I recently came across an environment where there was permanent SPAN set up on switches to accommodate required features of a system they were running. Basically if the SPAN was turned off their records and billing system totally broke and assigned all their customers a $0 bill. They had a problem where some transactions weren’t being captured by their records and billing system, and the reason ended up being oversubscription of the SPAN output port.
Thinking this was surely some hucklebuck solution, I spoke to the vendor and confirmed this was their official way of doing it. They also required customers on purchase to buy their switches which were already pre-configured, but they finally admitted that other vendors were supported so long as you SPAN’ed the correct ports.
This was at a big name national company too, not some little mom and pop shop. The system they were running is quite old, but the vendor is keeping it in support and continues to update it exclusively for this customer.
Not really asking a question here, just thought I’d share since I hadn’t encountered this before.
What other examples of a “feature” like this have you guys ran into where a vendor used the network as a crutch?
No comments:
Post a Comment