A small company I work for in the evenings decided to setup a real time data share between two of their offices. I had repeatedly informed them that sharing Quickbooks over a 1.5 meg DSL connection wasn't going to work very well, or at all. Those who have tangled with the beast from Inuit know, their software is bloated, and quirky and loves to spit in your face and the face of reason on a regular basis... and it requires at least a 10 meg connection. Now to be fair they do have an online version, but the client wasn't really interested in that for various reasons, one being the internet service in the area at the time wasn't known as being reliable.
A somewhat local networking outfit was contacted to come in and set up the connection as I had refused on the basis that spitting in the wind will come back in ways you don't want. My first indication that there would be trouble was the brand spanking new Dell computer the techs brought in to replace the old server. Being a small company without the means to afford a huge machine, this company had contracted me to build them a file server, running XP about five years before this incident. It wasn't a powerhouse exactly, but it had run flawlessly up to this point, and only gave up the ghost a few months ago when the motherboard finally bit the big one. All in all old Betsy, as I called her lasted about 7 years, at a cost of about $500. The new Dell was a lowend $700 model with about 256megs of ram, a maybe 30 gig hard drive, and a low end celeron. I giggled a bit to myself as I saw them hooking it up. Sure enough within an hour of loading up the company's Quickbooks files, I was hearing sounds of regret. The new machine couldn't even support one other computer accessing it, Quickbooks was taking upwards of ten minutes to open from the server, if it opened at all.
My second indication came quickly afterwards. The geniuses decided to set up a vpn between the hobbled server they had installed and another, identical machine at the other office. After a few hours of tinkering they came to the astonishing conclusion that the bandwidth necessary exceeded what was available. So they called the local ISP, a small independent setup and politely asked them to bump up the speed. They were politely laughed at and told to indulge in some personal activities that usually involve two or more consenting adults. I stayed in the background, again, giggling to myself.
The third indication actually slightly angered me. I had taken part in the wiring of the building, and to be fair had done a pretty decent job of running the line and terminating it. The new company took it upon themselves to rerun some of the cable claiming it was necessary, and not in any way trying to pad their bill or anything. I walked in and noticed one of the guys terminating a cat5e. The picture below should illustrate, beyond any words, my opinion on his skills:
Now I don't know what school of network wiring teaches that you need a quarter inch of breathing room between the sheath and the RJ45, or why they tell their students to use a fingernail clipper to strip the wire, but I'm guessing their credentials are suspect.
A few days of non-functionality was enough, finally for the company to decide they no longer wished to contract with these yahoos. I was called in to fix their mistakes, putting Old Betsy back into service and rerunning lines. It took about eight hours altogether to remedy a week of damage, and those were well paid hours.
Item 2: List of Offenders:
I'm throwing Quickbooks in here because I hate them with a passion (there will be a follow up on them later) Unnamed company X, I'll be nice enough not to post them on the net.
Item 3: Suggested Course of Action
If you have a good tech, and he tells you something isn't feasible, its probably not because he's lazy, and yes he probably is lazy, some of the best techs are, its because it probably can't be done reasonably financially, or with existing technology. Any good tech that sees the opportunity to set up something really cool like a VPN, or a VOIP network is going to jump on it, just because we find it FUN. We may have a hard time explaining things in a manner that you can easily understand, but, if a surgeon told you that an operation was necessary, you would listen to them, even if they don't go through all the details of what can and can't be done.
