This can't be good

Howling Monkey

My IS manager is a software eng, and no networking background(he was our GM golfing buddy). I've asked about about you bandwidth usage, and nobody knows. We don't have any idea how good or bad is our network, just hope its working in the morning when we come it.

We are running Groupwise 5.5, on a desktop from the late 90's. For external email we're running Outlook Express 6 from a desktop that's only 4 years old. We can't get workstations to update anti-virus from the server, that last time it did was in Feb, 10.

Since I'm working on my CCNA, I'm pretty new to all this. But I feel like we are all jacked up as a department.

That was my first rant about my company, I feel so much better.

phantasm

I've seen worse. I've had a job where our servers were NT4, the machines all ran Windows 2000 and we had no mmanaged switches anywhere in the company. Our other server ran SCO UNIX and we even had an AIX box.

tiersten

phantasm wrote: »

we even had an AIX box.

Whats wrong with AIX? :P

notgoing2fail

Make sure your network is IP and not IPX.





Quick story:

Years ago our sales guy sold a VPN/firewall solution to a nearby company without consulting any of us. (the engineers). We were left out of everything, the meetings, the plans, we were told last minute to go implement this firewall product at ABCXYZ company.

Immediately, we were like, "huh? WTF is this?"

So on the fly we drove over to this company, only to find out their network was IPX. And yes, our product ran IP only. Suffice it to say, the customer was pissed. And so was I.
We were literally kicked out of the company, that was part kinda funny, I've never been kicked out of any place before.

We came back and the sales and managers were pissed.....at us!!!! Yup, they found ways to blame us, why couldn't we figure it out? That's what we were paid for.

Eventually we explained to them IP and IPX were completely different types of networks. They thought because they saw the "IP" part in "IPX" that it was somehow backwards compatible..


Yes, this is a TRUE story....

Neiby

Howling Monkey wrote: »

My IS manager is a software eng, and no networking background(he was our GM golfing buddy). I've asked about about you bandwidth usage, and nobody knows. We don't have any idea how good or bad is our network, just hope its working in the morning when we come it.

We are running Groupwise 5.5, on a desktop from the late 90's. For external email we're running Outlook Express 6 from a desktop that's only 4 years old. We can't get workstations to update anti-virus from the server, that last time it did was in Feb, 10.

Since I'm working on my CCNA, I'm pretty new to all this. But I feel like we are all jacked up as a department.

That was my first rant about my company, I feel so much better.

Do you have access to any routers and switches? Perhaps you could post the output of some show commands and we can help you troubleshoot. Simple network diagrams would help, too.

phantasm

tiersten wrote: »

Whats wrong with AIX? :P

Fair enough... AIX is decent I will give it that. But the SCO box sucked. lol.

zerglings

phantasm wrote: »

Fair enough... AIX is decent I will give it that. But the SCO box sucked. lol.

We've used SCO for a very long time. We just recently moved from SCO Unix to Linux (not quite sure which one but I would assume Red Hat Enterprise). These boxes are for our remote sites. For the data center, I think we have so many flavors of Unix/Linux.

Kaminsky

notgoing2fail wrote: »

Make sure your network is IP and not IPX.





Quick story:

Years ago our sales guy sold a VPN/firewall solution to a nearby company without consulting any of us. (the engineers). We were left out of everything, the meetings, the plans, we were told last minute to go implement this firewall product at ABCXYZ company.

Immediately, we were like, "huh? WTF is this?"

So on the fly we drove over to this company, only to find out their network was IPX. And yes, our product ran IP only. Suffice it to say, the customer was pissed. And so was I.
We were literally kicked out of the company, that was part kinda funny, I've never been kicked out of any place before.

We came back and the sales and managers were pissed.....at us!!!! Yup, they found ways to blame us, why couldn't we figure it out? That's what we were paid for.

Eventually we explained to them IP and IPX were completely different types of networks. They thought because they saw the "IP" part in "IPX" that it was somehow backwards compatible..


Yes, this is a TRUE story....

Couldn't you get the magical tinternet fairys to sprinkle their dust on it and make it work?
I would have been going back to the sales guys with a bat !

notgoing2fail

Kaminsky wrote: »

Couldn't you get the magical tinternet fairys to sprinkle their dust on it and make it work?
I would have been going back to the sales guys with a bat !

We were a semi small company who were owned by a larger company and our sales people for whatever reason just felt they were technical "enough". They were your typical upper management that you see in TV/Movies where they thought they were hotshots. It was truly amazing.

When it was time to get business cards for example, they got their's first and made us wait months before we got ours because it was the "way it was suppose to work".

So we were used to this kind of mentality.

When 9/11 happened, the managers went home so they can watch the events unfold on TV live, we had to stay at work. There was NO WORK that day due to the events.

I was so scared that I thought we might have martial law in the area since I lived pretty nearby to NYC and thought that it would be a good idea to let us go home early in case that happens. Nope....

End rant....