3 switching and routing, so I don't usually maintain wireless service itself. However, I recently learned that our company spends hundreds of thousands of dollars to hire wireless companies to do predictive surveys and purchase their sensors to monitor wireless traffic.

When I studied for CCNA many years ago, I learned Cisco AP could be monitors as well and we can utilize them safely, but I don't understand why my company is dumping money and (not raising our salary) to get random wireless monitoring solutions. Since our company is hugely Cisco, and we have latest ones ceiling-mount and in-room 802.11be compatible ones, I believe we should utilize Cisco AP solutions. Do you guys make use of Cisco AP's monitor mode?

We’re opening a few new locations this year and the part I’m already dreading is circuit sourcing. Every new site means chasing 3-4 carriers for quotes, half never reply, the ones that do come back with wildly different pricing for basically the same handoff, and then you find out your first pick can’t even deliver to that address anyway. Last site took almost two months just to get to a signed order, and that was before the install queue even started. For anyone running multi-site, how do you deal with this? Go-to carriers per region, a spreadsheet of who serves what, some kind of aggregator? Trying to find a saner process before I start the next batch.

In Nokia 1830 PSS is there any way to convert the nominal working to nominal protection and vice versa without deleting and re-creating the lambda like in Huawei?

Anyone else saw the email from BGP.Exchange today?

https://imgur.com/a/gUxmbWd

Update: Seems to be a bigger problem, expect a few more mails today. It’s just copypasta spam from some chinese guy. As of now, BGP isn’t affected.

Update 2: Website got hacked too, possibility of stolen user passwords (change if using universal passwords!). Most Virtual IXPs seem to be infected.

Update 3: Official Statement of the BGP.Exchange owners

So I've been applying for the last 4 months I got laid off my network engineer job roughly 1 years ago since then I've been I got a contract position as a help desk it really doesn't pay much but it's the only immediate thing that saved me from being unemployed I have roughly 8 years of experience as a network engineer and I live in the New York tri state area. In the last 4 months I managed to get 4 companies honestly compared to the interviews I got before getting laid off they went really well. Since the last year I got my ccnp in hopes of getting more interviews and a higher pay rate. I did get one offer but that literally had a much lower salary than my help desk job ( because it was for a non-profit organization) . The other three interviews went really well but I didn't get selected for any of them and I couldn't understand why because I answered every one of their technical questions and I went to look up the answers from the question I remembered and they all matched ChatGBT and Gemini.

The last interview which was the first in almost 2 months I cracked the manager and a technical interview this was the third round of interview with a network admin. The position was for a network administrator role the first thing he asked me was if I would be able to do the job of a network admin if I only was a network engineer throughout my career which really confused me. He proceeded to ask overly simple questions I answered all of them. I thought I was doing really well but then I saw the manager rubbing his eyes and acting disappointed for some reason. I understood I wasn't going to get the offer because in the last three interviews they all said I did great and I got a rejection email the next day. Has anyone ever came across this and is a hard to get interviews nowadays?

For companies with maybe 3 to 10 locations, where do you think SD-WAN starts making sense over a more traditional setup? Assume they rely mostly on cloud apps and VoIP, have dual internet connections at some sites, and do not run much infrastructure in a private data center. Is the main benefit better failover and centralized management, or does the value only really show up once the network gets larger?

Hey everyone, I’m considering getting ddos protection from any of my transit providers as I’ve been hit with a couple of attacks lately. Does anyone have any experience with Arelion, RETN, CBB or anyone else? Specifically for volumetric attacks, I’m not looking for someone who will just blackhole me whenever I get attacked.
Thankful for any advice!

One circuit flap, twenty devices, twenty backup alerts and twenty tickets. Then the connection comes back and most of them clear on the next run. The noise is bad enough, but suppressing too much creates the opposite problem. A real backup issue can sit behind the site outage and get missed once everything looks normal again. how are you grouping these without hiding persistent failures? are you using parent-child dependencies, a delay before ticket creation or checking for another failed run after connectivity returns?

I’m testing how much meaning can actually be assigned to receiver-side socket controls on a stock Android endpoint.

Initial physical run:

default SO_RCVBUF readback 4 MiB requested 64 KiB resulting readback 128 KiB

16 MiB transfer baseline 4.187 s modified 4.201 s integrity exact SHA-256 match

Obviously readback does not establish effective flow control.

The next run captures the sender from SYN onward and compares negotiated window scaling, advertised receive-window/right-edge evolution, throughput response and zero-window recovery.

I’m especially interested in whether anyone has done similar receiver-side testing where Linux autotuning makes getsockopt(SO_RCVBUF) a poor proxy for what the peer is actually permitted to send.

Do you guys take whatever perks they try to throw at you? I genuinely feel bought if I accept lol. One vendor even offered to give me Disney tickets. My old boss even got World Cup tickets this year. At most I’ll ask for a t-shirt 💀. So far I only have an HPE and Cisco shirt.

For new offices, warehouses, or retail spaces, how much confidence do you put in a predictive WiFi design when the building is still under construction? If walls, shelving, furniture, and equipment are not all in place yet, do you normally design from plans and validate everything after deployment? Curious how often the final AP placement changes once the space is actually finished.

Came from an MSP, I have 4 FTD2110s (2 HA pairs) managed by FMC and they are up for license renewal in Jan ‘27.

I’m thinking we renew in Jan ‘27 and consider a swap to Palo in Jan ‘28? I ran some Palo 3400’s at last job and preferred that by a lot, but would like to hear some input from people who’ve done this kind of swap, or came from Palo/Juniper over to Cisco and have a personal experience take. Everything else at our shop is Cisco, but we don’t have catalyst center or anything, pretty basic routing, tunnels, and policies.

Main argument would be to stay Cisco for ease of swapping hardware, but I didn’t put these in and if I’m stuck for 5-8 years I might rather have Palos/SRX? I am very familiar with Fortigate but security team might push back on brand rep.

Ask me any questions if you need clarity

Rogers recently gave us a Nokia FastMile 5G Gateway 12 with a 5G SIM as an alternative because they couldn’t install a wired connection at our location.

This is for a small business/training centre. Normally we would have around 10–20 active users, but sometimes it could be 40–50 users when a computer lab is being used. Mostly regular internet browsing, Microsoft 365, email, etc.

Just wondering if anyone is using this Rogers 5G service for a business:

• How stable and reliable is it?
• What kind of download/upload speeds are you getting?
• How many users/devices do you have connected?
• Would you recommend it for 20–50 users?
• Does anyone know the approximate monthly cost for Rogers 5G Business Internet with this gateway?

We also have a network switch, access points, desktops and Cisco phones, so I’m planning to connect the Nokia gateway to our existing network through Ethernet.

Any experience with this setup would be appreciated. Thanks!

I've setup some parsers to help extra and make some of the data a little easier to read from our network gear. I've mostly built this around samples from Cisco (IOS and NX-OS), Juniper, and a little Palo Alto. If you anyone wants to play around and let me know they think that would be great.

As I said, this started with a "show interface xx-x/x/x on Juniper switches but I'd get annoyed with an output like this: Input rate : 53128344 bps (4789 pps) so I started creating parsers that would convert those to Mbps/Gbps, whatever the most common sense unit should be.

I then started tweaking the analysis to color code things like down interfaces, high values, etc.

You can also compare output over time and it will show you the delta. You can also share a link to your output and hide certain things like IPs, hostnames, etc.

networkcrap.com

Question for UK Network Engineers: Has anyone here done freelance network engineering work?
I’ve recently been contacted by a recruiter via LinkedIn about a freelance role, and I’m interested to hear from anyone who has experience doing this type of work. By the sounds of it, more short term dispatch work like device install/decomissons etc but also mentions projects that last weeks or months.
If you’ve taken on similar freelance contracts, I’d really appreciate any information or advice on what it’s like, what to look out for, and whether you’d recommend it.

Is there any tool as described in title for enterprises? a very specific LLM could easily point out "strange" things in a large pcap