On 1/5/08, David Magda wrote:
This may sound funny, but people (try to) do this. We had developers who wanted to e-mail DVD installation ISOs to other developers over oceanic links via Outlook / Exchange. They found it didn't work so well and couldn't figure out why.
That's why I mentioned this specific issue, although perhaps I didn't make it sound seriously enough.
When I was working for the consulting company Snow BV in the Netherlands, and they had me working at a customer site just outside of Eindhoven, among other things I got into helping them do their mail systems administration for the entire company. They had about ~3500 people there at HQ, about 7000 total world-wide, with a large number of small sales offices distributed around the world, all tied back to the HQ offices via private WAN connections.
Each of the small sales offices had a single primary server on-site (ancient Sun SPARC SS20 boxes -- not UltraSPARC, but the original SPARC SS20) with 4GB hard drives, and they were connected back to the HQ offices with 64Kbps or 128Kbps fractional T-1/E-1 lines. This server was used for everything -- mail, shell, web proxy, everything.
We had a sales guy in the Taiwan sales office who decided to mail his entire CD and DVD collection to a customer (also in Taiwan), and he did so in chunks of 500-700MB each. Apparently giving music or video to a customer is a common sales tactic over there, and sales people think nothing of sharing their massive library of content at the drop of a hat.
As you can imagine, this one tiny SS20 with 4GB total disk capacity across the entire box had a combined mail spool/user mailbox storage capacity of about 700MB in total, of which some was used for storing user mailboxes (POP3, not IMAP), leaving the machine with a variable amount of available storage on that file system, although usually somewhere in the vicinity of 500MB.
So, "small" mail messages with just a 500MB attachment could potentially get through the system without too much pain, but larger mail messages would just run the entire box out of disk space on that file system and, more often than not, the machine would crash. And this would happen repeatedly, until whatever message that was larger than the machine could handle would finally get through or seven days would pass by and it would get bounced to the sender -- although he didn't have 700MB free disk space to store the message in his mailbox, and he would just re-send the message all over again.
This literally wiped out the entire Taiwan sales office for days and even weeks. No one else down there could get any work done. Problem was, none of them could diagnose what was going on or how to fix it, and it took them a long time to finally decide they needed outside help and called us to help them fix their box.
And this doesn't begin to discuss the cost of sending such massive messages across transatlantic WAN lines that have an exorbitant cost per kilobit transferred, and what that does to the ability to try to transfer any other content over those lines during that period of time.
I don't know how many sales to other Taiwanese customers may have been affected, but each system that this company sold cost tens of millions of dollars, so if they lost just one purchase, then that lost revenue would cost way more than any salary they could possibly have paid to the entire Taiwanese sales office in an entire year, and way more than it would have cost to replace all of the mail servers/services across the entire company -- many times over.
No joke. You just can't make up stuff like this. -- Brad Knowles <brad@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu>