Accidental Spammers

[briany]

Every so often, you'll come across the 'accidental spammer'--the person who, through various mechanisms, sends out torrents of email that initially seem interesting but ultimately result in overwhelming annoyance

Comments

[vartan]

bleah, one of our clients was doing something stupid with a SAN they had and our service dept email address was the auto-notify POC for the built-in monitoring since we deployed it and our mailbox got something like 100 emails in the span of a few minutes because they were playing with things they shouldn't have (i.e. "the file server (aka fiber-channel raid) thing is acting funny, let's just keep turning it off and on, hey there's still lights on let's pull plugs out too")

also, I once turned on a full monitoring notification at a site I'm at once a week just because I was hoping it would help me catch some of their weird network problems and not only was my inbox promptly blasted with dozens of firewall denial notifications per minute, but things like minor temperature and fan fluctuations. whee.

[briany]

Anyone who thinks its a good idea to turn a SAN off and on repeatedly should be shot and fired. Not necessarily in that order.

Technology has progressed nicely in the last 10 years, but the fact remains that these things spin really fast and generate lots of heat...if the platters ever spin down and go cold, there's always a chance they'll never spin back up properly and you'll need to get a warranty replacement or fork over for another $1000 drive. To calculate that risk and accept it is one thing; to invite it freely is stupid. Never mind the risk to the controllers/supervisors.

Yeah, we're tweaking our monitoring as well. Several generations of network personnel ago had syslog entries going out as SNMP packets.

Our shiny new SNMP monitoring program, once configured to monitor the ASA's, promptly generated 19GB of database entries in 2 days. We fixed that config error and dialed back to "Warning" from "informational".