On the ‘net: Three for the week

Because this is a short week, I’m going to combine three places I showed up on other sites recently.

The lessons of trying to prevent failures, rather than live with them, is something I saw this in my time in electronics, as well. World events conspired, at one point, to cause us to push our airfield equipment into operation 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, for a period of about 2 years. For the first 6 months or so, the shop was a very lazy place; we almost took to not coming in to work. We painted a lot of walls, kept the floor really shiny, reorganized all the tools (many times!), and even raised a few shops and sheds at various people’s houses. After this initial stretch, however, the problems started. Every failure turned into a cascading failure, taking many hours to troubleshoot and repair, and many replaced parts along the way. —ECI

I was also featured on the IT Origins series over at Gestalt IT.

A while back yet, but Shawn Zandi and I I also talked to Greg Ferro over at Packet Pushers about white box switching.