From the Recliner...

OK, I'll admit it, I'm a recovering Cisco junkie.  Well, actually, I haven't started my recovery yet, but I'm close to checking in to the rehabilitation center.  At my employer, we're used to saying "we're a Cisco shop" when asked about out networking and VoIP solutions.  What does that mean?  We do the Cisco thing in almost every way.  We were early CallManager adopters (think 2000), we deployed they're early PoE offerings.  We have Cisco Cat 6500's as core switches, 3750's (and older 3524XL's) at the edge.  Cisco wireless, Cisco routers, Cisco WAAS (WAN acceleration).  But, why?  Why are we only a "Cisco shop"?  We don't generally do this with other technology.  We normally look at the technology and pick what we thinks fits our needs and budget.  But when we needed networking or phones, we would just call Cisco and not even look elsewhere.  What's up with that? Continue reading "Leaving Cisco Behind"

OK, so I'm a small time email admin.  I work for a company with approximately 700 email users, nothing too big or exciting.  We send and receive several thousand messages a day, and block many thousands of SPAM messages a day.  Recently, we noticed that our outbound queues were backing up.  Of course there's always some traffic hung up outbound, people practising greylisting, email address typos, mailboxes that are full or temporarily unreachable, but we set a threashold and send alerts when the outbound queue goes over.  When we started getting alarms this time I went in a took a look a noticed that 90% of the mail in the outbound queue was to Yahoo.com addresses.  Things only went downhill from there. Continue reading "Why I hate Yahoo Mail"