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Why a one-room West Virginia library runs a $20,000 Cisco router

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Re: Why a one-room West Virginia library runs a $20,000 Cisco router

#41

Post by vidarh »

bd_at_rivenhill wrote: post #21
juiceandjuice wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like your company ripped off the public schools, and that's why you are anti-government?

The fact that the government is not competent to spend taxpayers' money wisely seems like a good reason to be anti-government. After hearing enough anecdotal evidence on this topic (which very few people have both the capability and desire to thoroughly investigate in order to properly quantify it, thus the reliance on anecdotal evidence), it starts to appear as if such incompetence is an integral feature of all gove…

I think it's an integral feature of all organizations that reach a certain size without sufficient level of audits at lower levels. And given enough large organizations, there will be problems.

Given the number of large government entities, there's a lot of room for bad oversight.

But on top of that there is also often a lot more openness when the auditors does their jobs in government departments and these things are discovered, and even if not, the press often has a lot more access (e.g. freedom of information requirements).

In a lot of companies, a lot of borderline behaviour will instead just lead to people getting fired, especially when there is no evidence.

A new CTO at a company a friend does work for "decided to part ways" with his company a while back, for example, after migrating a substantial part of their service to a new, totally over-engineered and untested platform that failed spectacularly after they'd very publicly spent a massive amount of money on it. Incompetence or corruption? Probably impossible to prove.

And to the public there was no real sign anything was wrong: The launch was highly publicized by the company, and they never told anyone about the negative effects later. Only people with insight into internal sales numbers until they made emergency changes to revert some of his more harmful decisions would know.

And for him it likely doesn't even matter that he was effectively fired: He's either a useful fool, or a useful accomplice, for someone who will happily make use of their network to help him land somewhere else. And many potential hirers will only remember the positive press attention prior to the launch and will have no way of knowing about the problems.

There are a lot of stories like that in private business too.

Re: Why a one-room West Virginia library runs a $20,000 Cisco router

#42

Post by hmottestad »

bluedino wrote: post #14

Remember the wasteful spending back in the UNIX workstation days - a Sun 10 in every administrator's office for e-mail, and nobody ever had the training to use the things?

My high-school admin bought a Mac Pro with dual CPU. It was powerful enough to run all the school servers at once, yet he only used it to remote desktop into the real servers.

Re: Why a one-room West Virginia library runs a $20,000 Cisco router

#43

Post by pmorici »

noonespecial wrote: post #12

It seems absurd but I'm going to have to side with the state/library on this one. It can literally cost more to make a choice to use the cheaper unit than to just buy the big one. "Some libraries need smaller routers. Ok. Which ones?" could easily run in the millions before any routers were purchased. Unfortunately, that's just the nature of government purchasing.

That's nonsense the article shows pretty convincing evidence that even the largest IT department in the state, the state legislature, didn't need equipment this powerful. Even if they did want to standardize on one device across the state to gain administrative efficiency they should have picked something cheaper.

Re: Why a one-room West Virginia library runs a $20,000 Cisco router

#44

Post by jessaustin »

noonespecial wrote: post #34
jessaustin wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is bullshit. They could have put the network engineer from the Department (the guy who confirmed he had not requested dual power supplies) on this for a week, and he would have had a solid estimate for far less. Put him on it a month and he could have had an itemized order with the exact models to order from Cisco or from any of its competitors. If he were busy with other duties, any other network engineer in th…

Oh how I wish it worked like that. And who knows, perhaps out in WV it can. But I was once an appointed advisor (one of three) to a committee that was in charge of reviewing the qualifications of a similar outside consultant and making a short term contract recommendation to the department that would approve the hiring. I'm here to tell you...

Don't leave us hanging! b^)

I suppose when I say, "they could have" I mean that some appropriately-empowered decision maker who had an interest in making the right decision could have either assigned his own network engineers to do the work, or could have assigned such an engineer to hire someone else to do the work. I probably shouldn't assume that such a decision maker does exist.

Re: Why a one-room West Virginia library runs a $20,000 Cisco router

#45

Post by mrb »

Cisco: "the criticism of the State is misplaced and fails to recognize the forward-looking nature of their vision"

My sarcastic retort would be: "no, you fail to recognize the forward-looking nature of their vision because you did not recommend this other even more expensive and more powerful router!"

Re: Why a one-room West Virginia library runs a $20,000 Cisco router

#46

Post by vidarh »

_delirium wrote: post #35
vidarh wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You get similar stuff at private companies too, though few private companies are large enough for corruption like that to be able to reach the same scale without getting too big to go unnoticed by auditors for long enough. The number of times I've had potential supplier hint at extra perks or "return favours" is fairly high, and I've not even been in positions of very substantial purchasing power. It's often not even…

This was my 2nd-hand impression growing up with a father who worked for a large oil company. The extent to which nobody was really at the wheel in these kinds of negotiations was fascinating. As far as I could tell, many things sort of worked, when they did, because engineers had a cultural desire to "get it right", mostly for their own satisfaction. But the company itself didn't seem to either have an effective way…

A lot of the time people also think they can get away with a lot less than they can, because they assume that "someone" must be looking after these things. It's when you get insight into how things are run and see the boss rubber stamping expenses it starts to get scary. And someone decides to take advantage.

I went with a friend a few years back, to get a helicopter ride with someone he did consulting with in the forestry industry. He told me about how the people he worked for expensed a helicopter to go for coffee sometimes... Just for the heck of it. Nobody asked.

The assumption was that if they chartered a helicopter, it was for surveying, so any helicopter expenses were pretty much by default evidence they were doing their job, rather than slacking off and costing the company a fortune.

Re: Why a one-room West Virginia library runs a $20,000 Cisco router

#47

Post by fnordfnordfnord »

homosaur wrote: post #38

Corruption is awesome when you're on the nipple end of the government tit. Nice work if you can get it, Cisco.

Cisco may not have anything to do with it. It may be down to a salesman in the middle who is on commission. I once saw CCTV cameras deployed with Jena lenses, I guess for similar reasons. The auditors (if there were any) weren't knowledgeable enough to know better.

edit: After further reading, Cisco did in fact shamelessly participate in this gigantic boondoggle.

Re: Why a one-room West Virginia library runs a $20,000 Cisco router

#48

Post by amalag »

WestCoastJustin wrote: post #24

Probably going against the grain here, but what about the operations staff who are charged with supporting these 1,164 routers? What about warranties and parts replacements? There is a price for standardizing on a piece of hardware at such a large scale. When you standardize, sure there is going to be hardware overkill in some places, but in the big picture this is just a price of doing business at this scale. What i…

Nothing wrong with standardizing, so standardize on a $100-$500 router instead of a $20,000 router. The point is that some guy made a killing selling gear only a place with 10,000 users needs.

Re: Why a one-room West Virginia library runs a $20,000 Cisco router

#49

Post by _delirium »

vidarh wrote: post #46
_delirium wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was my 2nd-hand impression growing up with a father who worked for a large oil company. The extent to which nobody was really at the wheel in these kinds of negotiations was fascinating. As far as I could tell, many things sort of worked, when they did, because engineers had a cultural desire to "get it right", mostly for their own satisfaction. But the company itself didn't seem to either have an effective way…

A lot of the time people also think they can get away with a lot less than they can, because they assume that "someone" must be looking after these things. It's when you get insight into how things are run and see the boss rubber stamping expenses it starts to get scary. And someone decides to take advantage. I went with a friend a few years back, to get a helicopter ride with someone he did consulting with in the fo…

One of my favorite anecdotes along the rubber-stamping lines is that due to a miscoding in the software that auto-pre-filled expense reports (it pre-populated fields from company credit-card statements), my dad once accidentally filed an expense report with a 2-week hotel stay put down under meals, as a single $2500 dinner on the check-in date. He didn't notice the mistake until after submitting, and assumed someone would flag it, but he got the reimbursement and nobody ever asked. It's possible it did get flagged, and someone manually reviewed and realized that it was really a hotel stay, but it seems at least as likely that it just got rubber stamped, and he could've gotten away with $2500 dinners (at least occasionally) if he had been the type of person to do so.

Re: Why a one-room West Virginia library runs a $20,000 Cisco router

#50

Post by swixmix »

sputknick wrote: post #17
juiceandjuice wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like your company ripped off the public schools, and that's why you are anti-government?

They were 50% lower than the next lowest bidder. Sounds like his company provided the taxpayers with a bargain.

Do you work for the government?
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