[tres]

Ha, my first gig with a hosting company, 2950 was at the top of every. single. rack. We grew that company from a rack to about 40 racks using 2950s. Each one of those racks had hundreds of VPS customers. We didn't have issues with 2950s not doing what they needed to do, in fact, they were perfect for the job -- performance, price and design were just right & the success of the business kind of underscores that.

Later on, I was working a network overhaul at a private college dedicated to video game creation (DigiPen). Each student was provided a desktop with their own roaming profile. These profiles got huge because there were things like 3D Studio Max projects being transferred to whatever computer the student happened to be at during that period. So we're talking about hundreds of students signing on at about the same time & massive amounts of data being transferred in a very short time. The old network topology was melting down on a regular basis causing the entire campus to come to a halt.

We fixed that by putting in a pair of -- you guessed it -- OpenBSD/PF routers. Now this wasn't some "oh crap" kind of bandaid fix; we had planned this all out & implemented over the summer months when there were no students. It was all planned out (the only problem was that the original plan called for FreeBSD & PF, which crashed -- once we had OpenBSD running, it was 'set it & forget it.')

Maybe I'm just too dumb to know the difference, but those 2950s and OpenBSD routers helped me sleep a lot better at night... they were perfect for what they were intended to do.

And as more than a decade of experience since has proven, the right tool for the job is often the one that gets scoffed at as a "toy" or good "for small projects."

[scurvy]

You monitored those ports for drops, buffer errors, and discards? You alerted when they occurred? Most don't watch the right counters or log messages. Even then, I guess you can get away with it if your customers aren't savvy enough to complain. Detecting microbursts in a VM would be impossible. Ignorance is indeed bliss.

One of my first bosses thought his Dell switches were awesome until I showed him all of the drops.

Also, roaming profiles were a great idea in principle and a horrible idea in practice. There's a good reason those things went away circa Windows 2000. ;)