Wannabe Techies

Why is it that every idiot who has ever replaced a hard drive thinks they can do my job?

A small business that I do a little side work for wanted to hook up a wireless router so the owner could access the internet on his new laptop. I advised against it for security reasons. Even though you can lock down a wireless router pretty well, its still not 100% secure and I'm not comfortable running one in a business environment until they become more secure.

For whatever reason (maybe they didn't want to trouble me with it... maybe they didn't want to ask since I advised against it), they called Dell and had them send someone out to install it for them. So Dell sends out one of their fine service contractors to install the router.

Surprise, surprise... this morning, I get a phone call. Only about half the people in the office can connect to the network. After hearing about the installation of the wireless router, I immediately suspected the problem.

"Where is that wireless router connected?"

"Well, there's a grey cable going from the back of it to the blue box."

(Translation: the "blue box" is a Linksys router/firewall I had installed a few weeks ago.)

"Unplug that cable from the back of the blue box and restart the computers that can't get on the network."

Voila! Problem solved.

If this idiot was too stupid to hang a router off the back of another router without turning off DHCP, he clearly hasn't got a clue how to set up any kind of security. I'd be willing to bet I could have driven over there and gotten on their network without batting an eye. No WEP, no MAC address filtering (clearly, or the clients in the office wouldn't be getting an address from it)... NOTHING.

Now... I realize that this person is not an employee of Dell, but Dell most certainly should be screening their independent contractors better than this. Dell's in-house network team does a great job supporting servers. Why would they send someone so completely unqualified to do an installation for a small business?

I don't get paid NEARLY enough...

Posted by geekchik at July 20, 2004 09:39 AM