[geeks] bitchin' and moaning [wasRe: [rescue] U30--thanks]

[Tim H.]

On Thu, 8 Aug 2002 11:57:22 -0400
"Katherine Strojny" <kstrojny at worldnet.att.net> wrote:

> Choices are good.
> 
> Just out of curiosity (not like I'm actually considering this :) ), I
> searched for FDDI PCMCIA cards on eBay and Google, with no luck.  ?
> 
> -k

I was primarily being funny, but I do know that fiber pcmcia cards of
any type are relatively rare/expensive/clumsy, some of them actually
relying in a PS/2 doohickey for more power.  At my last job (which owns
most of the patents on fiber, and recently graduated to junk stock
status) we used external media converters for all our laptops, after a
bunch of research and trials of the available pcmcia fiber NICs.

<<<< verbosity and depression warning  >>>>>>

That does remind me of a pretty funny story, I was actually supporting
the datacenter and corp. IT folks in a desktop support role, as part of
a team which also supported Corp HQ.  We pulled the whole team in for a
weekend job to switch all the desktops from ST 10bFX to SC 100bFX, and
the two of us supporting the datacenter had made layouts, we had even
given the rest of the team pens and paper, and explicitly told them "We
have taken care of all the weird stuff we can think of, but if you run
into ANYTHING out of the ordinary, come get one of us.  And we repeated
it a bunch of times, cause these guys were used to supporting suits and
secretaries, and of course an undocumented but critical server isn't
likely to show up under a secretaries desk, and the nifty CD with
windows drivers wasn't gonna be much good after they tore into some
Linux/Tru64/VMS/ box running important jobs for someone.  It actually
went quite well.  

Did have one guy come up to me "we must have a bad port, the card
doesn't light up"  So I went to look, and 3 or 4 of them (including my
boss) were looking at this machine.  I looked at the back of it, and it
obviously wasn't the 3com network card they had been installing all day,
so I asked the guy "did you put this card in?"  And he says "no, it
already had a 100Mbit card in it, see, the square connectors."  At which
point I told them all I would handle it, totally amazed that the FDDI
stamped into the back of the card had meant nothing to any of them.

And yep, in that upgrade the Unix boys lost their FDDI connections and
went to 100bFX.  I think there was some behind the scenes posturing, but
the network guys won the fight with a "less different things to support"
argument.  I imagine by now the ones that matter are running Gbit in
their cubes, at least the handful that are still there.

I have officially decided today that the economy, jobhunting, suits,
pretty much everything I need to do to pay the bills, collectively
sucks.  And I really miss working in that datacenter, there were some
really clueful people there.  There definitely isn't anywhere else in my
area wher I can work with real enterprise level stuff, international
WAN, GS320 as _part_ of the big cluster, an actual growth and replace
plan.

Compare that to a tour I got on my last interview.  A credit union with
~110M in assets.  they have a hanful of T1s doing voice and data to the
branches, the IT suit who interviewed me said "we like to call it a WAN
because it sounds good, it's really just a big LAN"  They have 1 (one)
actual server designed to be a server, some HP Intel box.  The other
"servers" are, well, there was a Quantex desktop, a Dell desktop, well,
you get the picture. I need a job, I really tried to hide my dismay. 
Oh, and there was an RS6000 box of some type running the actual software
they live on, but they know very little about it, and he almost forgot
to mention what appeard to be a rebadged Alpha XP1000 or it's ilk, which
just handles phone banking.  I got the idea that nobody there even had
console access to that box, and he definitely had no idea that you could
bundle up all the "servers" they had and replace them with that box and
a box of disks.  

The interview before that was convinced that the college network was
safe from attack because they had locked down the Win2K domain servers. 
They have no firewall at all, their domain servers are open to the
internet, in fact you can authenticate against them from anywhere in the
world.  My wife works for them, and when she logs into her laptop at
home it takes forever because it has to wait for the login script to run
through my dial up, and the logout script is worse, probably 3-5
minutes. Probably letting the interview wander in that direction was a
poor decision on my part.

OK, I am feeling vented, please resume regularly scheduled flaming.

Tim