Head Geek's Top 10 Most Annoying
Topics in Networking
10. Overlapping IP address ranges. Let's face it folks, if you've inherited
a bunch of overlapping or duplicate address ranges you're going to be better
off just to figure out a solid addressing strategy and readdress the problem
areas. Otherwise, you'll be stuck trying to work around this issue forever...
9. "Classful" IP Address speak. When people are
speaking about any /24 as a "Class C" or any /16 as a " Class
B" it just gets in my craw...
8. Access Lists. There has got to be a better way to implement
the features that ACLs provide. Sure they're easy enough for those of us that
have been using them for years but for newbies they're a nightmare even when
trying to accomplish a relatively simple task.
7. The old "SNMP isn't Secure" compliant. So what
exactly is the argument here? Yeah, I use SNMPv2C to poll the devices on my
network and the data is transmitted in clear text. Let me tell you, if there is
someone running around my network looking at packets with a sniffer there is
way more dangerous stuff for them to see than the most recent ifInOctets
counter values from one of my WAN routers. And as for SNMPv3, it's great but
hardly anyone uses it... Bottom line - there are plenty of ways to secure your
SNMP traffic - not managing the network really isn't an option though is
it?
6. Over protective DBAs. Dude - we just want to put a database on your
gargantuan SQL server and store some statistics there. You'd think I was asking
to date your daughter or something...
5. Dress codes. Yeah, this topic isn't technical but all of us
networking geeks have to wear clothes to work and we oughta be able to wear
whatever the heck we want to wear.
4. Annual budgets without any allocations for lab gear. Hey, if you
want me to do my testing on the production network then it's OK by me.
3. Devices that don’t even support the most basic, standard MIBs.
Those RFCs are there for a reason people. Implement the standards based stuff
then put all of your special, fancy data in your own private MIBs. Don’t skip
the prerequisites…
2. SOX. I've seen this used for justification for everything from
Exchange mailbox size limits to how often we change the coffee filters. One of
these days we’re going to find out that it’s a bigger conspiracy than the
murder of JFK and that the whole dang thing was made up by one of the big 5
consulting firms that are pulling in all of the cash telling us about
everything we can and can’t do…
1. Copycat network management products. If you can come up with
something original then I'm all for it. But if you’re just putting new skins
and UIs on existing functionality then what's the point... We don't use these
tools because they're pretty, I mean, dude, we spend half our day in a freaking
CLI for crying out loud...
Flame on...
Josh