Re: LISA 2005 attendees?

On Fri, 2005-11-18 at 14:25 -0800, Phil Dibowitz wrote:
> Age has nothing to do with it. If you don't understand how and when
> technology can fail, you're a poor and/or inexperienced admin. Short
> and
> simple. I've seen plenty of 50 year olds make that mistake.

I've been in this business for years and I hear excuses like "The Server
will never fail" or "Out network never goes down".  Seriously do a
survey and figure out how many IT departments actually have what we call
"naked" consoles.  Most of them do.  If it has a console it needs to be
covered.  

A year ago I installed a large company in Texas.  I installed them after
their largest Cisco Switch had issues and nothing was attached to the
console port.  This happens all them time.  

The problem is that console management is a real project with real costs
and many companies can not see the need to spend that money especially
if they feel they'll never use it.  I look at it like insurance.  You
may not use it but if you need it then you'll have it.  And there have
been times that I've needed to file a claim on our network.  Like after
configuration ID-10-T errors.

For example.  Here is an email I received from a prospect we have been
helping.

-------------------------------------------------------------------
The final migration of the <REMOVED> project was successfully completed
last Saturday, and our customers have enjoyed one week of incident-free
operations in the new data center.
 
In view of the need for funds to be diverted to other project issues and
the perceived low risk of any OOB management being required in the short
term, the entire OOB management solution has been abandoned, and will be
re-visited mid to late next year.
 
I would like to take this opportunity to join my thanks with those of
<REMOVED> for the time and effort which you have put into your proposal.
While technically sound, it is regrettable that it has been unable to
proceed at this juncture.
-----------------------------------------------------------------


Translated:
Now the funds needed to implement such a huge project is more than the
perceived risk of needing OOB during failure.  (Out of Band) console
management.

Some people like me implement because we don't want failure and we need
access to the devices at the console level from anywhere.  Others wait
till they get screwed a few times.