You could copy the existing system used by librarians all over the continent.

Except that not all libraries use it. A lot (like the university I graduated from) use the Library of Congress Classification.

My goodness, would it kill you to state what an acronym stands for the first time you use it?

I think we need a federal stack exchange tax.

Let me give you a bit of problem solving advice. If the solution you arrive at involves taxes, you're doing it wrong.

The emulation isn't the most efficient. Without a decent CPU, you cannot emulate complex routing topologies. The biggest problem is that once you're emulating too many devices, you start dropping packets between them causing routing protocols to fail and effectively making the lab useless.

It's not clear to me the financial system needs such high precision timing.

A lot of it has to do with analytics and making sure your system is operating properly. Being able to compute network and software stack latencies often requires the clocks of multiple machines being very closely synced. NTP can't do it well enough in many cases. Without good synchronization, you end up (according to timestamps) receiving a packet before it was sent.

One question: with 1588 what sort of hierarchy do you set up? Does everyone have a rubidium or cesium clock attached?

A typical way is to use a GPS GrandMaster clock that outputs PTP. Some of these have good oscillators in them to keep good time if GPS dies for whatever reason. The tricky part is getting this time to many machines without bad drift.

All the tools suck. Firewalls cause more harm than good. The platforms are all mediocre. In my world (low latency trading), pulling firewalls out is one of the highest priorities if it can be done (legally and reputationally).

When Paypal says you have $100 in your account, they actually have that money somewhere waiting for you to withdraw.

What in the world makes you think that? Not only do they probably have the money in various forms of liquid and illiquid assets, but there isn't even FDIC insurance to protect you if they screw up.

Don't get me started on the silly political fallout of merging a network & SAN team in a large organization :-( (hint: the SAN team will lose as there are less of us)

Not sure how it happened, but somehow, where I work (a large company), SAN was another networking product from day 1. A storage team handles the endpoints much like a server team handles the endpoints on the IP network. But, we manage all the MDS and maintain the relationship with Cisco as we do for Ethernet/IP. It works well.

This kid brought a crazy lookin thing into school

Could you share with us your definition of a "crazy lookin [sic] thing"? I'm not very old and I brought homemade electronics into middle and high school on occasion and no one blinked an eye. If anything, this student's behavior should be encouraged and expected at a magnet school.

If wires sticking out of something are reason for alarm, then I think this clueless administrator would be very concerned if he walked around an engineering department at any university. This kid should not be punished for being precocious.

Though I worked throughout college, my sole internship was very well paid. I made approximately $30/hour plus housing stipend. This was working in technology at a financial firm. Companies who value technology are willing to pay for it. Never forget that.

So the behavior observed in our case was the clients get updated, but WSUS thinks only 1 client ever connected.

I know for a fact that WSUS (Windows Server Update Services... basically a centralized patch server) would do "weird, interesting" things when two machines tried to check into WSUS with the same SID.

I don't even work with Windows servers and I happen to know this from engineering some network infrastructure (load balancing) for the folks in our organization who do manage WSUS. Long story short, what they thought was problematic load balancing across WSUS servers was actually the same SID being used from 1,000+ cloned VMs. WSUS thought they were one machine.

SSD's don't perform nearly as well as 4 SATA drives in a decent RAID setup.

What are you smoking?

These are conservative numbers, and they show a commodity (Intel X25-M) MLC flash drive doing over 1,000 IOPS, but a typical 7,200 RPM SATA drive doing 100 IOPS. (Note, I rounded down for the SSD and up for the spinning disk.) So, SSDs are an order of magnitude faster at IOPS than platters. To get a 10x increase of write IOPS on a spinning disk, you'd need to use RAID-0 across ten disks. Hardly a good idea.

How about a MAC address?

MAC addresses are not known beyond your first-hop router, so this doesn't really work.