Oh my god, I can't believe how piss-poor the network design is in some companies. Like, say, the one I work at.
NetworkAdmin comes wandering around the IT department asking "is anyone downloading anything?"
"Yes," I said, "I'm doing an up2date on my workstation."
"You need to kill it, it's crushing our pipe."
(it's worth noting here that due to poor planning and/or design, all contact with our CSRs' data-entry system happens over the public internet, so crushing our internet pipe means order-entry is impacted. Yes, it's a crappy design. Yes, I've asked NetworkAdmin to spec out a direct link between our LAN and the colo where the order-entry system is located... yet to actually see it despite about three requests)
"You gotta be fucking kidding me, you're telling me that my little workstation, doing as simple as an update of its packages, can take down our entire network?"
"Yes. If the sending site has ample bandwidth, our ISP will happily fill the T1 with your traffic to the exclusion of all others."
Christ. Not at all like most sane traffic-shaping where -- while my downloading might consume a crapload of bandwidth, it will NOT do so to the exclusion of other traffic.
Then, of course, NetworkAdmin starts off on one of those "I'll mutter but loud enough that the person can hear" rants on how he has to keep reminding "those Linux people" how the network works. At which point I reminded him that I just assumed that our network was managed competently, had things like rate-limiting, traffic-shaping, QOS, etc. He, naturally, makes the "you know about 'assume'" comment. So I told him, "I'll never assume we're run competently again, believe me. I'll work from a presumption of having our entire operation on a 9600 baud modem, and just never get any work done."
Of course, if my box was to get somehow compromised because I don't keep up on updates, you know that NetworkAdmin will be quick to say "oh, no, not HIS fault..." blah blah blah. It'd be my responsibility to keep up on updates, even though doing so gets me yelled at because we can't manage a network to save our lives.
Is this a problem unique to the Pit of Despair, or do other people have problems like this with their networks, too?
Unique? Not really. My workplace used to be like this, but we got bit by a few things that put a fire under people to fix things right. A hacked box back in the 'every machine is public' days took out our I1 link cause it was trying to DOS some other site. Then after our Ethernet upgrade a student got the slammer virus and took out parts of the network with all the traffic it was generating. It's incidents like those that make people step up and say "huh. I guess we should do something about that"
So all you have to do is make sure some box gets infected or the like that takes down the Internet link. Especially if the network admin has to go around and ask who's doing it. It'll take him hours to figure it out and once the big wigs find out that he could of prevented them losing productivity time and/or money by spending a bit of time implementing some sane restrictions on the Internet link, he'll get that ass fire that he needs to do something.
I have that problem with my home network. I need to get me some shaped traffic...
Oh, yeah, we never have notwork problems. Right.
The tenacity of some people these days. I would have eaten him alive right there and then.
The college that I attend is that like, the real problem is that they have a traffic shaper that they turn off most of the time because it generates too many complaints from the dorms.
Here's an easy fix...put the IT department on a seperate VLAN and have everybody pitch in $20/month for a cable link. IT department gets 3-4Mb and you've got a catastriphic backup when the T1 gets hosed.