What was the worst network like that you inherited when starting a new gig?

CodeBlox

Curious about what some of you veterans will respond with. For instance, have you ever started a job working on a network where the former engineer used static routing exclusively for no reason?

alan2308

I work for an MSP, and we've stepped into some interesting situations to say the least. Some due to the lack of real IT, some due to incompetent IT providers, some due to malicious IT providers.

One network had 4 different linksys routers in parallel. PC's used one as their gateway, phones used another, the SBS2003 box used a third, and I don't remember what the 4th was doing. The guy we took over for couldn't get everything going out on different public IP's any other way. And I still hear about how smart he was with his PhD is computer science.

Another one had a part time IT guy who stopped in once or twice a week. He had this elaborate system of virtual machines on a couple of ESXi servers. Failover meant that he would come running in and start up the backup VM, and this would happen every couple weeks because both physical servers had overheating problems and needed to be hard reset. All in all, there were 14 servers for a site with 6 users.

The third one I'll mention isn't really a client, they just call us out when the cheaper company fails because we're always just trying to sell them stuff in their opinion. They lose a switch every year or two, but won't listen when we tell them they need a UPS or at least a good surge protector. The old switches that don't work are still in the rack, powered on. New switches are piled on top of the rack because it's full. There are routers stacked on a table running with a single Ethernet cable coming out and just hanging down. I usually get involved when they guy that brings out a new switch can't figure out how to copy the config out of the old one and can't figure out "how to turn on PoE on this thing." They'll pay for a couple hours of service just to get their phones working again, and "please don't try to sell us anything this time."