Well, really, Tivo isn't my problem. I don't have, nor do I really WANT a Tivo. I just want to sit on my couch, watch the 9:00 CBS show, then flip the channel and watch the NBC 10:00 show.
My real point is that they're not screwing Tivo users with this, they're screwing people who, like me, just want to watch two shows from competing networks back to back without them running into one another.
In the case of CSI, it would really just be CBS taking a poke at NBC by denying them viewers for the beginning of their flagship show. I really will write "Network Programmer" on my laptop in Sharpie and whip it through the TV.
If CSI runs until 10:02, and ER starts RIGHT AT 10 like they do, it is very likely my wife will take the laptop off my lap and hurl it through our TV.
It's bad enough with those two anyway if you're a fan of both. This is a problem for regular people who want to watch one thing at 9 and something else on another network at 10.
Thank you guys, thank you for reminding me why I pay for CABLE. Assclowns.
Knowledge comes from Experience, and experience comes from Doing.
Mistakes will be made, They key is in mitigating the effects of those mistakes. Redundancy and Manageability are your two biggest buzzwords here. A good load test and utilization projections are definitely key, but no matter what you think your userbase will be, if it's a public application, you'll almost certainly be wrong. Try to prepare for the most traffic possible.
Redundancy on every level, including switching infrastructure is a very good plan. Any decent server sold can use multiple bonded NICs for reduncancy, if possible design your network such that if a switch fails, your network will fail over to another switch, etc.
I would suggest going to many local datacenters and interviewing each with probing questions relating to your situation. You will find that they are all relatively equal in terms of Standard DC items:
Diversity of route (physical entrance of cabling into the building) and redundant carriers.
Cooling
Power and backup gens
The things they differ on will be the readiness of their NOC team (do you have to fill out a web-form or call a call-center in East St. Louis to get a problem fixed in San Jose, or can you just "call the NOC and somene goes to your cage"), the monitoring/alerting they provide their customers for issues on the datacenter network. Infrastructure-wise, most DC's can provide you with Ping/Power/Pipe, but the service and SLAs are where they get points.
Do a LOT of reading. Depending on your platform, you have many choices. Linux vendors and Microsoft both have good platforms WRT building redundant networks, provided you do your homework.
Which brings you to manageability. Make sure that you have a deployment framework you can live with right from the start. Deploying code by hand is alright when you have 2 sites in IIS x 3 or 4 machines, but it gets hairy when you have 15 sites x 20 webservers. Make sure you can deploy web content, mid-tier apps, etc, with the "click of a button". This helps to ease the possibility of repetitive mistakes being made. Depending on the app, you may have to roll-your-own, but it's worth it.
Scalability. Make sure you pick a DC that can grow with you. If you plan to start out with 4 1u rackmount webservers and maybe a 7u DB, plus some storage array, make sure there is "room to move" in the DC without needing to cross-connect all over their facility with a cage here and a couple cabinets on the other end. Scalability testing by your engineers would be a great plan also. During load testing, if you're planning on using 2 mid-tier servers to process "Project X" from the web-users, set up 6 or 8 and load them up with bogus traffic. See how long it takes to kill your DB server.
Monitoring/analysis. Make sure you have a monitoring system into which you can hook custom monitors and alerts. Of your installation, those parts with the lowest levels of monitoring will be the ones most prone to breakage. Good packages here are NetCool and HP Openview. Expensive though. It's something you can probably write in-house until you need to spend the big bucks for an enterprise package.
Look to do a lot of reading, but break it into chunks. There is (I hope) no book called "Building and Maintaining High Traffic Enterprise Networks, for dummies, vol2". Every network will be different. But if you componentize your search, you will yeild great results. If you look to build your own monitoring or code deployment system, read up on WMI, read Cisco related newsgroups for network layer redundancy, etc.
Consultant is NOT a dirty word. Make sure you hire one for the right reasons. You do not want someone to come in and "make it so". You want someone with more experience than you have to work WITH you to design a network that you understand, can maintain, and which will scale. There's an art to it, hire Chris van Allsburg, not Picasso, Dali or certainly not Poll
We make decent use of HP/Compaq Remote Insight (now Integrated Lights Out) boards. They work pretty well, allow remote power button, etc. The one thing that bothers me is that in the G2/G3 servers, they have started charging extra for a Remote Console license fee. What this means is that you can watch the boot through post, then the display shuts off and you have to guess. That means that if you have a Windows server which bluescreens or a Linux server which fscks every time it boots, you're kind of out of luck.
All of this type of product I've used, HP/Compaq RIB/ILO and IBM BladeCenter remote management all have used VNC embedded into their stuff, it works well and is as reliable as you need.
We investigated the Belkin IP based KVM, however since we don't have anyone within 1400 miles of our datacenter, and the datacenter could only supply us 110 through some hokey power converters which had a tendency to not only fry themselves but also the KVM they were plugged into, we abandoned that idea for exclusive RIB use and never looked back.
That's kind of what I thought, so I never tried. Oh well. It's still a good platform for my needs, I was just curious to see how painful trying to Term Serv to a machine from a phone with a teeny display over 1XRTT speeds would be. I guess speedwise it would be the same as our cellular laptop card, but at least with that you can see the whole remote display.
A lot of people have been saying how expensive these are, but they're good for corporate IT. With an SSL + password protected site, I can see which of my servers are alive, pull webservers out, initiate restarts of the webserver, etc. They work pretty well actually. At least when you're not spending your own money:-)
I'd love to see Wifi portability, which some people have been rumoring.
Anyone know if you can use TuSSH to set up a tunnel? I'd like to SSH tunnel and then run the Terminal Services client over it. Yes I'm that masochistic. I've only had the 600 a couple weeks and haven't gotten around to bothering yet, but that would be another big plus.
Putty does have a tunneling system - so you don't have to setup Cygwin/OpenSSH if you can't wait for it to install.
I'm not sure I understand. On the intermediate (tunnel) server, wouldn't you need an sshd running so that the client could connect, with putty, to set up the tunnel, or can putty handle both ends? If so, rock on putty.
All good points, however, vastly more PITA than hitting "connect through host" in the RAdmin client.
I assumed from the question that the network in question is all or primarily windows. Assuming he'd have to install cygwin first and set up sshd in Windows, that makes the time investment much higher.
That said, ssh tunneling works great, use it every day to hop around networks which can't directly see each other. However, you can't tell me that the 4 steps you listed are easier than a checkbox labelled "Connect Through Host" on the client side only.
SSH tunneling is far from a QED solution to your average Windows admin, believe me, I know from hard experience in trying to explain it. Heh.
To the best of my knowledge, RAdmin is not based on VNC.
RAdmin has several nice features, but they're mostly not really anything you can't get from VNC. One cool exception to that is the ability to "bounce" from RAdmin servers. Let's say you are adminning a machine a remote location which is "messed up" in some way, bad subnet mask, bad default gateway, etc. You can set an intermediate machine at that location for RAdmin to bounce off of. It's also possible to use this to create an "RAdmin Gateway", so a machine on your edge network, which you bounce through to get access to the internal machines. That isn't a recommendation, but I've seen people do it before.
The 3.0 beta client also has nice Dealmaker features for me. Folder support, so no more one long ass list of all your connections (although you could DIY this solution through the use of command line shortcuts), and the ability to set the default refresh rate to something other than 100 updates/sec, rather than having to change it every time you make a new connection.
Other than that, they're all fairly similar. I like RAdmin's Get/Set clipboard feature. The file transfer is decent only for small files, but for those small files, it's great. There's a remote CMD shell feature which always struck me as a bad plan, but no worse than remote desktop I guess.
Try them all out, there's a 30 day trial of RAdmin anyway, just play. It's not nearly as fast as Terminal Services, but it's not as slow as (vanilla) VNC, or slow feeling I guess. And I haven't tried VNC in an eternity, so I'm no expert.
Really, RDP is the way to go if you have Windows2000 or 2003. It's super fast relative to anything else I use, 2k3 gives you the option of full color. However RAdmin is very good for servers on which you WANT multiple user sessions to "collide". I don't want someone logged into a server making contradictory changes to mine without us colliding with each other and backing off.
IIRC, the Amiga prototype was offered to Atari first, is that right? Then the Tramiels whipped together the 130/260/520 STs to compete with what they knew was coming, with obviously only the 520 and 1040 being shipped initially.
I loved my Atari's, from my first 800, two 800xl's, and massively hacked 520ST. With the desktop addons, I always thought it was more polished than my friends Amiga, but I could never put my finger on why.
For the best Blast from the Past, check out Archive.org and their archive of Computer Chronicles, particulary this ST v. Amiga shootout.
The Walk of Fame lost a little for me when I found up that the actor has to pony up for the thing, so basically, some actor wants a star, splashes out the $15k and bingo. I'm sure there's more to it than that, or else David Spade would have one right next to Gilbert Gottfried. James Doohan deserves it totally.
But he had to pay for it, or more likely, Paramount sponsored it.
We should lobby for Wil Wheaton or JWZ to get a star though. I'll pitch in $3 towards the "get Wil a Star" campaign.
Re:I Use 3 Types Depending on Need
on
Portable Storage?
·
· Score: 1
I agree with the Archos, I bought my wife a Gmini 120, 20GB harddrive/mp3 player. This thing works great, Linux sees it without any problems, USB 2 is fast, and it has a reader for CF cards. The next model up has a color LCD which allows you to view the pictures on those CF cards.
That is good, but I'm vicariously curious as to why you don't have spares...is it because of variable products used?
For critical gear, we have spares on hand. However we have several locations which are only serviced by local contractors. In those cases, we require that the contractors have spares.
Everyone's so afraid of messing with stock prices, to the point of failure to be forthcoming. Or in the case of Google removing OS Stats in that other story, to the point of even having meaningless stats, which clearly state how meaningless they are.
Yeah, it is naive to rely on a company simply because of they claim to have good support. I've found a good route is to rely on reputable local Cisco vendors who do nothing all day except deal with the supply chain.
For example, if I have a bad linecard, and I call Cisco directly, I'm going to sit on the phone for 20 minutes before I get a level one CC rep, who will give me a case number and take my name. If I call my local vendors 24 hour support number, THEY can deal directly with whatever Cisco supply channel people they can get hold of at whatever time, and get my part, fast. The key, though, is reputable local vendor, and the fact that Cisco has the supply chain in place.
My CCO account has never worked right, I've given up trying to make it right, I don't care anymore:-) I can't decide which is worse, trying to deal with my broken CCO account or trying to call Cisco directly. However, every time we've had a failure, we've had a part delivered so fast it made my head spin. The only faster vendor we deal with is our storage vendor, which has proactive fault software which alerts us and the vendor of a bad disk. They often have a disk in the air within 20-30 minutes of a failure, worldwide.
I'm not saying Buy Cisco because of their stellar support, but I like it because the infrastructure is there to get things handled extremely quickly.
I don't agree with them keeping hush-hush about this vuln though, they should totally have a blurb up on their front page.
True, and right you are. If I hadn't blown mod points by posting, I'd have bumped you. There are several companies you can get gear from that have large support bases, but none as large as Cisco. I remember wanting to get some Extreme switching for our core, and getting outvoted because it's "not the same" as the rest of our gear. Oh well, I guess if we are going to make everything match, at least we're making it match with a good vendor:-) But Cisco is in a huge position to do lots of evil or good. And if they made a huge terrifying flaw that EVERYONE was open to, it would be a bummer. Remember MSSQL-Slammer? Yeah, times 1000.
You're right though, any monkey can learn syntax, it takes a special kind of monkey to understand the full impact of that syntax throughout a network.
I can't get 1 hour support for an Intel/OBSD server from a service provider with a worldwide reputation. If I do get such support, it would have to be guaranteed that they would have every combination of T1 and FastEther card in stock, power supply, etc that would possibly break.
Sometimes standardization on one vendor worldwide is a GOOD thing. It's no problem to find Cisco support in Europe, South America, North America, Asia, etc. If a company has a router in Singapore and that router fails, would they rather try to find support for an OpenBSD whitebox, or call 1800-Go-Cisco and have someone go replace it immediately? Many international offices don't have full-time IT staffing, so there may not be anyone within an 8 hour plane flight capable of fixing the issue within the company.
Cisco and the other infrastructure providers make a lot of money for a very good reason, people trust them and can get support anywhere they happen to be.
Certainly, for a home user or single office with 20 people, one of whom is a BSD junkie, a Unix based router might be a fine idea. However for global organizations with multiple high-bandwidth links between branches, for example, for whom downtime costs many thousands of dollars per hour, there aren't very many options. It's a good thing that what options there are are very solid.
I've never seen Tom Smykowski's point more elegantly demonstrated than right here in that post.
You can't have clients talking right to the engineers, engineers have an overwhelming tendancy towards dick-headedness, and a proclivity towards know-it-all-itude.
This kid might not know as much as an EE about how cordless phones work. BUT, keep in mind that, in the course of selling them for four years, he would have tons of anecdotal evidence about which "work better" under whatever conditions. Customers come back all pissed about why their phones don't work well, occasionally he might hear positive comments, whatever.
He'll be more in a position to be an authority than your average consumer who doesn't get that kind of feedback daily.
After saying that, yes, it's true, that most of the salesdrones I've had the fortune to bump into at Big Box Stores have been about as useful as, and slightly less welcome than, a sock full of quarters to the head.
"I'm a PEOPLE PERSON, what the HELL is wrong with you people?"
I have a few dozen machines that upgraded flawlessly to SP4. They are not all identical, some are webservers, some are DBs, some are various types of middle-tier application machines. Not a single one gave us any trouble at all. You must be running some funky funky code on there. We have some running.NET 1.0 apps, some with.NET 1.1.4, odd, never had the problem.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, really, Tivo isn't my problem. I don't have, nor do I really WANT a Tivo. I just want to sit on my couch, watch the 9:00 CBS show, then flip the channel and watch the NBC 10:00 show.
My real point is that they're not screwing Tivo users with this, they're screwing people who, like me, just want to watch two shows from competing networks back to back without them running into one another.
In the case of CSI, it would really just be CBS taking a poke at NBC by denying them viewers for the beginning of their flagship show. I really will write "Network Programmer" on my laptop in Sharpie and whip it through the TV.
If CSI runs until 10:02, and ER starts RIGHT AT 10 like they do, it is very likely my wife will take the laptop off my lap and hurl it through our TV.
It's bad enough with those two anyway if you're a fan of both. This is a problem for regular people who want to watch one thing at 9 and something else on another network at 10.
Thank you guys, thank you for reminding me why I pay for CABLE. Assclowns.
Fuck me. I'm ripping the "K" and "Y" keys from my laptop right now. I can't believe that post. I sound lie some bonehead owledge engineer.
eep it real.
Knowledge comes from Experience, and experience comes from Doing.
Mistakes will be made, They key is in mitigating the effects of those mistakes. Redundancy and Manageability are your two biggest buzzwords here. A good load test and utilization projections are definitely key, but no matter what you think your userbase will be, if it's a public application, you'll almost certainly be wrong. Try to prepare for the most traffic possible.
Redundancy on every level, including switching infrastructure is a very good plan. Any decent server sold can use multiple bonded NICs for reduncancy, if possible design your network such that if a switch fails, your network will fail over to another switch, etc.
I would suggest going to many local datacenters and interviewing each with probing questions relating to your situation. You will find that they are all relatively equal in terms of Standard DC items:
Diversity of route (physical entrance of cabling into the building) and redundant carriers.
Cooling
Power and backup gens
The things they differ on will be the readiness of their NOC team (do you have to fill out a web-form or call a call-center in East St. Louis to get a problem fixed in San Jose, or can you just "call the NOC and somene goes to your cage"), the monitoring/alerting they provide their customers for issues on the datacenter network. Infrastructure-wise, most DC's can provide you with Ping/Power/Pipe, but the service and SLAs are where they get points.
Do a LOT of reading. Depending on your platform, you have many choices. Linux vendors and Microsoft both have good platforms WRT building redundant networks, provided you do your homework.
Which brings you to manageability. Make sure that you have a deployment framework you can live with right from the start. Deploying code by hand is alright when you have 2 sites in IIS x 3 or 4 machines, but it gets hairy when you have 15 sites x 20 webservers. Make sure you can deploy web content, mid-tier apps, etc, with the "click of a button". This helps to ease the possibility of repetitive mistakes being made. Depending on the app, you may have to roll-your-own, but it's worth it.
Scalability. Make sure you pick a DC that can grow with you. If you plan to start out with 4 1u rackmount webservers and maybe a 7u DB, plus some storage array, make sure there is "room to move" in the DC without needing to cross-connect all over their facility with a cage here and a couple cabinets on the other end. Scalability testing by your engineers would be a great plan also. During load testing, if you're planning on using 2 mid-tier servers to process "Project X" from the web-users, set up 6 or 8 and load them up with bogus traffic. See how long it takes to kill your DB server.
Monitoring/analysis. Make sure you have a monitoring system into which you can hook custom monitors and alerts. Of your installation, those parts with the lowest levels of monitoring will be the ones most prone to breakage. Good packages here are NetCool and HP Openview. Expensive though. It's something you can probably write in-house until you need to spend the big bucks for an enterprise package.
Look to do a lot of reading, but break it into chunks. There is (I hope) no book called "Building and Maintaining High Traffic Enterprise Networks, for dummies, vol2". Every network will be different. But if you componentize your search, you will yeild great results. If you look to build your own monitoring or code deployment system, read up on WMI, read Cisco related newsgroups for network layer redundancy, etc.
Consultant is NOT a dirty word. Make sure you hire one for the right reasons. You do not want someone to come in and "make it so". You want someone with more experience than you have to work WITH you to design a network that you understand, can maintain, and which will scale. There's an art to it, hire Chris van Allsburg, not Picasso, Dali or certainly not Poll
Well, when MS needs stock art, Bill Gates /does/ own a very well known stock image library.
I thought it was very odd when Corbis had a contest offering a brand new dual G5 with a huge cinema display every day for a month.
Terminal Services is the only way to go as far as remote administration goes.
I have very little desire to remote control a window session over a RIB, but they are great for reboots and troubleshooting during the boot sequence.
That's absolutely true.
We've never bought one of the licenses, so I didn't really know what exactly they say.
We make decent use of HP/Compaq Remote Insight (now Integrated Lights Out) boards. They work pretty well, allow remote power button, etc. The one thing that bothers me is that in the G2/G3 servers, they have started charging extra for a Remote Console license fee. What this means is that you can watch the boot through post, then the display shuts off and you have to guess. That means that if you have a Windows server which bluescreens or a Linux server which fscks every time it boots, you're kind of out of luck.
All of this type of product I've used, HP/Compaq RIB/ILO and IBM BladeCenter remote management all have used VNC embedded into their stuff, it works well and is as reliable as you need.
We investigated the Belkin IP based KVM, however since we don't have anyone within 1400 miles of our datacenter, and the datacenter could only supply us 110 through some hokey power converters which had a tendency to not only fry themselves but also the KVM they were plugged into, we abandoned that idea for exclusive RIB use and never looked back.
That's kind of what I thought, so I never tried. Oh well. It's still a good platform for my needs, I was just curious to see how painful trying to Term Serv to a machine from a phone with a teeny display over 1XRTT speeds would be. I guess speedwise it would be the same as our cellular laptop card, but at least with that you can see the whole remote display.
A lot of people have been saying how expensive these are, but they're good for corporate IT. With an SSL + password protected site, I can see which of my servers are alive, pull webservers out, initiate restarts of the webserver, etc. They work pretty well actually. At least when you're not spending your own money :-)
I'd love to see Wifi portability, which some people have been rumoring.
Anyone know if you can use TuSSH to set up a tunnel? I'd like to SSH tunnel and then run the Terminal Services client over it. Yes I'm that masochistic. I've only had the 600 a couple weeks and haven't gotten around to bothering yet, but that would be another big plus.
Putty does have a tunneling system - so you don't have to setup Cygwin/OpenSSH if you can't wait for it to install.
I'm not sure I understand. On the intermediate (tunnel) server, wouldn't you need an sshd running so that the client could connect, with putty, to set up the tunnel, or can putty handle both ends? If so, rock on putty.
All good points, however, vastly more PITA than hitting "connect through host" in the RAdmin client.
I assumed from the question that the network in question is all or primarily windows. Assuming he'd have to install cygwin first and set up sshd in Windows, that makes the time investment much higher.
That said, ssh tunneling works great, use it every day to hop around networks which can't directly see each other. However, you can't tell me that the 4 steps you listed are easier than a checkbox labelled "Connect Through Host" on the client side only.
SSH tunneling is far from a QED solution to your average Windows admin, believe me, I know from hard experience in trying to explain it. Heh.
To the best of my knowledge, RAdmin is not based on VNC.
RAdmin has several nice features, but they're mostly not really anything you can't get from VNC. One cool exception to that is the ability to "bounce" from RAdmin servers. Let's say you are adminning a machine a remote location which is "messed up" in some way, bad subnet mask, bad default gateway, etc. You can set an intermediate machine at that location for RAdmin to bounce off of. It's also possible to use this to create an "RAdmin Gateway", so a machine on your edge network, which you bounce through to get access to the internal machines. That isn't a recommendation, but I've seen people do it before.
The 3.0 beta client also has nice Dealmaker features for me. Folder support, so no more one long ass list of all your connections (although you could DIY this solution through the use of command line shortcuts), and the ability to set the default refresh rate to something other than 100 updates/sec, rather than having to change it every time you make a new connection.
Other than that, they're all fairly similar. I like RAdmin's Get/Set clipboard feature. The file transfer is decent only for small files, but for those small files, it's great. There's a remote CMD shell feature which always struck me as a bad plan, but no worse than remote desktop I guess.
Try them all out, there's a 30 day trial of RAdmin anyway, just play. It's not nearly as fast as Terminal Services, but it's not as slow as (vanilla) VNC, or slow feeling I guess. And I haven't tried VNC in an eternity, so I'm no expert.
Really, RDP is the way to go if you have Windows2000 or 2003. It's super fast relative to anything else I use, 2k3 gives you the option of full color. However RAdmin is very good for servers on which you WANT multiple user sessions to "collide". I don't want someone logged into a server making contradictory changes to mine without us colliding with each other and backing off.
I hope he reads this.
IIRC, the Amiga prototype was offered to Atari first, is that right? Then the Tramiels whipped together the 130/260/520 STs to compete with what they knew was coming, with obviously only the 520 and 1040 being shipped initially.
I loved my Atari's, from my first 800, two 800xl's, and massively hacked 520ST. With the desktop addons, I always thought it was more polished than my friends Amiga, but I could never put my finger on why.
For the best Blast from the Past, check out Archive.org and their archive of Computer Chronicles, particulary this ST v. Amiga shootout.
See, now THAT's perfect. I just don't want to see a Pauley Shore star or whatever, just cause he has $15k to blow on crap.
How about that cite. Whoops:
Star Cite
The Walk of Fame lost a little for me when I found up that the actor has to pony up for the thing, so basically, some actor wants a star, splashes out the $15k and bingo. I'm sure there's more to it than that, or else David Spade would have one right next to Gilbert Gottfried. James Doohan deserves it totally.
But he had to pay for it, or more likely, Paramount sponsored it.
We should lobby for Wil Wheaton or JWZ to get a star though. I'll pitch in $3 towards the "get Wil a Star" campaign.
I agree with the Archos, I bought my wife a Gmini 120, 20GB harddrive/mp3 player. This thing works great, Linux sees it without any problems, USB 2 is fast, and it has a reader for CF cards. The next model up has a color LCD which allows you to view the pictures on those CF cards.
Highly recommended.
That is good, but I'm vicariously curious as to why you don't have spares...is it because of variable products used?
For critical gear, we have spares on hand. However we have several locations which are only serviced by local contractors. In those cases, we require that the contractors have spares.
Everyone's so afraid of messing with stock prices, to the point of failure to be forthcoming. Or in the case of Google removing OS Stats in that other story, to the point of even having meaningless stats, which clearly state how meaningless they are.
Crazy.
Yeah, it is naive to rely on a company simply because of they claim to have good support. I've found a good route is to rely on reputable local Cisco vendors who do nothing all day except deal with the supply chain.
:-) I can't decide which is worse, trying to deal with my broken CCO account or trying to call Cisco directly. However, every time we've had a failure, we've had a part delivered so fast it made my head spin. The only faster vendor we deal with is our storage vendor, which has proactive fault software which alerts us and the vendor of a bad disk. They often have a disk in the air within 20-30 minutes of a failure, worldwide.
For example, if I have a bad linecard, and I call Cisco directly, I'm going to sit on the phone for 20 minutes before I get a level one CC rep, who will give me a case number and take my name. If I call my local vendors 24 hour support number, THEY can deal directly with whatever Cisco supply channel people they can get hold of at whatever time, and get my part, fast. The key, though, is reputable local vendor, and the fact that Cisco has the supply chain in place.
My CCO account has never worked right, I've given up trying to make it right, I don't care anymore
I'm not saying Buy Cisco because of their stellar support, but I like it because the infrastructure is there to get things handled extremely quickly.
I don't agree with them keeping hush-hush about this vuln though, they should totally have a blurb up on their front page.
True, and right you are. If I hadn't blown mod points by posting, I'd have bumped you. There are several companies you can get gear from that have large support bases, but none as large as Cisco. I remember wanting to get some Extreme switching for our core, and getting outvoted because it's "not the same" as the rest of our gear. Oh well, I guess if we are going to make everything match, at least we're making it match with a good vendor :-) But Cisco is in a huge position to do lots of evil or good. And if they made a huge terrifying flaw that EVERYONE was open to, it would be a bummer. Remember MSSQL-Slammer? Yeah, times 1000.
You're right though, any monkey can learn syntax, it takes a special kind of monkey to understand the full impact of that syntax throughout a network.
No, in this case, I don't believe you may :-)
I can't get 1 hour support for an Intel/OBSD server from a service provider with a worldwide reputation. If I do get such support, it would have to be guaranteed that they would have every combination of T1 and FastEther card in stock, power supply, etc that would possibly break.
Sometimes standardization on one vendor worldwide is a GOOD thing. It's no problem to find Cisco support in Europe, South America, North America, Asia, etc. If a company has a router in Singapore and that router fails, would they rather try to find support for an OpenBSD whitebox, or call 1800-Go-Cisco and have someone go replace it immediately? Many international offices don't have full-time IT staffing, so there may not be anyone within an 8 hour plane flight capable of fixing the issue within the company.
Cisco and the other infrastructure providers make a lot of money for a very good reason, people trust them and can get support anywhere they happen to be.
Certainly, for a home user or single office with 20 people, one of whom is a BSD junkie, a Unix based router might be a fine idea. However for global organizations with multiple high-bandwidth links between branches, for example, for whom downtime costs many thousands of dollars per hour, there aren't very many options. It's a good thing that what options there are are very solid.
I've never seen Tom Smykowski's point more elegantly demonstrated than right here in that post.
You can't have clients talking right to the engineers, engineers have an overwhelming tendancy towards dick-headedness, and a proclivity towards know-it-all-itude.
This kid might not know as much as an EE about how cordless phones work. BUT, keep in mind that, in the course of selling them for four years, he would have tons of anecdotal evidence about which "work better" under whatever conditions. Customers come back all pissed about why their phones don't work well, occasionally he might hear positive comments, whatever.
He'll be more in a position to be an authority than your average consumer who doesn't get that kind of feedback daily.
After saying that, yes, it's true, that most of the salesdrones I've had the fortune to bump into at Big Box Stores have been about as useful as, and slightly less welcome than, a sock full of quarters to the head.
"I'm a PEOPLE PERSON, what the HELL is wrong with you people?"
I have a few dozen machines that upgraded flawlessly to SP4. They are not all identical, some are webservers, some are DBs, some are various types of middle-tier application machines. Not a single one gave us any trouble at all. You must be running some funky funky code on there. We have some running .NET 1.0 apps, some with .NET 1.1.4, odd, never had the problem.