Cutting costs could also mean you will have budget to hire more people and/or address other problems.
Infrastructure budget cannot be used to increase headcount. We aren't allowed to classify any more interns as servers.
Cutting costs could also mean you will have budget to hire more people and/or address other problems.
Infrastructure budget cannot be used to increase headcount. We aren't allowed to classify any more interns as servers.
I know I'm late to the party and all but I have to ask:
How do the autism rates in Japan compare with those in the West? Because if mercury causes autism, it should be an epidemic in Japan since they get more mercury than anyone (they eat a lot of fish and their local oceans are a bit of a toxic hell-stew).
@chubertdev said:Wondering why I was just assigned a project when my last day is Friday.Hah. Wait until Friday to ask why.
Swing by a pet supply place and pick up a couple of live crickets and leave them in your drawer. That way when someone comes by on Monday to ask about it, there'll be a proper cricket sound to go with your empty workspace.
Even though it is the holiday season and I will soon have all the snide, cutting remarks and passive aggressive abuse that only family can provide, I would relate the tale of my last few days and let strangers on the Internet tell me how unbelievably stupid I am and how I am truly the real .
It was time for our yearly power system maintenance (last performed circa 2009). We would have to disconnect the server room power from the generator circuit for a couple hours. Since the in-rack UPSes don’t have anywhere near that kind of runtime, all of our servers would need to be shut down. This bit went relatively smoothly other than an “identical” spare part from 1995 not fitting in place of a failing part from 1985.
While everything was down, I thought I’d have a look inside our anaemic, 10 year old e-mail server in case it might be possible to add more RAM (it chugs so very hard with only 2GB). This is the point at which my employer became totally justified in firing me, should they choose to do so. It seems that the server was not, in fact, hooked into one of its rails but only balancing there. So when I went to pull it out, it fell over and went clonk. It didn’t actually fall out of the rack but it did stop very abruptly. I hooked it in correctly and shoved it back into the rack with some profanity.
When it came time to power everything back up, surprisingly almost everything came back except that e-mail server. The RAID BIOS showed a failed disk in the mirror (never did figure out why it didn’t boot from the 2nd disk). Apparently 10 year old SCSI disks don’t like being banged around. This is where I made my second firing mistake. I removed the failed disk to have a look at it. When I put it back, the RAID BIOS decided that it was good and that it was the primary disk in the array and proceeded to rebuild the mirror over top of the other disk, resulting in a disk that was bad and another disk that was a perfect copy of a bad disk.
Much wrangling within the RAID BIOS ensued but there was nothing for it. It was Belgiumed. It was now about midnight and tomorrow was a work day so I ventured to the tape safe and retrieved the image hard drive from the last time one of my predecessors broke the e-mail server. Written across it in bright red letters:
Corrupted Drive – Do Not Use for New Images
With that auspicious start, I find the server image, finally figure out that it is a “PartImage” image and set out to the Internet to download a recovery CD to let me restore it and get back to business. Let’s digress for a moment and talk about PartImage. W. T. F. is up with imaging software that, when you use compression to save the image neglects to properly indicate that it is a compressed image meaning that you need to rename the image files in obscure ways and / or perform command line shenanigans to properly restore it? Some days I think that @blakeyrat’s stance on OSS is hyperbole and then I’m faced with this kind of shit and I think he’s totally right and we should form a cult based on his writings on the DailyWTF preaching the gospel of Windows good, death to open source.
So, fresh new disks in the machine (‘cause why not?). Image installed using minor Linux command line wizardry. Fire it up and... no boot. Disk looks good when viewed from the Linux recovery CD but won’t boot. Can we make a Windows Server 2003 boot disk? We can (that this server is old enough to still have a floppy drive should tell you everything about it you need to know). Boot from the disk, server boots but won’t connect to the domain. It's wanting the local admin password to log in and see exactly what state it’s actually in. Usual admin passwords for these sorts of things don’t work. Where would we have recorded such a password? After briefly considering “solving” this problem by typing up a letter of resignation and leaving it on my boss’ desk, I set out on an epic quest through our procedures and setup specs to try to find the password. Never did find it but I did run across a “bare metal Exchange server disaster recovery” procedure.
At this point, I’ve had enough trying to get the original server back. I’ve still got the mail store (conveniently on an external SCSI array that didn’t get dropped). Waited around (for about an hour) for my boss to come in so that I could make sure that I wasn’t completely out of my mind by starting fresh then pave the server, reinstall everything following disaster recovery procedure, spend way too much time working out the 3 steps omitted from disaster recovery procedure and get it all back up so that the company can resume “normal” operations. Final tally:
Without e-mail: 9pm – 1pm next day.
Without sleep: 26 hrs.
Without BlackBerry connectivity: still (but I can probably write another one of these just on the myriad of things wrong with BES 10).
Without good, working, tested image of critical servers: never again 🔫
Replaced broken dryer belt on mother's dryer. Sliced open hand on sheet metal so blood sacrifice has been provided and it is a true and good home repair...
Conversation w/ Accounting manager re: hypothetical catastrophic failure of our ERP system:
how long can you live without it?
3 - 5 days but not 2 days before / after the end of the month (to do month end) and not for the 2 weeks that the auditors visit every year
@Intercourse said:
Disaster Recovery
This is one of those things you have to have to check a box on the CIO's list of toys all my friends have so I want one too or I'm gonna throw the mother of all tantrums in the toy store. But no one actually tests it until you need it and that's when you find out that the backups are being piped to dev/nul and the CIO's intern nephew has been using the space to host the biggest warez site on the 'net.
@smallshellscript said:you'll have to transplant a disk controller.Sadly, I've actually gotten this to work a few times...
As have I, regrettably. Though if you hit the disk with a mallet until the platters start making a tinkling noise, you can avoid having to try it.
Conversation w/ Accounting manager re: hypothetical catastrophic failure of our ERP system:
how long can you live without it?
3 - 5 days but not 2 days before / after the end of the month (to do month end) and not for the 2 weeks that the auditors visit every year
The US insists that I file taxes every year being a citizen and all. Since I live and work in communist Kanuckistan, I never actually pay anything thanks to our tax treaty and somewhat higher tax rates but do the paperwork and send it in or else...
@accalia said in Cartman sucks at hardware:
where do they go to destroy a city after Tokyo is rubble?
San Fransisco. Especially in western made movies because Hollywood hates San Fransisco...
@Nagesh said:
if English had won 100 years war, then we would not have to suffer this
We beat the French on the Plains of Abraham in 1759, guess what we got for it...
@blakeyrat said:
@Tsaukpaetra said:
Really? People would really try to type out something like afebb01aa3?
They'd HAVE to on their tiny-ass touch-screen cellphones and tablets, or using the D-pad of an Xbox One controller, and hate and curse your shitty password with every character.
Particularly iOS devices. Fucking . Let's nest the numbers down a level and the common symbols down 2...
@Tsaukpaetra said:
@smallshellscript said:
if you give your users a new WiFi password without sufficient special characters, they will try to type it by hand
Really? People would really try to type out something like
afebb01aa3
?
Filed under: Full disclosure: That is the actual WEP password on the AP I keep for my legacy Nintendo DS systems
I favour sentence'y passwords with possible strategic replacement of characters if you need more apparent entropy (see XKCD about "Horse Battery Staple" that I'm too lazy to look for). I watched one manager pull up the email with it in and then try to type it into the password dialog (making that very mistake). Just need to watch out for Il in future.
PS - if you're using WEP, your AP is open anyway. Might as well turn it off.
TIL: if you give your users a new WiFi password without sufficient special characters, they will try to type it by hand. And the fact that Outlook 2010's default font lacks serifs means that upper case i and lower case L will bite you in the ass...