The ears of a few well known networking companies must have been burning this week, as subscribers to the mailing list of the North American Network Operators' Group (NANOG) made their choices for the world's worst design decisions in networking gear.

These folk have plenty to complain about. After all, many of them are the guys'n'gals who get called out at night to fix your ISP connection. Their beefs (beeves?) center on features of networking gear that interfere with the efficient completion of their appointed rounds.

Examples include modules that can't be slotted into or out of routers easily; cable adapters that don't fit the equipment; sharp edges that cut engineers' hands; handles that don't work...

Here's a sampling of the choicer bits:

• "Why did Cisco not include side handles on the 12000 chassis? It's a heavy chassis, and I can imagine how many techs have thrown out their back moving that chassis around." (NOTE: Subsequently, the thread moved on to how the scissors-jack included with the product could lift a house, or double as an office coffee-table.)
• "Personally my issues are console-cable related: is there a benefit to the HUGE variety of console pinouts used by the various hardware vendors?"
• "Could people just pick ONE pinout and connector and stick with it? Please!"
• "I can't stand it when I sit down and find the keyboard in front of me has moved the 'backslash' key. It drives me crazy and prompts me to find a real keyboard right away to work with."
• "RJ45 connecters that have a rubber hood over the release. Grrrrr!"
• "The little clippy widgets (looks kind of like @) on some oldschool racks, that hold the nut in place for the hex-head bolt. Why these were considered desirable is beyond me."
• "The slimline DS3 patch panels. God help you should you need to do something with the two innermost wires on the back end of that -- there's barely room for pliers, much less fingers."
• "Any device whose physical characteristics make it a likely candidate to be shelf-mounted, yet which has side ventilation ports which will be blocked by the sides of a rack shelf."
• "Routers that will accomodate high density of OCx ports but only have the bus capacity to support a fraction of hem."
  
  

Vendors, take heed. Messages like the above insert a healthy dose of reality. Have a thought for the poor fellow who has to confront this gear in the middle of the night.

— Mary Jander, Senior Editor, Light Reading