So what does network downtime mean to you?

O

O2Flow

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jul 8, 2004
Messages
371
I've been at a client's site migrating/installing the new network for 16 hours straight now...:eek:

The business cannot run without the network, so what does network downtime mean to you? :D

PS - Going from Netware 3.12 to XP, so you can imagine the shit I've gone through at this point
 
any enterprise-wide downtime is an absolute disaster. Problem is that some people may say "hey it's only 2 days! who cares, you'll be back up and running before you know it", but that's only because it's often impossible to put a dollar value on the downtime.

Sales aren't getting their work done, new orders may not be coming in, customers are not being contacted, vendors are wondering what's going on since thye haven't heard in 2 days etc...

personally, in the past year I've had our only exchange server shit the bed, database wouldn't mount anymore etc... even with backups it was an overnight process to get email back up, another 1 day to restore mail

that was way too much for my taste (I was relatively new at the company then, there was no disaster recovery and no one had any experience in doing what had to be done, it was more of a "lets have a meeting to figure out how we get our mail back up!" , about 60 grand later, NT4 to 2003 migrations on all the servers, LTO2 tape backup and some experience I'm confident it could be done now within 4 hours which for this size business is acceptable.

Network downtime is even worse, if yo utell people the mail server crashed they seem to understand, if you tell them your 48port cisco switch is up in flames they tend to think you should have had a replacement, lol
 
Just had 3 hours of planned downtime yesterday morning. Upgraded the main file server.

Planned downtime not bad, with plenty of notice to all users, when done afterhours.

Unplanned downtime for more than 1 hour is bad bad news.
People can usually burn an hour doing paperwork at thier desk, or go on break for 1/2 of it.

That is the TOS we've agreeded upon with the company, if they want better, they need to be aware of the cost associated with it.
 
Downtime means the store doesn't open :) While not as big as $2,000/minute... it's a family owned and run business, so it can be as high as $233/hour. It's pretty significant considering we have to pull in $1700 a day to break even.

Retail blows.
 
downtime means ppl runnin to me....

email isnt working
net isnt working
i cant use IM anymore...

i tell em hold tight itll be back up when its ready....besides when its planned i do it on their lunch hours...so its not too bad....

planned vs unplanned tho....thats a bitch...at least when ive planned it, im not swamped with my users.....when its not planned, they all come runnin to me askin questions, and its just like...go sit back down ill take care of it damnit!
 
It means I get 12 different calls to "just let me know there is a problem" and noone works because everything is centralized.

Now when the connection to the internet goes down "by accident" it means the boss told me "there is a big project that has to get done today make sure noone is jerking around" And the net connection gets magically restored at 6:00 ;)

Edit: Dollarwise....not really sure but a lot.
 
For me (someone NOT in charge of the company network, just my home one), it means an upset wife and a anger-barely-kept-in-check call to our cable company. And get this (I kid you not!): When you call about an internet problem, there is a recorded message that says "You can find answers to many common problem on cebridge.net". HULLLO??!?!?! I wouldn't be calling if I could access the internet!

 
it means an ulcer. especially since the people mainly in charge of the network where im employed are fuckin idiots.
 
People's lives are in danger, military brass gets their panties in a wad.

(military network in Iraq)
 
Shadowspawn said:
People's lives are in danger, military brass gets their panties in a wad.

(military network in Iraq)
Click to expand...

Well we have a winner....... :D
 
It means my telephones will explode with hundreds of angry people, tens of thousands of streaming radio listeners get a looping buffer, thousands of email accounts are not receiving email, hundreds of websites are offline and dozens of servers offline. This all ends up as a reputation loss and issueing compensation for the downtime.

All around a bad experience for a hosting/colocation/dedicated server operation.
 
It's terribly painful... I manage about 30 small to mid sized businesses IT. When about 1/3rd of them are using the same ISP and it gets DDoSed its a day of misery. Call after call after call about I can't get to the internet or I can't send email. For my clients (mostly medical, architectual, graphic design, and advertising firms) the net going down is a big bad problem. This happened thursday of last week and the outage lasted 4 hours. So downtime depending on the company was between $200 - $3000 (full press print clients) an hour.
 
Well I have a quite ironic ending to the story. The downtime lasted for around 36 hours total, 0 of which were during business hours. I had to bring up a new temp server and do the necessary software upgrade, devise a new way for the dummy terminals to connect to the new temp server, and make sure the custom software ran. Also had to run all new cabling (wall drops) and bring up some new dummy terminals. Not to mention backup the entire data store to another new server (which will be implemented this weekend). Went from Novell 3.12 with BNC to a temp 98 machine and CAT5e. Eventually it will be a hybrid fiber and Cat5E with XP on the new server and XP on the client machines. I left the business around 5am to go pick up some supplies. As I am walking out the front door, I turn around to lock it, turn around again, and someone has a gun in my face The man starts asking all kinds of questions, to which I am replying truthfully. He doesn't believe me, he thinks I am robbing the place. Finally I show him my ID and tell him he can call the owner, I have keys and the codes to the alarm. He puts the gun away, but doesn't apologize :mad: . I leave and come back about an hour later. Now they are all laughing about it, and in hindsight it wasn't that big of a deal I suppose. This is probably the worst job I have had to date, but I am finishing up this week and should get paid a pretty hefty nickel :p
 
O2Flow said:
Well I have a quite ironic ending to the story. The downtime lasted for around 36 hours total, 0 of which were during business hours. I had to bring up a new temp server and do the necessary software upgrade, devise a new way for the dummy terminals to connect to the new temp server, and make sure the custom software ran. Also had to run all new cabling (wall drops) and bring up some new dummy terminals. Not to mention backup the entire data store to another new server (which will be implemented this weekend). Went from Novell 3.12 with BNC to a temp 98 machine and CAT5e. Eventually it will be a hybrid fiber and Cat5E with XP on the new server and XP on the client machines. I left the business around 5am to go pick up some supplies. As I am walking out the front door, I turn around to lock it, turn around again, and someone has a gun in my face The man starts asking all kinds of questions, to which I am replying truthfully. He doesn't believe me, he thinks I am robbing the place. Finally I show him my ID and tell him he can call the owner, I have keys and the codes to the alarm. He puts the gun away, but doesn't apologize :mad: . I leave and come back about an hour later. Now they are all laughing about it, and in hindsight it wasn't that big of a deal I suppose. This is probably the worst job I have had to date, but I am finishing up this week and should get paid a pretty hefty nickel :p
Click to expand...


So who was the guy?
 
I have no idea, but for mission critical stuff it's bad news. I would say anything over a hour is very bad. Weekends it's not that big of deal, but needs to be planned so people can be notified.

At my last position nothing more than a couple hour dowtime happened (if that) over the course of hte year. We had weekend projects, and internet out for a day once. But all the systems were up.
 
For a 27 billion dollar company.

Downtime means a ton of money not being earned. Employees not being productive. And the CEO not able to post their next acquisition and when the CEO is not happy. Everyone is not happy ;)
 
Private school, kids get the day off!! They like it when the network goes down!! :D

SO far it's only happened once in the last two years.....

QJ
 
It means that 10-15 students are generally pretty angry with me when they cannot get on the the internet. Not so bad....yet
 
You'd have to get more detailed in the question for me to answer accurately. The entire network wouldn't go down. Way too many locations and redundant paths but just for the sake of argument if the entetire network went down at a bank the size of the one I work for it would be a panic mode unlike any other I've ever seen for sure. But VLAN's or subnetted networks going down would cause problems based on the area so again, the question is really too vague for me to comment accurately. It'd be a bad thing in most areas to be sure but some would be more important than others. I've seen one major problem that resulted from various layer3 switches blowing up. It was pretty fun to see all the brass pacing around the data center. not so fun to see the engineer at the console(s). Felt for the guy.
 
Downtime is avoided by redundancy. :p

Of course most companies don't understand the terms "disaster preparedness" and "disaster recovery". :rolleyes:
 
Spectre said:
So who was the guy?
Click to expand...

He was the brother-in-law of the business owner. Apparently the business owner rents some office space out to this guy for him to use for his own business
 
ktwebb said:
You'd have to get more detailed in the question for me to answer accurately. The entire network wouldn't go down. Way too many locations and redundant paths but just for the sake of argument if the entetire network went down at a bank the size of the one I work for it would be a panic mode unlike any other I've ever seen for sure. But VLAN's or subnetted networks going down would cause problems based on the area so again, the question is really too vague for me to comment accurately. It'd be a bad thing in most areas to be sure but some would be more important than others. I've seen one major problem that resulted from various layer3 switches blowing up. It was pretty fun to see all the brass pacing around the data center. not so fun to see the engineer at the console(s). Felt for the guy.
Click to expand...

Ok, put it this way:

Your WAN/MAN provider just went out.
 
Wolf-R1 said:
Downtime is avoided by redundancy. :p

Of course most companies don't understand the terms "disaster preparedness" and "disaster recovery". :rolleyes:
Click to expand...

We had the same problem a year ago. Lost 500k in equipment in one site due to no environmental monitoring. Building lost power during a hurricane, generator for the power came up, A/C generator did not. You can imagine how hot the server room got :eek:
 
Shadowspawn said:
People's lives are in danger, military brass gets their panties in a wad.

(military network in Iraq)
Click to expand...

kinda OT and personal, but how much are you getting paid to work over there? Are you a civ contractor? The job offers look very promising over there ($)
 
Downtime for us means i work my arse off to get it back up.
Being a Network Technician i get to be on call whenever a server goes down no matter what time i get the call..
What fun :p
But i Love my PayCheck :D
 
Back when I was working for a college and taking care of the systems & network of the local campus, it meant a flood of phone calls. As far as money, who knows, probably not much since the students had already paid for school, and a borked network just mean mostly peoples IM programs and webshots background changer thing wouldn't work.

Then it meant that I'd probably look into the problem after I finished the level of the game I'd be playing at the time, diagnose the issue, but oddly enough I'd usually get hungry around this time, so I'd go hit up a pizza buffet for about 2 hours. Then I'd run back into the building with a dead Cisco 2500 in hand making sure the big brass and motor mouths saw me, so that they would think I was really a genius and cared about their working network, and then just go back into my office or wiring closet and really fix the problem.

Then it eventually means I could sneak out of work 2 in the afternoon because "I worked so hard fixing that" instead of the normal 5, which is really 4:30 in IT time.
 
It means i get to work on an interesting problem for a change.

There are about 10 of us who work here, and we're running on a local community college's WAN, but we have our internal workgroup network set up with a router and a couple switches. My main job isn't the the network/IT troubleshooting guy, but since i'm the most technically savvy guy there i'm the one they turn too, which is fine by me. The regular work i do sucks.
 
O2Flow said:
Ok, put it this way:

Your WAN/MAN provider just went out.
Click to expand...

I guess if the backbone went down it would be the southeast US going down as well so we'd all be in a pickle.

80billion dollar bank so various redundancy paths in place for links.
 
O2Flow said:
We had the same problem a year ago. Lost 500k in equipment in one site due to no environmental monitoring. Building lost power during a hurricane, generator for the power came up, A/C generator did not. You can imagine how hot the server room got :eek:
Click to expand...
Toast anyone? :p

My company is borderline that way. If they don't have to spend the money they won't. Luckily I present good reasons why we should be doing certain things. But in the end it's always an uphill battle. :(
 
Wolf-R1 said:
Toast anyone? :p

My company is borderline that way. If they don't have to spend the money they won't. Luckily I present good reasons why we should be doing certain things. But in the end it's always an uphill battle. :(
Click to expand...

Can I get an Amen?

And downtime, it means time to scream at the ISP that connects my remote sites together. They've been REALLY flaky lately.
 
means that when im at school, that i can just sit there and look at the desktop
 
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