56k Warning

[mix-hyenataur.livejournal.com]

There are lj comm moderators that are in a mindset where "But there's STILL 56k users out there!!! PITY THEM!!!"

I got banned from art comm on lj for basically saying fuck it to a mod's post when she prompted everyone to only post 1 pic, 100x100 of their artwork, under a cut.... and so on... because 56k users still exist.

I'm not talking about people that live in the country and their ISPs are too lazy to upgrade. They know they're fucked, but they deal with it. Seriously, DSL is just as cheap, if not cheaper in some instances. Fuck it. Yeah, I know some people who use dailup, but for really stupid reasons:

"Hackers can't hack over analogue signals." - A hospital's data-center's lead technician who incorporated 56k throughout the building for means of a 'sercured' network.

"Faster internet means I get viruses faster." - A client who never installed SP1, and had no drivers. I spent 5 hours on site.

"But I like AOL." - no comment.

(no subject)

[jarad.livejournal.com]

Two posts inside a week... this is a first for me. I don't normally encounter these levels of stupidity.

Call from a customer saying that half his phone lines and internet in some places on his campus site have gone down. We dispatch someone the next morning. They return flabbergasted.

An entire rack is gone.

A 42u rack, two 24 port POE switches, E1 extenders plus 2 fibre trays; all gone.

The fibres had been yanked hard out of the fibre trays by brute force and all utterly destroyed.

Did I mention they have no idea who did it or when because this particular building is mainly used by outside contractors, but noone ever thought to stop them from destroying an armoured cable marked 'DANGER - LASER - DO NOT TOUCH' and wheeling out an entire rack of kit that didn't belong to them.

Estimated cost to get them up and running again and in under 24 hours is running upwards of £10k (new rack, 2 new switches, 2 new fibre trays, splicing and engineering time).

Noone in the office can still quite wrap their heads around this.