[geeks] Rant: Network "Industry Leaders" That Don't.

[Jonathan C. Patschke]

On Wed, 1 May 2002, Fogg, James wrote:

> I can't speak much to Lucent network gear, but overall I find Lucent to be
> the netbox-of-last-resort. As for phone stuff, Lucent has relied heavily on

Lucent makes pretty decent nuts-and-bolts telco/network parts, but I've
always preferred Meridian office PBX systems.

> I have often considered starting a consulting company that won't sell
> hardware, won't draw up designs and won't configure anything. Instead
> all the company would do is review other peoples work and let
> technically clueless managers know who is screwing them.

I'll work for you.  Nothing better than getting paid for legitimately
calling other people idiots.

> You would probably do better by telling the *people-with-checkbooks* to bite
> the bullet and start over.

This is government.  Government (at least around here) doesn't work that
way, and saying that would guarantee that I'd lose the contract, because,
after all, they've already -bought- all this stuff, and dammit, it's going
to work.

So, you have to take a "stone soup" approach to it.  I got them to get rid
of the Linksys cablemodem router (I forgot to mention that) and buy a
decent PC to serve as an OpenBSD router.  Now, I have to tell them that
it'll run "even better" if they can pay $contractor to run two more fibre
strands.  Then, I can tell them that it'll be less of a fire hazard to
remove all this PVC crap and replace it with plenum, during which time,
$contractor will do the cabling -right-.

> If you beat the network into performing one more task for now, it will
> still be broken and even harder to fix later.

Nope, I know what I'm doing.  The end result is less of a mess, except for
the double-NAT.  So long as I play my cards right, I'll be stuck with this
little nightmare, and I know what I'm getting into.

> That makes you just as much an ass (in the eyes of the
> *people-with-checkbooks*) as the people to fscked it up in the first
> place.

Oh, but they -didn't- fuck up.  They were competitive!  Remember, this is
government.  Clue and money never intersect.

They know the entire network is broken, but they don't want the entire
network to be replaced.  So long as it always has basic functionality, and
I can show real numbers as to why they should invest more money to make it
better, they'll pay.  So, it'll move towards the (sort-of) right thing,
over time.

> At least this is what I have learned from hard experience. You need
> the *people-with-checkbooks* to see you wearing your red cape and
> tights (hero mode).

I'm managing that fairly well so far.  At least they can -get- to the
Internet without having to resort to dialup.  The only thing that doesn't
work at this point is printing to those two remote sites since I turned on
unconditional NAT.

--Jonathan