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?""

Comments

I'll feel bad...

[CCFreak2K]

...for the poor guy who said it wasn't a Cisco problem when he starts getting those Apple fanboy death threats.

More information?

[physicsnick]

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.

Re:More information?

[physicsnick]

"Given the widespread use of Cisco". So Windows must be pretty good too, right? You misunderstood. I wasn't implying anything about the quality of Cisco routers.

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.

Everyone is a winner

[BillGatesLoveChild]

Cool. Cisco screws up, iPhone gets blamed, but nobody minds, because iPhones are so cool.

Boss: "Did you get those reports done?"
Underling: "Sorry Boss, I Couldn't. iPhone Congestion."
Boss: "iPhone? ... (smiles) iPhones are cool aren't they!"
Underling: "They sure are boss!"

Boss wanders off feeling good.
Underling returns to screwing around with his iPhone.

Cisco gear just isn't that good.

[CRC'99]

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.

Re:Cisco gear just isn't that good.

[jkbull]

...(NEVER make one of these crash to ROMMON on boot. The fix is to RMA the NPE)...

I understand the ROMMON, RMA, and NPE acronyms, but what's NEVER stand for?

Re:idiots

[nosilA]

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....

[Vacuous]

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.

Re:So what was it

[sammy baby]

I prefer Charles Wang's assessment of the folks at Gartner.

"I want to choose my words carefully here, so I'm not misunderstood," he said. "They're a bunch of fucking idiots."

Sorry I can't provide an authoritative cite... but even if it's apocryphal, it's so perfect that I can't care.

Obviously a Cisco Problem All Along

[smack.addict]

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.

Jumping to conclusions

[faloi]

Seems to be all the rage at Duke. One would think they'd learn from their past mistakes.