On Sat, 31 Mar 2012 15:48:37 -0700, Network IP Dog said:
I'm utterly amazed how many people give away free consultant work.
A lot of us are quite busy with $DAYJOB and not in a position to take on a consulting engagement - and there's no good micropayment infrastructure to deal with 20-minute consulting gigs anyway. So we give away 5 minute chunks of our time for the benefit of the networking community. It's a large chunk of what makes 'best common practices' evolve. (Hint - that consultant you hired? How much of *their* knowledge did they aquire from other people's free advice?) And those of us who *do* go looking for consulting gigs often need to market ourselves as somebody clued. You read NANOG for a while, you get a good idea of who is clued and who isn't. And thus you decide who gets the gig.
Google is your friend... ;^)