Cisco's Network Bugs Are Front and Center in Bankruptcy Fight (bloomberg.com)

When will IT training become formal curriculum by Anonymous Coward · 2016-09-09 04:39 · Score: 3, Insightful

Never? That's all being outsourced, duh.

Re:When will IT training become formal curriculum by freeze128 · 2016-09-09 04:44 · Score: 1

Plus, it's a foolish thing to do. It doesn't make any sense to forego a class like history or math just so high school students can learn how to configure a network switch. Save that as an option for trade school!

Plus, there are plenty of students who don't want to go into that industry. They would rather be lawyers, bankers, artists, athletes, and those kind of careers really should stay out of IT.
Re:When will IT training become formal curriculum by roc97007 · 2016-09-09 04:45 · Score: 1

True, to a certain point, and also to a certain point, it's true that the more IT goes offshore, the worse this is going to get. Fortunately, it looks like some companies are waking up, and realizing that contrary to what the IT service provider is telling them, IT isn't "just following procedures, which anyone could do".

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Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Re:When will IT training become formal curriculum by fustakrakich · 2016-09-09 04:58 · Score: 1

"High school"? They insist that this stuff be taught in pre-school. On the other hand I see no problem if it replaces "women studies" in those ivy league colleges.
point and click

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“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Re:When will IT training become formal curriculum by petes_PoV · 2016-09-09 05:17 · Score: 2

It will never hit the curriculum because schools could never retain IT competent teachers. As soon as they were sufficiently highly skilled to teach any sort of IT class that was relevant, they'd be off to work in IT, rather then remain a teacher.
This is the exact same reason why companies don't train their (IT) staff. What is the point in spending money to make it easier for them to leave you?

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politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Re: When will IT training become formal curriculum by Anonymous Coward · 2016-09-09 05:34 · Score: 0

No, but it does make sense to expect some professional accountability here. I know the libertarians are just quaking with rage at the notion, but we're going to have licensed practicioners or we're going to have worse--courts holding people to equivalent standards that can change all the time.
This is an opportunity and a danger. It's a wonderful opportunity to slam the door in the faces of H1-Bs and return competence and compensation to our profession. It's a danger because if the likes of Microsoft, Facebook, et al have anything to do with it any certifications will be watered down and given away to foreigners. It's also a danger because the IT world is horrible at sticking together like doctors, lawyers, and other professions do, preferring an everyone is a special snowflake mentality so we all get melted one by one. (Libertarians never learn).
I welcome greater accountability and liability. It's what the megacorps don't want, and that's enough reason to have it, besides maybe not having too much critical infrastructure designed and run by rank amateurs.
Re:When will IT training become formal curriculum by umghhh · 2016-09-09 05:58 · Score: 1

They need some time to learn it too. In essence any job is 'just following procedures'. Only 'following procedures' may be as simple as 'if A then B' or quite complex with quite some freedom to develop ad hoc 'procedures'. You need to have a good and motivated team and a good manager to do that. My ex boss always claimed that the cleaning lady could do my job too. I always agreed, pointing out that it could take the time to learn the 'process', languages used and the language spoken by customer (documentation) - after that she could fail or flee too with her small pay and this high expectation.... He knew very well what I meant. My current boss does not.
Re:When will IT training become formal curriculum by roc97007 · 2016-09-09 06:31 · Score: 1

I think that's true in some cases, but I've met people who couldn't apply the scientific method to a problem to save their lives. (Form a theory, devise a test, perform test, collect results, revise theory.) There are apparently people who don't understand this at a fundamental level, and even learned as a procedure, are at a loss as to how to apply. System administration is a skill that not everyone has, and one that can't be taught to just anyone. You get outsourced IT on scratchy phone lines who when presented with a problem, call the vendor, who's outsourced tech support advise patching firmware or OS or drivers to latest level, (because that's all they know) which not only does not fix the original issue, but often creates new ones (up to and including bricking the server). That is not problem solving. It's a ghastly parody of same.
Similarly, I have met people who can't dig procedural languages, at all. Otherwise smart people who will never in their career get beyond simple batch files with hard coded arguments.

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Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Re:When will IT training become formal curriculum by JosephDoeden · 2016-09-09 07:01 · Score: 2

High School is not to train kids. If it were then McDonalds, Walmart and AppleBees would be the top classes. That's not the proper way to educate the future of your nation.. stop being so stupid and argumentative just to be stupid and argumentative. One thing we don't need is more angry little trolls who want to hate on everything and be critical without taking the time to think or knowing how to use words well. We should have more coding and computer classes, which I think most people would call an IT class. IT is not just about configuring switches, most people would consider that coding. I think we have a coding class because coding is a field that will grow and grow. We should ALSO have a class for compouter and office apps use, just like most high schools have had for years now. I had a coding class in BASIC in elementary school. I think most average or better schools have IT classes now, they just aren't standardized. Lets get MS and Cisco to give billions more to schools to get kids interested.. whats wrong with that? You think GYM is a class, but not programming? WTF peopel
Re:When will IT training become formal curriculum by networkBoy · 2016-09-09 07:02 · Score: 1

I have encountered those types as well.
They can *perfectly* follow a list of instructions, even those with branches, so long as those branches describe exactly what they see.
Those people are invaluable in a HVM testing environment where it's:
* Load trays in tester
* Push run button
* Unload passed and failed parts, put on appropriate shelves
* If tester jams like picture A do worksheet FOO
* If tester jams like picture B do worksheet BAR
All is well. BUT if the tester jams and it's not like A || B they are hopelessly lost.
Same with switch config and debug.
-nb

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whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
Re:When will IT training become formal curriculum by roc97007 · 2016-09-09 07:50 · Score: 2

You are right, for processes that can be described in a small enough number of steps. You definitely don't want to take up the time of a big brain with lots of experience doing the same operation over and over. But I would submit that a modern Enterprise installation is just too big and too varied to expect any practical set of procedures to cover, say, 80% of issues. The fall back in my experience is typically to (a) apply patches, and (b) hope the problem goes away.
I think this is why, when a company decides they've had enough and insource their IT, they leave the helpdesk offshore. Because that really *is* a set of procedures that are easy enough to document. Communication issues are another matter, but that's not germane to this discussion.

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Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Re: When will IT training become formal curriculum by hackwrench · 2016-09-09 12:26 · Score: 1

The QuickBASIC language will never die. It lives on today in the most faithful adaptation with extensions, QB45. Want to write the least buggiest graphical applications for sale? QB45 libraries are all BSD/MIT licenses by design so you don't have to open source your code while reaping the benefits of open source.
Re:When will IT training become formal curriculum by cheesybagel · 2016-09-09 15:05 · Score: 1

https://xkcd.com/908/
Re:When will IT training become formal curriculum by Eunuchswear · 2016-09-09 21:34 · Score: 1

Which would you rather interact with? A CISCO Nexus 3000 or a woman?

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Watch this Heartland Institute video
Re: When will IT training become formal curriculum by BarbaraHudson · 2016-09-10 01:43 · Score: 1

If you can't figure out the basics of how to use a word processor or spreadsheet on your own with a little trial and error and some googling, you're an idiot and will always be others how to do the simplest things. We don't need busywork classes for that.
The nature of coding has changed tremendously over the years. What they learn today will have to be unlearned, because by then it will become the wrong way to do it. And that's if there is still a need to do it at all.
Cars don't need a tune-up and chassis lube anymore, so learning that at school was a waste of time. Better to give them needed skills that will not become obsolete, like spelling. Researching a topic and writing about it. An appreciation of world history so that they can understand just how stupid American exceptionalism is. Science so that they don't think the Bible is the final authority on any subject, not even religion. Geography, so that they don't think Australia or Canada are part of Europe.
For the vast majority, coding will not only be useless, but will lead to the same safety issues as doing their own electrical wiring or trying to repair their TV - it will just make things worse.

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"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Re:When will IT training become formal curriculum by fustakrakich · 2016-09-10 03:00 · Score: 1

I wouldn't know, I've never had a Cisco...

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“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Re:When will IT training become formal curriculum by nanoflower · 2016-09-11 12:46 · Score: 1

I would say that depends upon the woman.

business-critical means you need hot sparing by swschrad · 2016-09-09 04:46 · Score: 2

or at least a cabinet full of new plug-ready parts. that means the HDAs need to be pre-formatted, for instance. cables tested. configurations stored on a server for tftp loading behind your firewall.

things that cost money. things that suits have no clue about.

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if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?

Re:business-critical means you need hot sparing by mlw4428 · 2016-09-09 05:17 · Score: 0

"Suits" don't want to/need to know the details. An effective IT leader can communicate this in a way that good leaders (emphasis on "good") can understand. You shouldn't expect C-suite executives (outside of the CIO/CISO/CTO/Chief-IT-Leader-Guy) to understand or care about IT related concepts. Accountants don't expect a CEO to understand how a double-entry bookkeeping system was implemented or the details about its implementation, merely that it is a GOOD thing for the company to have because of reasons A,B,C,D, and E.It's generally explained in simple, quick, concise terms not using industry-speak.

Far too often poor IT leaders use phrases like "hot-swappable" or "Uptime" instead of "minimizes outage exponentially" or "how long our systems are expected to be online and available". Obviously bad leaders make bad choices, but good ones tend to understand and value their IT departments with just a little hand-holding.

All Cisco users had this problem? by HornWumpus · 2016-09-09 04:47 · Score: 5, Insightful

All systems have bugs, not all data centers have this kind of crap uptime record.

Smart IT people build data centers out of heterogeneous hardware and set it up to degrade gracefully when something fails. You won't get this if you just hire A+/Net+ staff.

Blame the PHB/CTO not the hardware.

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John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'

Re:All Cisco users had this problem? by Salgak1 · 2016-09-09 05:01 · Score: 5, Interesting

Agreed. I've worked at places that kept five nines of availability. By "normal" IT standards, it was massively overbuilt: multiple sets of gear, clustered in failover mode, with a separate redundant setup elsewhere in the data center, on an entirely different power feed. . . (as I recall, we had at LEAST 4 independent power feeds)..
We also had cabinets full of spare parts, entire full pieces of gear on the shelf, and an entire library of config files on the TFTP server. Plus duplicated on a laptop that lived in one of the cabinets. Took a LOT of labor and gear, and was not cheap,
And we constantly had to explain the man-hour and spares costs to the suits . .
Re:All Cisco users had this problem? by Anonymous Coward · 2016-09-09 05:10 · Score: 0

If you have to explain operational costs below seven digits/year for a five-niner 100+ server DC to the suits, it is time to replace the suits. They are clearly incompetent if that value is not below 5% of the raw revenue...
Re:All Cisco users had this problem? by The-Ixian · 2016-09-09 05:13 · Score: 1

Yeah, this sounds to me like management overselling/overpromising and underfunding the back end IT staff and hardware.
It just sounds like their network was not properly architected with redundancies, perhaps with the hope of getting the contract first and building up the infrastructure later.
Then, when they can't deliver, they look for scapegoats... oh look, Cisco has some money... it's their fault!

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My eyes reflect the stars and a smile lights up my face.
Re:All Cisco users had this problem? by silas_moeckel · 2016-09-09 05:22 · Score: 2

I work with and build them all the time. Mind you I realy no longer think you can get any complex service into 5+ 9's without the application being part of the solution, reliability is not a bolt on thing it's baked into the design.
The story is laughable, fault fans, buggy firmware on the nexus 3k's. Those are TOR switches should be extremely easy to replace and always used in redundant setups. They probably got suckered into VPC and similar, guess what I dont care what they say all stacks share a single failure domain, dont get me wrong they are great but you need at least A+B stacks. These guys cited cable issues, it realy sounds like PHB;s trying to blame the vendor because they picked the lowest bid not the right one and failed to test every failure mode they could come up with before going into production. 7 9's work is hard and your never going to just bolt it onto somebody else's design.

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No sir I dont like it.
Re:All Cisco users had this problem? by skids · 2016-09-09 05:41 · Score: 1

Smart IT people build data centers out of heterogeneous hardware and set it up to degrade gracefully when something fails.
That would always be a preferred model, if you have that kind of budget, but...

Blame the PHB/CTO not the hardware.
...I'd say the equipment vendors should share some of that blame. I don't work anywhere near the 5 9's area and even I find some really appalling feature bugs introduced on even routine patchlevel upgrades. Stuff like the combination of DHCP-snooping/arp-inspection/source-lockdown on a port, which is the right way to configure access ports for anyone who gives a flip about security in depth, suddenly blocking all traffic after an upgrade. This is in general availability software releases. Things that clearly should be getting tested in QA are being left up to the customers to discover. We're no longer customers but unpaid beta testers.
Now with an access switch I can make up for the slack and script up some tests and a test environment. With a core switch an operation like mine doesn't just have a test switch sitting around, so it's hit the button and hope.
If the vendors want places like us to try the new fancy features they force feed to the sales reps, they'll have to up the game because A) kicking the tires on routine software upgrades saps the time we would normally use to kick the tires on a new feature and B) repeatedly finding bugs that would have really horribly screwed over your infrastructure during these tests tends to encourage a minimalist design approach.
Equipment vendors simply are not doing their job in the post race-to-the-bottom era.

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Someone had to do it.
Re:All Cisco users had this problem? by skids · 2016-09-09 05:50 · Score: 1

They probably got suckered into VPC and similar, guess what I dont care what they say all stacks share a single failure domain, dont get me wrong they are great but you need at least A+B stacks.
Yeah and reading release notes is an easy way to convince yourself that unless you need something like VPS or are cheesing license limits on a management platform, stacking should just be purged entirely from your configurations.

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Someone had to do it.
Re:All Cisco users had this problem? by Anonymous Coward · 2016-09-09 05:57 · Score: 0

Smart IT people build data centers out of heterogeneous hardware
No, they don't you homophobe.
Re:All Cisco users had this problem? by ewhac · 2016-09-09 06:26 · Score: 3, Funny

And we constantly had to explain the man-hour and spares costs to the suits . .
Suit: "Explain the man-hour and spares costs to me."
Engineer: "Certainly." (*brains him with a fried 24-port managed switch*) "Would you like it explained again?"

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Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
Re:All Cisco users had this problem? by JosephDoeden · 2016-09-09 07:11 · Score: 1

Bad IT Directors like that screwed it up for everyone after them by bringing down upper management on IT. Now a lot of upper management doesn't trust or want to fund IT because they let IT Directors just run wild. It's a mutual mistake, but the IT Directors knew they were not being cost effective and that's their job. IT needs to think it itself as amp or turbo booster for business profits. Good IT brings massively increased production and automation. Good IT raises revenue so much more than it costs that nobody complains. A great IT Director is mostly doing research, accounting, delegation and people management. Too often we elevate the actual IT experts to the level of Director and they don't have the proper skillset at all.
Re:All Cisco users had this problem? by suutar · 2016-09-09 07:47 · Score: 1

I was thinking "our contracts specify that if something goes wrong we have to fix it in under 30 minutes or we pay a lot of money. The only way to do that is to have the spare parts and people on site." but I like your method :)
Re:All Cisco users had this problem? by silas_moeckel · 2016-09-09 08:46 · Score: 1

I'll take trill over full stacking anyday, but I still think of trill as a single failure domain.

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No sir I dont like it.
Re:All Cisco users had this problem? by scamper_22 · 2016-09-09 11:32 · Score: 1

This is really the answer.
Buggy or not, if you provide an SLA (service level agreement), then you are ultimately responsible for it.
You do what you have to provide that SLA.
Test the equipment you plan to use.
Add a lot of redundancy and failovers ...
SLA's cost money.
Heck one silly line in the article is
"The entire network often has to go down in order to patchâ"very disruptive in the best of times,"
I really have to wonder what kind of network these guys are running. There should be failover nodes to take on the load when one is being upgraded. Heck, in some firms, they even have entire sites as backup for major upgrades.
HInt... don't put SLAs in the contract unless you can meet them. Nothing to see here.
Re: All Cisco users had this problem? by hackwrench · 2016-09-09 12:37 · Score: 1

That's not even a troll, folks. You build using uniform well understood devices. When something fails or simply starts acting a little bit squirrelly, you swap it out with the exact same part, almost. And you have a small amount of replacement parts on hand that can go anywhere in the network, because it is all the same.
Re:All Cisco users had this problem? by swalve · 2016-09-09 14:00 · Score: 1

Architected?
Re: All Cisco users had this problem? by HornWumpus · 2016-09-09 16:28 · Score: 1

Priceless: Having the whole network vulnerable to a single exploit.
All the vendors want you to go 'one stop shopping'. That should make you a little uncomfortable.

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John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Re: All Cisco users had this problem? by BarbaraHudson · 2016-09-10 01:57 · Score: 1

Until we stop lying to ourselves by calling them "bugs', as if they crawled into the code on their own, software will continue to be full of errors. "Oh, we'll just patch the bug" does not fix the underlying problem, which is coders and everyone else up the food chain having an "if we fuck up, we will say it's a bug and just patch it" and wait for the next bug.
The Internet has contributed greatly to this mentally. It's a lot cheaper to have your users download a patch than to ship a CD, floppies, or tape reels to each user, so the financial incentive to get it right the first time is gone, and as an added bonus, you get to blame the customer if they don't patch your mistakes.

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"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.

Read the warranty card. .. by Salgak1 · 2016-09-09 04:49 · Score: 2

"Disclaimer of Liabilities - Limitation" Page 16, states that (condensed) : all liability shall not exceed the price paid for the software, or of the price of the product which includes the software.

And to use the equipment and Cisco software, you agree to the terms of service.

http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/t...

So, at best, they can recover the costs of the switches involved. . .

This is timely by roc97007 · 2016-09-09 05:01 · Score: 5, Interesting

I'm a photographer, and I sell my work through a web service. They bring together the finishing providers (prints, calendars, t-shirts, etc) and take care of payment, and all I have to do is provide content and manage sales. When I finish post-processing on a new photo, the tool I use (Adobe Lightroom) automatically uploads to the web service in the album I select. I cover events, so there's often a massive number (600 or so) of photos to upload.

Yesterday I was getting sporadic "service not available" messages from the service. After doing some triage to verify the problem was not at my end, I contacted customer support. Mind you, this was 10:30 PM PST. But that's the way it is with photographers -- we often take photos during the day and process them at night, which is somewhat the opposite of a standard use case. (And should be borne in mind when said services schedule maintenance. Just sayin'.)

Browsing the service's forum, I saw others were seeing the same error message, and people were starting to get excited. (This is our livelihood, after all.)

I got an answer to my service ticket in less than 30 minutes, that they were struggling with with network problems with one of their service providers (probably a cloud service). I got a followup shortly after that they thought the service was up now but they were still testing. And I got another followup at 6:30 AM that the problem had been resolved and they had put steps in place to insure it would not happen again. They also implemented a "status page" that we could consult in the future (which should have already existed, but live and learn).

Now, *that's* the way to handle an incident like this. Very commendable. But it does point up the problems a business sometimes has when they rely too much on external services. Just my opinion, but the main difference I can see between in-house and outsourced is one of motivation. If you're providing an online service, your employees realize in their heart of hearts that outages can easily result in business failure and loss of jobs. But if you're renting all the pieces of your service from outside vendors, you soon find that those vendors may be concerned about their contract with you, and the money they make off you, which isn't at the same level in the hierarchy of needs as the live-or-die situation you are in.

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Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.

Re:This is timely by Anonymous Coward · 2016-09-09 07:52 · Score: 0

What exactly does telling the level zero answering machines what the problem is have to do with corporate management understanding the MAINTENANCE does NOT mean RUN IT 'TILL IT BREAKS.
You sir are NOT an IT support person.
Re:This is timely by cant_get_a_good_nick · 2016-09-09 13:53 · Score: 1

Reply All podcast had a good episode on a cloud photo provider that had massive tech problems and people lost contact with their photos. Worth a listen.
Cloud just means a computer you can't control.
Re:This is timely by roc97007 · 2016-09-09 15:07 · Score: 1

> What exactly does telling the level zero answering machines what the problem is have to do with corporate management understanding the MAINTENANCE does NOT mean RUN IT 'TILL IT BREAKS.
I'm having trouble parsing that. I'm going to assume the third "the" is supposed to be "that". Ok, now it scans.
Ok NOW, I'm having trouble relating what you wrote to what I wrote.
> You sir are NOT an IT support person.
I, um, sir, have been an IT support person since 1984, the date of my first post to net.news.newsite, until late last year. (How old did you say you were, again?) I have for years made a side living as a photographer, and haven't decided at this point whether I want to continue doing that full time or get back into IT.
But I'm going to assume that this was all a misunderstanding, and I'd like to invite you to make your case using more words.

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Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Re:This is timely by roc97007 · 2016-09-09 15:16 · Score: 1

Absolutely true. I pay for a professional account on the service I use, and one of the bennies is the opportunity to keep all my original images on their cloud so that I don't have to worry about storing them locally or backing them up.
No. Not only no, but Hell No. Not on your friggin' life. Ok maybe as a backup, but putting the only copy of an original photograph on *someone else's* cloud? It is to laugh.
My original images reside on a local hard disk, periodically backed up to *another* hard disk, which is then disconnected and stored on a rack in a different room. (I use one of those "hard drive toasters" so I can use raw disks and not have to pay for USB enclosures.) On a slightly longer timeframe, I do a level zero backup to a hard drive and then drive it over to a friend's house to store in his fire safe. (That's my disaster recovery copy.)

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Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.

Re:Read the warranty card. .. by Anonymous Coward · 2016-09-09 05:02 · Score: 0

Fantastic, then: a chance to test EULAs in a court of law! I'm sure Cisco will let that happen.

IT in schools? by Kwyj1b0 · 2016-09-09 05:09 · Score: 2

Good, bad, or ugly, is it time to admit that business really can't continue without IT? When will IT training become formal curriculum in schools?

Good, bad, or ugly, is it time to admit that business can't really continue without Patents/Accounting/Negotiations/Advertising/Sales/1000 other things?
When will patent law/banking/economics/marketing of these become formal curriculum in schools? That's about the time when IT should become a part of the formal curriculum as well.

High school shouldn't be about training for a job that only a fraction of the students will eventually do. If businesses can't survive without IT, then they hire people who are specially trained in IT - a HS course won't be train people enough to solve any hard IT problems anyway.

Re:IT in schools? by Anonymous Coward · 2016-09-09 05:18 · Score: 1

Now that ITT Tech has been closed down, we're expecting a massive shortage in IT talent.
Re:IT in schools? by The-Ixian · 2016-09-09 05:20 · Score: 1

Well, to be fair, almost all professionals will touch a computer of some kind at some point.
So learning *generally* about IT is not a bad idea. Basic principles of how a computer works, how networks communicate, how the Internet functions. All good things to learn.

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My eyes reflect the stars and a smile lights up my face.
Re:IT in schools? by CharlieG · 2016-09-09 05:56 · Score: 1

I agree it probably does not need to be part of schooling, but there are a lot of businesses that STILL treat IT like an unimportant part of the company, right up there with Janitorial Services etc, instead of what is really a mission critical part of the company

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-- 73 de KG2V For the Children - RKBA! "You are what you do when it counts" - the Masso
Re:IT in schools? by Anonymous Coward · 2016-09-09 06:43 · Score: 0

How well would your business function without janitorial services?
Re:IT in schools? by JosephDoeden · 2016-09-09 06:44 · Score: 2

We should be teaching coding, especially scripting and automation in school. They are universally useful in all fields. Many fields WISH they had more field specific coders.. aka engineers who are also coders or scientists who are also coders. These people can help you build better apps faster than most anyone else. Since most of the important professions use computers we want to train kids to be good at computers and coding. Robotics, Automation and Coding is the future. Business and management is still an awesome field too. Accounting and Business Math have been part of High School educations for awhile. Chemist and Physics are as well. Do we expect kids to come out of school and solve chemistry problems? NO.I don't see where you really have a point in the words you've put together. We can offer kids more vocational options, but High School itself should continue to have classes that 'only a fraction of students will eventually do'. Dumbing down high school even more is a very bad idea. I don't know how any American could suggest we don't need computer training in high schools. It's been in high schools for 30 years now. We need IT and Coding, we need Chemist and Biology and Calculus even though 'only a fraction of students will eventually do'. Can we not have a bit better computers classes with more serious coding as standard in all high schools? Whats wrong with that? Stop being so narrow minded or you will live in a society of narrow minded people and you will no like it one bit.
Re:IT in schools? by JosephDoeden · 2016-09-09 06:52 · Score: 2

Do you guys not remember High School? GYM is a fucking class. You're sitting here, like argumentative clowns, telling people we don't need more computers classes in high school because that's not real education or that's not going to payoff? Yeah but Home Economics, Gym, Cheerleading, Marching Band, shop class are all totally practical. If you want to TRAIN people to fill a role instead of educating them to live up to their potential, you have a serious lack of understand of how society really works and that masses of stupid people are dangerous and costly. I guess we will be importing yet more college educated people if more American are thinking public education is yet another bloated government program they can cut. Why not just like McDonalds and Walmart make their own classes if you're going to do that?
Re:IT in schools? by Anonymous Coward · 2016-09-09 06:56 · Score: 0

You think it's bad when your network goes down, wait until your plumbing fails...
Re:IT in schools? by bluefoxlucid · 2016-09-09 07:02 · Score: 0

Explain to me how a shoe functions.

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Support my political activism on Patreon.
Re:IT in schools? by Anonymous Coward · 2016-09-09 07:11 · Score: 0

Or at least that's the excuse your lobbyists are taking to DC to request more H1-B's, right?
Re:IT in schools? by Anonymous Coward · 2016-09-09 08:27 · Score: 0

Explain to me how a shoe functions.
Nobody taught you how to tie your laces ?
Re:IT in schools? by Anonymous Coward · 2016-09-09 08:36 · Score: 0

Not really a suitable metaphor given a shoe isn't complex.
However a car is a good example, not only do you need to know how to drive but you should have a general understanding of how it runs & maintenance for both safety and convenience. This is becoming less true with electric cars though. For example one should know how to change a tyre and check its pressure, fill up the window wiper fluid, check power steering fluid, oil levels etc. Obviously you call a mechanic for anything more complex like one would expect with a computer.
Re:IT in schools? by HornWumpus · 2016-09-09 08:39 · Score: 1

It prevents the PHB's foot from being covered in feces when he puts it up some IT dweeb's butt after unscheduled downtime.
Last time that dweeb will ever try and tell a manager 'I told you so'.

--
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Re:IT in schools? by CharlieG · 2016-09-09 08:39 · Score: 1

I know very very few schools that even OFFER shop even as an elective (My son's school does - one section, and it is mostly an engineering design class - they spend a lot of time on FEA etc - more computer time than tool time). Offering Computers? Sure!! Mandating it? Nope.
Seriously, I also know of no school that offers Home Ec, Cheerleading, Marching Band as CLASSES - After school activities? Yes. Gym ? Yeah NYC requires it, but you'll find more than 50% of the kids don't take the required amount the law requires

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Re:IT in schools? by phantomfive · 2016-09-09 09:01 · Score: 1

I don't know, I kind of feel like I have understanding of shoes. I've even built them. Lousy shoes to be sure, but I think I get the basics.

--
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Re:IT in schools? by swalve · 2016-09-09 14:15 · Score: 1

You are talking about users versus workers/manufacturers. I don't need to know how my heating system works to use the thermostat. I don't need to know dick-all about how shoes, cars or heating systems work to be able to use them to suit my needs. But apparently we all need to know the OSI model so we can understand the IT staff when they explain how they have once again gotten in the way of progress.
Re:IT in schools? by swalve · 2016-09-09 14:19 · Score: 1

How about getting some industrial engineers into IT to bring some kind of order to the fat, zit faced chaos? Until then, we are just worse smelling janitors and plumbers.
Re:IT in schools? by Anonymous Coward · 2016-09-10 11:00 · Score: 0

Mark this as humor (and it is funny).
Re:IT in schools? by bluefoxlucid · 2016-09-12 02:04 · Score: 1

I meant to indicate that most people don't understand the biological support mechanism of the foot, and how that interacts with shoes. The arch of the foot and the ankle work together to provide shock-absorption, protecting the knee and hips; a shoe provides arch support, and how and to what degree it supplies this support affects the health of these anatomical components. So does the shoe's profile (raised heel?). The sole is made of complex rubber compounds which affect traction (e.g. some shoes can walk on ice, but not so good on wet wood), and has a tread which provides terrain traction (mud, steel, asphalt; hard, soft, firm, loose, or uneven ground). The entire shoe itself is built of multiple components and layers, and its construction determines how sturdy and effective it is as a shoe in general.
Shoes involve fairly complex engineering. Identifying what kind of shoe you need beyond what the label on the box says (WHICH hiking boot is best, given the trails and conditions in which you hike?) is difficult without knowing quite a lot about shoes. I'm rather certain most shoe-wearers don't know a god damned thing about how a shoe works.
Interesting that you've built your own shoes. It's a process, to be sure, if you took it any seriously. Specialized tools and a hell of a lot of work.

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Re:IT in schools? by phantomfive · 2016-09-12 02:20 · Score: 1

I don't think shoes are about support....that is a secondary (and probably rather recent) problem. The primary purpose of shoes is to protect your feet from the environment.

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"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."

Systems, not IT by Anonymous Coward · 2016-09-09 05:13 · Score: 0

Setting up this or many other systems has nothing per se to do with IT, and everything about a design philosophy called "fail-operational/fail-safe", meaning a system should tolerate a failed component and keep going, or with multiple failed components degrade to a safe mode.

This applies to everything from surgery to rocket science. It's why airliners have triply-redundant control systems, why trucks and trains have air brakes (losing pressure applies the brakes), why elevators are ubiquitous (the Otis braking system -- if there's no load on the cable, the brakes activate), why valves for spacecraft guidance rockets are actually four valves connected in parallel/series (so a single valve failing open or failing closed will not affect the overall system), why a glitch in an intersections traffic lights fails them to all blinking red (all green should be electrically impossible). Shit happens, and you should be designing for that. (Sure, sometimes shit still happens regardless, but less often.)

If your SLA calls for 99.999% uptime, you'd darn well better design for that (and 27 minutes downtime a year is only 99.95% uptime, how hard can that be?).

Re:Systems, not IT by umghhh · 2016-09-09 06:36 · Score: 1

I recall working for telecom vendor in 90ties - they had to comply with a requirement of max 60s/year downtime including upgrades and this also HW upgrades with calls not allowed to be interrupted for more than 500ms. I laugh (trough tears, I admit) when I work for ISP and also telecom operators these days. Cutting costs and increasing complexity does not really do anybody any favours. Good the customers are used to crappy service and this in EU. I wonder how bad the average service must be in US - judging by posts on /. quite bad. Fortunately we all are racing the same direction - with some glorious exceptions but these, as somebody here said, achieve actual HA with application being designed for it.
Re:Systems, not IT by I4ko · 2016-09-09 07:29 · Score: 2

Most likely it never touched systems and was put in by some sales shmuck or bean pusher after everything on the RFP response was reviewed and engineering told them not to. Someone asked for 99.995% uptime (26min and a change; there is one more 9 than you put in), sales decided that planned outages and packet loss don't count in, hilarity ensues.

IT training? by ilsaloving · 2016-09-09 05:31 · Score: 3, Insightful

People will figure out IT training is important, when they realize that they can't make stupid statement like "IT training" as if it means something.

What even IS I.T.?

Are you talking about server management? Network Managment? DevOps? What skill sets do you need?

It's like saying we need more brain surgeons, so we need MOAR BIOLOGY TRAINING!

MBAs, or people in general, will never appreciate just how complex some work can be, because of Dunning-Kruger. They don't know or understand how complex IT is, therefore they are unable to *appreciate* how complex IT is. Just like they are unable to appreciate anything else that is complicated, whether it's medicine, physics, etc.

Re:IT training? by umghhh · 2016-09-09 06:46 · Score: 1

This has not much to do with D-K: your job is simple and I do not understand why it takes so much time and why you failed to deliver on time etc because it is so easy etc. - because I have never done it. Also: you are stupid a-e because you do not appreciate how difficult and tricky my current task is. These two work most of the time. There is also a genius part, I had few of those in my team some years back - really good developers. They could not understand the whole idea of a bigger team. I took our git repo and calculated what our 50persons team did over last year (this did not include testing and deployment configurations for which we had another repos but I wanted to have mercy on them) and asked them if they were able to write this many lines of code per day - not even if they were writing every day and were not making any mistakes. Well they disagreed with me but my calculations ended the discussion.
The point is: even smart people underestimate complexity and costs of jobs that they do not do as well as efforts and skill needed to accomplish them.
Re:IT training? by bluefoxlucid · 2016-09-09 07:01 · Score: 1

IT is the burger-flipping job of the future. It's the people who rack switches, wire up networks, and generally do grunt work. High school students are IT worker stock.
This is Slashdot, where we confuse Computer Science--the elites, the engineers, the mathemeticians, the people who can't do their job because they don't know linear algebra--with IT, simply because most burger-flipping server jockeys have figured out how to use awk and perl, kind of, and think that makes them the same thing as a software engineer.

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Re:IT training? by pseudorand · 2016-09-09 09:10 · Score: 1

Wow. That's a bleak and insulting picture of both the future and of slashdot. And you're clearly suffering from Dunning-Kruger -- or more accurately, the rest of us find you insufferable due to Dunning-Kruger.
I admit, I awk and perl pushed everything about linear algebra and a whole boatload of other things I learned in school out of my brain. But that doesn't make me stupid -- I simply know practical things for my particular and current situation. I have no doubt I could pick up linear algebra quickly should I ever find a use for it. But advanced mathematics is a very specific skill that's valuable only in a very specific few situations -- just like awk and perl. And just as equation solvers like matlab devalue some of the skills of people who can do certain algebraic manipulations in their head quickly, new languages, software and IT design patterns will (hopefully) supersede today's internet duct tape. But just as you learn to use matlab to work more efficiently, I learn how to use Docker Swarm and Consul and RUM and CNDs to work more efficiently. Sure, some of today's current IT people will be freed up for more productive work because I can do more with less. But those of us left will be paid more, not less. And the results of our less but smarter work will make the world exponentially better (though we'll almost certainly not be paid exponentially more).
Re:IT training? by swalve · 2016-09-09 14:27 · Score: 1

And we have done it to ourselves. We used to be the guys in the IBM suits that worked for NASA. We rebelled against that and now we are cable tv installers.
Re:IT training? by Dharkfiber · 2016-09-11 14:30 · Score: 1

So you think our future CXX types couldn't have used some basics in ITIL when they are younger? Certainly would have served some of them better than a logic class.
Re:IT training? by bluefoxlucid · 2016-09-12 01:42 · Score: 1

It has to be wrong to be ignorant; and it has to be at least almost-true to be insulting.
Someone on Slashdot started talking about IT degrees when I mentioned self-studying Computer Science. If you've ever looked at the two programs, you'd facepalm at warp speed: IT degrees include "general IT", network administration, and IT security; Computer Science is essentially a mathematics discipline based on exploring what can be computed (and how). They're not really equivalent in any sense.
You talk a lot about Docker and, I assume, have a lot of general Unix and perhaps Windows domain administration knowledge. That's good for an IT person. Other IT jobs include racking servers, running cables, and figuring out what size switch to buy. The thing is I learned Docker, too; I made use of it after reading TWO WEB PAGES, and spent several months tweaking and refining my approach. Many of the tools are immature, although that's mostly because clustering is hard--some really smart Computer Science people did a lot of work most of us don't understand, and we've worked out how to use Pacemaker and Corosync to "do the right thing" for us, even if configuration is beastly.
That's the point: it's all surface stuff. I picked up most of my IT administration skills by looking and thinking. Most IT people around me can both give me new information *and* learn from me, because the field changes a lot and I go pretty deep into the one or two things that matter to the tasks I'm trying to accomplish. I'm something of a Systems Engineer more than just an administrator, but not really qualified in the way a dedicated SE is.
All the stuff IT people do is learned by reading a book and working with an IT team for a few weeks or months, depending on how specialized.
IT isn't the domain of scientists, engineers, and frontier researchers; it's the domain of grunt work supporting scientists, engineers, and frontier researchers.
People come to me with requirements about running a software environment or supplying a level of service, and I use some off-the-shelf tools to hand them a solution in about ten minutes; then the programmers write an enormous accounting system using the databases and application servers I provided them on which to run said software. I am not a software engineer.
Network engineers use first principles to design networks, selecting routing protocols and VPN solutions like MPLS or IPSec; very-smart-sciencey-people design those routing protocols, design encryption algorithms, and even design the hardware. I don't understand the graph theory or the electrical engineering involved in making those things.
You want to know why we have so many security problems? IT Security people are operating on a checklist. They know what firewalls do, what encryption is for, and some things about access control. In the end, they're working from first principles: you need anti-virus and don't share passwords. IT Security is so bad because IT Security isn't a first-principle job; we *should* be hiring engineers. I have a Project Management certification, and part of that is an understanding of risk (something I understand *well* beyond PMI's domain); most IT Security people don't understand risk, so they don't project threat models and work out strategies to protect their organizations. They're actually supposed to.
Aside from IT Security being full of people who just plain don't know how to do their jobs, the IT field is essentially a field of mechanics and plumbers. Large IT departments are made primarily of people who can be EASILY REPLACED WITH HIGH SCHOOL GRADUATES, if they need to graduate high school at all. Even at places like Amazon, you have high-level engineers designing their services; programmers writing the software to connect together other software supplying that service; and a sea of cable monkeys whose job is to rack servers, run network cabling, and install softwar

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Re:IT training? by bluefoxlucid · 2016-09-12 01:56 · Score: 1

I didn't say it was a bad thing. Why do you think cell phones cost so little now? Just cell phone service for 2 hours of voice per week would cost $550/month right now if it had only followed inflation since 1984 (the first commercially-available cell phones cost $4,000--over $9,000 in today's dollars--and yes, that's what the rates were like).
You have to remember: businesses don't pay wages. Businesses get revenue from product sales. In the end, what isn't taken by profit or taxes somewhere along the line is divided up among employees as wages. If you have an employee making $20/hr and producing 100 things per hour, 20 cents of that thing's price goes to paying this employee's wages; if we give him a way to produce 1,000 things per hour, then 2 cents of its price goes to his wages. That "way" might involve a machine which comes with a cost of, say, 7 cents per thing produced, so the cost falls from 20 cents to 9 cents.
That's why food costs the average middle-class family 11% of their income today, versus 30% in 1950 and 43% in 1900: fewer farm workers, more chemical and engineering workers, and the total comes up to be a smaller proportion of our population in total per yield of food produced. Fewer people are being paid--or, to be specific, fewer wage-hours are being paid--per tonne of food. We transferred that to manufacture first; then we outsourced manufacture for cheaper, and transferred the difference to shit like IT work and fast food, because we like things like Spotify and none of us wants to bag our own groceries.
The world changes. A lot of what you use today is predicated on that change; as well, our ability to provide welfare relies on the easier access to food by the poor (it's cheaper, so it doesn't cost us much to take care of them; plus they're generally more-stable, so less-frequently need aid). We get shifted to unemployment, muddle around a bit, and then new jobs become available because the difference in buying power gets spent on things and, because buying power eventually comes down to wage-labor involvement in making things, we can't actually produce those things without more people (although those people are now needed just to run the machines, hence why we need so few and things are so cheap!).
In the future, we'll all drive Teslas, because it'll take 1/10 as many people to actually produce a Tesla. With 100 times as many being sold, that means there will be 10 times as many jobs involved in making Teslas--most of which will be mind-numbing, and up the line toward mining and milling and shipping the source products that go into Teslas.

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"faulty cables and cooling fans" by bmk67 · 2016-09-09 05:49 · Score: 2

If they're contractually bound to deliver that sort of uptime, and their system isn't designed to tolerate these kind of failures, they deserve to fail.

Re:"faulty cables and cooling fans" by spacepimp · 2016-09-09 06:23 · Score: 1

To a degree. What if there is a serious bug or hardware flaw from a sourced component. Remember when HP bought motherboard components (faulty capacitors - from a supplier who had tried to steal the code from another company and had stolen fake docs) about 10 years ago? Their laptops and desktops had about a 40% failure rate in the first year as a result. Is that on the consumers shoulders to have purchased a machine with bad motherboard capacitors that were sourced by HP? They should have met the specifications but the failure rates were 3-4 times the norm. So the consumer is at fault for expecting lower failure rates?
This may be very different than what happened here, but it might not be entirely different.
Re:"faulty cables and cooling fans" by Anonymous Coward · 2016-09-09 07:40 · Score: 0

Many companies with these kinds of uptime expectations dual-source their gear. So they'll have a rack full of HP servers, and another rack of Dell boxes. On the network side, one side of each network "layer" will be a Cisco device, and the other will be a Juniper or (more commonly nowadays) Arista. If you don't use proprietary protocols, everything interconnects. So a vendor bug will only ever knock out half of your network, and you size capacity so that you never push anything past 50% utilization.
Re:"faulty cables and cooling fans" by HornWumpus · 2016-09-09 08:48 · Score: 1

Bad Chinese electrolytic caps were _everywhere_ for a few years there. It's been more than 10 years, about 20. Tempus fugit.
The world continued to turn. Not everything was replaced in the bad cap window, not every OEM pinched that penny and not all bad caps failed when new.

--
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Re: "faulty cables and cooling fans" by Anonymous Coward · 2016-09-09 09:18 · Score: 0

When I last checked, neither cables nor cooling fans are constructed with electrolytic caps.
Re:"faulty cables and cooling fans" by Anonymice · 2016-09-09 11:02 · Score: 1

Whilst I agree in principal, in practice, we know that the 5* service offered by a budget provider will not be equal to the 5* service offered by a reputed provider.
A decent datacenter wouldn't be taken down by shoddy cables & ventilation.
There's no problem with choosing a low-cost datacenter...as long as you factor that into your infrastructure design and put the saved money into redundancy. Done right, spreading your risk over several low-cost options can provide a stronger service than putting all of your eggs into an expensive quality service with little contingency. But cutting costs on both infrastructure and redundancy is a fools game.
Re:"faulty cables and cooling fans" by thegarbz · 2016-09-09 13:38 · Score: 1

So the consumer is at fault for expecting lower failure rates?
Depends on the failure rate. Considering high end server hardware has a very low failure rate and yet in critical applications with contractual uptimes they still get clustered or put in redundant pairs, yes I would say it still is the consumer's fault for not being able to handle the failure gracefully.
Re:"faulty cables and cooling fans" by swalve · 2016-09-09 14:30 · Score: 1

Or you just test shit before you put it into production. You buy from companies who won't let shit like that happen. Cisco and Compaq/HP/Proliant/DIGITAL used to be like that.
Re:"faulty cables and cooling fans" by swalve · 2016-09-09 14:32 · Score: 1

It was also shitty engineering, or at least that's my position. You notice that motherboards don't have banks of capacitors anymore, don't you?
Re:"faulty cables and cooling fans" by HornWumpus · 2016-09-09 16:22 · Score: 1

Not sure I can recognize a surface mount cap at a glance. I bet they are still there. Sure the busses are better tuned, but at the end of the day, caps fix many things.

--
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'

SOP by isotope23 · 2016-09-09 06:07 · Score: 1

Sounds like the suits took a contract but did not want to pay for the back end infrastructure to really support it.

I can't tell you the number of times I've seen this mentality -

From Banks to Airlines to Healthcare to "Service" Providers....

Usually it seems to be a combination of cheap C-level people and a layer of "yes" men between them and IT.

Unfortunately the deciders in chief don't feel the pain when deals like this cause the company to implode....

--
Service guarantees Citizenship! Questions Guarantee GITMO.... Amerika Uber Alles!

Re:SOP by swalve · 2016-09-09 14:37 · Score: 1

It seems to me that the C-level people usually just say "do this thing for the least amount of money" and it's the boot lickers in the middle who really louse things up by not having the smarts and/or balls to actually get the thing done.

Coding and IT aren't exactly the same thing by JosephDoeden · 2016-09-09 06:31 · Score: 1

We really just need more coders and engineers, for now. AI will replace a lot of coders too. The continued move to the cloud will replace a lot IT personal. We always need good managers and customer relations/sales if you prefer more stable fields. Coding can be hard work for the money. I don't think people get that. Most IT is a lot of ass sitting waiting for something to happen. Coding is more like real work unless you own the product and can mostly do bug and feature requests. If you planned to work for a corporation, the Network and Server Administrator jobs are FAR FAR less work than coding. Coders should probably be paid 50-100% more than they are and you'd have a lot more ppl want to be and STAY coders.

Re:Coding and IT aren't exactly the same thing by swalve · 2016-09-09 14:39 · Score: 1

You can't say that and then also say things like "ALL code has mistakes!" Want more money? Be better at your job.
Re:Coding and IT aren't exactly the same thing by Anonymous Coward · 2016-09-10 12:14 · Score: 0

FACT: Minus coders IT menials can't do their jobs. All you techs and network admins are is users with a better password that merely use what coders create for you to use. Nothing more.

Don't depend on what you can't see by T.E.D. · 2016-09-09 06:42 · Score: 2

The basic moral here is not to bet your life on systems you have no capability of fixing, if you can at all avoid it.

The company’s Nexus 3000 switches began to fail after trying to improperly process a routine computer-to-computer command, and because Cisco keeps its code private, Peak Web couldn’t figure out why.

...

Finally, late in October, came the 10 hours of darkness. Three people familiar with Peak Web’s operations say the lengthy outage gave the company time to deduce that the troublesome command was reducing the switches’ available memory and causing them to crash. The company alerted Cisco.

So they ended up black-box debugging the vendor's own problem for them. I wish I could say I am unfamiliar with that...

Re:Don't depend on what you can't see by swalve · 2016-09-09 14:40 · Score: 1

What "routine" computer to computer command? It's a fucking switch.
Re:Don't depend on what you can't see by blindseer · 2016-09-09 21:42 · Score: 1

After taking training for Cisco certification I can think of many such commands. These switches are not the kind you find at Best Buy. These switches will communicate with other devices on the network about how to route traffic. Ethernet does do routing much like how IP does routing, just at a different layer. For this routing to be efficient every device needs to know something about where on the network the other devices are located.
An equipment failure, a poorly planned network, and improperly trained staff, would make a lengthy network failure inevitable.

--
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
Re:Don't depend on what you can't see by swalve · 2016-09-09 22:51 · Score: 1

Which has fuck-all to do with computer to computer commands, whatever those are.
Re:Don't depend on what you can't see by blindseer · 2016-09-09 23:14 · Score: 1

Is that how you think you should respond to people trying to answer your questions? Is it that hard to comprehend that an Ethernet switch is a kind of computer? And that to make sure that the network is maintained that this computer needs to send commands to another similar computer? And do so "routinely"?
Therefore, if the switch fails to respond to those commands, and the network was not planned well, and competent people aren't there to fix the problem then the the network fails. Which is what brought this lawsuit, the network failed and they are trying to put this on Cisco instead of their own failure to plan for the possibility of a broken/buggy switch.
From your response I must assume you are either a child or just acting childish. So, grow up.

--
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
Re:Don't depend on what you can't see by T.E.D. · 2016-09-12 06:29 · Score: 1

One obvious possibility are standard routing/switching handling messages like ICMP and IGMP. The former is used for all kinds of routing and error reporting purposes, and the latter for helping equipment keep track of which IPs need which multicast messages. ARP is perhaps technically another. That's the protocol network hardware/drivers use to map IP addresses to hardware MACs. But there are all kinds of other messages going around down under the application layer.
These are the kinds of things you'd expect an "intelligent switch" to have built in logic to chew on, so it doesn't surprise me in the least to hear about issues with them. We have expensive smart switches from a competitor to CISCO, and I know of at least one bug/"issue" we tracked down in them where it would occasionally lose packets for about a second (no big deal for most applications, but we're doing real-time UDP, and this brings our whole application down on very well-paying customers).
From talking around here and based on the description, my money would be on mishandled spanning-tree packets. Those go from switch to switch in an attempt to give them all a picture of the best way to route, even in the event of individual switch failures. Mishandling those happened to be part of the problem in the aforementioned issue with our non-CISCO switch.

There's nothing to see here, folks. Move along. by Anonymous Coward · 2016-09-09 06:55 · Score: 0

The reason they were able to underbid the competition was because they had insufficient redundant infrastructure. Now they're paying the price, and good riddance.

LUDDITES try to ruin another app! by Anonymous Coward · 2016-09-09 07:15 · Score: 0

The modern app appers behind App of App almost lost their entire appy app because the LUDDITES at LUDDITE Peak Web can't app apps because they're LUDDITES, not modern app appers!

Apps!

IT is a "cost center" as treated as such by Anonymous Coward · 2016-09-09 07:29 · Score: 0

No matter how much we hate being treated without respect, both infrastructure and desk-side support are considered as a "cost center" as opposed to a "revenue center". This means that the company spends money on us without any tangible return as opposed to the sales and sales support group that actually generates income. The best way to increase profits is to reduce spending and staff reduction is the quickest and easiest way to reduce spending. In the short-term things will continue humming away in the data center but users may start to notice it's taking longer to get a call-back regarding their open ticket.

Sales people are basically reactionary and the way to solve a problem is to immediately get on the phone and talk to a customer or a prospect. No plan - just "wing it" and hope for the best, close the deal and sign that contract. Ring the bell and everyone cheers.

Tech people, on the other hand, are thinkers and planners. We put things in place to prevent having to "put out fires" later on. We'd rather fix things BEFORE they break but when pushed, we think through the problem and come to a solution. Unfortunately, there is no deal closing, signing of a contract or a cheerful bell ringing. When it comes time to figure budgets they look at how much they spend on IT while IT, from their point of view, doesn't really do much of anything. "Do we really need "X number" of people on staff? Can't be get by on "X/2" people?

Developers may create the product that ultimately gets sold, but it's the sales people that get the commissions while throwing money at prospects and contract renewals. When it comes time to figure the budgets they look at how much they spend on developers and assume one developer is as good as any other developer so why can't they just use developers from India and spend a tiny fraction of what they're currently spending.

Once IT stops being viewed as an expense and viewed as a way to generate income, we will continue to be treated like low-income crap.

Outsource the Sales Staff to India? by Anonymous Coward · 2016-09-09 08:20 · Score: 0

"Hey, let's cut our expenses by 90% and outsource our sales staff to India"...

...said no company ever.

Plaintiff said it was cables and fans not the host by Anonymous Coward · 2016-09-09 09:11 · Score: 0

Editors: Please RTFA and then ask yourself, "does my summary accurately convey what the article said". You failed horribly here.

It's important to note that the plaintiff (Machine Zone) is one asserting it was faulty cables and fans, not the host (Peak Web). Peak Web is asserting that the outages were caused by issues with their Cisco equipment. Why is this important? It seems the hosting contract included an indemnification of some type for vendor failures. So if Peak Web can prove that it was a Cisco failure, they're off the hook. If Machine Zone can prove that they were caused by shoddy equipment or installation then Peak Web has to cough up.

The headline mentioned Cisco but the summary doesn't mention Cisco at all and completely left out any discussion of the fact that Cisco acknowledged that there were issues with their equipment and seems to have done a piss-poor job of supporting PeakWeb (though PeakWeb shouldn't have singled sourced).

Regardless of how it shakes out, whoever it was at Machine Zone that agreed to the indemnification in the hosting contract needs a boot in the a**.

previously worked for this company by Anonymous Coward · 2016-09-09 12:15 · Score: 0

All I can say, their horrible uptime is not because of cisco. Piss poor management, emphasis on sales over service, etc. All the things that make a company bad. This is why I no longer work there..

Re: When will IT training become formal curriculu by hackwrench · 2016-09-09 12:27 · Score: 1

QB64, doh.

Re:Read the warranty card. .. by blindseer · 2016-09-09 21:21 · Score: 1

How else do you expect this to turn out? I suppose that Cisco could pay up to keep them quiet and out of a courtroom but that sets a precedent for writing checks if a company can somehow blame them for their failure.

There is already a long history of people getting fitness of purpose claims tossed out of court. I don't believe that Cisco has much to worry about here.

--
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.

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