Re: Intel Mac Mini: loses internet connection

Jay Bryon wrote:
> I feel your pain. I would like nothing more than to rip out the old and
> put in the current standard which is another world.
>
> Unfortunately you're stuck with it until your department pays for the
> upgrade, we have a seismic retrofit in the building, or divine
> intervention occurs. (Normally I'd add the occasional if rare funding
> exception, but given the state budget, see divine intervention).
>
> The point I have to repeatedly make is that whatever the network costs,
> not having it costs more. Take all the salaries being paid and burn the
> percentage wasted waiting or lost when it's broken. I guarantee that
> this is more expensive to the department than the network within months
> at most. Probably weeks. If only the ledger reflected this...
>
> I do encourage you to file trouble tickets *every single time* you have
> an unworkable network. This will be tracked, and the pain is then
> visible to those above via reports.

I think I can speak for pretty much all the departments who are still
running shared-10 networks, when I say that the department cannot pay
for the upgrade. If it could, it would have done so already. It is
definitely true that the real costs of network management,
troubleshooting, and lost productivity are larger than the costs of
replacing the network--that's why the *campus* needs to pay for
providing a basic level of network service to every campus building.
What is Pedro's department going to do--lay him off and use the salary
savings to pay for a riser project? Who'll support the computers, then?
  Academic departments in divisions like Arts+Humanities have the choice
of paying people to teach classes, or paying for network upgrades. They
can't do both.

Furthermore, if the campus plan to move to headcount-based network
billing goes through (planned for July 2009), Pedro's department *will*
be paying for the network, and paying just as much as departments in
buildings with modern switched networking. They just won't be getting
the service.

My computer is on a shared-10 network, and it sucks. In fact, right now
I have 13% packet loss to my router interface. We put in a trouble
ticket a couple of months ago, and after spending a good amount of our
time on it, got back the answer that "well, there's just too much
traffic on the network." Well, duh. I could put in a similar trouble
report probably three days a week, but I really don't see how it's worth
my time to do so.

It makes no more sense to ask departments to pay for network
infrastructure out of their meager discretionary funds than it does to
ask them to pay for water, sewage, or electrical service. Can you
imagine a department putting in a trouble report that their sewers are
backing up, and having the campus respond, "yeah, the sewer
infrastructure in that building is really lousy, you should pay for an
upgrade. Until then you can buy some air fresheners"?

The network needs to be considered part of the basic infrastructure of
campus buildings, and funded as such.

-- 
Tom Holub (tom_at_LS.Berkeley.EDU, 510-642-9069)
Director of Computing, College of Letters & Science
249 Campbell Hall
<http://LS.berkeley.edu/lscr/>
 
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