I lost an entire RAID 5 disk array due to bad ram. It was running Windows 2003 64bit server and one day I turned the screen on and noticed some artifacts and a completely locked up machine. To be sure it wasn't some freeze up in the GUI I tried accessing the shares which didn't respond.
So I was like ok great..time to do a hard shut down and reboot. Well, when it came back up I noticed my RAID array is no longer showing up in the shares or in disk manager. I was like..aww crap. I tried to rebuild the array via the built-in tools of the raid controller and it didn't work. Somehow it totally fuber the disk array tables to the point everything on my 5 320gig disks are trashed. Good thing the OS runs on a separate non-raid hard disk right off the motherboard's disk controller.
Nothing wrong with the raid controller and the drives. Just at the point of writing stuff to the drives RAM had to take a dump and totally froze the server.
Least to say I swapped out the ram modules with known good ones and never had a problem since. Lucky I regularly make backups of my critical stuff to another set of hard drives elsewhere.
I follow this moral code as my second religion, "Don't put all your eggs in one basket!"
Graceful shutdown: you have a chance to tell your buddies that your power just went out, and you'll be coming back once it's restored.
or if they're local, you get to see them timeout one after another and disappear as you are saving your documents and committing your databases.
The main unit in the basement holds for over two hours. (has two car batteries to munch on) but that's longer than my ISP evidently.
That brings up an interesting question about using car batteries since they all use 12volts. So is it safe to actually hook one up to the standard UPS provided the cables are rated for it? A typical UPS battery is only like 7 Amp-Hours units while a car battery is like 40+ Amp-Hours.
It's human nature. We tend to not think about the future until "oh shit" happens THEN something is done about it. It happens with everything these days.
Years ago UPS used to be very expensive item and was not the norm for home user to actually own one. Now it's becoming more affordable but the same users who couldn't afford a UPS back then think, "Well, I've been without one for years so why should I need one now?". Same logic applies to what I said above.
I 100% agree with the idea of testing under controlled conditions. The oops you guys discovered is a good thing to be caught early on. I can imagine the look on your support team's faces when the UPS suddenly turned itself off while the remaining servers still trying to perform a safe shutdown. I'm sure the secondary UPS was left running as a precaution until the test is successful.
I have seen a screw up where somebody cut into a live power cord thinking it was a tie wrap caused a major short in the PDU. The guy thought he was safe until he discovered whoever installed the servers didn't double check the power connections and loads so it created a cascade failure in several racks and lost several tons of data. Recovery took awhile.
I've heard several positive things about the C6xxx series printers. The biggest thing is the ease of setup. User just install the software and it automatically finds the printer via the internal network and configures the PC. I'm old school, I'm used to assigning an IP to the printer and then physically adding it to the print queue or add printer on the PC.
It's cool things are getting easier to locate devices on the internal network and configure it for you. Certainly less helpdesk calls to HP.
Granted, I am not too thrill with their high prices of the ink cartridges and do wish they actually up the price on the printers a little but to offset the cost of the inks. I would actually print more if the costs are lower.
Interesting now with high gas prices I'm doing the same thing with inks. I only print when I have to.
I remember a few years ago some company dreamed up disposable cell phone using thin cardboard paper. I'm so glad they threw this idea in the recycling bin on the desktop.
You can buy a photo printer with LCD display with a built-in card reader. I have the Epson Photo R380 and it works well. Very easy to use.
There is an argument that going to a photo shop is cheaper than printing the pictures out at home. I'm not too sure about it but I still like the idea of printing them out at home in complete privacy.
Yep and always makes me cringe when I call up a company for tech support since I usually get the ones from overseas. All they do is read the script. 80% of the time I managed to get the guy to stop reading the script when I say, "Sir, I know exactly what the problem is and the solution so can we start the RMA process NOW so I can get on with my job?" Granted they were told to stick to the script but I just wish management give them the flexibility to realize I am not some low level user who don't know how to install a printer driver. I'm in IT HelpDesk too so I know how it feels to be on the other end of the phone so I give everybody a chance to prove he or she have tried troubleshooting the problem themselves before calling me and not treat them like an idiot even when a guy didn't know how to plug in a usb device into the computer (believe me, they are out there).
I can vouch for that. Some people said to me find a job in the local classified. I actually laughed and said, "Are you serious? They are not going to waste their time and money on a newspaper ad." Tech savvy people will use the net to find jobs.
So CareerBuilder, Dice and Monster are worthy sites for jobs. I'd stay away from Craigslist.com as I don't trust that site for jobs.
I know exactly what you mean. Corporate environments can't use something like Firefox because it lacks policy controls other than allow users to run it or not. Only real way is to run a security device at the firewall to monitor the traffic. It's not perfect but at least it's first line of defense. Ultimately training the users NOT to do stupid things but being in IT we can't always trust them to do the right things.
Piracy been around for ages and some ways it helped the software company to be widely known by everybody. Cheap advertising so to speak.
Once the user base reaches critical mass they can roll out the "security fix" to start validating the licenses. This is what happened with Windows XP awhile back when they released SP1. Alot of people gotten away with it using leaked enterprise license keys until they apply the SP1 which disabled their pirated copy.
Now Microsoft changed it again with SP3 for WinXP to allow installs without license keys for 30 days. This is a blessing for me as I do alot of software testing and hate using keys over and over again when the PC is going to be reformatted. Only gripe is if I try to perform software updates manually it'll ask for the license key.
Realistically Microsoft should make their desktop OS free and charge for their apps such as Office. If that happens it'll effectively kill off Linux desktops for good.
I can vouch you on that statement. When I was living in Florida I was paying high taxes and figured it was the norm. When I moved to California the taxes dropped so much I had to double check the bill three times to be sure.
So in Florida I was paying like $23 in taxes for a $40 plan while in California I'm paying like $7-$8 in taxes. Huge difference in my book.
City of SF screwed up. They didn't take into account this guy got the ONLY keys to the city. They didn't do the research on procedures and ask the right questions before they canned this guy.
This will be a valuable lesson and an embarrassment to the City of San Francisco.
Cisco will be making some money off of this mess and rightfully so.
I recently ran into this at my aunt's workshop. One of their PCs been infected with 9 or so viruses / trojans that I said the only true way to get rid of them all is just reformat the hard drive. I've tried removing them all but a couple kept reappearing and making a strange SMTP mail connection to some server in Australia owned by some Asian company..odd? I was like screw it..just reformat it to be 100% sure it's gone. I even ran a DOD disk eraser program to be 100% sure it's totally gone. I know reformatting the MBR would have fixed it but wanted to be sure.
Yes reformatting sucks but when it comes to sensitive data on the PC I couldn't chance it.
Be funny if Microsoft changed their minds again in a few months and instead of using the original name they put "Classic" in it just like Coke-Cola Classic.
I like this numbering system better myself. Mandriva did the same thing with theirs but could do away first two digits to make things simple and rest of the distro should follow that example.
I believe part of the reason for the 1998 graphics as you put it is to appeal SL to wider audience with older hardware.
Remember Asheron's Call before they finally upgraded their graphics engine? Took them long enough but the main reason they didn't upgrade it is to keep subscribers with less powerful hardware while rest of us with decent broadband and good hardware suffer. The game was interesting enough to keep playing for a couple of years before I finally quit.
Try to limit the amount of open connections if you're running bittorrent and maybe the bandwidth too. If that doesn't help you should probably build your own router. m0n0wall works for me and I've heard good things about IPCop.
I love IPCop. It's running on an old Dell desktop OptiPlex GX 150 1Ghz PIII with 512meg of ram off of Ebay on the cheap. I also installed two dual Intel NICs in it and it's been running great for me.
It can handle bit-torrent with no problem.
Biggest thing I like about it is I've installed the update accelerator add-on which caches the windows updates, adobe, AVast! and Apple to save on bandwidth. Very handy for a household or an office with several computers.
I remember a few months ago that a nuclear power plant was shut down due to a zero reading of the data files after a server reboot due to OS update. It didn't really matter which OS it was, just it was poorly designed for the way it handles critical data and no sense of fault tolerance if something should go wrong. Also, the person who allowed the reboot didn't test this scenario to make sure it wouldn't cause any problems. Can you say, "Whooops"? It doesn't give me a warm fuzzing feeling about it.
Here is the link to the story:
http://www.liquidmatrix.org/blog/2008/06/07/nuke-plant-shutdown-due-to-upgrade/
Slashdot Mirror
Yep, would explain why Iron Mountain been complaining the back data is too heavy.
I lost an entire RAID 5 disk array due to bad ram. It was running Windows 2003 64bit server and one day I turned the screen on and noticed some artifacts and a completely locked up machine. To be sure it wasn't some freeze up in the GUI I tried accessing the shares which didn't respond.
So I was like ok great..time to do a hard shut down and reboot. Well, when it came back up I noticed my RAID array is no longer showing up in the shares or in disk manager. I was like..aww crap. I tried to rebuild the array via the built-in tools of the raid controller and it didn't work. Somehow it totally fuber the disk array tables to the point everything on my 5 320gig disks are trashed. Good thing the OS runs on a separate non-raid hard disk right off the motherboard's disk controller.
Nothing wrong with the raid controller and the drives. Just at the point of writing stuff to the drives RAM had to take a dump and totally froze the server.
Least to say I swapped out the ram modules with known good ones and never had a problem since. Lucky I regularly make backups of my critical stuff to another set of hard drives elsewhere.
I follow this moral code as my second religion, "Don't put all your eggs in one basket!"
I wonder if this is a standard practice in Florida home having varisters system installed in the electrical panel?
If I am ever going to build a house anywhere I'd definitely have it done since it sounds cheap to do.
Yep, that is a biiiiiiiiiig whoops. Hopefully you guys have a UPS service contract to get that sorted out fast.
Graceful shutdown: you have a chance to tell your buddies that your power just went out, and you'll be coming back once it's restored.
or if they're local, you get to see them timeout one after another and disappear as you are saving your documents and committing your databases.
The main unit in the basement holds for over two hours. (has two car batteries to munch on) but that's longer than my ISP evidently.
That brings up an interesting question about using car batteries since they all use 12volts. So is it safe to actually hook one up to the standard UPS provided the cables are rated for it? A typical UPS battery is only like 7 Amp-Hours units while a car battery is like 40+ Amp-Hours.
Just curious.
It's human nature. We tend to not think about the future until "oh shit" happens THEN something is done about it. It happens with everything these days.
Years ago UPS used to be very expensive item and was not the norm for home user to actually own one. Now it's becoming more affordable but the same users who couldn't afford a UPS back then think, "Well, I've been without one for years so why should I need one now?". Same logic applies to what I said above.
I 100% agree with the idea of testing under controlled conditions. The oops you guys discovered is a good thing to be caught early on. I can imagine the look on your support team's faces when the UPS suddenly turned itself off while the remaining servers still trying to perform a safe shutdown. I'm sure the secondary UPS was left running as a precaution until the test is successful.
I have seen a screw up where somebody cut into a live power cord thinking it was a tie wrap caused a major short in the PDU. The guy thought he was safe until he discovered whoever installed the servers didn't double check the power connections and loads so it created a cascade failure in several racks and lost several tons of data. Recovery took awhile.
Least to say it was not a good day.
I've heard several positive things about the C6xxx series printers. The biggest thing is the ease of setup. User just install the software and it automatically finds the printer via the internal network and configures the PC. I'm old school, I'm used to assigning an IP to the printer and then physically adding it to the print queue or add printer on the PC.
It's cool things are getting easier to locate devices on the internal network and configure it for you. Certainly less helpdesk calls to HP.
Granted, I am not too thrill with their high prices of the ink cartridges and do wish they actually up the price on the printers a little but to offset the cost of the inks. I would actually print more if the costs are lower.
Interesting now with high gas prices I'm doing the same thing with inks. I only print when I have to.
I remember a few years ago some company dreamed up disposable cell phone using thin cardboard paper. I'm so glad they threw this idea in the recycling bin on the desktop.
We don't need unnecessary waste in our landfills.
You can buy a photo printer with LCD display with a built-in card reader. I have the Epson Photo R380 and it works well. Very easy to use.
There is an argument that going to a photo shop is cheaper than printing the pictures out at home. I'm not too sure about it but I still like the idea of printing them out at home in complete privacy.
I got your Cherry!!
Yep and always makes me cringe when I call up a company for tech support since I usually get the ones from overseas. All they do is read the script. 80% of the time I managed to get the guy to stop reading the script when I say, "Sir, I know exactly what the problem is and the solution so can we start the RMA process NOW so I can get on with my job?" Granted they were told to stick to the script but I just wish management give them the flexibility to realize I am not some low level user who don't know how to install a printer driver. I'm in IT HelpDesk too so I know how it feels to be on the other end of the phone so I give everybody a chance to prove he or she have tried troubleshooting the problem themselves before calling me and not treat them like an idiot even when a guy didn't know how to plug in a usb device into the computer (believe me, they are out there).
I can vouch for that. Some people said to me find a job in the local classified. I actually laughed and said, "Are you serious? They are not going to waste their time and money on a newspaper ad." Tech savvy people will use the net to find jobs.
So CareerBuilder, Dice and Monster are worthy sites for jobs. I'd stay away from Craigslist.com as I don't trust that site for jobs.
I like this approach better and it's a win / win for everybody.
I know exactly what you mean. Corporate environments can't use something like Firefox because it lacks policy controls other than allow users to run it or not. Only real way is to run a security device at the firewall to monitor the traffic. It's not perfect but at least it's first line of defense. Ultimately training the users NOT to do stupid things but being in IT we can't always trust them to do the right things.
Piracy been around for ages and some ways it helped the software company to be widely known by everybody. Cheap advertising so to speak.
Once the user base reaches critical mass they can roll out the "security fix" to start validating the licenses. This is what happened with Windows XP awhile back when they released SP1. Alot of people gotten away with it using leaked enterprise license keys until they apply the SP1 which disabled their pirated copy.
Now Microsoft changed it again with SP3 for WinXP to allow installs without license keys for 30 days. This is a blessing for me as I do alot of software testing and hate using keys over and over again when the PC is going to be reformatted. Only gripe is if I try to perform software updates manually it'll ask for the license key.
Realistically Microsoft should make their desktop OS free and charge for their apps such as Office. If that happens it'll effectively kill off Linux desktops for good.
I can vouch you on that statement. When I was living in Florida I was paying high taxes and figured it was the norm. When I moved to California the taxes dropped so much I had to double check the bill three times to be sure.
So in Florida I was paying like $23 in taxes for a $40 plan while in California I'm paying like $7-$8 in taxes. Huge difference in my book.
City of SF screwed up. They didn't take into account this guy got the ONLY keys to the city. They didn't do the research on procedures and ask the right questions before they canned this guy.
This will be a valuable lesson and an embarrassment to the City of San Francisco.
Cisco will be making some money off of this mess and rightfully so.
I recently ran into this at my aunt's workshop. One of their PCs been infected with 9 or so viruses / trojans that I said the only true way to get rid of them all is just reformat the hard drive. I've tried removing them all but a couple kept reappearing and making a strange SMTP mail connection to some server in Australia owned by some Asian company..odd? I was like screw it..just reformat it to be 100% sure it's gone. I even ran a DOD disk eraser program to be 100% sure it's totally gone. I know reformatting the MBR would have fixed it but wanted to be sure.
Yes reformatting sucks but when it comes to sensitive data on the PC I couldn't chance it.
Be funny if Microsoft changed their minds again in a few months and instead of using the original name they put "Classic" in it just like Coke-Cola Classic.
WinXP Pro = Old Coke
Vista = New Coke
Yeah, I can see it now... Apple coming out with iPOS.
I like this numbering system better myself. Mandriva did the same thing with theirs but could do away first two digits to make things simple and rest of the distro should follow that example.
I believe part of the reason for the 1998 graphics as you put it is to appeal SL to wider audience with older hardware. Remember Asheron's Call before they finally upgraded their graphics engine? Took them long enough but the main reason they didn't upgrade it is to keep subscribers with less powerful hardware while rest of us with decent broadband and good hardware suffer. The game was interesting enough to keep playing for a couple of years before I finally quit.
Try to limit the amount of open connections if you're running bittorrent and maybe the bandwidth too. If that doesn't help you should probably build your own router. m0n0wall works for me and I've heard good things about IPCop.
I love IPCop. It's running on an old Dell desktop OptiPlex GX 150 1Ghz PIII with 512meg of ram off of Ebay on the cheap. I also installed two dual Intel NICs in it and it's been running great for me. It can handle bit-torrent with no problem. Biggest thing I like about it is I've installed the update accelerator add-on which caches the windows updates, adobe, AVast! and Apple to save on bandwidth. Very handy for a household or an office with several computers.
I remember a few months ago that a nuclear power plant was shut down due to a zero reading of the data files after a server reboot due to OS update. It didn't really matter which OS it was, just it was poorly designed for the way it handles critical data and no sense of fault tolerance if something should go wrong. Also, the person who allowed the reboot didn't test this scenario to make sure it wouldn't cause any problems. Can you say, "Whooops"? It doesn't give me a warm fuzzing feeling about it. Here is the link to the story: http://www.liquidmatrix.org/blog/2008/06/07/nuke-plant-shutdown-due-to-upgrade/