Control is only an illusion, no matter what you shove on the Netware share Welcome to Who, Me?, The Register's timid delve into the dark past and dastardly deeds of our readers. Today's tale comes from a reader who was hoping for a pseudonym along the lines of Thor, Clint or maybe Butch. Luckily for him, our patented pal, the Reg-onymiser, has gone one better and elected to call him "Neil". Here at …
We had an OLAP database that needed recalculating every 3 hours (month end financials). OLAP back then was slow and recalculating a full cube was "inefficient" - it would take 4 hours. Exporting the bottom rows (i.e. source data) dropping the database and reloading needed about 40 minutes.
So, export, delete, load and calculate it was...
Except, one day, I started with the second step instead... AARGH!
My colleague said, just load the previous export and blame it on the users! Instead, I had a quick word with the finance manager, explained the situation, restored from the previous export and then replayed the transaction log. We got all but 4 entries back! I was applauded for my honesty... Its great having a good boss.
I did the exact same once or twice myself, fortunately was able to recover also. Also exported a blank cube over a good backup once or twice too. Usually came about when hacking build scripts for other purposes.
Essbase how I loved and hated you.
Although it was far better that the first consolidated version of OBIEE that included it. That had so many poorly documented interdependencies between components that the UAT system accidentally got connected to Prod and wiped during one memorable tenure at a major bank. That was a 4 day outage in financial reporting. My team weren't responsible but as the Ops team we had to fix it. I had to write up the RCA. TL:DR only full network segregation between UAT and Prod would have stopped it, and since it took 6 months to get approved ports open between UAT and Prod networks we never went down that route. The concept that there may have been good reasons (DR and Prod Copies) to pass data and config between networks never seemed to occur to our Info Sec team.
Still I had the pleasure of my resident tech genius giving Oracle product development (we actually got to the product developers!) a good shoeing on the technical ins and outs of their own product.
Yes, and it was still Arbor Essbase back then. We used Arbor Essbase for reporting and Hyperion for data collection. Hyperion bought Essbase out shortly before I moved on to the next project.
I miss Essbase, it was fun to develop on and its pivot table concept in Excel was a lot easier to grasp than Microsoft's own interpretation.
Oh I've heard the words all right, but the sphincter-loosening generally comes when I answer "Well, I guess you're data is screwed then".
That has happened a few times in my life, and once to person that I had personally counseled on backups prior to the incident. In any case, it's always followed by much gnashing of teeth, pulling of hair and some wailing about how life is unjust and can't I really do anything ?
No, I can't. You hard disk is dead. The solution is the backup I told you you needed. Now you know why you needed it. Now, you can still send your disk to a data recovery center. How much ? Oh, between $50 to $1500. You don't have that kind of money ? Like I said, a backup is the solution. Sorry.
Yep. Been there, done that, at least a dozen times.
The last time was my daughter. She had her Bachelor thesis on her Mac. I was paying for 1TB of OneDrive for her and had given her some USB thumbdrives.
She packed her MacBook Pro in her rucksack along with her coffee thermos and drove home from her lecture... Only she forgot to double check the thermos before throwing it in her bag. The Mac showed a lovely fractal pattern on its screen. But the MBP itself was dead, deceased, pushing up daises. The fluid and sugar also hadn't done the HDD any favours either. Even after thoroughly drying it out, it was dead (probably didn't help that she had tried to start it a couple of times before calling me).
Lesson learned, she let me put Carbonite on the new Mac.
Stick a NAS somewhere in her home that has the Time Machine stuff on it, make it accessibe via wifi, configure it on the Mac, then, everytime she turns it on at home, it will back up without her having to do anything. It is also super-easy to restore from it, either individual files if you accidentally delete something, or the whole system it it b0rks for any reason.
Everyone else. Please copy this. This is how you do backup.
Sure, but a backup procedure that isn't carried out is completely useless. If your backup routine requires you to plug/insert something into your computer, press some buttons, wait for ages, and remove the aforementioned thing from your computer; most people will forget to do it. Set up something that requires zero effort to do, then you will at least get some sort of backup.
This post has been deleted by its author
NB: it is trivial to roll your own TM on any unix via shell -- I wrote mine in '96 on SunOS, just to get round a company's lack of source-control tools and to facilitate tiny per-client diffs in source autoexpanding to custom client-specific full-installs. In essence, run a find over $SOURCEROOT to walk the tree, create $DESTROOTNEW dirs on on any dir node, on all other nodes diff $SOURCEROOT $DESTROOTOLD, if no change create link in $DESTROOTNEW, else copy new file to $DESTROOTNEW. The end.
TM uses hardlinks; I used symlinks for easy auditability.
Quite useful for graphics+video workers actually. Intra-workingday TM backups explode as even tiny changes in multigb files each get a full copy taken. Rollyourown to set cycletime differently for those directories, and to trim out unnecessary snapshots intelligently (e.g., keep rolling 10min snapshots for 3 hours' rollback horizon intraday, then only EOD).
And can do so across your whole backups too: add "compression" of old backups by trimming out old intra-month/intra-quarter/intra-sixmonthly/etc snapshots. Trivial to do: just inspect (regex) snapshot-sets' filename-timestamp-pattern, rm -ring any matching set.
Oh, been there before with this!
Had a user a few years back, his laptop was playing up so one of my team offered to re-image it for him. He backed up the user profile to an external drive, quickly checked the root of drive C for any other folders that looked none-standard, then ran one of our build sticks to re-image the laptop before transferring the guy's profile back and handing him the laptop.
10 minutes later, the guy returns: "Where's all my data?". Turned out the guy had created an incredibly vague folder on the root of drive C (something like C:\inf) and was storing all his files there, my engineer had missed it due to the vagueness of the folder name. We asked him if he had a backup "nope", and asked if he'd installed CrashPlan (the provided backup tool we have) "also a nope".
I explained his files were toast, only for him to suggest a specialised data recovery firm - adding "when the hard drive failed on my previous laptop, they managed to get the data back". My jaw dropped at this point. He'd almost lost everything only a couple of years earlier and STILL hadn't implemented backups.
Sure I re-iterated to all engineers the importance of double checking with all users in future to ensure we'd retrieved their old data before re-imaging. However when it comes to protecting data, some people are simply unbelievable beyond words...
Very early on in my career I've learned that most users are liars, cheats and they are never to be trusted. For that reason, my techies are NOT permitted to overwrrite or delete anything without a backup. If latop has to be re-imaged, the backup image must be created.- It saved us countless times.
Some users still bitch and moan about mundane things so every-now and then I have to let the worse offenders crash and burn.
Do a full disk backup rather than just copying their profile. Restore the profile to the re-imaged device but retain the backup for a couple of weeks. Make it clear that if they have anything missing it needs to be reported within a week (yes, the differing times are deliberate)
Not quite those words. I was called to a friend's house with a plea to fix their broken PC - it wouldn't start. Got there (in the next town) to find, yes, it definitely wouldn't start. "Do you have a backup disk?" I asked. "Yes" was the reply, "I bought one after you said I should." Great, I thought. It was a portable USB jobbie so I plugged it into my MacBook so she could check what was up to date and what wasn't. It was blank - she hadn't actually got around (in over a year) to actually running the backup software she'd also got with it! "All our family photos are on the PC, and my work files" she cried (she worked, part-time, from home for a local business). OUCH!
Some further digging around her PC and it looked like it might be a faulty motherboard, so I drove home to get a dongle so I could attach the PC's HD to my MacBook. Success, so I copied the whole drive over to the backup, just in case.
She now has a MacBook, provided by her daughter, set up on her desk with monitor, keyboard and mouse, with all the files restored to it, and the backup drive permanently attached - and TimeMachine running its hourly routine. She's a good cook and my wife and I got a good meal as a thank-you.
'"She's a good cook and my wife"
How very modern of you.'
Alternatively, rather than going for the cheap shot and a few easy upvotes, you could actually quote the full sentence - "She's a good cook and my wife and I got a good meal as a thank-you." - or does this not suit your personal agenda?
Reading the second sentence from the OP, "I was called to a friend's house with a plea to fix their broken PC - it wouldn't start.", it's pretty obvious that the OP fixed a friend's PC and as a reward that friend cooked a good meal for the OP and his wife.
She now has a MacBook... and the backup drive permanently attached
Better hope she doesn't get hit by ransomware, or lightning, or even something spilled over both.
There no thing as a 'backup' only 'backups', unless there aren't at least 3 additional copies of the data, one of which is offline and another offsite, it's not backed up.
Yes, lots of backups.
I was backing up my Amiga to three tapes. Had my backup fail to one tape. Then I realized that to test and track down the problem I'd need to use another tape to be sure it wasn't a bad tape. And that would leave me with only one more "good" tape.
Now that I use DVD's for backing up my important data I rotate through 10 RW DVD's. They are cheap enough and I don't have that much data.
Copy pasta has saved my life sometimes.
A PC is missing a DLL? All the computers in the office have the exact same windows install, just copy it from one PC to another. That even worked with Windows XP.
Dunno how well it works on more modern Windows.
There was also of course, the custom CD I made once a month to install all those stuff the morons, also known as the users, tended to delete from the computers for some reason.
Windows wasn't happy with a read-only folder
We ran a couple of thousand Windows 3.1 PCs from Netware 4 servers, all with read-only Windows directories. It wasn't completely simple or straightforward to configure, but it could certainly be done. Since the only local data was the swap file, it meant any failed PC could simply be swapped out and as soon as the user logged onto the server, everything was back to normal. No malware either, though once you could embed a virus in a document with the wonderful Visual Basic, that changed.
Word 6.0 was such a nightmare that the plugin to open word documents without macros was forcefully installed on every PC. We even added post it notes to the side of the monitors (easy to to since back then the things weren't flat) with instructions to NOT OPEN a word document with macros before using the antivirus on it and even then to try to open it without macros first.
I thought the same, but I think the story describes an attempt to run all the workstations from a single network folder.
The first PC network I set up consisted mostly of diskless workstations booting off the network. The server mapped the MAC ID to a 1.2Mb read-only network resource - you could just about fit a Windows 3.1 on a disk that size. The main problems were instability resulting from the need to shoehorn the network stack into extended memory, and the excruciatingly slow performance caused by keeping the paging file on a network drive.
You could fit the OS (DOS of some flavour), memory management tools and netware network drivers onto about 1.2MB if you restricted yourself to a couple of NIC drivers. From there, you could create a boot image for a diskless workstation.
The diskless workstation would boot to a Netware login prompt and once a user logged in, their home directory would have the writable files (i.e. *.ini) and the read-only files would sit in a network share.
It worked reasonably well at the time given slowish network/disk performance and Windows being reasonable consistent with DLL's. Printers were the biggest issue from memory where old printers need an early DLL while the newest printers required the latest and greatest and there were a lot of issues with backwards compatability. For some apps (AutoCAD spings to mind) that wouldn't play nicely, they got their own Windows share to reduce compatability issues with other office apps.
You did better than I did.
As part of a regular networking column I was writing for Practical Computing (we're talking 1987 here), I got an IBM shop to install a TR network in the editorial office. Everyone was very pleased - until we fired up the PCs and found that there was only just room in 640k to run the network stack - but not to run anything useful, like WordPerfect.
Out went the network on everyone's PC apart from muggins here, who had to write about it every month. I had two config.sys files, and rebooted to write, then rebooted to connect as this was before EMS. Those weren't the days...
There is a version that works on XP I used to run. Great fun.
Just checked, and screensaversplanet have a method for getting it to run in 64 bit windows by making it a DOSBOX application. Guess I will test that our when I get a break from helping panicking companies sort out their capacity problems with Remote Access.
For light admin and word processing for groups of up to 10 users we used NetWare servers with networked diskless PCs that got their DOS images from bootPROMs. Bit slow at 8:30 when everybody started up, but not too bad after that. A couple of bean counter admin types thought that they would be OK for shared database work with Windows 286, they weren’t. So everybody who was affected had their PCs upgraded with a 10MB hard drive. Then we had the fun of getting users to save their work onto their servers. They didn’t...
By not trying too hard you mean "Not even looking at the Wikipedia article". Said article links to this page:
https://www.screensaversplanet.com/screensavers/johnny-castaway-237/
That links a few workarounds.
Of course if you use Linux you can always "Wine" about it.
Wine 3.0 on PlayOnLinux has worked me well to run Windows 95 and older stuff, unless is Dos games, is better to use Dosbox for that.
There is also that Windows 95 app if you wanna risk it.
In the very, several years, gradual switchover from having no network or any kind of pro support ( just me, semi-trained and doing it alongside my real job) to having an actual IT team and a server and everything, no one higher-up seemed to plan in any kind of backup system, though I kept asking about it. We had maybe twenty staff members doing record keeping and report writing about very vulnerable kids, on a network, and no central back up system.
My colleagues were, by and large, pretty good at keeping second copies of their work on floppy - something they'd been doing on their standalone PCs.
But they knew there was no backup, because they asked about it.
Which meant getting them to stop saving to the local PC and copying the files to floppy was pretty much impossible. But the confidential nature of the files meant we shouldn't have been removing them from the premises.
It took the next two years to get the corporate IT team to provide a very simple backup system. ( It had taken me more than two previous years to even get the supposedly networked PCs to be given a shared storage area for shared files,templates etc. which was a partition on one of the PCs).
Four years later they still hadn't provided any kind of off-site backup, and I was still making CD copies of some core data and taking it off-site.
And I'm pretty sure that many staff members were doing the same with their precious work.
Many years ago, I was running a set of SCO boxes (remember them?). SCO had only one file in /, the rest of it was the usual directories. /unix
So in a moment of absent mindedness about where I currently was in the directory structure I did "rm *".
Short pause. Oh shit. Actually, everything kept humming along, except a few things like "ps" stopped working.
Luckily, it was not a custom kernel, so I was able to grab one from the adjacent machine, while muttering imprecations on the lines of "please don't crash. please don't lose power"
Of course, you had sequence numbers on them as well. Don't want to "drop that deck"!!
No sequence numbers?? If you weren't too clumsy then the cards might fall is such a manner as they would be easily picked up "intact". I got lucky a couple of times, but not always!
Back in the the 60's Rowan & Martin did a sketch about the "One minute news", where after rehearsal, the cue card guy dropped and shuffled the cue cards. The result was what you might expect, pretty funny!!
Back in the early days of Windows 98, I was working for a small software company. We had a couple of guys working for us whose idea of troubleshooting was to simply re-install Windows. We managed to sell a system to a company in China, so a friend who worked for us (and spoke Chinese) spent many hours installing and configuring Mandarin fonts etc (a long and difficult job in those days). While he was getting the PC set up to work in Mandarin, another guy was configuring our software... one of those guys unfortunately. As it was new software and full of features (or bugs to the uninitiated) something didn't work. My friend left the other guy to resolve the issue. When he returned later, he was proudly told that the issue had been resolved.... by reinstalling Windows. It was not long after that, that we got rid of the re-installers.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
