The article is full of poorly written handwaving. Every problem <i>looks</i> easy from a distance. The devil is in the details. Sure it sounds like networking should be "just plug a bunch of boxes together and let them figure it out". But that's about as naive as saying we shouldn't have bother with these pesky programming language things.. We should just be able to describe what we want the computer to do in english! :-) Yeah, that's likely.<p>Aside from the run-on sentences and other grammatical problems with the piece, specific comments in that article also lead me to believe the author doesn't know much about networking. Take this one for example:<p><i>"We don't need a cable between every pair of switches carrying the same subnet, though; a switch will happily forward traffic coming from one trunk out to another trunk, but we need to be mindful of our uptime requirements; if an intermediate switch or trunk fails, then the subnet will be shattered into pieces unless we set up alternative paths through the network (andsuffer the consequences of Spanning Tree Protocol aka STP, which doesn't yet support VLANs very well; you pretty much have to trunk every VLAN to every switch if you're using STP and VLANs together"</i><p>Say what? Every working network engineer in the world will be quite suprised to know that STP doesn't support VLAN's well. They'll also be quite surprised at the assertion that VLAN trunking is required <i>because</i> of STP?!?! That whole sentence is so wrong I'm not sure where to begin.