With the New Year comes another desk move and with another desk move comes inevitable irritations. I've given up having my desk-phone number listed on our internal directory; it changes so often that there is little point having it listed and there is no point having it on business cards. But that is a minor irritation; what I know is going to be a pain is getting the various firewall rules changed so that I get access to the various boxes that I support. Something is going to get missed and the first time we realise it has been missed will be when we need to access it in a hurry.
Perhaps the various vendors could get together and agree on standard management ports for their arrays and devices; that'd be nice. And perhaps, you could document which ports are required to be open in one place! The number of manuals I have to go through at times; there will be one for the web-GUI, one for the CLI interface, another one for the desktop GUI and then another one for the reporting tool; almost inevitably, these will be in separate manuals. This sort of information needs to be included in the 'quick start' guides but rarely is.
Sounds like you need a different phone system / firewall. Our phones are logical numbers, so you login to the phone as you and it becomes your number…
All our systems are firewalled via set of servers and the user is the access criteria, not network port.
The phone thing is nifty as it means I can login at any UK IBM site and it becomes my number.
I agree re: the standards for GUI & CLI but I’d argue that these already exist. Shame on stupid vendors that don’t use 80/443, all equipment should be using a web GUI by now or standard SSH for CLI.
You could get around some of your issue by having a remote desktop somewhere to log in to and manage from there in a pinch!
Finally, your telco department should be more on the ball, these days your number should be able to travel with you to different buildings, etc. unless your company is still using a realy old system which might be the case since despite common perception… there is little ROI to replace a paid for working PBX.
Love your blog!