mcbeen.com

So. Where to start.

Just to show that I am an equal opportunity bitcher, I had an hp d530 ultra slim blow a motherboard last week. hp was nice enough to send me a used motherboard to replace it. Unfortuantely, they did not make sure it was usable before shipping it. The video connector was mostly broken off the board. They did not argue and sent me working used board. At least it works now. TAKE NOTES DELL!!!! [sigh]

Ok, so… the fun of my day today. Everyone is really keen on all these lovely cisco IP phone we have now. I have to say the whole thing has been quite mixed from my point of view. On a scale of 1 to 10, our success runs in the 3-4 range.
And now that I have discovered the most wonderful “feature” ever, I can tell everyone I know to run away from these pieces of shit screaming. As fast as you can. Are you ready? You sure?

Every cisco IP phone ever made is a network time bomb. Every fucking one. Want proof? Read this:

If the phone is not powered by an AC power adapter and the phone is connected to an Ethernet switch that does not provide POE support, the circuit inside the phone’s uplink port remains closed. In this state, any traffic sent by the switch to the phone may loop back to the switch and create a loop back storm that disables the entire VLAN.

This may mean nothing to most of you non network admins, but all you real admins right now are shuddering. Read that again to just make sure you fully understand the situation.

It took out one of my branches last night. A cleaning lady knocked a powersupply loose. Took everything out: Security, atm, teller machines, phones, everything. And it can happen to anyone. Any company that has IP phones, and a mix of POE and non POE ports on thier system (everyone), are in danger. Just imagine little Suzie moving some stuff around in her cube, and accidentally plugging her computer and phone into the opposite ports. POOF the main vlan for the comapny is now DEAD! By design no less. Here is another quote for you:

Devices that are capable of receiving POE, such as Cisco IP Phones, close the loop back circuit on their uplink Ethernet port when they are powered down to enable the POE discovery pulse message to be looped back to the switch.

Again, you might want to read that twice. Cisco ip phones use the biggest mistake in networking to power themselves up. It is completely unnessesary as well. 802.3af uses resistance and capacitance on the line to determine the same thing. And it is backward compatible to NOT take your network down. how quaint.

Cisco is quick to trumpet the fact that cisco hard ware is “immune” to this problem. They claim that their hardware has loopback recovery features to prevent the vlan from crashing down. Just one problem. It shuts down real live working servers. cisco has shut down their own fucking Call Manager software (phone switch) on our network three times due to “errors”. The problem has been remedied by moving the server to an HP switch that does not suck.

Full doc on this “feature” can be found here