Thanks. Your observations are good related to active posters. The overall list is very diverse. Aside from the active posters, the list is about 10K strong. Everything from AOL to people from Zoos, law enforcement, banks, and any industry you can think of. NANOG is not just a list, but an interesting hodge podge of builders and occupants of the Internet that sometimes make sense. :-) As Paul Wall might say, Drive Slow. Best, Marty On 7/1/10, Butch Evans <nanog@butchevans.com> wrote:
I have been on this list for about 2 weeks, just observing the discussions. I have primarily worked with wireless service providers in the past who are fairly low budget operators. Some of the things I've observed about this group are:
* This list seems to be populated by better funded operations (whether that means larger or just better at getting funding may remain to be seen)
* Most of the operators on this list seem to be pretty good at their work and the questions seem to revolve around more complex issues
* There seems to be a number of corporate network operators on this list as opposed to access network operators (such as ISPs and such)
I hope you all don't take this as an affront and get offended, as that's not my intent. I am just making some simple observations.
Having said this, I wanted to introduce myself and see if this is a list that I need to participate in actively. I am a network engineer and consultant. I have worked in the past with Cisco, Juniper and other similar "higher end" type devices, but it's been a while since I had customers who use that gear. Most of my current customer base are smaller operators who can pinch a penny in half. :-)
I do a lot of work with MikroTik RouterOS, ImageStream and other Linux based devices. I do engineering, training, hardware sales and such for networks all over the world. I am likely to continue to monitor the list for questions that are in my area of expertise, but wondered if these devices I mention are "common" to operators on this list. I know that I have not caught a discussion that involved any of them so far (other than one reference to an OpenBSD solution a day or two ago).
Anyway, hello to the list and I look forward to finding a home among this group.