The networking world has long known that accepted standards are the best way to achieve interoperability. When is the last time you worried about uplinking a 3Com switch to a Cisco switch? But how about getting Apache on Linux to pass application server requests to IBM's WebSphere Application Server on Windows 2000? Or figuring out why Microsoft's implementation of DNS doesn't play well with BIND? Or ... well, you get the picture.
Through this implementation we've been DBAs, system and network administrators, software installers, and wire monkeys. And we were working under some tight deadlines. We had less than two months to procure the hardware, software and facilities upgrades to make this lab happen. Why? The same reasons you'd cite for such hurry-up-and-do-it projects in your organization: budgetary constraints, corporate red tape and politics, and the need to get the business up and running so we could start selling our widgets.
Although we ran into late shipments and downtime courtesy of electricians ripping up the place--not to mention running out of caffeine more times than we can count--nothing frustrated us more than dealing with the applications necessary to run this little business we created. In fact, after listening to us vent about some database issues, contributing editor Don MacVittie's only comment was: "Welcome to the real world."
One of the most common causes of application problems is that people who write software make assumptions. And while some of those assumptions are good, others are just downright asinine. Take Microsoft DNS, for example. If you aren't networked when you install it, it will decide you want to be a root server. That's an example of an assumption that ought to be a configuration option. When you finally do network that machine, guess what? You can't do anything but resolve addresses in the configured zones. Our directory server (ADS) was the first machine we installed, and we didn't have it networked because we didn't have our switches yet. When we finally hooked it to a switch and set up routing to give the machines Internet access, you can imagine our consternation. And to add insult to injury, the cure wasn't pleasant: We deleted the "." zone, and every last pointer record in the reverse-lookup zone was deleted along with it. As for Microsoft DNS, well, address resolution stopped working entirely.
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FYI
Having integration anxiety? The Interoperability Clearinghouse seeks to "promote mechanisms for assuring the successful implementation of enterprise technology solutions." Members include Boeing, Microsoft and a number of government agencies, including the CIA, DARPA and NIST. See a complete list at www.ichnet.org/members.php.
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And it's certainly not just Microsoft. IBM made some assumptions during the configuration of WebSphere Application Server that drove us batty. You can configure WebSphere to use IBM's HTTP Server (based on Apache) or Apache. In the last stages of the installation a dialog box pops up and asks for the location of the Web-server configuration file. Sweet. We set up a quick Samba share on the Web server machine and selected the file. IBM takes care of adding the necessary configuration to the file. Cool, right?
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