Eric Stewart: Running Off At The Mouth

Related to my previous post about “The Network As A System”, during my time on call, I got another request that stated: “I need a port opened between 10.0.0.24 and 10.0.0.56. I know they’re on the same subnet, but I’m getting timeouts when trying to connect between them.”

The thing is, they weren’t on the same subnet.

We have an on call rotation at $JOB where, for a week, a given engineer is responsible for responding to after hours phone calls as well as tickets and ACL requests. During a recent turn of mine with the football, I got an ACL request that didn’t make sense, and after working it through with the DB Admin that made the request, I figured I’d write this. It’s sad that it’s probably mostly networking people that read the blog, because they already understand everything this will explain. It’s the DBAs, Developers, and other IT support personnel that could benefit from what I go over here.