From: Howard C. Berkowitz (hcb@gettcomm.com)
Date: Tue Jul 20 2004 - 16:01:03 GMT-3
At 2:18 PM -0400 7/20/04, Chad Hintz wrote:
>Hi all,
>
>
>
>Sorry for the OT but my company has deployed MGX overseas and needs me to do
>support on it but I cannot find any non-onsite training for these. Any help
>would be much appreciated.
>
Unfortunately, you are not likely to find it. I qualified as an MGX
instructor some years ago, although there wasn't much business demand
for it and I only taught a couple of classes. In general, it is
unrealistic to have other than onsite classes -- too much extremely
expensive equipment is involved. IIRC, the last lab I used, at Cisco,
had five MGX, six BPX, and assorted other gear. Complicating the
problem is that you need to have lots of spare boards -- it is
possible, for example, to get firmware upgrades out of sequence, and
wind up with a BPX processor board that has to be reset at the
factory.
On the one occasion we were able to do a class at the customer
premises, it was a one-time situation where a customer had bought a
significant number of MGX and BPX switches, and had them shipped to
their corporate headquarters. Even there, it took a week or so to
set them up as a lab. Once the company put them into service, all
subsequent training either was on-the-job or at Cisco. Learning
partners typically do not have their own equipment, but rent a lab at
Cisco.
Unfortunately, there isn't complete compatibility among the command
sets of the xGX products. I'd have to look at the manual to remember
the exact syntax, but on one box, the command to show all trunks was
something like shtrks all, where on the other, it was shtrk *. If
you just have MGX, fine. But if you have BPX or other boxes, you
really need some of each.
I don't see any reason why the courses coudn't be distance learning,
with someone physically at the lab site to change boards, etc. As far
as I know, no one offers that. Cisco does increasingly do its
in-house training via distance learning [1], so you might talk to
your account team and see if there is any way to get into an internal
class.
[1] A slight rant, but I believe that the practice of having the routers, etc.,
in the same room as the students, unless it is a hardware maintenance
course, is a very bad way to learn. Being able to look at the lights
and such is not realistic in a real world of networking, where the
majority of equipment will physically be remote.
Unfortunately, while it is cheaper and a better way to learn to have
just PCs in a classroom, connected to the equipment through reverse
telnet (and SNMP, etc., where appropriate), the commercial reality in
the training business is that students give higher ratings to
courses that have equipment they can touch. You can't touch it if
it's on another continent, you can't touch it if it's in the CCIE lab,
etc., but there is this distorting emotional need to have things to
touch.
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