I tell ya, it's really getting to me.
Ok, for starters I work at a small conservative educational facility. There's typically around 20 students and 20 staff. Most of our funds are donations, and as such there's never any to spare. Well, we have a half-decent computer network. Most of the computers are P233s or slower, plus we got a couple celeron 400s. In short, this place ain't rich. Most of the computers have win98 on 'em (real secure, right?), 2 have ME, and one has 2K. Well for some dumb reason my <choke> boss got the idea that he wants managed switches. His main reason? He wants the equipment to be around a
long time. We have NO use for managed switches at the moment. The only "use" he could come up with was "security against some guy walking in off the street and plugging his comp into our network." Well we've already
got a firewall that'll prevent that, since it's setup to assign static IP's to computers on the network, and all the IP's are set to static. And then there's our comps in the library with win98 (ordinary setup, nothing special) that are readily available to anyone who wants to use them. And he's worried about someone walking in off the
street and plugging in his own comp? Let me explain something. This
aint exactly downtown NYC. This place is a little bitty town called Guys mills, and our little place here probably makes up about a fourth of the population. Most of the people in town here don't even know what a computer
is, let alone
own one. So far he's thrown away $3000 into these managed switches. The only use we get out of them now (and will get out of them probably for the duration of their use here, when you realize how fast stuff gets outdated) is the large capacity. (two of 'em are 24 port and the third is 48 port) The only problem is, you can get
unmanaged switches with that kind of capacity for less than a quarter the cost of the managed switches. And then when there's something we
really have a use for, such as newer computers or a CD burner "we don't have the money." And I'm like gee... I wonder why. Problem is, there's only two guys on the admin team who know anything about computers and networking. He's one of them, and the other one doesn't have time to do anything about it. Basically he has free reign to do whatever he wants.
Sorry, didn't mean to be disrespectful, but this BS is really pissing me off.
Linear Mode
