"Dumb ideas in networking" Topic

I live and work in Northeastern Pennsylvania, soon to be renamed "Upstate PA!", but that's another silly story…

Ever since those ing weasels in GM Management ruined the nice company I used to work for, I have had a variety of jobs, for a varying size of companies.

I noticed a silly trend in the "multinational" companies I worked for in the interim.

One company had its manufacturing facilities in its Scranton plant, but had its corporate HQ in California. ALL the printers (except mine!) were networked through … California. This means that a sales rep could be delayed for in some cases hours until the server in California decided to print out a report to a printer sitting 10 feet from the rep. I don't know why *I* got an exemption from this, but it may have been because CAD desingers were Special and prone to tantrums.

When I worked for Sanofi Pasteur in the Poconos as a contractor, all our uploads were networked through … France. The entire WORLD was networked through France.

I am sure someone in the networking business can come up with a logical reason for this, but to me it seems like the exemplar of anal pinheadedness and control.
I will laugh at you and scorn you if you attempt to justify this, but you may try.
"But, you can print your report directly to M Plantard's desk!" seem an awfully flimsy reason to tie up that mysterious resource, "bandwidth".

My Dad used to sell security systems for a large company. Before he could schedule an instalation or a service call to the technician that was in his smae building…he had to call the corparate office so they could call the tech themselves. Seemed rather silly.

Hmmmm… I used to work for EDS back in the early 80s before GM bought them and screwed them up.

Regards, the Gorb

"anal pinheadedness and control"

That pretty much nails it. Theory is, drive all communication through a central hub. The only thing you have to dedicate real resource (power, cool, secure, IT dorks, etc…) to is the central hub. Everything off the hub is just dispossable; nothing more then a McDonnalds toy. Your printer has a problem? Throw it away (ok, fedex it back to the mothership) and plug in another one. Oh, can't communicate back to mother ship because the network is down? Oh, con someone that accidently displayed a little technical apptitude (they track that sort of thing) into helping restore connectivity.

My personal favorite is when the little IT staff that they have at the hub gets sent to India. So now, the only real flesh and blood technical guys awake while you're at work has been reduced to pure hardware guys and maybe someone that actaully knows Oracle is actually installed on one of the machiens. Most of the skilled database guys won't see your question until 2:00am and won't get to ask you their first round of questions until 8:00am the next day. If you're lucky, you get resolution in 3 days. Good thing they're cheap.

You nailed it John. Like I always say, "Dilbert" isn't a commentary on reality it IS reality!

Why ? Somebody convinced the suits that it was cheaper and there is probably a buzzword that covers the practice, and therefore according to business laws it must be applied, no matter what the final cost may be.

Personally I always thought it was as much an attempt by the Windows network 'IT' staff to recreate the 'glory' days of the mainframe/minicomputer. Back when the users were all on workstations/terminals and the 'IT' staff were the 'little tin gods' of computing. 'Need a partition/drive mounted?' send a request to IT and sit on your thumb until they get around to you. And having the IT at corporate maintains a higher visibility for them than if they were off toiling in the boondocks with the rest of the peons.

At the last two places I worked, the IT staff was really keen on remote control software. That was they didn't have to leave their office to install software or 'troubleshoot' problems. Not that the last outfits contract computer guru knew which end was up.

"At the last two places I worked, the IT staff was really keen on remote control software. That was they didn't have to leave their office to install software or 'troubleshoot' problems."

-- As a IT guy I have to throw my 2 cents in here. A lot of times, it's not our choice on things like this, its management (and take it from me, IT guys HATE remote-control software, it's slow, it doesn't tell you everything you need to know, and it locks up on you). The problem is that management's choice is always "do it cheep".

It seems trivial if a IT tech just has to walk 50 feet across the building to work on a problem, but if a critical server goes down and the IT tech is 50 feet away and doesn't know about it, then heads roll, and it's usually the IT guys bosses head, which because everything rolls down hill, ends up on the IT guys head. Now add other buildings, next door, down the street, in the next town, and the problem get's so much worse. And every second that the IT guy is traveling, even if it's just 5 minutes, it time that management feels he is wasting. Which means that a job that could take 2 minutes to fix if we were on site, we have to spend a hour on remotely, because management doesn't want us to spend 10 minutes traveling back and forth from the site of the problem.

Oh sorry, this was someone else's rant wasn't it? I didn't mean to hijack it. Carry on.

Well said Eclectic!

The other major issue is the user community itself, they want it all, everything. Users want fully secure open collaboration with no limitations. Users also don't want to raise the tech rate that hasn't changed since 1996.

IT is a service; IT doesn't produce anything that is immediately or directly profitable. IT is an expense--guess what kiddies, all this crap you want costs a lot more than it did in 1996!

Your answer-we'll outsource get our IT on the cheap! The World Bank did that and the Indian outsourcing companies developers got paid a boat load of money by an emerging world power to code keystroke loggers, backdoors and password crackers into the services they were providing. You outsource you lose complete control of your data--real nice plan there!

The threat keeps getting smarter and smarter. The cost to provide services (I'm not talking salaries which are actually trending down), raw technology, keeps getting more and more expensive.

The user community keeps getting, well; loser+user=luser.

I work in Network Security; 8 years ago a $50,000 firewall and a $15/seat AV program were state of the art. There was only one of me here. Now there are 2 of us doing the job of 8. We control IPS, AV, Patch Management, Firewalls, Antispyware, AntiBotware, PKI, Secure Access, Wireless Security and a host of other systems that are all like small infants; they require constant continuous attention. Meanwhile the TechRate (the thing that pays for everything IT) hasn't changed in 10 years!

The users say: I don't want to install the patches they make me reboot, I don't want AV to run at lunch on Friday it slows my system down, why can't I send active code through email (these are developers and they should know better), how come I need both AV and Antispyware, why can't I use Yahoo P2P, how come I got this 1 Spam email yesterday (I'm not kidding about this either), why can't I share my PC with my friends and family at home, what's wrong with file sharing software at lunch, why are you looking at my network traffic don't you trust me, how come we don't just shift to all Macs because you know they can never be hacked or get viruses. The user community needs to grow up and get qualified! You need a license to run your automobile, you probably shouldn't be allowed to place a computational node on the interent until you have mastered and proved via testing that you can competently operate it.

There was a change in the business model in America (probably the whole world) a few dozen years ago. Accountants now run everything and they are only interested in efficiencies and math models to develop cost cutting ideas to make them (and possibly the shareholders) more profitable and richer. This model doesn't work <period/>

I'll stop here-it isn't the fault of IT.

Donald~

Ditto DRD and Eclectic.

The common id10t/user has NO clue as to what happens in the background. To them, IT should just work like a phone call (I blame marketing for selling the idea that IT has gotten to the level that things run themselves). I also blame the inclusion of personal devices in the work place that makes users feel that it should work at work like it works at home. HELLO, do you have to worry about Sarbox at home, additional security etc that we have in the workplace?

The reason that there is central control is to lower operating costs, and to limit liabilty due to infrastructure damage or data loss, nothing to do with wanting control. Get real. To see it from our perspective, take whatever job you have, increase the workload 100 fold, then entrust the work to people who have NO idea how to do what you do (rabid monkeys will do), give them the ability to totally negate all the work you have done, all the while being the one person soley responsible for the end product.
I have 600 computers where I work, and I am the ONLY ONE they have here to run things. I have one database admin, and me as IT Director and thats it. Id be dead in the water if it wasnt for remote control/access. Ive been pleading for additional help here for the past 4 years, and get nothing but sympathy and being told to make due, but remember to keep the systems running – actual quote from Accounting.

I wish users got a clue before shooting their mouths off.

As to the original poster, I think your deficiency rests in the IT department, no excuse. What they should do is install a print server at your location which would handle print jobs much quicker than having to route it half way across the country. Who did they hire in IT, the lowest bidder?

Try being in my position – front line IT – dealing directly with staff and students. but at the most (and only just) my ability to do anything with/to the network is patch the machine into the wall socket, and maybe, if I am lucky, be able to get into a server room to patch it in on the hub/switch – if they are labelled properly, and I don't have to ask someone else (as I am not allowed) to use a tone generator and find which socket I should be using on the hub/switch.

Can you see why I gave up studying my Cisco certificates – anything I learn, I cannot use! (and I cannot change job at the moment either or I'd study up and leave).
I'm the only guy with any decent Mac knowledge (luckily I've manged to get a new guy up to speed) as the whole department hates Macs. The other day I had to get permission for someone to come and let me into the server room as I couldn't remote onto the Mac server (and thus any of our software, drivers etc) -when I got in there, I just needed to re-boot it – as no-one had thought to do this after a power cut we had had that knocked out the PC servers. Hello? A server is a server, if you had to re-boot the PC servers, why not do the Mac server at the same time?

And I regularly get asked about the server, whether X,Y or Z can be allowed/done, why can't staff and students bring in their own machines and access the internet on out wi-fi and so-on, but as I don't know/get told what is going on by the higher powers, I look the idiot. Bloody network admins, all seem to be paranoid star-trek loving freaks (or at least ours is) – who do not miss a chance to show how invaluable they are and or how superior they are (or think they are). Grrrrrrr

"anal pinheadedness and control"

That pretty much nails it. Theory is, drive all communication through a central hub.

As someone for whom database administration is one of my duties as a mangler, I agree such a set up is ridiculous in the extreme. Data, sure, but printing? Give me a frakking break.

In my opinion, it's obviously a company where your managers are unable to communicate anything effectively to the executive.
--
Tim