02-05-2004, 08:30 PM
This story reminds me of a vagely related incident at my previous job. I was working for a small company with about 35 employees that used a business dsl line to connect to the outside world (I think something on the order of 500kps both ways). The employees could be divided up into roughly four groups -- Research and Delopment (four programmers of which I was one), Graphic Arts (5-6 people), Video production and editing (4-5 people), and Sales and Management. Serving these groups was Lynda, our System Administrator who became a good friend of mine, and a half-time assistant. Since she built and maintained Windows, Macintosh, and Unix systems, built and maintained the entire network, and was able to get everything to talk to each other, she was an overworked miracle worker.
Now which group do you think Lynda had the most trouble with? She got along well with the R&D group, because we actually knew what we were doing, understood her system, and were willing to ask for help when we ran into something we didn't understand. The Sales & Management group rarely did anything to mess up Lynda's work, because they were afraid of computers. As long as they could surf the web and read their e-mail, they didn't bother her. The video people mostly stuck to using their own fancy video editing equipment and rarely interacted with the network. That leaves the Graphic Arts deparment.
Ah, graphic artists. It seems to be a general trait among graphic artists that they think that because they can work miracles in Photoshop, they must know everything about computers. So you have the most frightening situation for a SysAdmin: a group of people who know just enough about computers to mess everything up.
The tales of her dealings with the Graphics Art department were many and varied. But the tale that partially relate to this thread comes in two parts. First, one day, the head of the GA dept came up to Lynda, upset that the graphics files he's been trying to send to a client hadn't been getting through. It turned out that the graphic artists were trying to e-mail their images to the client, despite the fact that these files were 10-20 megabytes in size. Lynda had to explain to the department manager that e-mail wasn't designed to handle such large file sizes, that binary files get UU encoded and therefore double in size, and that many companies and ISP's have a roughly 1 megabyte limit on the size of any incoming e-mail message. It took about a half hour to convince the manager that the Lynda didn't have some sort of established and arbitrary limit placed on outgoing file sizes and that there was nothing we could do on our end about this. (This was understandable, since Lynda was known to be subversively vindictive -- such as placing a half second delay on packets going to a computer used by a person who upset her, slowing the person's web browsing to a crawl). Only when I backed Lynda up on everything she was saying did the manager back down. So Lynda set up an easy-to-use annonymous ftp server from which clients could download their files. Everything worked smoothly for a couple of months.
Then, one morning, Lynda got an angry call from the CEO. He wasn't able to get his Yahoo and wanted to know why. Lynda quickly got dressed and went into work. Sure enough, the whole network had slowed to a crawl. She sniffed the network packets and found a ton of activity coming out of the ftp server she had set up for the graphic arts department. She went down there and asked the graphic artists what was going on, and they told her innocently that they had placed a file on the ftp server and told the client to download it. She asked what kind of file it was, and they told her it was a digitized video with some animations they had created spliced in. Her eyes went wide, and she asked them how big the file was. Puzzled, they said that they didn't know and clicked on the file to view its properties.
I forget what the exact number was, but I think it was on the order of 10 gigabytes -- all being transfered over a small DSL connection. I remember calculating how much time the transfer would take if the company's entire bandwidth was dedicated to that one file and that the transfer happened consistently at the fastest possible rate. It came out to something like three and a half days. Lynda just about broke down an wept. She stopped the file transfer, had the graphic arts department burn a DVD, and had them FedEx the movie to the client. The movie got there faster than the ftp transfer would've taken.
Now which group do you think Lynda had the most trouble with? She got along well with the R&D group, because we actually knew what we were doing, understood her system, and were willing to ask for help when we ran into something we didn't understand. The Sales & Management group rarely did anything to mess up Lynda's work, because they were afraid of computers. As long as they could surf the web and read their e-mail, they didn't bother her. The video people mostly stuck to using their own fancy video editing equipment and rarely interacted with the network. That leaves the Graphic Arts deparment.
Ah, graphic artists. It seems to be a general trait among graphic artists that they think that because they can work miracles in Photoshop, they must know everything about computers. So you have the most frightening situation for a SysAdmin: a group of people who know just enough about computers to mess everything up.
The tales of her dealings with the Graphics Art department were many and varied. But the tale that partially relate to this thread comes in two parts. First, one day, the head of the GA dept came up to Lynda, upset that the graphics files he's been trying to send to a client hadn't been getting through. It turned out that the graphic artists were trying to e-mail their images to the client, despite the fact that these files were 10-20 megabytes in size. Lynda had to explain to the department manager that e-mail wasn't designed to handle such large file sizes, that binary files get UU encoded and therefore double in size, and that many companies and ISP's have a roughly 1 megabyte limit on the size of any incoming e-mail message. It took about a half hour to convince the manager that the Lynda didn't have some sort of established and arbitrary limit placed on outgoing file sizes and that there was nothing we could do on our end about this. (This was understandable, since Lynda was known to be subversively vindictive -- such as placing a half second delay on packets going to a computer used by a person who upset her, slowing the person's web browsing to a crawl). Only when I backed Lynda up on everything she was saying did the manager back down. So Lynda set up an easy-to-use annonymous ftp server from which clients could download their files. Everything worked smoothly for a couple of months.
Then, one morning, Lynda got an angry call from the CEO. He wasn't able to get his Yahoo and wanted to know why. Lynda quickly got dressed and went into work. Sure enough, the whole network had slowed to a crawl. She sniffed the network packets and found a ton of activity coming out of the ftp server she had set up for the graphic arts department. She went down there and asked the graphic artists what was going on, and they told her innocently that they had placed a file on the ftp server and told the client to download it. She asked what kind of file it was, and they told her it was a digitized video with some animations they had created spliced in. Her eyes went wide, and she asked them how big the file was. Puzzled, they said that they didn't know and clicked on the file to view its properties.
I forget what the exact number was, but I think it was on the order of 10 gigabytes -- all being transfered over a small DSL connection. I remember calculating how much time the transfer would take if the company's entire bandwidth was dedicated to that one file and that the transfer happened consistently at the fastest possible rate. It came out to something like three and a half days. Lynda just about broke down an wept. She stopped the file transfer, had the graphic arts department burn a DVD, and had them FedEx the movie to the client. The movie got there faster than the ftp transfer would've taken.