Technical Blog of an Amish Network Administrator

The following is an old post in a series of posts I made about being a Network Administrator.  It’s possible the forum will be going offline in the future, so I’ve extracted many of the posts and will be placing them here for posterity.

Another day and another time to play “Stump the Salesperson”.

I was asked by our FD (Finance Director) to come and discuss new financial software since the software we own that was supposed to be supported indefinately is no longer supported after April of next year.

So he gets a quote about updating the software to the newest version which I go over and immediately pull out certain line items that I know we don’t need after which we decide to call the sales person and ask a few questions.

My first question was can I have their application on one server and the database on another server. He sounds confused by this, but says yes we can but it’ll be an additional cost. To which I ask why is it additional? He says because we’d need two servers, well duh! I know that, I already have a server dedicated as a Database server, and I have a server dedicated as an application server. Thus the two servers. He then tells me that they ‘like to have their application all by itself on a server, that why when there is a problem they know it’s not interference from another program’. Which then I say “if I listened to every time a salesman told me something like that I’d have 30 servers laying around.” and I’m thinking to myself that they must not do any quality control on their product.

So he starts spouting off about their ability to run their product fully offsite via a VPN connection, so we don’t need a server onsite at all. I ask him what type of encryption their VPN uses, he doesn’t know, but starts spouting about all their different clients that are using their product and if it’s good enough for them, it must be good enough for us. Umm, Yeah sure.

He likes to side step questions by talking about all the wonderful services they offer, so he starts to talk about their Disaster recovery plan, for only $5k/year, that guarantees that we’d be back up and running within 12 hours, but according to him, most of the time it’s within 2 hours of us calling. Oh yeah, I believe that one. So I quickly skim through their literature on their disaster recovery plan and see that you can only call and report a disaster between 8am and 6pm M-F EST. So I guess we’d have to plan our disasters accordingly. When I asked him about what happens when the system goes down at 6:01PM on Friday night, he didn’t really have an answer. He mumbled something about Financial things could wait until monday morning and the call could be placed then.

Of course, that’s something every Admin loves to do, wait until first thing monday morning when people are bitchy about coming into work to tell them there’s been a failure and they can’t get the things done they need to do. I’d rather work over the weekend and get it done instead of having several people standing over my shoulder asking me when it’s going to get fixed.

We signed off on the call with him with the understanding that he was going to get the answers that hey didn’t know about, and that ends the daily game of stump the salesperson.

I guess the reason why I’ve posted the two stories about sales people is to point out that all sales people will try to sell you a bag of magic beans. They’re used to talking to suits that are impressed by technical jargon, even though the salesperson themselves doesn’t understand the jargon. It’s your job as Admin/Bullshit filter to press the salesperson to get the truth out of them. You need to read the fine print on that bag of magic beans and find out that they don’t grow unless they’re exposed to high doses of gamma radiation. You’ll also need to press the salesperson to find out where their company will be when the fire-breathing-poison monkies come flying in and destroy all that you’ve built. Will they be standing there toe to toe with you against the monkies with a BFG or will they be cowering behind their desk?

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