MavEtJu's Distorted View of the World - 2013-08

Posted on 2013-08-28 18:00:00
Tags: Rant, Spam, Politics

Over the years, I have published various email addresses from the @mavetju.org domain in my weblog. They have been harvested by spammers. In this article, I published a From and a Reply-To field which don't exist as an email address: [email protected]. It also published a Message-id: [email protected].

Imagine my surprise when I found two emails from Clive Palmer, the head of the Palmer United Party, in my mailbox:

From: [email protected]
Subject: A Message From Clive Palmer
To: [email protected]

and:

From: [email protected]
Subject: A Message From Clive Palmer
To: [email protected]

Looks like he got his list of email addresses from a dubious source!

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Posted on 2013-08-10 18:00:00
Tags: Rant, Bridge, Happiness

Earlier this year Naomi obtained her bridge director status and is involved in the New South Wales Bridge Assocation. She is also directing at the Southside Bridge Centre and plays at the Port Hacking club. As they say, never a dull moment!

One of her ideals is to organise a bridge tournament in Southern Sydney and now that she is involved in the NSWBA this is something which might actually run! It's called the Inaugural Sydney South Trophy Day and if it's up to her, it will be the first of a yearly event. However, doing this without stepping on anybodies toes seems to be impossible.

Issue 1: The location. Naomi wants to run it at the Southside Bridge Centre because they can provide the room, cards, accessories for a price much lower than the rate at a commercial event venue company. Sounds reasonable... Well, not if you consider that a lot of owners of other bridge clubs wouldn't mind to have it at their place too. And if it is not at their place, preferable not at anybody elses bridge club. Seeing as if this might going to be a yearly event and thus the location might be somewhere else next year, that doesn't really come up in their minds.

Issue 2: The date. Naomi wants to run it on the Labour Day public holiday on Monday 7 October. That is the day that the Hurstville Bridge club normally runs. So the Hurstville Bridge club is angry because this is going to cut in their number of people coming.

The bridge community in South Sydney consists in general of old people: In the Port Hacking, Hurstville and St George clubs Naomi is the youngest by far, and no new blood is coming in. It is just a matter of time before they are gone. However, in the Southside, Ingleburn and St George Budapest bridge clubs are actively promoting bridge and get new people involved.

So... On 7 October there will be a bridge tournament, most likely visited by people who want to promote the game of bridge and see it continue in a healthy way!

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Posted on 2013-08-09 18:00:00
Tags: Rant, Networking, Riverbed

In the first thirteen years of my working life I have encountered a lot of different people in the field of networking. And for some reason they were all skilled, experienced and willing to learn. They understood their stuff, in case of issues a pointer to the right direction was enough to help them out.

In my experience at the Riverbed TAC I have encountered several new kind of networking people, although I wouldn't call them all "networking" people.

• You have the ones described above: Call in with an issue and just need a clue on where to start looking. They know their network and they know how the WAN optimization works. When looking at packets together and explaining what can be seen, they already know where to look before I can ask them "Is there anything in the network which would strip these TCP options?".
• Outsourced network manager and network architects: Oh how do I pity you. Your company got this multi-million dollar contract for the network, but WAN optimization is more than the network. It is the servers and the clients too, but because you only got the network you are not allowed to talk to the company which is managing the servers and the company which is managing the end-user support. The company which is managing the servers will not tell you that they upgraded to a newer version of whatever application and blame the fact that half of the company can't retrieve their email anymore on you! You will never be able to optimize encrypted MAPI traffic because the team of the other company which manages Active Directory doesn't want your Steelhead appliance to be able to perform delegation, let alone be configured as a read-only Domain Controller...
• You have people who have inherited a network and just found out that besides routers, switches and firewalls you have another kind of network equipment and they have no idea what... These are people who can be saved, if introduced properly. Explain what WAN optimization is, give them documentation, explain what the issue is and follow up a week later. If it works out, they will end up as the first group. If not, they will end up as the next group...
• Outsourced NOCs. They seem to look at a screen and when there is a different colour than green they will identify the brand of the device and call the TAC. They refuse to do basic troubleshooting themselves nor learn from previous cases opened and need to be asked for the system dump every time they open a case. You will get emails from them every eight hours with the request for an update because that is when they handover their cases but don't bother to forward the next steps to the original customers because they are not online yet... Getting information from the device in question goes most of the time without a problem. However getting more information about the issue will have to go through the NOC, who rephrases it and forwards it to the user, who answers the wrong question and sends it to the NOC and who forwards it back to you...

Did I miss a category? Most likely because I have repressed them, very deep...

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