Which is why its not a great idea putting mission critical thin clients across a WAN
Though having worked for several years in large corporate environments (and their associated love for citrix farms), I would observe
- WAN accelerators work. A riverbed (mind you at ~$50,000AUD a pop it ain't exactly cheap) will make a 2M link seem like LAN speeds for the protocols its optimised for. Depending on cost of bandwidth....
- Consolidation does not have to go overboard. If there are at least a few hundred users, it can be cost efficient to run a local server. Most network problems that are not a result of a bungled change / cabling stuffup are WAN.
- Government network? good luck with that buddy!
- The bean counters find it very easy to quantify the cost 'savings' and push their agenda as such. However for your potential losses due to downtime caused by network outages.... heck the fortune 500 I am contracted to presently doesn't even have a method for estimating the dollar cost of downtime, let alone a method for estimating the amount of downtime likely to occur (needless to say they also choose the cheapest carrier, which has a ridiculous inability to meet SLA, and then consolidate like mad to place even more reliance on the WAN).
Like most things in IT there is no silver bullet or magic formula, each case needs to be judged on their own merit.
And on a side note, given how much hardware costs have dropped and the fact that user requirements have remained relatively static (i.e. most generic office workers are still using the same software as 4 years ago), how hard can it be to embed the email client (with local cache so they can at least view emails they already downloaded) and office suite on the thin client itself so at least they can keep working on documents?
In my experience (~ 2 years each at 3 different major corporations of over 5000 employees), the CS guys are the programmers in their cupboards who have absolutely no idea about HOW their code actually works within the larger infrastructure. And even less of an idea of how it actually ends up on the end users screen. Needless to say, troubleshooting an issue with these guys is like pulling teeth.
Of course help desk drones are helpdesk drones.
But don't lump them in with the 'real' techies. You know, they guys who configure the routing and switching (thats me here), the guys who configure the AD / MS infrastructure, the unix admins (and they have VERY strong opinions on the 'quality' of the outsourced DBAs...), etc....
And in this area, a variety of non-technical skills is just as critical (organisational, common sense, etc.), I've met more than one technical genuis who couldn't organise a pissup in a brewery and hence have completely foobared simple jobs (e.g. order new WAN circuit from carrier and ensure its physically hooked up to port X on equipment Y)
And in most companies (who aren't devleopment shops), guess which function is more important - in house programming or the guys who actually keep all the digital infrastructure running / build more infrastructure.
There are people who can do both but by god they are rare....
The most broken things are - Airstrike and Helo kills stacking. Once you get an Airstrike you're almost guaranteed a Helo. Support kills should not count same as normal kills - Grenade perk is overpowered
But being multiplayer its pretty hard to think of leadership/intel perks as all the other players are human, and they're not going to be inclined to take orders;)
Still a level 1 player in COD4 is on a far more level playing field than any MMORPG confrontation between people of varying levels. A headshot is a headshot and even starting out you have the tools to do that;)
Re:I don't know if I fully agree with that
on
Fire Your IT Boss
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· Score: 1
Familiar enough with concepts to grasp details, when they are put in front of him, is very different from the nuts and bolts knowledge of how to actually do the task.
e.g. my boss understands the concept of a routing protocol. He also understands that sometimes we need to modify it to achieve XYZ result. He can make a good decision of whether to go with X option or Y option if we provide him with sound technical advice / evaluation and he listens (which he does). I do not expect him to understand the IOS syntax or be able to come up with the technical options by himself. And yes he is a damned good boss. Of course this is my 'paper' boss but operationally even the tech lead reports to him, and the business interfaces with us through him. That is his job, not the actual configuration / implementation.
As many other posters have pointed out, as long as he understands your environment well enough to do his job (which is MANAGING) then thats enough. Of course any extra knowledge is beneficial as long as it doesn't tempt them to micro manage / meddle, but the basic tone of the article is over the top.
Re:I don't know if I fully agree with that
on
Fire Your IT Boss
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· Score: 1
"any manager that can't add a router into an existing OSPF area is in the wrong job"
"any manager that can't configure RAID 6 is in the wrong job"
"any manager that can't configure a trust relationship between two AD domains is in the wrong job"
"any manager that can't install and configure a PABX trunk card is in the wrong job"
"any manager that can't terminate Cat5/6 is in the wrong job"
and soforth
its not their job to be able to do that, its their job to understand what that stuff is and why its done.
and if he's referring to a programming manager then maybe fair enough, but "IT manager"? a bit of a stretch methinks
I take it then you've never had a WinXP SP2, SP3 or WGA inflicted meltdown. Or a windows driver borking everything. Or spyware/viruses causing random issues everywhere.
All OSs are susceptible to breaking with updates. If you tinker under the hood of your linux system then of course it makes it likelier. If you stuck completely to pre built packages and never edited any config files by hand (see windows) its rare that stuff breaks as completely as you described, and if so its a big bug thats usually quickly resolved.
new, young developers who are just _better_ than their older co-workers
Sorry no, maybe in your firm....
In this brave new world all that matters is the figures that the bean counters pull out of their behinds, whether the figures accurately reflect reality (or 'externalities' I think they're called) or not.
Granted my current customer is the king of outsourcing (50% of workforce is contracted.... they change vendors like underwear, then wonder why nobody knows what the f--k is going on). But they are in a market that lets them print money (hint: 3 words, start with O, end with L) so maybe thats a distorted perspective.
I have yet to see a single CS grad who can set up an AD forest properly, or configure a pair of routers in CLI for site to site IPSEC VPN and tie it back into the existing routing scheme.
On the other hand, I have seen MCSEs and CCNA/CCNPs do that kind of thing, qualifications that require far less time and effort.
Unfortunately, as management sees computing as a monolithic black box thingy, we end up with people hiring the former to the latter.
Got bumped from helpdesk to PABX work, then saw the tide coming, made myself go to cisco night school and now I'm one of the mysterious 'network techs' that nobody questions because they don't have any idea how subnetting works (that's simplifying it greatly but you get the point). I have seen so many CS graduates come in and burn because at the end of the day, when your router borks, you need a guy who understands how to flash an IOS and what to do when the IOS doesn't recognise a specific interface card or the like. Being able to code mediocre.net and java is irrelevant.
We had a paper CCIE come in from global head office (on megabucks I might add), and within 15 minutes the on the ground techs had him sussed out. I think it was when I asked him to help diagnose a spanning tree convergence issue, and he replied "oh I only did BGP in my last job". This is also a guy who has managed to systematically piss off every single vendor we deal with because of his complete lack of understanding of how enterprise IT works, his only knowledge is working on routing designs on VISIO diagrams. We stuck him in front of a rack once with a console cable and he came crawling to us lowly CCNAs for help.
Maybe its like that in the US, or in the bottom of the trenches (helpdesk, linesmen, desktop grunts).
In my experience in Australia, a skilled tech is always in demand and can secure a reasonable wage with a reasonable amount of difficulty. You could also see it as being co-opeted by "the man" by being thrown a few juicy bones (truth be told the cynic in me still sees it that way).
Recently I've become bored with my job and fired off a few random applications. So far I've had coffee with three recruiters who are all salivating and it has only required a minimum of effort on my part.
Granted that is my personal experience and we haven't been in a recession since the early 90s (I know, I know, I skim the financial pages as well and it ain't looking pretty). But the amount of competent skilled techs / engineers / whatever (and in that package I include things like being able to face up to customers without appearing like a total dweeb or a BOFH, being able to talk to the business on their level, being able to curb the excesses of the sales bastards, etc.) is getting lower by the day, partly due to GUIs and the like, and partly due to the fact that there are some very smart people in R&D putting out smarter and smarter systems with nice streamlined management tools. No amount of cookie cutter offshore test passers will ever in the long run make things work properly, you need the real techs, wherever they come from. For every 'real' tech there are 10 helpdesk grunts / paper certs who will fold once you stick them in front of the rack with incomplete documentation and an angry customer (i.e. your typical enterprise scenario). In other words, the reality is that demand is still > supply, the problem is convincing the bean counters to see it that way. (when was the last IT cost cutting exercise you saw that did anything except make everything go boom in the long run, leading to the start of another cycle of spending to fix the problems caused by neglect).
Also that is not a tired communist mantra, its a fact. Everyone is out there to get their percentage, its inherent to the market mechanism. Just because we haven't figured out a better way doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
Its not so much the hardware, its picking the right hardware, which unfortunately most end users will not have the knowledge/interest/time to pick correctly.
If you pick the right mid-high range card it will soldier on for over 2 years which isn't really that bad, though that's still nowhere as good value as consoles.
but seriously, if that is what he's angling for, why don't they just release a USB hardware key or something similar. Audio software producers have been screwing over users with that one for ages (STEINBERG ARE YOU LISTENING). Of course its not uncrackable but it can be hard enough to crack to deter 80% of 'casual' pirates.
These holier than thou anti apple zealots really need to get an education and / or some sense of perspective.
Rabid ideological views don't usually fare too well even when dealing with static things like ideas and concepts. When dealing with a moving target like the state of 'X' technology / software / hardware........
(speaking as a former rabid apple hater who saw the light after 15 minutes with a macbook, and wonders why he wasted so many years tolerating wintel desktop)
Add me to that chorus. I have two laptops through work (contractor, on-site managed services).
My parent company laptop - which I don't actually need for my day to day (as I use the customers laptop) - is Vista Business Premium - Core2Duo 2Ghz, 2 Gig RAM.
Tried it, didn't like it. Apart from security, I fail to see any real advantages, and they also decided to shuffle all the menus and options around just for fun. All I notice is that stuff is slower esp file copying (yes SP1 is patched).
Aero? pffft have you ever tried compiz-fusion or any of the derivatives on any modern linux distro?
Desktop search? addons for XP and linux available.
DX10? 5% extra eye candy for 10% less performance = bad deal in my book. Of course this situation will change. Also irrelevant for busineses
Yeah but it might overload the local router before it exceeds the switch threshold.
Though most of the time I have seen this is with old/crappier models (26xx, 17xx), I've never seen this with 28xx or 18xx series before the switch err-disables the port.
Then again like 99% of workplaces, its probably 10 year old gear that just worked - until it borked. I'm on the network team of a fortune 500 and I swear there are sites larger than 10 people still using 10Meg HUBS that they are too cheap to replace. Heck our internet facing checkpoint Fws are 5 year old Nokia IP440s. No budget.
there are plenty of examples of 10 minute failover
Older cisco ATAs take 10 minutes to swing onto SRST if keepalives are lost to the callmanager cluster.
a complex routing protocol refresh (big BGP networks) can take many minutes
a faulty NIC can easily bring down a LAN segment, with or without redundant switching paths - and it makes it look like a router failure as the router overloads trying to deal with the broadcast storm
Yeah Cisco QoS is fantastic if configured properly. Work was nice enough to send two of us on the proper QoS course (straight out of the CCVP syllabus) so we got to see first hand how effective it is.
The config is actually pretty simple IMHO, its getting the correct understanding that is the hard bit. (why do Cisco insist on their stupid bucket analogy!!)
Why don't you put your dragonfly (BSD I assume) box IN FRONT of the 2620? i.e.
WAN --> modem --> dragonfly --> 2620 --> switch
Then you can do your QoS, NAT and all your internal routing on your faithful 2620:) I hate wrestling with iptables commands but you could also do your routing / NAT on the dragonfly and only use the 2620 for Qos, its up to yu - heck you could even NAT twice if you want to be difficult LOL
NBAR on any current cisco IOS feature set will detect pretty much anything you need to prioritise without seriously impacting performance.
Juniper has something similar on their gear as well.
Easy QoS: Low latency queueing = fair queue with a priority queue as you described.
tag real time traffic as priority queue and allocate enough bandwidth depending on your capacity engineering. tag your important apps and put them in the second queue. Rest in default class.
This is really all you need, I have seen VOIP for over 500 extensions hold up as that sites link is over 90% for an hour And this is Cisco callmanager i.e. the remote phones and gateways bork and go into fallback mode if the keepalives are lost.
Just need to remember it needs to be end to end and in both directions
I love these home geek "i know how to flash DD-WDT and click on a GUI" networking experts, who fail to grasp your point above (i.e. QoS = OUTBOUND).
Since downstream QoS from telco aggregation router is not practical to implement, the best fix is to throttle the clients on the end user PCs, free and just a few clicks away.
Or if you want to be really advanced, QoS outbound from a second router (or linux gateway or firewall etc.) behind your WAN router but really that's overkill for 99% of users.
True, but then you'll have to convince companies to break said silly-but-vital piece of (usually undocumented) software to migrate.
And no, quoting FOSS benefits will not get you change approval. Not even me (runs linux on desktop + server at home, has BSD based network monitoring servers under my management at work) would let that one fly.
Re:I Want My First Personal Linux Machine
on
Ubuntu 8.04 Released
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· Score: 5, Informative
Most modern distros will overwrite the XP bootloader with GRUB the linux bootloader. However GRUB will detect windows and present it as a boot option so its pretty much seamless.
To prepare, use partition manager in windows to free up some space on one of your drives, then install linux in the free space. As above GRUB will detect windows partition seamlessly.
If you ever want to revert to windows bootloader, just boot off the XP disk, go into recovery console and type a command which I can't remember but googling will reveal it very quickly (its something like fixmbr).
NTFS is fine with a driver called ntfs-3g, may not be out of the box but it is usually easily obtainable via an update. In Ubuntu it will be a one-line command to install, same as installing anything (you will love this about linux) as long as you have an internet connection. There will be a general 'install X package' commmand, from memory in ubuntu its 'sudo apt-get XXX'.
However this will only install the driver, you will probably have to manually mount the windows partition via either the mount command or editing your fstab which is the file linux uses to determine what file systems to mount.
Personally if its ur first go I would install linux on a spare box to have a tinker first. I went down this path for a year before I was game enough to muck with my 'production' desktop.
The critical thing is to have another working computer with the internet available so you can look up instructions on the fly whilst you're in linux in case you can't get something to work in linux that also kills your web browsing. Once you have google at your disposal, your issues (barring bad-luck hardware incompatibilities) are all solvable and someone out there will have solved it already and posted a solution for you, often with cut-and-paste commands to follow.
Have fun, and don't get discouraged - remember it took you however many years to learn what you know about windows, and for the first few weeks it will feel like learning how to walk again. Remember: most of what you know about PCs is actually what you know about WINDOWS, so don't be surprised when things are done differently in linux (on the upside it generally makes perfect sense). But in the long run it will pay off. The great thing is that in linux everything is controlled via human readable text files, no registry hunting required, even if you don't know anything about X you can tell a lot from the config files and tonnes of issues can be solved by a simple and obvious parameter change.
Disclaimer: above is general linux advice from a Fedora user, I do not use ubuntu so your mileage may vary.
Well on the bright side, it lets cisco guys like me and unix admins to say in chorus 'its a fscking microsoft problem' and 90% of the time we're right even if its a complete guess.
But back on topic I agree completely. I tried to turn my windows media center into my main file / geek-toy server since I figured if I have to leave a computer on 24/7 it might as well be the one driving my tv tuner, videos, music etc. then I found out what a kludge it was to just get an openssh server up and I abandoned the project and went back to my linux for my server geeking.
Slashdot Mirror
Which is why its not a great idea putting mission critical thin clients across a WAN
Though having worked for several years in large corporate environments (and their associated love for citrix farms), I would observe
- WAN accelerators work. A riverbed (mind you at ~$50,000AUD a pop it ain't exactly cheap) will make a 2M link seem like LAN speeds for the protocols its optimised for. Depending on cost of bandwidth....
- Consolidation does not have to go overboard. If there are at least a few hundred users, it can be cost efficient to run a local server. Most network problems that are not a result of a bungled change / cabling stuffup are WAN.
- Government network? good luck with that buddy!
- The bean counters find it very easy to quantify the cost 'savings' and push their agenda as such. However for your potential losses due to downtime caused by network outages.... heck the fortune 500 I am contracted to presently doesn't even have a method for estimating the dollar cost of downtime, let alone a method for estimating the amount of downtime likely to occur (needless to say they also choose the cheapest carrier, which has a ridiculous inability to meet SLA, and then consolidate like mad to place even more reliance on the WAN).
Like most things in IT there is no silver bullet or magic formula, each case needs to be judged on their own merit.
And on a side note, given how much hardware costs have dropped and the fact that user requirements have remained relatively static (i.e. most generic office workers are still using the same software as 4 years ago), how hard can it be to embed the email client (with local cache so they can at least view emails they already downloaded) and office suite on the thin client itself so at least they can keep working on documents?
You could also observe the opposite.
In my experience (~ 2 years each at 3 different major corporations of over 5000 employees), the CS guys are the programmers in their cupboards who have absolutely no idea about HOW their code actually works within the larger infrastructure. And even less of an idea of how it actually ends up on the end users screen. Needless to say, troubleshooting an issue with these guys is like pulling teeth.
Of course help desk drones are helpdesk drones.
But don't lump them in with the 'real' techies. You know, they guys who configure the routing and switching (thats me here), the guys who configure the AD / MS infrastructure, the unix admins (and they have VERY strong opinions on the 'quality' of the outsourced DBAs...), etc....
And in this area, a variety of non-technical skills is just as critical (organisational, common sense, etc.), I've met more than one technical genuis who couldn't organise a pissup in a brewery and hence have completely foobared simple jobs (e.g. order new WAN circuit from carrier and ensure its physically hooked up to port X on equipment Y)
And in most companies (who aren't devleopment shops), guess which function is more important - in house programming or the guys who actually keep all the digital infrastructure running / build more infrastructure.
There are people who can do both but by god they are rare....
My sentiments exactly
The most broken things are
- Airstrike and Helo kills stacking. Once you get an Airstrike you're almost guaranteed a Helo. Support kills should not count same as normal kills
- Grenade perk is overpowered
But being multiplayer its pretty hard to think of leadership/intel perks as all the other players are human, and they're not going to be inclined to take orders ;)
Still a level 1 player in COD4 is on a far more level playing field than any MMORPG confrontation between people of varying levels. A headshot is a headshot and even starting out you have the tools to do that ;)
Familiar enough with concepts to grasp details, when they are put in front of him, is very different from the nuts and bolts knowledge of how to actually do the task.
e.g. my boss understands the concept of a routing protocol. He also understands that sometimes we need to modify it to achieve XYZ result. He can make a good decision of whether to go with X option or Y option if we provide him with sound technical advice / evaluation and he listens (which he does). I do not expect him to understand the IOS syntax or be able to come up with the technical options by himself. And yes he is a damned good boss. Of course this is my 'paper' boss but operationally even the tech lead reports to him, and the business interfaces with us through him. That is his job, not the actual configuration / implementation.
As many other posters have pointed out, as long as he understands your environment well enough to do his job (which is MANAGING) then thats enough. Of course any extra knowledge is beneficial as long as it doesn't tempt them to micro manage / meddle, but the basic tone of the article is over the top.
"any manager that can't add a router into an existing OSPF area is in the wrong job"
"any manager that can't configure RAID 6 is in the wrong job"
"any manager that can't configure a trust relationship between two AD domains is in the wrong job"
"any manager that can't install and configure a PABX trunk card is in the wrong job"
"any manager that can't terminate Cat5/6 is in the wrong job"
and soforth
its not their job to be able to do that, its their job to understand what that stuff is and why its done.
and if he's referring to a programming manager then maybe fair enough, but "IT manager"? a bit of a stretch methinks
I take it then you've never had a WinXP SP2, SP3 or WGA inflicted meltdown.
Or a windows driver borking everything.
Or spyware/viruses causing random issues everywhere.
All OSs are susceptible to breaking with updates. If you tinker under the hood of your linux system then of course it makes it likelier.
If you stuck completely to pre built packages and never edited any config files by hand (see windows) its rare that stuff breaks as completely as you described, and if so its a big bug thats usually quickly resolved.
new, young developers who are just _better_ than their older co-workers
Sorry no, maybe in your firm....
In this brave new world all that matters is the figures that the bean counters pull out of their behinds, whether the figures accurately reflect reality (or 'externalities' I think they're called) or not.
Granted my current customer is the king of outsourcing (50% of workforce is contracted.... they change vendors like underwear, then wonder why nobody knows what the f--k is going on). But they are in a market that lets them print money (hint: 3 words, start with O, end with L) so maybe thats a distorted perspective.
I have yet to see a single CS grad who can set up an AD forest properly, or configure a pair of routers in CLI for site to site IPSEC VPN and tie it back into the existing routing scheme.
On the other hand, I have seen MCSEs and CCNA/CCNPs do that kind of thing, qualifications that require far less time and effort.
Unfortunately, as management sees computing as a monolithic black box thingy, we end up with people hiring the former to the latter.
Spot on mate.
Got bumped from helpdesk to PABX work, then saw the tide coming, made myself go to cisco night school and now I'm one of the mysterious 'network techs' that nobody questions because they don't have any idea how subnetting works (that's simplifying it greatly but you get the point). I have seen so many CS graduates come in and burn because at the end of the day, when your router borks, you need a guy who understands how to flash an IOS and what to do when the IOS doesn't recognise a specific interface card or the like. Being able to code mediocre .net and java is irrelevant.
We had a paper CCIE come in from global head office (on megabucks I might add), and within 15 minutes the on the ground techs had him sussed out. I think it was when I asked him to help diagnose a spanning tree convergence issue, and he replied "oh I only did BGP in my last job". This is also a guy who has managed to systematically piss off every single vendor we deal with because of his complete lack of understanding of how enterprise IT works, his only knowledge is working on routing designs on VISIO diagrams. We stuck him in front of a rack once with a console cable and he came crawling to us lowly CCNAs for help.
Maybe its like that in the US, or in the bottom of the trenches (helpdesk, linesmen, desktop grunts).
In my experience in Australia, a skilled tech is always in demand and can secure a reasonable wage with a reasonable amount of difficulty. You could also see it as being co-opeted by "the man" by being thrown a few juicy bones (truth be told the cynic in me still sees it that way).
Recently I've become bored with my job and fired off a few random applications. So far I've had coffee with three recruiters who are all salivating and it has only required a minimum of effort on my part.
Granted that is my personal experience and we haven't been in a recession since the early 90s (I know, I know, I skim the financial pages as well and it ain't looking pretty). But the amount of competent skilled techs / engineers / whatever (and in that package I include things like being able to face up to customers without appearing like a total dweeb or a BOFH, being able to talk to the business on their level, being able to curb the excesses of the sales bastards, etc.) is getting lower by the day, partly due to GUIs and the like, and partly due to the fact that there are some very smart people in R&D putting out smarter and smarter systems with nice streamlined management tools. No amount of cookie cutter offshore test passers will ever in the long run make things work properly, you need the real techs, wherever they come from. For every 'real' tech there are 10 helpdesk grunts / paper certs who will fold once you stick them in front of the rack with incomplete documentation and an angry customer (i.e. your typical enterprise scenario). In other words, the reality is that demand is still > supply, the problem is convincing the bean counters to see it that way. (when was the last IT cost cutting exercise you saw that did anything except make everything go boom in the long run, leading to the start of another cycle of spending to fix the problems caused by neglect).
Also that is not a tired communist mantra, its a fact. Everyone is out there to get their percentage, its inherent to the market mechanism. Just because we haven't figured out a better way doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
Its not so much the hardware, its picking the right hardware, which unfortunately most end users will not have the knowledge/interest/time to pick correctly.
If you pick the right mid-high range card it will soldier on for over 2 years which isn't really that bad, though that's still nowhere as good value as consoles.
HAR HAR HAR
but seriously, if that is what he's angling for, why don't they just release a USB hardware key or something similar. Audio software producers have been screwing over users with that one for ages (STEINBERG ARE YOU LISTENING). Of course its not uncrackable but it can be hard enough to crack to deter 80% of 'casual' pirates.
Not advocating, just pointing it out
Hear hear.
You just saved me 15 minutes of my life,
These holier than thou anti apple zealots really need to get an education and / or some sense of perspective.
Rabid ideological views don't usually fare too well even when dealing with static things like ideas and concepts. When dealing with a moving target like the state of 'X' technology / software / hardware........
(speaking as a former rabid apple hater who saw the light after 15 minutes with a macbook, and wonders why he wasted so many years tolerating wintel desktop)
thats exactly why I haven't requested a downgrade :)
Add me to that chorus.
I have two laptops through work (contractor, on-site managed services).
My parent company laptop - which I don't actually need for my day to day (as I use the customers laptop) - is Vista Business Premium - Core2Duo 2Ghz, 2 Gig RAM.
Tried it, didn't like it. Apart from security, I fail to see any real advantages, and they also decided to shuffle all the menus and options around just for fun. All I notice is that stuff is slower esp file copying (yes SP1 is patched).
Aero? pffft have you ever tried compiz-fusion or any of the derivatives on any modern linux distro?
Desktop search? addons for XP and linux available.
DX10? 5% extra eye candy for 10% less performance = bad deal in my book. Of course this situation will change. Also irrelevant for busineses
Yeah but it might overload the local router before it exceeds the switch threshold.
Though most of the time I have seen this is with old/crappier models (26xx, 17xx), I've never seen this with 28xx or 18xx series before the switch err-disables the port.
Then again like 99% of workplaces, its probably 10 year old gear that just worked - until it borked. I'm on the network team of a fortune 500 and I swear there are sites larger than 10 people still using 10Meg HUBS that they are too cheap to replace. Heck our internet facing checkpoint Fws are 5 year old Nokia IP440s. No budget.
there are plenty of examples of 10 minute failover
Older cisco ATAs take 10 minutes to swing onto SRST if keepalives are lost to the callmanager cluster.
a complex routing protocol refresh (big BGP networks) can take many minutes
a faulty NIC can easily bring down a LAN segment, with or without redundant switching paths - and it makes it look like a router failure as the router overloads trying to deal with the broadcast storm
can I clear something up: is this only for PCs directly connected to internet i.e. their IP address is their public IP?
As any PC behind a NAT (without static mappings) cannot be directly targeted by a connection initiated from the internet.
Of course the internet facing device itself is another matter....
Or am I mistaken?
Yeah Cisco QoS is fantastic if configured properly. Work was nice enough to send two of us on the proper QoS course (straight out of the CCVP syllabus) so we got to see first hand how effective it is.
:) I hate wrestling with iptables commands but you could also do your routing / NAT on the dragonfly and only use the 2620 for Qos, its up to yu - heck you could even NAT twice if you want to be difficult LOL
The config is actually pretty simple IMHO, its getting the correct understanding that is the hard bit. (why do Cisco insist on their stupid bucket analogy!!)
Why don't you put your dragonfly (BSD I assume) box IN FRONT of the 2620? i.e.
WAN --> modem --> dragonfly --> 2620 --> switch
Then you can do your QoS, NAT and all your internal routing on your faithful 2620
You forgot protocol inspection
NBAR on any current cisco IOS feature set will detect pretty much anything you need to prioritise without seriously impacting performance.
Juniper has something similar on their gear as well.
Easy QoS: Low latency queueing = fair queue with a priority queue as you described.
tag real time traffic as priority queue and allocate enough bandwidth depending on your capacity engineering. tag your important apps and put them in the second queue. Rest in default class.
This is really all you need, I have seen VOIP for over 500 extensions hold up as that sites link is over 90% for an hour And this is Cisco callmanager i.e. the remote phones and gateways bork and go into fallback mode if the keepalives are lost.
Just need to remember it needs to be end to end and in both directions
Hear, hear
I love these home geek "i know how to flash DD-WDT and click on a GUI" networking experts, who fail to grasp your point above (i.e. QoS = OUTBOUND).
Since downstream QoS from telco aggregation router is not practical to implement, the best fix is to throttle the clients on the end user PCs, free and just a few clicks away.
Or if you want to be really advanced, QoS outbound from a second router (or linux gateway or firewall etc.) behind your WAN router but really that's overkill for 99% of users.
True, but then you'll have to convince companies to break said silly-but-vital piece of (usually undocumented) software to migrate.
And no, quoting FOSS benefits will not get you change approval. Not even me (runs linux on desktop + server at home, has BSD based network monitoring servers under my management at work) would let that one fly.
Most modern distros will overwrite the XP bootloader with GRUB the linux bootloader. However GRUB will detect windows and present it as a boot option so its pretty much seamless.
To prepare, use partition manager in windows to free up some space on one of your drives, then install linux in the free space. As above GRUB will detect windows partition seamlessly.
If you ever want to revert to windows bootloader, just boot off the XP disk, go into recovery console and type a command which I can't remember but googling will reveal it very quickly (its something like fixmbr).
NTFS is fine with a driver called ntfs-3g, may not be out of the box but it is usually easily obtainable via an update. In Ubuntu it will be a one-line command to install, same as installing anything (you will love this about linux) as long as you have an internet connection. There will be a general 'install X package' commmand, from memory in ubuntu its 'sudo apt-get XXX'.
However this will only install the driver, you will probably have to manually mount the windows partition via either the mount command or editing your fstab which is the file linux uses to determine what file systems to mount.
Personally if its ur first go I would install linux on a spare box to have a tinker first. I went down this path for a year before I was game enough to muck with my 'production' desktop.
The critical thing is to have another working computer with the internet available so you can look up instructions on the fly whilst you're in linux in case you can't get something to work in linux that also kills your web browsing. Once you have google at your disposal, your issues (barring bad-luck hardware incompatibilities) are all solvable and someone out there will have solved it already and posted a solution for you, often with cut-and-paste commands to follow.
Have fun, and don't get discouraged - remember it took you however many years to learn what you know about windows, and for the first few weeks it will feel like learning how to walk again. Remember: most of what you know about PCs is actually what you know about WINDOWS, so don't be surprised when things are done differently in linux (on the upside it generally makes perfect sense). But in the long run it will pay off. The great thing is that in linux everything is controlled via human readable text files, no registry hunting required, even if you don't know anything about X you can tell a lot from the config files and tonnes of issues can be solved by a simple and obvious parameter change.
Disclaimer: above is general linux advice from a Fedora user, I do not use ubuntu so your mileage may vary.
Agreed (we certainly don't allow that here) but since its updatable, who knows what else it can do
Well on the bright side, it lets cisco guys like me and unix admins to say in chorus 'its a fscking microsoft problem' and 90% of the time we're right even if its a complete guess.
But back on topic I agree completely. I tried to turn my windows media center into my main file / geek-toy server since I figured if I have to leave a computer on 24/7 it might as well be the one driving my tv tuner, videos, music etc. then I found out what a kludge it was to just get an openssh server up and I abandoned the project and went back to my linux for my server geeking.