NCR?

Wincor Beetles are equally bombproof, but we're not exactly talking modern systems here.

Our beetles ran a highly customised install of '98, and still used BNC networking as the shielding of the cables was useful to compensate for the environment they were in.

You think getting dimms is hard, try finding new ISA BNC network cards. We had to get the damn things custom made in batches.

@Mosquito

It is the introduction; first part of a set. There will be additional articles with details as to what was attempted and what we suceeded/failed at.

Insufficient info

I second that. This article has left me with more questions then answers. I too am a bit puzzled as to what the details of the 'hellish' weekend are. Very little hard facts or useful info.

@Gordan

I can RAID drives. DIMMS, not so much.

As to redundancy...difficult to do on an SME budget, but I'd like to think we don't do too badly. I've learned the hard way some failure points, while others I was fortunate enough to see coming. The La Cie isn't something I would /ever/ use as a primary device. It was hoped however that the thing would serve as a temporary storage point during the move. Not so much, apparently.

As to fans issue; good fans will give me three years. The fans that don't give me a single year irk me greatly. We can't afford IT bodies in all sites, so we are reliant on yearly preventative maintenance. Fans that refuse to give me even that year...I'll not be buying from that company again.

Any decent sysadmin plans for redundancy within the budgetary parameters given them. There is that point however where you do have to trust hat some of your components will stay up some of the time; a minimum service life if you will. If only because the primaries have to be operational whilst you are upgrading the backups.

@Peter2

I have three Model Ms. Every one of them gets a good dishwashering (NO SOAP!) followed by a three day air-dry. Take the caps off the keys first, or you'll spend the next few days picking them out of the dishwasher.

Works like a charm. There was a rumour about the nets that this was the recommended way of cleaning the things in their original manual. I though "what the hell, worth a try" and haven't looked back since. More than two decades of this with my first one, and well over a decade with the other two. No problems so far. Of course, the water in my city is very soft...I have no idea what a dishwasher with a lot of minerals in the water would do.

Voip downtime

Can't comment directly on the Cisco voip stuff. I use Asterisk - and indeed, I had my share of problems with it. However, once all of them are ironed out - it tends to be pretty reliable. It is a software under continuous development - with new thinks added all the time - lots of them very useful. I tend to think of the occasional problems as the price to pay for the amazing amount of flexibility and great number of features it provides. And it is free :-)

@Pavlov's obedient mutt

I can't speak to the "legal" part of the editing...but it definitely reads significantly different than written. My editor tries to compress my articles into as small a space as possible; I fear I have not yet learned the art of telling my tale in few enough words. ("Be ruthless, you know it makes sense!") Overall I think he's an excellent editor. I like to think that any improvement at all in my writing style is due to his hard work and the kind advice of several folks at El Reg.

I was hoping that this article would serve as an introduction to a short series of articles based on a particular hellacious network migration I recently underwent. Unfortunately, that introduction contained a lot of lead-in and ended up being about three hundred words over limit. I can’t really comment on the resultant article; it would be the ultimate height of arrogance to comment on one’s editor’s style. Frankly, I’m new enough not to have much experience in what “sells,” other than I write (and talk) way too much.

The ultimate measure though is whether the readers here like my articles or not. While for all other articles I’ve been merely posting links to them on my personal blog. I am allowed to post the full unedited articles there after a few weeks have passed since their publication on El Reg. It might be an interesting experiment to post the “Doomsday Weekend” articles in full and have some folk read the edited and non-edited versions.

That, and my editor has kindly offered to take me through editing one of my articles step by step. With luck, from both I will learn what people like and don’t like. Stylewise, my articles (when they reach my editor) read no different than my comments. I have a lot of learning to do before I can pare my writing down enough to produce articles that don’t need editing at all…but I’m learning!

Model M dishwashing.

My understanding is that the model M can be dishwashed, but doing so does lead to contacts getting wet and i've heard that it can lead to those contacts going rusty.

I wouldn't want to do it without disassembling it to dry bits off, which defeats the object. Otherwise you'll probably be knocking a fair bit off the expected in service lifetime.

It might only last 50 years instead of a hundred. :) (well hey, mines at ~25 years at the moment) I have visions of still using my indestructible model M when everybody else is using some advanced holographic keyboard along the lines of a VKB in 2100. Assuming I live that long.

P-Series Reliability

I would have shared your sentiment regarding premium hardware up until the last few weeks. We've had a bad run of late with our P-series boxes. In a way they remind me of a Wintel server vendor I ran across years back - they had triple redundant power supplies, triple redundant fans. Wintel servers might crash more often, but P-Series crash more spectacularly due to the critical loads we tendto pile onto them.

All the virtualization and premium hardware in the world will not replace physical redundancy as a core architectural principle for "critical" systems (which are not properly identified in most environments - if everything is critical, nothing is). I had one client (you know their name but that's all I'll say) that actually ran "redundant" application clusters on different partitions on the same physical box. I had another that put an entire n-way redundant farm on the same SAN. I had another that back-ends *every* server in their environment with SAN - anyone care to guess what happened when someone accidently bridged the A and B fabrics?

@alphawave

I use no alias. I make mistakes, same as any other human being. I will fess up in public in the hopes that others can learn from my mistakes. The fact that I have made these mistakes is called “experience.” You screw up in some way once and then tend not to do so again. For the record though: I don’t happen to work in one of those lovely environments with unlimited budgets, massive amounts of free time and adequate manpower for every task. Quite the opposite: I am regularly tasked with doing the impossible on a shoestring budget. Some times I make it…many times I don’t.

It certainly doesn’t make for bragging rights. I don’t get to stand up in front of all the commenters on El Reg and proclaim “here’s how I pulled off the perfect everything with no mistakes whatsoever.” It does is keep me humble. With luck, it will help a junior sysadmin or two avoid the same errors that I have made. Additionally it gives some of the commenters here on El Reg a reason to feel superior: many of you have avoided the mistakes I have made. Some have avoided these issues due to superior foresight, some due to superior experience and many due to superior availability of resources.

Whatever the case…I don’t try to hide my faults, or my mistakes. I would rather honestly make a mistake (and own up to the consequences) than bury the truth and be hired/respected/whatever on false pretences.

My blogs are my experiences in IT. The good, the bad, the hideously ugly. If it means that an IT recruiter looks at my articles and believes that I am completely incompetent then so be it. That is a consequence of my choice to try to pursue writing. I have often been told “write what you know.” Much of my life has been devoted to IT. Combine that with a personal philosophy of never sugar coating anything and you get El Reg’s Sysadmin blog.

Warts and all.