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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?""
...for the poor guy who said it wasn't a Cisco problem when he starts getting those Apple fanboy death threats.
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master."
I'm curious to find more information on this. TFA just says "Cisco has provided a fix". What nature of fix was this? Was it actually a flaw in the routers, or did someone just configure them wrong?
Given the widespread use of Cisco routers compared to the isolated nature of the problem, it sounds a bit like Duke is just trying to save face.
This is unfortunately a common issue with people. When two events happen at about the same time, people assume they're somehow connected. The autism and vaccine link, for example, is one of those things where they get their shots and soon afterwards, they notice their child is acting strangely. Then there's the old "this coincidence must be a sign of the divine" theory.
We run into this all the time when doing server administration. For example, one of our developers found that web pages were slower on our new virtual servers. The obvious thought is that virtualization=slow. It turns out that compression hadn't been turned on for those servers. Since he was going over a slow VPN connection, it made a fairly significant difference. Once switched on, they worked about the same as real servers.
Many network IT folks just understand how to change settings on routers (what you learn to do in a "certification" course on a router) and understanding networking. Networking is more than just some router settings, and understanding the organic interdependent flowing nature of a network is critical to debugging problems. Just knowing something is causing a problem, and blaming the most recent change as the cause (as opposed to some underlying problem that this change simply brings to light). A senior IT official should, even if he doesn't know the exact problem, know that weird entworking problems are often way more complex than they seem, and should not jump to knee-jerk conclusions (especially based on some 1994 anti-mac bias about networking)
Cool. Cisco screws up, iPhone gets blamed, but nobody minds, because iPhones are so cool.
... (smiles) iPhones are cool aren't they!"
Boss: "Did you get those reports done?"
Underling: "Sorry Boss, I Couldn't. iPhone Congestion."
Boss: "iPhone?
Underling: "They sure are boss!"
Boss wanders off feeling good.
Underling returns to screwing around with his iPhone.
I think that after spending a number of years working in Cisco only networks, I'm constantly amazed at the generally poor compatibility and functionality of Cisco equipment.
This ranges from critical recovery steps being removed from the 7200 series G2 NPE (NEVER make one of these crash to ROMMON on boot. The fix is to RMA the NPE) for Xmodem recovery of bootloaders - something a basic 827 router has to their latest 7961 VoIP SIP phones that are apparently RFC compliant for SIP communications - but aren't.
There are MANY things that make Cisco equipment worse and worse as the years go by. Part of it I believe is the outsourcing of the people who write the software for these things now. Chances are that they weren't even around with Xmodem was in use - and I bet a lot of the coders have NEVER admin'ed a network of Cisco gear. This is the only thing I can think behind removing essential recovery procedures for $35,000AU routers.
There's a whole new direction that Cisco is heading, and with the stupid things missing from their new gear, I'm starting to wonder if it's a direction that will have huge impacts for the worse in the network admin side of life.
Sendmail is like emacs: A nice operating system, but missing an editor and a MTA.
Shouldn't that be "fuck's sake" or "fucks' sake" - certainly not "fucks sake"..?
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.
Sorry I can't provide an authoritative cite... but even if it's apocryphal, it's so perfect that I can't care.
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.
Why is everyone picking on Sake? I mean, sure it's served slightly warm and in tiny cups, but it's not all that bad to drink, is it?
Your assumption at the skill of the network folks at Duke is sadly mistaken. The people at Duke are very intelligent and experienced group of folks that detected a problem on the network that seemed to be related to the iPhone. In turn they contacted BOTH Apple and Cisco and began running dumps to try to figure out what was going on. In the beginning it did appear to be caused by the iPhone and only after a lot of testing and help from Cisco was the true problem discovered. They had Cisco network that functioned perfectly until iPhones started popping up, it wasn't a far stretch to suspect the new device introduced into a working system.
The only thing they did poorly was fail to realize how much the techie world is hot and bothered over ANY news about the iPhone. Had the cause seemed to have been the the latest Crackberry this would have never sweep through the iPhone loving media/techie-verse this quickly.
So come off your superiority complex a bit and cut them some slack. They managed to detect and solve this issue within a week on a massive University network with half the tech world breathing down their collective necks. It wasn't the work of inexperienced MIS folks but group of talented network professionals that had the misfortune of publicly grappling with the iPhone juggernaut and half million know-it-alls on forums like this.
go back and read the slashdot article on the subject when this first came out. Dozen of slashdot guys were reporting that cisco routers and WAP's have a flaw that would enable just such a solution and that you had to patch the routers with a patch that Cisco already had made.
Cisco makes some solid equipment, but when they let flaky stuff loose it's really flaky. It is also not something you announce to the world first, without throughly checking out your own equipment first, especially when the iPhone was working perfectly fine with tens of thousands of other access points around the country.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
Perhaps they should have waited a week then and not announced prior to discovering the true issue that the iPhone was at fault.
- "Scientia non habet inimicum nisp ignorantem"
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
See, that's what he gets for not reading Slashdot. If he would've just sat there eagerly refreshing his browser, he would've seen several people post the solution to their problem last week and could've taken the weekend off. Hope this is a lesson.