>> I remember when we moved to the new building at work. I was just going 
>> to pay maybe £300 for some new network switches. But no, the Director 
>> of IT insisted that we had to buy Cisco switches, which are £1,500 each.
>>
> 
> As I mentioned to you at the time, the IT Director might have had very 
> good reasons for going with Cisco gear.  (One of which may or may not be 
> that they took him on a good golf outing!)
> 
> What kind of troubleshooitng facilities exist for your £300 switches? 
> What's their MTBF?  Can they survive a broadcast storm?  Can they 
> PREVENT a broadcast storm?

It's a switch? It connects two computers together. What could *possibly* 
go wrong? In about 5 years, the existing switches we had worked 
flawlessly. The only reason I was going to buy new switches was so that 
they would be gigabit. Ironically, we bought Cisco switches that provide 
PoE (which none of our equipment uses), and apparently you can have PoE 
*or* gigabit, so they bought PoE.

>> As soon as we started setting them up, I quickly realised that they 
>> aren't switches at all. They're routers. You can filter traffic, route 
>> between different network numbers and God only knows what else.
> 
> See?  That's probably because the director of IT wanted to use some of 
> these features.

Yeah. They actually split our network into several logically seperate 
networks. I have absolutely no idea why. Other than needlessly 
increasing the complexity of the network, I cannot imagine what useful 
purpose this serves. It's not like there's any special routing or 
anything; everything still routes to everything. It's just that now I've 
got 5 network numbers to worry about instead of 1. And I have to 
remember which ports are on which subnet.

(Oh, and did I mention? All the personell who had the access passwords 
and the training to know what to do with them have now left the company, 
so the switch configuration can never be altered again.)

>> (Not, of course, that *I* have access to do any of this. I'm only the 
>> person in charge of the network, right?)
> 
> Most companies will not grant more than read-only access to their onsite 
> tech, if any access at all.

The guys at HQ seem to have the general opinion that anything more 
complex than switching on a light switch is far beyond my capabilities. 
(Presumably because for everyone *else* in IT, this is actually the 
case. :-P ) When we had new servers come in, they had to send a guy from 
America over here to set it up for me. Because, you know, I'm completely 
incapable of installing Windows by myself, right? I mean, it's not like 
I've already set up 3 different servers all by myself to far. Oh, wait...

> I'm not suggesting you're a cowboy who does any of this, but if you're 
> interested in helping out your network folks (who are in the US, IIRC) 
> Cisco offers courses.  I'd suggest bringing that up with your manager 
> and explain that this way, you'd be able to provide faster help when a 
> problem arises and the boys from the Mothership are still asleep.

Hmm. Getting them to pay for some Cisco training might not be a bad idea 
actually. When I do finally manage to leave, that may come in handy...

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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