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Duke Wireless Problem Caused by Cisco, not iPhone
jpallas writes "Following up to a previous Slashdot story, it now turns out that the widely reported problems with Duke University's wireless network were not caused by Apple's iPhone. The problem was actually with their Cisco network. Duke's Chief Information Officer praises the work of their technical staff. Does that include the assistant director for communications infrastructure who was quoted as saying, "I don't believe it's a Cisco problem in any way, shape, or form?""
I used to work with the "hair trigger IT moron." He has a CS degree from one of the best CS schools in the country, he has been running college networks since 2000, and he does, in fact, know what he's doing.
I will admit though, that he has been known to get ahead of himself. When he looked at the logs and saw a bunch of iPhone MAC addresses spewing garbage, but no other devices are, he assumed that it's an iPhone problem. The quote in Network World is unfortunate, but he is no "hair trigger IT moron." He continued working on getting to the root of the problem and solved it yesterday.
To be fair, who hasn't had an issue where you were SURE it wasn't one thing, when it actually was. I would imagine most of you, like me, have seen issues where you still can't explain how you fixed it.
The sick thing is that it was OBVIOUS it was a Cisco problem from the start. If you make the assumption that the iPhones are somehow defective, it's still a Cisco problem because any defective behavior from an iPhone would be indistinguishable from malicious behavior from a student. The fact that the iPhone was involved really was a non-issue all along.
It was terribly irresponsible of them to go off blaming Apple and, worse, absolving Cisco of responsibility.
Suppose Duke University (and only Duke university) suddenly has problems with all of their Windows boxes. Do you think it's a Windows problem? Given the widespread use of Windows compared to the isolated nature of the problem, it's far more likely that they themselves configured something incorrectly, otherwise all universities should be encountering similar problems.
This isn't to say that there aren't such problems; just as you said, both Cisco and Windows have widespread flaws that affect all universities. But for THIS particular problem, it's more likely to be just a misconfiguration, simply because of the fact that it's localized to Duke.
Seems to be all the rage at Duke. One would think they'd learn from their past mistakes.
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." -Albert Einstein