Re: The OTHER problem with Netgear WGT624 (and probably others)

On Mon, 14 Aug 2006 22:36:58 -0700 Jeff Liebermann <jeffl@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
| phil-news-nospam@xxxxxxxx hath wroth:
|
|>You're assuming that the maintenance cost is inevitable.
|
| I'm in the maintenance business, so that's a fair assumption. I call
| to your attention the large number of software and firmware, updates
| and fixes.
|
|>Do you figure in the percentage probability of an expense and prorate
|>it across all expenditures to calculate an average cost of ownership?
|>Or are you assuming the worst case where everything will fail and drive
|>costs to a maximum?
|
| Neither. My job was to calculate the cost of a crash and recovery,
| not to predict its incidence. That's the insurance company's problem.
| Please note that I suggested that you calculate the cost of a failure,
| not the probability of it happening.

When weighing in a wide range of expenditures, probability plays a very
important role. Given 100 purchases where the failure rate over the usage
period is 3% then you can expect approximately 3 failures. Plan for it.
But you don't have to plan for 50 failures in this case.

Businesses that are not flush with cash have to figure this in so they
can minimize the expenditure on as many things as possible.


|>Sounds like someone bought a cheap UPS.
|
| Yep. APC BackUPS ES 350VA. Very cheap. Works well enough for power
| failures, but doesn't stop the small glitches. In this case, there's
| construction going on next door, which probably is causing the
| glitches.

Where glitches don't matter, but having some power during an outage does,
then I suppose that is an OK choice for that power size. I would not use
such a thing for mission critical functions.


|>I don't always put them in,
|>depending on need, but where I do, I get the dual-conversion type that
|>are always converting AC to DC, paralleling the battery, and converting
|>DC back to AC, 100% of the time. I never see glitches with those.
|
| Yep. SmartUPS series. No switching time, but there's a price. They
| suck power in standby. I recently measured an APC1400RH, which burned
| about 40 watts (70VA) doing nothing. At $0.15/kw-hr, that's about
| $50/year in electricity.

If you need glitch-free reliability, wouldn't that be worth it?


|>But it would tend to concern me if I was making use of their
|>service and they were making use of wireless.
|
| Chuckle. Many years ago, I tried to setup a 900MHz wireless link (all
| that was available at the time) across the freeway between a hospital
| and the medical office buildings. The hospital was "concerned" that I
| might be "irradiating" the patients and killed the plan. Years later,
| 2.4GHz wireless is all over the hospital, plus a cell site on the
| roof, but no wireless link across the freeway. The big antennas I
| proposed must be more dangerous than small antennas.

The larger microwave ovens in hospitals are 900 MHz. That was probably
a number that got them so concerned. A shame they totally misunderstood
technology and you were unable to convince them of what was right.

That reminds of me a story where a hospital in Dallas was using a lot of
monitoring devices in the 186-192 MHz range. Then a local TV station
fired up their new digital TV transmitter on channel 9 that the FCC had
licensed them with. The hospital's usage was all technically secondary.
Ultimately they had to move, but the station voluntarily took the digital
transmitter back off the air for a while to give them the time to do so.
I wonder how that affected their technology planning or perspectives.


| Most of the wireless is the medical offices is used for updating
| patient records in real time and thus eliminate medical transcription.
| In the hospital, it's also used for telemetry and monitoring.


|>A TV station can't afford to go cheap on the transmitter
|>or master control, and in most cases the studio equipment.
|
| I've never worked for a TV station, but I have worked for AM and FM
| stations. Let me assure you that cutting corners on the transmitter
| and studio equipment is very common. I've seen more money spent on
| furniture than on equipment. Perhaps there are stations that value
| their transmitters, but after 3 college and 3 broadcast stations, I
| haven't seen any.

I've seen quite the opposite. I did volunteer work for a community FM
station once. Everything was shoe-string, duct-tape, bailing wire :-)
But when they finally got some major funding, it went for a new tower
site, new antenna, new transmitter, and a license upgrade.


|>But they can
|>go cheap on many other things that would be just a short term inconvenience
|>if they fail (a new operation can't do that with remote cameras).
|
| The current philosophy is that two pieces of junk, one acting as a
| backup for the other, is better and cheaper than one allegedly
| "reliable" device. I have some rather "interesting" photos of some of
| transmitters and sites.

That's not unlike the benefit of doubling the data speed when it increases
the packet failure (requiring retransmission) rate by say 15%. It's still
a win. OTOH, if latency is an issue, it might not.


|>| As I said, I don't think
|>| you've ever estimated the cost of downtime or failure for a business.
|
|>Yes I have. But not in a medical setting.
|
| I'll take your word for it. After paying for my learning curve, I
| soon discovered that few IT people have even a clue what downtime
| would cost a company or even how long it would take to recover from a
| crash.

When I talk to the managers about what to put in, I try to get these
figures from them. I've actually had one manager (was a hired position)
say "just make sure it never goes down". My reply was "is that a blank
check?". Turns out he just assumed that "never go down" was a simple
configuration choice. I finally convinced him _we_ had to work the
numbers together and figure out how much to spend. I ended up putting
in triple redundancy 7200 routers. A few months after I left, one of
them did in fact fail (burned out power supply) and the guy who was
responsible for the monitoring then figured it must be a misconfigured
alarm since it was labeled "internet 1" and he could tell the internet
was working just fine. So he turned the alarm off and they ran things
that way for 3 months until the upstream ISP that router was connected
to called and wondered why the circuit had stayed down for so long.


|>Speaking of medical settings, it sounds like you are working pretty in
|>depth in that field, not just the wireless/networking setting. If that
|>does include their computers, I sure hope you are taking appropriate
|>consideration for verifiably wiping out the contents of all computer
|>storage devices leaving such offices because of replacements or being
|>upgraded. If a hard drive is replaced because it's too small, do you
|>wipe off its content and check that it is, or irreversibly destroy it?
|
| We smash the drives with a large hammer. However, I do break the
| rules on upgrades and use a "disk nuker" problem to wipe the drive. No
| sense in ruining a perfectly good drive. Keeping track of the drives
| is a major problem but is being handled.

I hope the hammer manages to at least warp the platters.

The disk nuker is probably adequate for the job. The one I wrote wiped
the platters with random garbage just to be sure (since it cost no more
time than just wiping with zeros). The problem is making sure people
actually do it. At one place I worked at, I got a bunch of disk drives
for a project that were manufacturer refurbs. On two of them I found
medical database data, with medical info, SSNs, etc. I used that data
to show the company's head auditor what risks we had in letting data out
by recycled disks to get some policy changes.

--
|---------------------------------------/----------------------------------|
| Phil Howard KA9WGN (ka9wgn.ham.org) / Do not send to the address below |
| first name lower case at ipal.net / spamtrap-2006-08-15-1419@xxxxxxxx |
|------------------------------------/-------------------------------------|
.

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