Posts by Lusty

Re: sometimes...

I would assume that the majority of people in management positions are educated people, yes, and that they got there by understanding how to play well with others. The ones with the personality disorder are usually in the basement under fluorescent lights dealing with IT issues rather than in the penthouse office looking at the view and calling IT...

Re: sometimes...

"...it's OK to give shit "service".

It's my weapon against the "disrespectfully disorganised". You know, that senior manager that needs X by 6pm, and only bothers to call you at 5pm, even though it's been one of their "actions" from a meeting that took place 2 months ago."

No, it's not OK to give shit service, that just makes you shit at your job. Your job is to help the person with their IT. If you don't have SLAs in place to point at as the reason you can't help them in under an hour that is not their fault - you have essentially advertised an unlimited service to your users and they are using it. Why would they play within an imaginary set of rules they know nothing about?

Re: Yes !!!!!

No, I'm not a manager. I am, however, a techie who has understood the business side of the equation and knows what the managers want.

From the managers perspective, you have the support phone which is connected to the support number that IT gave him. He calls the support number expecting one of two scenarios:

1. Answering machine message saying it's out of hours and to leave a message.

2. Someone answers in which case the support line is open for business. He logs a call and gets help.

If you answer the phone, the support line is open - this is your fault if you answer out of agreed SLA hours, not his. If you don't have an SLA then this is either your fault or your bosses fault and you should work to fix it - again this is not the fault of the manager and certainly doesn't make him rude for calling the number you gave him.

Since you are therefore being paid to answer the phone, then yes it certainly is your job to convey information as to what is and is not supported by your support line. If the manager, the CEO, or $DEITY calls up and asks for a burger you tell them you don't do burgers and the educated person on the other end of the line will likely never ask you for a burger again. If they ask for help with something you support then log a ticket first and then help them to the best of your ability or escalate it.

Because you logged a ticket first, the business can see how busy and overworked you are, so next time you ask for a pay review or extra staff they will listen because you have the numbers. If you fail to log a ticket each and every time you answer the telephone, guess whose fault it is that your career isn't going how you'd hoped?

I'm not sure how you have translated that into managers having bad manners, or being childish. They are using a service that their business pays for so they can use it. If I ask the canteen for lobster they don't freak out because all they do is chips and peas...

Re: Yes !!!!!

And you think he's at fault? It is your job to stop that kind of nonsense, if you allow it to continue then it's your own fault. The correct response is that it's not something you support and therefore there will be no call logged - the conversation should be less than one minute. Managers are grownups believe it or not, and they will understand if you talk to them as such. If you treat them like toddlers why wouldn't they continue to interrupt your sleep when they need something - they know you'll answer them!

Big buildings like blocks of flats are way above Ethernet distance unless you go with fibre or add repeaters. Also, phone cables are already in - nobody likes to re-cable a building if they don't have to, especially a residential one where each property is owned by a different person.

"how were they able to browse on the kiosk in the first place?"

Most kiosks are just PCs with locked down configs, often just using a browser in kiosk mode instead of the normal shell so all it would take is not having the proxy/firewall stopping it and browsing would work fine.

Obviously on a well set up kiosk you couldn't browse, but kiosks are often implemented by first timers (as in first kiosk, not inexperienced staff) since it's not exactly the sort of thing you'd become an expert in and go consulting. Because of this it's likely many of them have "obvious" security holes. You're looking at this with 20:20 hindsight, but would you have thought of everything if you started fresh? Even with a thousand el reg vultures poring over your config?

Re: I can't get excited about gender imbalance on this occasion

My comment about parents telling them they are pretty was a single example of the conditioning that all children are put through as they grow up. Look at any toy shop - there will be one aisle of "girls toys" and one of "boys toys" and that's a prime example of the change in young people. Yes, you can tell your little girl that she can do anything she likes, but give her an easy bake oven and a pram for her 6th birthday and her brother a console for his 7th and subliminally what did you actually tell her? Allow her brother to go out in the mud while she stays in playing with makeup and brushing her hair and you can tell her what you like but inside her head it's not that she can do anything. Even if you don't stop her going out and playing in the mud, what if all she has are those pretty dresses and her brother has ripped jeans - you think she's going to ruin a princess dress in the mud?

Add to this the various media pressures both sexes face and you end up with a society that genuinely believes women prefer "women jobs" because they are genetically programmed to be more caring.

What I'm saying is lay off the "unfair workplace" nonsense and start a campaign to actively push parents to be gender neutral to fix the root cause and the rest will sort itself out. Give the boys makeup and get the girls playing on their skateboards and for the love of $deity, keep them away from comics and magazines and make sure there's an even split of movies and tv shows.

Re: Not just IT

As I said above, you can't attract women into STEM subjects if everything leading up to that point was brainwashing to create a preference against such things. The commonly held belief that girls prefer pink is a prime example - surround someone young and impressionable in pink for 10 years and tell them they love it and they will likely prefer pink. Just as computers were considered "boys toys" in the 80s don't forget girls were being given easy bake ovens and baby dolls in pushchairs as "girls toys". The workplace is complete as far as gender equality is concerned, the next steps are society and parenting, and articles such as this one are just distracting from that truth.

Re: NetApp customers

Not sure why you think the Azure/AWS stuff doesn't work. It's ideal for replicating data to be consumed within the cloud either on dedicated hardware with solid sovereignty for important or large workloads or on a software defined SAN with cloudy sovereignty for smaller workloads. It's also ideal for cloud migrations alongside project shift to reduce downtime during the move since you can mirror data disks to the cloud ahead of time.

Re: Doesn't surprise me...

You're clearly missing the point of NetApp. They do actually have a VSA appliance, as well as one for the public cloud, it's just that those of us who understand the value in NetApp never use them. Your HP VSA will definitely not have similar performance to the NetApp hardware solution for a start, but it also won't be able to cover you for backup purposes in quite the same way, so on your bill you will also need to pay for some kind of backup media be it d2d or tape libraries as well as a software suite to go with it. You also need to add to that mix the extra effort required to manage that backup solution and the extra bandwidth required to stream those backups around the place not to mention the strain on your virtual hosts in performing the backups. You're also missing the business benefits such as instant recovery of large data sets such as Echange databases, sql databases and the end user recoverable file data which can drastically reduce service desk calls and hence staffing.

I too get the money for services when selling NetApp, but it's because I justify my time by properly explaining performance and business benefits which the StoreVirtual cannot compete with.

Re: 4k video editing

You're ignoring the fact that this won't be worthless in a years time. If you want to swap out your computer then it's no more effort to swap out the screen at the same time, so sell this and get the new model. The Apple backup regime makes this extremely simple, and their resale value is second to none.

The real bonus here is that real professionals don't have time to fart about with drivers and upgrades. If your time is valuable it's much better to replace the whole caboodle and carry on working so component upgrades are less likely the further up the tree you go, especially given that for professional use as a tool, £2k is really not that much money!

Re: This is one issue that the EU could for once be useful on.

The EU are the ones who started it with the WEEE directive, why would they strive to make things less recyclable? These things are not allowed to go to landfill anymore, and you'd be surprised how little rubbish in the UK actually does go anywhere near landfill now with the various recycling schemes in place. I found that there's even a scheme to turn plastic into diesel the other day, and all those nasty batteries get frozen and smashed for recycling, but to get at them it's easier to melt some glue than have an army of slaves undoing screws. Sadly iFixit have a fairly simple view of the world and a single point to make over and over again so purposefully ignore these facts.

Re: Thinness.

No, it's their quest for WEEE directive compliance, meaning that devices need to be recyclable as cheaply as possible since it's the manufacturer paying the bill. A bit of heat and the iPad falls apart ready for separate recycling processes, screws make that impossible and so have been ditched by all of the sensible manufacturers. That this makes thinner devices more easily achievable is a happy side effect.

That almost nobody would get their devices repaired anyway seems to be ignored by everyone when these articles are published. Yes, we would all replace a broken hard drive in a recent PC, but how many people actually repair a TV, washing machine or microwave these days? My washing machine was replaced because a replacement pump plus labour would make it more costly than a shiny new one. I could have done it myself but to be honest I value my time more than the repair man valued his!

The fact that you don't agree doesn't make what I'm saying FUD, and what I'm saying is based on considerably more than a couple of years experience.

To make storage highly available you need to either have two controllers able to see the same blocks, or you need two separate copies of the blocks, one for each HA controller. Currently it's pretty much only SAN hardware which can do the former since SCSI died off, SAS switches are beginning to become available which will eventually allow multiple hosts to see the same disks for a reasonable cost. Until these become cheaper than SAN hardware then the alternative is the two copies approach which absolutely requires a round trip over the network which raises latency. This is a physics thing. If you genuinely believe your data is in a good place with only a single controller having access to up to date info then fair enough, our opinions differ perhaps based on the types of solution we work on. Again that doesn't make what I say FUD, it just means my customers value their data and its consistency more than yours do.

Trevor, the interconnect problem is certainly not the same for server SAN compared to traditional SAN (counting P4000 as server SAN in this instance). In a traditional SAN you send the data to the storage and it's confirmed as written, in the case of Violin this is done via the PCIe interconnect ideally or IB, Fibre for the less well off. With server SAN, that same write has to go out and back to the second copy server, usually via Ethernet over an Ethernet network. In almost every real world case this results in higher latency for the server SAN. Anything the server SAN guys say to the contrary is from their "testing" which ignores data consistency issues completely in favour of better stats. EMC, NetApp, HP, HDS never ignore data consistency for their tier 1 systems even in testing, hence the apparent difference to the layman.

As for using volatile memory for storage, the same is true - yes it's quicker, but only in the same way as strapping solid fuel rockets to your car. Survival rates are considerably lower in exchange for a faster ride.

In addition to the above, CPU and memory usage for modern SAN operations are huge. I don't really have that sort of spec to spare on my virtualisation platform, and if I did, it would have cost as much as a real SAN to purchase the extra hardware and more importantly software licences. For each virtualisation host with Windows and VMware you're looking at more in licence costs than hardware costs - these are usually ignored by the software SAN guys.