Everybody uses and almost noboby understands.
Published: 2005-06-25
Category: Tech
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Language: [English]
page views: 296

There are some tecnologies that are fundamental for the functioning of the lifes of milions that only very few really understand. And since they are vital to the well funcioning, there's no room for error or down-time. Funny thing is, that they are also one of the least well understood parts. Resulting in many many halfbaked and flaky instalations where "well it sort-of works" seems to be good enough.
These things as IP routing, DNS and SMTP. As I am taking control (slowly) of the systems I am suposed to maintain, I am brushing up on all three of the tecnologies, since i need to go a bit further then the "well at least it works" configurations.

Now i realize that i really know only 30 to 50% of the potential of these tecnologies. Funny thing is, that most people see me as the "know it all" of these techs, however I really don't know the bottom of it. Worse, i couldn't even see where the bottom was. Ofcourse my hope is that this changes now that I am reading more about the subjects :D.

I can see how people see these things as magic.. Ofcourse, it doesn't really help that Bind has a really messed up configuration (Why aren't Forward and reverse name mappings managed together anyway?). And since they don't understand it, they go into "trial-and-error" mode. Meaning that what somehow works first, no matter how borked, will stay... and please don't touch it either, becuase who knows how to fix it, once broken.

End result is that IT people are resistent to making the correct changes to the infrastructure, since they don't really know how it works, and prefer to patch ontop of the current working instalations... degenerating the infrastructure designs until it is just a big ball of dirt, where you can't change anything without breaking a dozen of things in unexpected ways.

High points being, for example, using IP numers for anything since changing DNS might break it, and that is because there is no knowledge how to setup DNS it robustly or with subzones to limit possible breakage. But, gee.. changing a service from one Server to an other becomes a dance of changing all clients or adding to the spaggeti of Portforwarding rules in the routers.

Having everything, servers, office users, and externals in the same subnet, since that "simplifies" routing. Modern networking hardware and speeds let you get away with it as well.. but gee.. a virus really does get far.

Using a "all-in-one-package" for email.. it might not do exactly what you need, but at least it works, sortof.. but since nobody set it up, nobody knows how it fits together, and changing anything becomes a magical mistery ride of unknown side-effects.

Still is mighty strange that the most fundamental tech of the internet age is also the least understood by the people that are getting payed to know it.