Show NOCs: OIG report: Should you charge extra for NOC tours?

Thu Jan 7 22:22:53 UTC 2021

On Thu, Jan 7, 2021 at 1:49 PM Brandon Svec <bsvec at teamonesolutions.com> wrote:
>
> Don’t dismiss and underestimate the curiousity and amazement of those who have not seen such things in person.

Indeed. Not too long ago I was at the headquarters of an organization
which runs some "critical infrastructure".

In the lobby there are 5 or 6 racks behind glass, all lit up with
pretty blue lights. The racks have a bunch of Dell servers, some
multi-U copper switches, a couple of older routers, etc. The switch
lights all go blinky blinky, and the cables are all suspiciously
nicely dressed -- and in the very bottom of the last rack is an
Ixia...

Chatted with a friend who works there, and yup, the devices don't do
anything at all, and the Ixia exists purely to make das blinkenlights
blinken. The waste of power was quite sad, and we spent some time
discussing how much work it would be to rip the insides out of all of
the gear and replace it with some arduino controlled LED blinkers...
and then we got sidetracked and had lunch instead...

IIRC it was Foundry that had a few linecards that just had blinky LEDs
for use at tradeshow? -- 'tis much lighter and cheaper to ship a
chassis filled with LEDs than actual hardware...

W

>  In the San Francisco Bay Area and Silicon Valley area tourists come from around the world to see signs and parking lots of places like Google, Twitter, etc. it is easy for me to scoff at them, but I try not to.
>
> It is not really different than most other tourist attractions. Some are amazed and curious to see the largest ball of twine and some think it is ridiculous.
>
> Brandon Svec
>
>
> > On Jan 7, 2021, at 10:38 AM, Sean Donelan <sean at donelan.com> wrote:
> >
> > On Thu, 7 Jan 2021, Christopher Morrow wrote:
> >> almost all of this seems like ... really not worth the time for
> >> external people to bother with.
> >> which is maybe why: "Sure, you wanna visit? pay me" (Oh, now you dont'
> >> want to visit? ok, cool!)
> >
> > I'm imagining a bunch of MBA's at large carriers thinking, gee the NOC is treated as a cost center. How can we make the NOC a profit center?
> >
> > I know -- Let's sell NOC tour tickets!
> >
> >
> > On the other hand, NASA (or SpaceX) I would still go on a tour of Mission Control during a launch (geek out)
> >
> >

-- 
The computing scientist’s main challenge is not to get confused by the
complexities of his own making.
  -- E. W. Dijkstra