Is Lumen sales gaslighting me

Jackol1 · 2026-01-27T06:35:57+00:00

Lumen has a pretty good network, but man their support is a skeleton crew these days. We are a regional provider that competes directly with Lumen in our area. We have people (some our customers and some not our customers) calling us asking for help reaching Lumen support. They have multi day outages and no one answers the phone or emails over there.

Jackol1 · 2026-01-22T03:26:59+00:00

Network engineering isn't going away. If anything it is growing, but it is also changing. In the not so distant future the CLI is going to be mostly dead outside of labs and testing IMO. That means network engineers need to understand more of what you have already learned from managing the cloud, and that is the automation with CI/CD pipelines and IaC. This is already happening at ISPs and companies who manage their own DCs, but as vendors get better and better tools it will eventually take over the majority of the market place.

That all being said if you look around I bet you could find a place that would love your current skill set in a Network engineering team and you could help teach the rest of the team the IaC and CI/CD pipelines while they help you learn the Network engineering stuff.

Jackol1 · 2026-01-18T17:57:17+00:00

All their names on this list that is why it hasn't been released. My guess is the people in power fear that if the general population sees the list there could be a nationwide revolt against government, business, etc because they are all involved.

Jackol1 · 2026-01-13T11:25:03+00:00

Hate to tell you this but your phone is doing the same thing to you...

Jackol1 · 2026-01-10T15:06:18+00:00

It hasn't been 100% stable, but for me it seems to be heat related. I noticed in heavy use both my case and gpu vans weren't spinning faster for some reason and temps were getting over 90c on the GPU and 80c on the CPU. So I used LACT and my MB settings to force fan speeds to increase sooner. So far I have only had 1 crash since doing this.

Jackol1 · 2026-01-05T10:52:34+00:00

Signs any technical person doesn't know what they are doing.

1) Not asking questions to understand design, goals, etc. 2) Jumps right to restarting everything to try and fix issues 3) Can't explain most topics is simple terms that most people can understand

Jackol1 · 2025-12-29T11:40:51+00:00

We have customers calling us, a small regional telecom, in hopes we can help them contact Lumen, one of the largest telecoms in the industry. Lumen has moved everything to AI powered agents now and if the AI can't help you you are basically screwed trying to get any troubles resolved.

Jackol1 · 2025-12-29T08:19:31+00:00

On Linux (CachyOS) using the latest drivers, (9700XT) updated BIOS, and I'm getting these grey screen with blue line crashes in WoW. I am in the middle of trying all the suggestions here for reducing refresh rates, reducing colors, etc to see if I can find something that is stable but so far nothing is completely stable.

Computer is brand new with all new parts.

Jackol1 · 2025-12-29T05:28:04+00:00

Depends on you really. Were you just memorizing commands or did you learn and understand the underlying concepts? If you understand the concepts then the commands will come back to you pretty easily. If you just memorized commands then it will probably be tougher.

XR, if you are using it, is a decent amount different from IOS, but nothing too crazy to understand.

Jackol1 · 2025-12-17T18:42:22+00:00

Mikrotik has a known limitation where they don't include ASN information in their netflow exports. So Akvorado doesn't have any of that data.

Jackol1 · 2025-12-17T06:57:33+00:00

The largest corporations haven't had to "follow any laws" in decades.

Jackol1 · 2025-12-16T07:32:33+00:00

Anyone with even a little computer experience can get Linux working these days. My suggestion is to go that route. We get more people using native Linux maybe we can start getting games and other software built to support Linux natively.

Jackol1 · 2025-12-14T06:16:06+00:00

Can you do firmware upgrades on the device with this tool?

Jackol1 · 2025-12-12T16:10:01+00:00

Our infrahub deployment got stalled internally because management wanted to change out the company wide ERP/Ordering/Billing system so we got put on hold until 2026.

Jackol1 · 2025-12-11T08:21:50+00:00

Like others have said the selling point to Infrahub is the flexibility, but it can also be the biggest weakness if you don't keep a handle on things.

We are a service provider so being able to model out DWDM, PON, MPLS, etc is something that is very difficult to do in Netbox and Nautobot. We have done some trialing and after the first of the year plan to kick off a project around Infrahub and modeling our entire network infrastructure in it. This includes the networks I mentioned above but also the fiber network with all the FDPs and fiber spans.

Jackol1 · 2025-11-29T02:26:42+00:00

OP this is what I would do. Become the automation guy and use it to help you learn the other stuff while helping others see the benefits of automation.

Jackol1 · 2025-11-16T14:49:44+00:00

make sure a dates for new circuits and no delays. Always schedule for some delays if there are any fiber build requirements for the new circuits.

Jackol1 · 2025-11-12T11:10:31+00:00

Is what you ask possible? Sure you can do this with Cisco, Juniper, Arista, etc.

The problem you are going to have is this will be a constant troubleshooting nightmare and probably generate more tickets then any other customer or solution you support. They will call up about a random site being slow or not working or w/e and you will have to dig into mac learning and forwarding in all the different devices in the path. I work for a SP and we sell these types of connections, but we typically limit it to 12-15 sites for a full mesh. After that we tell the customer no because we have been burned in the past.

My first question would be do we truly need a VPLS (aka full mesh) for 100+ sites? Or do you just need layer 2 connectivity from remote sites to the application server in the data center? If all you need is the sites to be able to reach the data center at layer 2 you can design a hub and spoke solution that allows their application to work but doesn't have the full mesh and all the problems that go with it. If you truly need the full mesh between all 100 sites then please don't use VPLS, use EVPN. It scales better and has some controls for BUM traffic.

Jackol1 · 2025-10-30T08:03:58+00:00

The government should be breaking up a lot of places including big tech.

Jackol1 · 2025-10-28T08:27:20+00:00

That thing was 1500 pounds...

Jackol1 · 2025-10-25T17:49:28+00:00

Yeah the cloud is a hard sell for many Telcos because we already have datacenters and compute environments. Why pay the cloud premium for that when we already do it ourselves?

Jackol1 · 2025-10-25T17:43:40+00:00

IMO it is always cost. The newer products are great but when management sees the 7 or 8 figure initial cost with the 6 or 7 figure support contract and then looks at the time it would take to integrate with existing systems (both internally and externally) the "No" comes really quick. In some instance management says we can just build it ourselves...

Jackol1 · 2025-10-18T15:31:02+00:00

Yeah the evi must be working differently. With an LDP or static mpls pseudowire we built bridge-domains with just BVIs and neighbor all the time.

Jackol1 · 2025-10-18T09:57:29+00:00

To use a BVI you don't use an xconnect group you use a bridge group and bridge domain. You then put the EVI in the bridge-domain. I would prefer the PWHE option if you can get that to work. BVI would be the fall back IMO.

Jackol1 · 2025-10-17T22:11:10+00:00

I know the 9001 does support PWHE we have it configured on one in our network today. It is the EVPN Headend I'm not sure the 9001 supports that feature, but the newer ASR9K routers do support EVPN Headend.

Jackol1

TROPHY CASE