18 May
2004
18 May
'04
10:59 a.m.
Sometimes we lose a sense of the more pragmatic
aspects of tech work. If
your business is halted because a computer system is down, would you
rather your tech take a few hours or a day or two to track down and fix a
problem, or would you rather they swap a few boards in an hour or so until
they find the problem?
Hour? Don't be so generous. At ANS you would be in serious hot water for
any maintenance involving an outage that lasted more than about a minute,
scheduled or not. At one point I was told how much AOL lost per minute per
down core router, and it was pretty impressive.
This was five years ago. I am sure it is even "worse" now.
William Donzelli
aw288(a)osfn.org