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
Hi Josh
Agree 101% on your point #10. Its always a nightmare managing the thousands of IP addresses. As the number of addresses grows, this throws my IP addressing scheme haywire. To make matters worst, whenever we have a change of IP administrator, there is a sudden surge of IP address conflict. These problems are hard to find and rectify. I cannot be the only one in this part of the universe facing these problems. How are people handling these issues ? Any software ? Any solutions ?
Ooooo... now you've got me excited. Does this mean we can expect a SW IPAM app to be released in the near future?
Guru,
Well, all I can say is that the more people ask about/for this the easier it'll be for me to get it moved higher on our priority list and the sooner I can get it to you :)
Josh
Hi Fong,
Back in the day I did a lot of netwrok consulting and this was one of the items that we generated a lot of revenue from. I thiink the first step is simply admitting that this is an important item and including it within the scope of things that have to happen when there is a chance in administration, a merger, or etc. There are several great tools within the SolarWinds Toolset - Engineer's Toolset that is - that are very helpful for projects such as this.