Aug 2, 2012 Posted by Sebastian in Government | 1 comment

Government at Work

Blocking their own web sites.

One Response to “Government at Work”

1. Patrick says:

   Aug 3, 2012 at 7:40 am

   Funny. Behind the covers, the reason they block WebEx is almost surely because their horrifically common-sense-challenged IT cannot handle the bandwidth requirements. It’s common in a lot of government facilities. I work with the feds a lot, and they often ask us to host WebEx/GoToMeeting/whatever and then they call from home (screaming kids included), or sometimes from a cafe down the street.

   It’s not that they don’t have the pipes into the buildings (they have those in spades), it’s because the crappy low-bid contractors they hire could not put it together correctly. You would be amazed how many expensive routers they can place in a 20 machine office. Seriously, they were buying $100,000 Cisco machines to switch 20-30 desktops, and that connects to “the WAN backbone” (a leased line) one floor down through more switches, including a monster “core” switch that makes the Cisco look cheap. Sometimes they trunk between them using ATM – !!within the fracking building!! – just because some consultant told them how awesome it would look on a resume.

   I once counted $5 Million in network hardware to support an office of about 50 PowerPoint warriors (no A/V, just docs) get to an OC-3, which they used exclusively to cruise the web and maybe send/receive an occasional email. The irony? They all had junk workstations, because they needed to “lower costs”.