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Ask HN: Do you refuse to do stupid assignments?

4 points by methou ↗ HN
Background:

I'm a systems engineer, back in a few weeks ago there was a wifi outage in several meet rooms. The incident has affected a few C ranking officers' access to the internet. The company president went outrage and CTO offered my manager to set up a few android pads to monitor the WiFi connection.

I told the manager that it's stupid thing todo and why in detail, anyway, he could not say no to the CTO. We eventually bought 10+ Android pads and placed them around the workspace. He setup a simple automation flow to log WLAN connection and disconnection events to a txt file, and each week we will have to manually fetch the file and put it into an Xls file.

Situation:

It's my shift this week. Should I say no to this kind os BS? Or should be quitting the job, this happens inclines that a lot of things that have gone wrong already.

8 comments

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actionowl
> each week we will have to manually fetch the file and put it into an XlS file.

Could you just automate this bit? Please your boss and remove the manual task from your duties?

methou
I could but it's doesn't change the nature of the job.
svecoldr
We use PRTG with tons of sensors to catch situations like that.

Imho: The requirement to alert when WIFI is down is not stupid.

methou
I have snmptraps and rsyslog for monitoring, the management somehow don't believe things from the AC/AP, as they are data from the "vendor" or something.
lazylizard
All of that failed to prevent that outage. Someone failed to convince your management that the wifi wont go down again..
yorwba
Monitoring can't possibly prevent outages. All it can do is alert someone when an outage happens.

Based on OP's description, it sounds like that alert will be up to a week late, because the connectivity data is aggregated manually.

lazylizard
His existing monitoring setup has snmp traps n rsyslog involved somehow? It didnt detect the outage soon enough for them to prevent the issue from escalating into...whatever it is now...

I mean...end user complaints is the cheapest kind of monitoring solution but maybe its not politically acceptable?

You could totally do redundancy and failovers and stuff. And perhaps automate some of that. And monitoring is there to detect the "down" to trigger some of these?

lazylizard
Um. Monitoring is not stupid. If you have a better solution to the problem. Thats not stupid either. Your problem is wifi availability. I think?