5 things that bug me about working in IT

IP addresses.You can’t take them with you. In a business with a number of offices or sites, you’ll have a collection of WAN IP addresses, and these will be pretty important to know. Routers all over the business will use them to route traffic to the different sites. Invariably, and usually for historical or internally political reasons, these connections may be with different ISP’s. However, if you want to change the ISP, you’ll have to accept that the IP address will change, and the amount of work that entails may well put you off changing ISP. The same (usually) goes for when an office is relocated – even if you retain the ISP, you may not be able to retain the same IP address.Whether IPv6 will affect this at all, I’m not sure. Certainly, the pool of available addresses will be so large that ISP’s won’t feel the need to hoard them, but the logistics of moving IP addresses (as far as the ISP is concerned) may still be prohibitively complicated.Still, wouldn’t it be nice if you could get what amounts to a MAC (Migration Authorisation Code) for your IP address, and switch providers without a massive overhaul of your router configurations?

Constantly growing system requirementsIn the past 10 years or so, I’ve always owned a car that had roughly the same size engine, though they have got progressively more efficient over that period. Over the same period, a desktop machine has gone from 256MB to 2.5GB of RAM. That’s a ten-fold increase, on a standard desktop machine. It’s not quite as simple to compare processors, since we’ve moved from single cores to multiple cores, but it’s safe to say that the computing power has increased dramatically, and so has the power consumption. Granted, the power consumption per unit of performance may well have improved, but keeping up with the system requirements of operating systems and general software can still be quite expensive.

The compromise between usability and security/uniformityThe most stable and secure desktop machine would be one that only has one user, no network connection, and one button (which would be an on/off button). The most “usable” machine (from the user’s immediate point of view) is the one where they can do anything they want, including installing hardware and software, browsing any site on the web, accessing any resource, and physically moving and using the machine anywhere they want, and using any connection. Of course, that scenario would last probably less than an hour before the machine was infected with malware, running slowly due to hundreds of software packages vying for resources, someone has accessed and transmitted confidential material, and put the business at risk. The compromise is somewhere in the middle. I’ve usually leaned towards a more libertarian view, allowing users to install certain software packages, and have a certain amount of control over their machines, while web traffic, data use, and email usage is logged and recorded (but rarely blocked). For notebook users, this is fairly critical, and in general it works fairly well, with users being aware that they’re being trusted to not abuse the responsibility they’re given. In a much larger organisation, this would be far more difficult to manage, so I’m fairly lucky in that respect.

Updates. For the past few years, I don’t think I’ve ever had a completely pending-update-free WSUS (the Microsoft server that allows administrators to control windows updates). It’s very difficult to keep up with the constant stream of updates from MS, and even once they checked and approved, you’ve then got to deal with users who will be annoyed and frustrated by the updates being applied, and (on occasion) a reboot being required. Updates to servers mean downtime for reboots, out-of-hours working to make sure users don’t get affected, and potential for problems if the update causes some unforeseen problem.But MS isn’t even the worst offender. Java seem to release updates to the runtime environment almost every month, and there’s no central management available. Adobe and Apple are just as bad, and Apple even try to bundle their other software packages with each update. It would be nice if MS, Adobe, Apple, Sun, etc, could all get together and establish a common update-approval management method.

Email. Email, essentially, is outdated, ill-conceived, awkward to manage and maintain, and doesn’t even do a very good job. Anyone who’s used (and understood) Google Wave realises that email must be on its way out soon. There is no real sender verification, spam and viruses are so massively intrusive that whole industries have developed around making email secure. The conversation style of email makes discussion (and business) difficult when dealing with more than two correspondents – send an email to two people, and get two replies. Trying to retain some sort of thread of the conversation is difficult at best, and with four or more recipients, practically impossible. Bringing someone into a discussion part-way through is difficult, as they cannot easily view the thread of conversation before them. Managing the size of mailboxes, archives, mailbox permissions, attachments, addresses, security and safety is far more work than it should be. I can’t wait for email V2.

Next time, I’ll find five good things about working in IT!