Tagged: IT RSS

  • sbostedor 12:15 pm on June 29, 2009 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: Charter, Internet, IT, Router, Sonicwall, , TZ170   

    Charter Business Internet has been making my day HELL! 

    Here’s the chain of events:

    Here’s what happened …

    1. Lightning struck near our building, sending a surge into the building by way of the COAX broadband Internet cable
    2. The strike blew the cable modem
    3. Charter was called and they brought us a new cable modem.  The tech seemed to be unsure of how to provision it but seemed confident that he had it correct when he left. The initial tests of Internet connectivity seemed to confirm this.
    4. After the cable connection was revived, I quickly discovered that the current from the lightning strike followed the Ethernet cable out of the back of the cable modem and into the firebox firewall that provided Internet access to a critical web server and a number of other shop floor devices.  The device would appear powered on but would not route traffic.
    5. This was the backup device that was put into place because it’s predecessor had died a couple of weeks earlier.  This left us with no device to fail over to.  we were forced to put the web server back onto the TZ170 router that it was removed from in the past due to performance reasons.
    6. I configured the Sonicwall TZ170 for the NAT and performed a connectivity test.  The speed tests on the TZ170 were equal to the old firebox.  Everything looked great  … at first …
    7. Over the weekend, the TZ170 stopped routing published traffic to and from the servers.  A reboot of the router seemed to have cleared it up for a while
    8. Reports were pouring in that customers could not access the web and our remote staff could not access the remote terminal server reliably.
    9. This morning, I started to investigate these reports and believed that I had found the root cause. I thought that it was because the cable guy just forgot to provision the correct static IP addresses for our router.
    10. I called Charter again and they assured me that the correct addresses were provisioned correctly.  We rebooted the cable modem and the TZ170 and everything seemed to work for the duration of the support call.  We hung up.
    11. 15 minutes later, the servers were inaccessible from the outside again.
    12. I connected my MacBook Pro directly into the cable modem and assigned it an available static IP address from our public pool.  I got nothing.
    13. I removed the static IP from the macbook and set it to obtain via DHCP and … It was gived an address by the modem!  This was bad!  Really bad!  But really good at the same time because now I knew exactly what the problem was without a doubt!

    The cable modem should NEVER be giving out automatic dynamic IP addresses because everything is statically assigned to published servers.  We only have a small range of addresses assigned to us and all but two are taken by servers and services.  The address that the modem gave to my MacBook Pro was actually the address that the TZ170 was statically assigned.

    So, this whole thing was cased by an IP address conflict caused by a misconfiguration that left the DHCP server running on the modem.  The Charter guy should have known better.

    I called Charter back and let them know what I found.  They logged into the router, disabled DHCP, and everything has been working since.

    To add to this story, we performed a Pretty massive server room consolidation project over the weekend that went off without a hitch.  Instead of getting praise for the awesome job that we did, this Charter screwup made it look to the company like our move caused the Internet servers to go off line for 2 days off and on.

    They will never understand the root cause … and this is the thankless life of an IT Admin.

     

  • sbostedor 7:15 am on February 26, 2009 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: CIS, Computer, IT,   

    The IT Accounting Debate 

    An unnamed company has a defunct training room with 5 new computers sitting in it with only 3 of them ever being used. In fact, two of the computers have not been plugged into the power sockets in the 4 months since they were purchased.

    There are no future plans to ever utilize those two computers. The company has dismantled its training department and has no plans to reinstate it.

    A new need has developed for a PC on the manufacturing line that would give valuable feedback to the workers on that line. The manager for that department suggested that, instead of purchasing a new computer, we redeploy one of those wasted training room computers to the new line.

    Person A in the IT department argued that this would violate some accounting practice that he was not sure of. He said that, if this department wants a computer, they need to account for it’s dollars at a department level as if it were a new computer and not skate on the fact that it has already been purchased by the company,

    He believes that moving the computer from one department to another is an Accounting issue that needs to be realized as a cost to that department.

    Person B takes the view that the company realizes resources as a whole and not as bickering departments. He believes that a move of an unused resource between departments has nothing to do with Accounting.

    B argues that the new computer has been sitting on the floor of the training room for months unused is actually wasting the company’s money that can be only put to value by transferring it to an area of the company where it can be used to produce goods.

    Person A and Person B seem to have different paradigms of how the accounting of computer equipment should be done. Person A partakes in the old school paradigm that pits departments against neighboring departments for control and usage of resources while Person B sees the company as a whole where every resource is accounted for on a company level.

    Person A insists that there is some Accounting law that needs to be adhered to when moving a computer from one area of the company to another that requires that department realize the cost of the equipment as if it were a new purchase. When asked for an example, Person A simply shrugged and said that he didn’t want to argue about that and changed the subject.

    Who is right? Person A or Person B? Who would you want in your IT Department?

     

    • Shannon Geer 9:54 am on February 26, 2009 Permalink

      I would want person B. If they want to keep the accounting straight transfer monies from one department to the other and utilize the computer.

    • Jonathan 3:54 pm on March 21, 2009 Permalink

      Person B of course. I work in an IT dept at the UM. There isn’t enough paper in the world to print the number of impractical rules/laws/regulations. Since no one is affected negatively with the computer being reallocated and since there is no authority on the situation I say move the computer yourself. Its easier to ask forgiveness than get permission.

  • sbostedor 6:46 pm on May 5, 2008 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: IT, Services   

    Service Like Air 

    We had a discussion in this morning’s  IT meeting about the perception of IT in our company.  The general population typically has a negative image of IT or feels that we are just sitting by the phone waiting for them to call so that we can drop everything and unjam their printers or rearrange their cubical wiring.

    I proposed the analogy that IT services can be viewed as air that the company breathes.  It’s necessary for the life of the businesses but is only noticed if it smells badly or if it ceases to exist.  Nobody notices IT when all of the services are running and hardware is operating as expected.  We’re only measured by the failures and disruptions caused by services that we are hired to manage.  People rarely chalk one up for air because of the simple fact that they can breathe today.

    It is the goal of our IT department to become invisible like air by providing seamless and redundant service to all consumers of our managed services.  When this is achieved, the company that we are hired to support will thrive like never before.

     

c
compose new post
j
next post/next comment
k
previous post/previous comment
r
reply
e
edit
o
show/hide comments
t
go to top
l
go to login
h
show/hide help
esc
cancel