### On Tue, 12 Mar 2002 12:23:51 -0800 (PST), Ratul Mahajan ### <ratul@cs.washington.edu> casually decided to expound upon Sean Donelan ### <sean@donelan.com> the following thoughts about "Re: Telco's write best ### practices for packet switching networks ": RM> On the downside -- this is yet another instance of conflict between RM> research and operations. Being able to address the (core) routers This may be a repeat discussion but I also wonder if there are some other social level conflicts derived from how one structures their management network. For instance, many providers have a seperate group which handles the corporate IT which is different from the group which handles the production provider network. One could take the stance that the production network should only be reachable from the corporate network and that the management network become an extension of the corporate network. I imagine that many network engineers on the side of the production network might take issue with that (I probably would). For better or worse, many of us have gotten used to managing our backbones under a single umbrella including control over how we design and run our management network. I'd be interested in hearing about some of the practises of bigger providers (assuming I'm not asking anyone to violate security) on how they let their emloyees access their infrastrcture. Do you seperate and outsource your management infrastructure to your corporate IT support? Do you seperate but control it within your production network engineering groups? If so, do you have a special group within network engineering concentrating specifically on management or do you have the same people designing the network also do the management design? -- /*===================[ Jake Khuon <khuon@NEEBU.Net> ]======================+ | Packet Plumber, Network Engineers /| / [~ [~ |) | | --------------- | | for Effective Bandwidth Utilisation / |/ [_ [_ |) |_| N E T W O R K S | +=========================================================================*/