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Heya,
I am hesitant to post this, not because it will seem like i'm soliciting tech support, but rather because it will reveal the degree to which i'm out of touch on one aspect of the tech field. While I rode the dotcom boom and worked for lots of tall-building, suit-and-tie gigs back around the turn of the century... lately a lot of folk here know that I have taken some time to just relax with small-business and educational contracts. Way less pressure, and wickedly flexible schedules... which allows me to be at so many cons that i'm routinely greeted with "Jeebus... what the fuck are you doing here?? Weren't you just <somewhere halfway across the country/world> last week?" (Another key benefit pertains to attire... aside from renderman's wedding, i can't remember the last time i wore a tie or footwear other than my boots or sandals in the past year or so)
However... one negative thing that working in small environments like that has done to me is made me woefully out of touch with a lot of enterprise hardware. At present, none of my major clients are using managed switches. One school, however, really should be.
Today was the second time in as many months that their whole network was blown offline by some doofus kid pluging both ends of a CAT5 cable into a small network switch in some classroom... which results in a cascade effect and a panicked phone call to me, then I drag my ass all the way out there just to see one port in the switch rack going fucking bananas, etc etc etc.
I've worked with a number of really nice enterprise and large-facility devices... but never selected one outright. Some of them that i've used have really sweet management features that go beyond simple traffic shaping and mirroring mode for an IDS on one port.
Perhaps the coolest thing I have seen thus far was a series of switches that were managed through a web interface... there were actual graphics showing every port on the switch bank, color coded to reflect certain states like "not enabled" or "enabled and in use" or "enabled but no device connected" etc etc. I'd love something like that but I don't even know who made that gear (I was on a campus somewhere just hanging out with a friend, as opposed to on a job.)
Does anyone have any thoughts here? What are your favorite devices with which to backbone a facility's network and why? I really just want to prevent one port from idiotically flooding the hell out of the system (and I would like to have the opportunity to mirror all traffic to a snort box or something perhaps) but most of all i don't wanna break the bank.
I am hesitant to post this, not because it will seem like i'm soliciting tech support, but rather because it will reveal the degree to which i'm out of touch on one aspect of the tech field. While I rode the dotcom boom and worked for lots of tall-building, suit-and-tie gigs back around the turn of the century... lately a lot of folk here know that I have taken some time to just relax with small-business and educational contracts. Way less pressure, and wickedly flexible schedules... which allows me to be at so many cons that i'm routinely greeted with "Jeebus... what the fuck are you doing here?? Weren't you just <somewhere halfway across the country/world> last week?" (Another key benefit pertains to attire... aside from renderman's wedding, i can't remember the last time i wore a tie or footwear other than my boots or sandals in the past year or so)
However... one negative thing that working in small environments like that has done to me is made me woefully out of touch with a lot of enterprise hardware. At present, none of my major clients are using managed switches. One school, however, really should be.
Today was the second time in as many months that their whole network was blown offline by some doofus kid pluging both ends of a CAT5 cable into a small network switch in some classroom... which results in a cascade effect and a panicked phone call to me, then I drag my ass all the way out there just to see one port in the switch rack going fucking bananas, etc etc etc.
I've worked with a number of really nice enterprise and large-facility devices... but never selected one outright. Some of them that i've used have really sweet management features that go beyond simple traffic shaping and mirroring mode for an IDS on one port.
Perhaps the coolest thing I have seen thus far was a series of switches that were managed through a web interface... there were actual graphics showing every port on the switch bank, color coded to reflect certain states like "not enabled" or "enabled and in use" or "enabled but no device connected" etc etc. I'd love something like that but I don't even know who made that gear (I was on a campus somewhere just hanging out with a friend, as opposed to on a job.)
Does anyone have any thoughts here? What are your favorite devices with which to backbone a facility's network and why? I really just want to prevent one port from idiotically flooding the hell out of the system (and I would like to have the opportunity to mirror all traffic to a snort box or something perhaps) but most of all i don't wanna break the bank.
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