Cisco Sucks Rocks

God, did I have a bad day.

This started yesterday when Cisco acknowledged that there could, possibly, maybe, but-they-weren't-really-sure be a bug that causes OC12 interfaces to crash when Netflow is enabled on them. This is a show stopper of a problem for me at work. Serious fucking problem.

Today began by suffering through a management meeting wherein I suddenly realize that the company I work for is too big. I don't know if I can work for a company that requires me to take on an adversarial relationship with other departments in order to get my job done. This does not foster the feeling that we are all working towards one goal and it's a combative style of management that I'm not sure I'm cut out for. This sort of thing is necessary in a company of this size that has a scatter shot approach to the market instead of a core competency. It's a bad thing, and I'll leave it at that.

Anyway, back to why I hate Cisco today. The Cisco guys that are in Austin right now are trying to help with another problem with those very OC12 cards. They suggested that maybe they fixed the problem with with Netflow 8. The production engineer checks with his boss, I check with my vendor and we decide to test Netflow 8 in Seattle. Right now. This afternoon. While the Cisco people are there.

Unfortunately, you cannot enable Netflow 8 in our particular code rev. My vendor doesn't support 8 for collection anyway. v6 also crashes the cards. v5 is what we're working with now. v7 only runs on certain routers that these are not but *is* supported by the data collection vendor.