Workshop

The Outsiders
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Two types of vendors who don’t have to get into your building to wreak havoc on your network are ISPs
(Internet service providers) , who you rely on to surf the Web and send email, and, of course, telephone
companies, who may connect your sites to each other via leased lines. Of these two, the telephone
company is the much more mature vendor. Although the various phone companies take a lot of abuse,
they’ve been doing this stuff for decades, and they tend to have good change-management policies in
place. Consider that ISPs have only been around in their current form for less than a decade, and it’s easy
to see why they still have growing pains and therefore a bum rap.
Mondays can be tough. ISPs and phone companies tend to make changes over the weekend when
utilization is low. If something that worked on Friday doesn’t work on Monday, it’s time to pick up the
phone and call the appropriate provider and ask what’s been changed? The answer will likely be
“nothing,” but if you can verify that nothing has broken over the weekend at your end and hang in there,
the problem may mysteriously vanish around lunch time.
For longer-term problems, you may have to convince them that there’s nothing wrong with your
computer equipment (or figure out that there is something wrong and apologize for having doubted
them). One way of doing this is to set up a test network; if two sites can’t talk, you might as well bring
the equipment to the same site and connect them directly. Once you do this and see that it works, you
have pretty compelling evidence for the outside provider that nothing has changed with your equipment
and that something has changed between the two sites.
The Risk/Benefit Ratio
New programs are cool. They offer features not offered in older versions, and it’s fun to be the first one
on your block to have them. Unfortunately, experience shows that for every new feature introduced, there
are probably two new bugs in a product. The breakneck speed of Internet time means that software
developers have unbearable pressure on them to be first to market. This usually translates into quick
product testing, which means that the programs are released with at least a few bugs. Check out any
software vendor’s Web site—you’ll see fixes posted for products that have been out for at least six
months.
Because you have better things to do with your day than report these bugs to the software vendor, it’s a
good idea to not be the first one on your block to put a new application or operating system on your
network. Unless you desperately need the new features of a new product, you should wait six months
after product release to start rolling it out. If you need to do it sooner than that, consider what surgeons