Please leave comments on the blog if you have an IT myth that needs to be confirmed or busted. (Nothing is sacred!)
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Assisted by my trusty clan of Meerkats, who use unscientific measures like the attitude of the cobras and the presence of edible bugs, here is the 
Over at the Thinking problem management! blog, a new series of polls has been started, which focuses on IT myths. 
I wrote about the "techie curse" some time ago. Techies don't create documentation and most environments are a SOP (Standard Operating Procedures) desert. In every job in which I have started, no-one has ever given me a SOP of the services being provided. I would have to "sink or swim." Most techie managers who were treated in this manner, reinforce the behaviour by treating their subordinates in a similar manner. Imagine if a new hire was given a SOP over the service they are responsible for delivering on day one of their tenure. Alas, most techies spend the first three weeks of their job being unproductive.
The JSE still hasn't said what in the Cisco IOS crashed the stock exchange. One unsubstantiated report was that it was a change to a firewall rule. However, I saw this released by Cisco:
I have often encountered the myth that VLANs are insecure and should not be used. People who state this proceed to buy a separate switch for each LAN that they deploy. Great commission for the salesman, but bad for the business paying the premium for the extra tin! 
Over at Denver, this week, the IEEE finally closed the book on 802.5, a.k.a. token-ring. The standards have been withdrawn. Token-ring is well and truly dead. 
Information security largely focuses on data communications, and voice is often ignored. Every successful hack or extortion has a phone involved somewhere in the process, but in most cases the phone is a silent and overlooked component in the forensics.
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The Nokia N82 does more than being just a phone. It is better than the iPhone or any competitive device. This is a mobile phone that does a great job for the ordinary person but does a greater job for the unsighted. The phone was developed with the NFB and Kurzweil Technologies. 
I felt proud about being backward and simple, after reading an article in Network World. As stated by Dennis Drogseth in CMDB in the NOC? Is it time yet?, I belong to a collective group called the Archie Bunkers. ('hold outs for a past era when things were presumably “simpler."') I join that great luminary, Albert Einstein, who said: "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler."" 
I was reading Terry’s blog where he posted about auralization which reminded me about my own experiments in using voice for monitoring a network. 
The most important step in the major incident process is what I call the Harrison step with relates to the timelines.
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I have just reviewed an interesting Field notice from Cisco. A MDS switch reboots after 233 days of operation. Now imagine the surprise of the IT guys when it happens. "Boss, I swear, I did nothing, I was having a smoke outside!"
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Terry has a very interesting post on his Netcordia blog about the history of ping. Ping was based on the submarine sonar eqivalent.
In his next post he muses about network visualizations. It made me think about my own thoughts on network visualizations.
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The latest outages at Amazon and RIM have been attributed to capacity and storage upgrades respectively. In both these cases the real root cause of the problem is not capacity or the upgrade. Why did the capacity problem occur? Why did the upgrade have an adverse effect?
There are two major categories of problems, those above the water line and those below the water line. As is the case with an iceberg, the visible problems above the water line are small in number but major in scale while those below the water line are larger in number but smaller is scale.
The problems at Amazon and RIM are above the water line due to their visible impact, but generic studies show that for each problem occuring above the water line there are 600 ones that have happened below the water line.
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The Perkins braille keyboard has 9 keys and does the same job as a qwerty keyboard. It takes a while to learn to use the keyboard, but once mastered it lends itself to multi-finger typing in a manner more intuitive than its qwerty counterpart.
After stuggling with various different clumsy keyboards on different phones, I wonder why vendors have not designed one with a really alternative and radical keyboard like the braille one?
Ronald is an IT firefighter who enjoys the thrill of solving and analyzing problems. He was painted into a corner to become an IT firefighter because as a network engineer he quickly learned that everyone blamed the network, when there was a problem. He now works in the field of infrastructure architecture and service management.
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