Is it bad, If they (your sysadmins) understand your backbone infrastructure and understand such things, as MTU MTU discovery, knows about ACL filters (without extra details) and existing limitations? They are not required to know about VPN mode or T3 card configuration, but they must understand basic things. Else, everything ends up in a long delays and 10 person technical meetings (by the phone, of course) - which is the best way of wasting anyone's time.

: : to pass the buck, one needs to know nothing. what makes a great noc : engineer is taking ownership of the user's problem.

In smaller networks, sure. However, it's not about passing the buck in large networks. It's about responsibilities. There, if you take ownership of the sysadmin's part of the ticket (where there're a lot of sysadmins for every OS), you'll likely get =them= chopped off and hung on the wall as an example to others. I would be pissed if one of the sysadmin folks tried to troubleshoot the backbone network instead of handing it off to me after clearing their part of the problem...

All I need to do is clear my part and pass it to them with all helpful data points included in the ticket. Any more than that and I'm stomping on other folks' toes.

scott