Sunday, July 13, 2008
Implications
Friday was a bad hair day. Let us not talk about Friday.
…
Actually, lets talk about Friday.
Okay, I'm not going into details about what happened Friday (it was my fault for not fully testing the configuration, but really, what did Cisco do to break DHCP in IOS 12.3?) but I do want to talk about the insane incipid stupid? ill-thought out … I'm not sure how to diplomatically state what I think this is.
I think this stems from an incident last week when F (a company that's also a customer of ours) experienced an outtage. I suspect that everyone suspected their consumer grade router that was suspected of going out (resetting it seemed to have fixed the issue, which points to the base problem, but it's not what you think it is) and Smirk thought that a Cisco router (that would connect us to them via Ethernet) that could switch over to a DSL connection as a backup was a good solution (I'm guessing here; I don't know the actual details that lead to this solution).
And that right there is the problem I have with this scenario.
Let's see … our Ethernet connection to F goes down (I can't see how it can, seeing how Cisco routers rarely fail, and we have a cable that runs down the hall from our Data Center to their office). Their Cisco router sees this, and thus the default network route through us (populated via OSPF) is removed, and the backup default route through the DSL (static route with a higher metric than the OSPF default route) kicks in. But since the DSL is being provided via another party, F's public IP address suddenly changes. Any ongoing TCP connections they might have had are now gone.
I'm not even going to mention the email issues that come up.
The change-over is noticable, and annoying enough to possibly prompt a call to us asking us what the aitch-ee-double-hocky sticks is going on (or even worse, what the fudge is going on).
And that's the best case scenario!
Most likely is a routing issue with our upstreams that cause the outtage (and affecting not only F, but us and all our customers). F's connection to us is still fine and thus, the Cisco router sitting in their office has no reason to switch over to the DSL connection. It would have to be done manually and well … that's a call to us.
Then there's the fact that they have 8 static IPs through their DSL provider because, hey, why not? They only have one static IP through us. I don't see this as being a Good Thing™.
But I still don't like country music
When culture was a product consumed by the upper classes, it wasn't viewed by them as being subversive or tasteless since it was created for them. However, when you start getting a growing middle class who were not aristocrats but who did begin to have the kind of money and leisure to consume culture, there is the beginning of strain. Cultural products could be produced to appeal to the middle class sensibility, and to the upper classes this was low brow, unsophisticated, something to be scorned, and also perhaps something to be feared, because it could be politically subversive. So the upper classes generally used their disproportionate influence with the government to impose varying degrees of censorship to suppress that which was considered vulgar or dangerous (to their dominance).
…
None of [the US media, reflecting US culture] was being produced with the intent of delivering some sort of ideological message, but it turns out there is one, and it runs deep, and it's one of the big reasons it's popular in the world and why it is scorned by the elite everywhere.
…
The message we're delivering is that the individual is not the group to which he belongs, and doesn't have to be bound by that group. We're delivering a message of personal freedom, and it reverberates at least somewhat with all who hear it who are under the control of their betters. (And some of us here who embrace “identity politics” deeply disagree with that message …)
And we in the US prove that when the lower classes cast off the upper class, and rule ourselves, that we can actually be better. The US is the triumph of the gutter, the land of the vulgar and unsophisticated, the huddled masses who became free, who are led but not ruled by their government; and in nearly every way we're leaving all of the nations ruled by the upper classes in the dust.
We're not just complacent about being from the gutter; we're proud of it. A lot of our culture still glories in coming from the ghetto. Some of the attraction of Rap is that it comes out of the black ghetto, and even when it's put on there's almost a requirement that it keep referring to that experience. We gleefully absorb culture from all over the world, and equally gleefully share ours with the world.
For years I've been trying to track down an article I read (on the web) about culture, and how what has traditionally been called “culture” is really the “pop art” of the aristrocracy, and why most governments around the world dispise our “culture,” yet most people around the world love our “culture.”
Here is that article, found deep in my bookmarks file (containing almost 2,600 bookmarks—I should go through my bookmarks file more often).
