Cisco complaining and other things

I’ve been spending a good part of my time at work recently reading large amounts of Cisco documentation for Unified MeetingPlace, Unified Communications Manager (formerly Call Manager) and all the necessary parts and pieces that an enterprise needs to make those work. The most aggravating part of the reading has been finding that no one seems to ever do a “sanity check” on the documentation. For example, our technical engineers keep telling us that the MeetingPlace Network Backup Gateway runs on Windows 2003, even though the release notes for the most recent version say:

Network Backup Gateway must be installed on a 7800 series Cisco Media Convergence Server (MCS) with the Cisco version of the Microsoft Windows 2000 server operating system installed.

Also frustrating initially, very little of the pre-sales technical work seems to have been transferred to the post-sales technical group. Cisco claims to have made a serious effort is correcting this, but we haven’t had another conference call since our concerns got heard by the right people.

In a completely unrelated event, a coworker has joined the ranks of us bloggers, and she’s trying to write one entry every day. I also need to document my thoughts on the record US$100 million fine against McLaren for the Stepney-gate industrial espionage event in F1, but that really should be another post.

Silly, Silly vendors

Your DNS May Be EOL

So, I’ve gotten 2 separate notes from 2 separate vendors over the last couple of days proclaiming similar things. Recently, ISC has declared several older versions of BIND “End of Life“. These older versions are no longer supported and may or may not have security issues. But, if your boss gets one of these, you can be sure that he/she will forward it on to the technical people out on the pointy end of the stick to answer for. I hope you don’t even have to think twice, you shouldn’t be running this stuff anymore.

2007 Sweetcorn Festival

Corn on the Cob
The 64th annual Sweetcorn Festival is over, we cooked 21 tons over 3 days. We ran out of corn every day, Monday earlier than other days. Monday was essentially a repeat of last year, the fences were rolled up and the steam engine was ready to leave by 4 pm.