OK. I've been doing this for almost 20 years and known that bit of info for almost 20 years.
You exist only to enable productive people to produce more efficiently. You aren't in charge of anything.
Besides the networks, backups, security, servers you mean I'm not in charge of anything?
You work for us. Continue to annoy us and you will be replaced.
And vice-versa, baby.
Just like the guy in the tool room that used to guard the pin gauges and the hammers like he owned them. And the facilities guy who refused to add a 30 Amp circuit or run a Nitrogen line. The IT support model that treats everyone like a serf doing word processing is over.
Um, OK. I figure no matter what happens or how nice I am that eventually most businesses will not have internal IT staff. The march of technology demands this, usually.
The design engineers need nonstandard hardware to do modeling. They might even need multiple computers.
Cool. Not a problem. Give me the money and I'll have that for you. It's always been about the money, you know.
In fact every individual user has specific and unusual needs that they understand better than you do.
I'd love that to be true. Fact is that most of my users don't understand what they need or how to improve the technology. The most I hope for is that they understand their own tools better than I, because they use said tools while I don't, but only a few even manage that.
And it's Not your call. Make it happen or go extinct. Computers aren't a new special thing anymore. Many of us users understand every aspect of your network as well or better than you do,
Bah hah hah hah!
Hey, this is your turf, and I understand that change is hard, and that you need to grumble, bitch, rant, whatever. get it all out. It won't change anything though.
Right back at ya', homey. The network is secure because the company's lawyers and the company's insurers demand it. The data is secured for the same reasons. Me, I don't care in the slightest. I do this job for money, not love and certainly not the love of annoying people.
The antonym of "secure" is not "insecure" but instead "accessible". When e-mail became popular it was common practice to have an address that would send a message to everyone in the company -- that was abused so became restricted. Address books were available with everyone's contact information -- that was abused so became restricted. Databases accepted connections with empty "sa" passwords (no joke) -- that was abused so became restricted.
Notice a fucking pattern?
My job boils down to keeping the stuff running and keeping it secure. Someone wants to access the systems with some new toy I only ask two questions -- does it break the systems? does it break security? The business, by the way, asks just one question -- how much?
Aside from developers and a tiny group of specialists who need access to a particular app? In the datacenter world this is anathema. No one running a gaggle of boxes would ever seriously consider this and get paid for it. Cheaper and easier by far to throw up one more server and spend the 0.04 FTE (1/25th of a person) it takes to run it. I assume you mean that you think it irresponsible to be running Windows in a virtuallized environment? If so, I hate to tell you this but I'm seeing more and more companies, some with very large and capable tech staff, doing just that. At first it was for testing and development, true, but it just became easier to copy the image files onto the production VM serves. I even know of one credit union that has ALL production Windows servers as VMs.
The ease of backups-restores is one big reason for the love being directed at VM servers. Just shut the machine down, copy some files, and boom! a point-in-time backup. Moving an application from testing to production, same things as a backup with just loading the files into a new VMWare (banks require physical separation of hardware between development/testing/production so these files are actually copied to a new VMserver).
To be honest, I'm an old systems admin, too, and thought VMs were just for testing and development and was a bit disturbed to see big, careful companies using them for production. Worse, I'm a consultant installing some heavy Windows applications that can overwhelm even beefy machines and virtuallizing my servers just slows them down. I am not privy to the reasons for why the move to VMs but I think management was getting tired of all the problem tickets that amounted to "hardware problem with ServerX, moving to new hardware -- 20 hours". (Yeah, way too long to move a server, but at large institutions everything takes longer than it should; in my network, creating a new VM image takes about 15 minutes, with the procedures and paperwork at the credit union this will take 2 hours and require 5 people be involved.)
The formula was derived by Fischer Black and Myron Scholes and published in 1973. They built on earlier research by Edward O. Thorp, Paul Samuelson, and Robert C. Merton.
What is interesting, to me at least, is the people mentioned as providing "earlier work". Edward Thorp is probably more popularly known as the guy who wrote the first real Blackjack strategy book, "Beat the Dealer". After a short stint proving the validity of card counting strategies for Blackjack in real casinos, he went on to apply much the same mathematical reasoning to financial markets where he has had reportedly found more success.
Paul Samuelson has a much less colorful biography than Thorp but his name being included here is interesting because Samuelson's work has dealt mostly with "welfare economics" by studying and trying to apply mathematical methods to social problems/solutions. Finding his name included as helping work out the possible future values/present cost of stock options is somehow amusing to me. Some really great stuff in his work and he also wrote a very readable introductory textbook for economics.
I never looked too closely into the Black-Scholes valuation formulas but when I would read about them and their applications, I always thought the idea sounded familiar. I could have easily guessed Thorp because I read some of his financial articles and those cover much of the same ground but I would never have guessed Samuelson.
I'm surprised that Joel does not reference one of his earlier rants about people wanting to feel in control. When the results of each decision is unknown then people start to feel like they are losing control and seek happier pastures elsewhere. When people fully understand the implications of a choice, they feel in control and are happier.
A choice between "sleep" and "hibernate" is great when the person making the choice knows what each option does. Most people do not care and do not want to care. This choice is useless to them and even lowers their sense of control over their computer and thus their satisfaction with it.
The trick is not taking away all the choices, like Joel is suggesting, but giving users control over what they want to control. Those that care can select their options, those that don't care get a fairly basic guess at what they want. Joel's guess for the power-off problem with laptops is fine but does not always work for me and probably lots of geeks. Hell, I want my laptop to suspend but keep the 3G network connection and there is no way to do that.
Years ago, back a few jobs, I handled internal user support plus the occational escallation from external clients. Such an escallation comes in but not from a client but from our vendor support people. That's strange, I think, I never get calls from them. Anyway, I'm told that the vendor is having problems logging into our web site and checking his payment status. No big deal, really, since most vendors prefered to get that information by phone from the very person who was transfering the call to me. I just assume that he hasn't been set up for on-line access to his account.
I pick up the line while at the same time checking the database for his information. At the very second I find out that he has been set up for on-line access I get an earfull about how "you guys" are fucking everything up and nothing works. "Total fuckups who can't do anything right. This worked before but then you changed something and now nothing fucking works you ass-hole."
Yep, he is swearing. A lot. This goes on with every sentence and he accuses me personally of screwing it up with some mysterious changes to the web site. Never mind that the site had never been updated since the vendor logon was implimented, I was not the one to make those changes.
I sigh, take the abuse, and lead him through the logon "process". "Yes, I have the fucking right page." "I know my fucking ID number." The ID number was four digits long and I checked that he was using the right one. "My fucking password is my last name, goddamnit!" I look that up in the database (nice security, huh?) and that is true. On my machine I log in just fine and he is still complaining that it isn't "fucking working".
I check the web logs. Bad password. He is connecting fine but typing in the wrong password. I try to find some way polite way to ask if he knows his own last name. He does. It was Johnson. OK. I keep having him try the user ID and password. I lead him through the numbers one at a time, although I could see from the web logs that he was getting that right. I finally lead him, letter by letter, through the spelling of his own last name (not case-sensitve). That worked.
"What the fuck did you change! Well... shit. Stop fucking with my stuff." Then he hung up.
His heartfelt thanks fills me with warming joy to this very day.
They claim that the Seattle area has unpredictable traffic and to prove it they have this series of examples all taken at 8:15am.
Now, I don't live anywhere near Seattle but every day the traffic looks the same to me. A bunch of heavy traffic in the same places every day. This is supposed to convice me? All this product demostration did was convice me to not move to the suburbs of Seattle anytime soon and if I already had, to try some different routes.
It also just displays four highways with just the promise of "compelling upgrades" in the future should new roads be added to the system. I'm sure the "compelling upgrades" will be much teh same as some software companies who charge for the upgrade and drop support for the old product. Compelling like a court order.:)
While reading the article, I read that Optimoz's Mozilla gestures have "Easter Egg" gestures. Since I use this little app I wanted to see the hidden features. Unfortunately, my google search turned up nothing useful but then I thought, "Wait, the code is there for all to see."
I'm hardly a programmer but a quick look and I found the file the sets the actions for various gestures and looked through it for new and exciting gestures.
The only Easter Eggs I found were (for those that use gestures in Mozilla):
Right - Left - Down - Up - Right : this will give pages an "Exploding Backgrownd" which worked best on Google's home page. It is just an animated image of an explosion tiled in the background. Caused my little 450MHz to slow way down but everything was back to normal after exiting that page.
The other is a "V" shape for "Validate" which, I think, sends the page being viewed off for wc3 validation. This is cool because I didn't even know that gestures could handle diagonals.
The human eye really cannot tell the difference between 30 frames and 60 frames; 30 frames is the upper limit of seeing. Why do people really care about these high frame rates?
But the human eye can tell the difference between 30 and 60 fps. Look closely at movie with lots of action and you will notice the individual frames. That is at 24 fps but US television at 30 fps would appear just as choppy if the resolution were higher. At high resolutions, it becomes more important to have more fps to make the action appear continuous and smooth. That is one reason why video cards are getting the gamer's money. The other reason is that when aiming at a fast moving target that is "far away" (smaller image on the screen) you don't want a choppy image or low resolution to cause you to miss out on a frag.
Of course, the human eye will "see" a continuous light when it is really a strobe light at just over 50 Hz (depending on the individual). Movies get around this limitation by "double-pumping" the projected image by flashing each frame twice giving a 48 Hz strobe effect that most adults don't even notice (children's eyes are more sensitive).
So, I predict that the video card market will stop its mad technological advances about the time it can push a steady 75 Hz or so at 1600x1200. Of course, if the average monitor gets bigger than 19 inches, I reserve the right to change that projection.:)
You can say all these things about auto repair, too, and I don't imagine you'd include auto mechanics in the new intelligentsia.
Not the new intelligentsia but perhaps for a former era they would be included. Bruce Sterling's essay almost stated as such. Who would be best included in the intelligentsia of a machine era but those who actively worked on the machines. That we tend to give credit to writers, scientists, and phylosophers does not mean the contributions of machanics should be overlooked nor that they did not have considerable influence.
For a new era based on information and networking it might be a good idea to have those that work on and write the programs to handle information and networks included in the intelligentsia. Of course, good ideas do not always translate into good action, or any action for that matter.
NT has to do the same checks when it thinks there might be an FS problem, its that or chance destroying your data.
Not when it's NTFS, it doesn't...done on the fly, not on boot.
Of course, that is what is supposed to happen but my experience has been quite the opposite.
We have a rather flakey NT file server at my company that will slowly begin corrupting new saved files. Of the many proceedures tried to fix this problem, the only consistently successful one is to run chkdsk c:/f which will wait for the next reboot and then run a full check of the hard drive before starting up.
This command is more benificial (and worthwhile) than the regualar file checking performed by NT during standard operation.
Ever notice how the real power to Windows NT is accessed though the command line like the file checking command above?
I for sure am not an expert but I did spent some time studying nuclear reactions in college. Take the following with a grain of salt, therefore.
A nuclear reactor relies on a few things to create energy from radioactive decay. Of course, one of those things is Uranium (isotope 235 ususally, some 233, and the very common 238 to create Plutonium). Uranium by itself will not cause a self-sustaining reaction, a "catalyst" needs to be used. Water happens to work quite well as a catalyst (as well as graphite which contributed greatly to the Chernoble thing a few years back).
It sounds like, from the reports, that some suicidal moron added enough quality Uranium into some water to start a chain reaction that became self-sustaining. Now, since water acts as sort of a fuel for this reaction, it is hard to put out once started.
Very simply, somehow someone started his own little nuclear power plant.
I work for a company that uses all Dell machines for the client computers which all have Windows pre-installed. Random Dell computers, when Windows 98 would be re-installed, exhibited this missing.vxd file error. Like you I spent some time trying to fix the problem with limited success. Ultimately, using Windows 98 SE instead of the original Windows 98 solved this problem best. Buying a whole new version of Windows, rather than the upgrade, is not an option for everyone, however so this solution would be useless for those people.
Oh, I have also installed Mandrake and RedHat on the same boxes and using a local ftp server (100 BaseT network) the average install time is less than 20 minutes total (faster than the CD-ROM). Compared to the Windows installs of over 35 minutes. This is for a base installation with network card driver but not video or sound card drivers. Those take some amount of fussing in both OS's to get working properly on newer machines. Windows really likes to be rebooted after each driver is installed. Sure, you can do them all at once but the systems installed that way are usually more unstable. (When I install the OS, it is EXPECTED to be rock solid. Most complaints about Windows instability stem from poor installs, like from the factory, or hard drive corruption due to improper handling by users, like not shutting down properly.)
I forgot about changing network configurations after the install. That requires a reboot with Windows, too. Reboot reboot and reboot seems to be the rule with Windows. But you all knew that already. Why Windows requires a reboot for network services is beyond me because it is the only OS I have used that does.
Yes, please, for your sanity, do not use Exchange unless you have to. It is large and cumbersome and requires a large server with expansive drives for even one hundred users.
I use and maintain an Exchange server (well, three) and the main server consumes 10 gigs of a harddrive and all of a 333 MHz Pentium. This is for about 200 users and most are not that active.
Besides the hardware overhead there are other negatives to Exchange. Namely, it does not route internet traffic well, it has poor error reporting, and it "clusters" badly. I'll take each point one by one.
My company has affiliates in small offices around the world and they have neither the on-site resources or talent to maintain an e-mail server so these offices use our Exchange server as POP3 and SMTP. This creates an open relay and all attempts to close the relay have met with stiff opposition -- users complaining they now have to use a password, cannot remember what domain they are on, and general users resisting change. At the moment, Exchange has no true "Back Office" solution for this problem and I would have to personally configure all of our affiliate offices if I want to completely secure routing.
The error reporting come down to this -- either you log all of the messages passing through Exchange or none of them. I wanted to log the messages that caused errors for obvious reasons and after about 4 days noticed the drives filling up with archives all all the messages, not just those messages generating errors. Microsoft admits this is a problem but there is still no fix, at least not in SP2.
And finally, "clustering". I'm not talking about true clustering but instead about using multiple Exchange servers to distribute the load somewhat. We have two e-mail domains and wanted to start putting people on the second domain to balance the load. Each server runs fine on its own but for some reason they hate talking to each other. The replication services keep stopping (pausing, really) and site connector is more frustrating than helpful.
I have not had many problems with our Exchange server otherwise. It runs forever and reliably. It has the longest uptime of any of our NT machines, only needing a reboot every month or two. However, I'd think long and hard before accepting a job caring 25,000 user's e-mail if the server were NT. Anything over about 1000 users you should look elsewhere if you can.
As a network administrator, most of the problems I face have nothing to do with what I was tested on for my MCSE. There is no way that a simple test could cover some of the problems that I have encountered.
I genuinely feel sorry for companies looking to hire competent systems administrators. Education, testing, and experience are all that hiring departments have to go on in choosing staff yet the most important thing is problem solving abilities. I routinely encounter problems that would never be written about because the problem would not exist anywhere else in the world.
Oh, the second most important asset of a good systems admistrator is a driving need to solve the problem. Which is why, I guess, that so many of us work such long hours. I know that once I have a problem to solve, the rest of the world fades from my mind and hours pass without notice.
Of course, once the problem is solved, I usually think that the time was well spent. Mostly, I like what I do. If there was only some way to avoid the more annoying users.
Slashdot Mirror
Wake up!
You are a cost center.
OK. I've been doing this for almost 20 years and known that bit of info for almost 20 years.
You exist only to enable productive people to produce more efficiently.
You aren't in charge of anything.
Besides the networks, backups, security, servers you mean I'm not in charge of anything?
You work for us.
Continue to annoy us and you will be replaced.
And vice-versa, baby.
Just like the guy in the tool room that used to guard the pin gauges and the hammers like he owned them.
And the facilities guy who refused to add a 30 Amp circuit or run a Nitrogen line.
The IT support model that treats everyone like a serf doing word processing is over.
Um, OK. I figure no matter what happens or how nice I am that eventually most businesses will not have internal IT staff. The march of technology demands this, usually.
The design engineers need nonstandard hardware to do modeling. They might even need multiple computers.
Cool. Not a problem. Give me the money and I'll have that for you. It's always been about the money, you know.
In fact every individual user has specific and unusual needs that they understand better than you do.
I'd love that to be true. Fact is that most of my users don't understand what they need or how to improve the technology. The most I hope for is that they understand their own tools better than I, because they use said tools while I don't, but only a few even manage that.
And it's Not your call. Make it happen or go extinct. Computers aren't a new special thing anymore.
Many of us users understand every aspect of your network as well or better than you do,
Bah hah hah hah!
Hey, this is your turf, and I understand that change is hard, and that you need to grumble, bitch, rant, whatever.
get it all out. It won't change anything though.
Right back at ya', homey. The network is secure because the company's lawyers and the company's insurers demand it. The data is secured for the same reasons. Me, I don't care in the slightest. I do this job for money, not love and certainly not the love of annoying people.
The antonym of "secure" is not "insecure" but instead "accessible". When e-mail became popular it was common practice to have an address that would send a message to everyone in the company -- that was abused so became restricted. Address books were available with everyone's contact information -- that was abused so became restricted. Databases accepted connections with empty "sa" passwords (no joke) -- that was abused so became restricted.
Notice a fucking pattern?
My job boils down to keeping the stuff running and keeping it secure. Someone wants to access the systems with some new toy I only ask two questions -- does it break the systems? does it break security? The business, by the way, asks just one question -- how much?
The ease of backups-restores is one big reason for the love being directed at VM servers. Just shut the machine down, copy some files, and boom! a point-in-time backup. Moving an application from testing to production, same things as a backup with just loading the files into a new VMWare (banks require physical separation of hardware between development/testing/production so these files are actually copied to a new VMserver).
To be honest, I'm an old systems admin, too, and thought VMs were just for testing and development and was a bit disturbed to see big, careful companies using them for production. Worse, I'm a consultant installing some heavy Windows applications that can overwhelm even beefy machines and virtuallizing my servers just slows them down. I am not privy to the reasons for why the move to VMs but I think management was getting tired of all the problem tickets that amounted to "hardware problem with ServerX, moving to new hardware -- 20 hours". (Yeah, way too long to move a server, but at large institutions everything takes longer than it should; in my network, creating a new VM image takes about 15 minutes, with the procedures and paperwork at the credit union this will take 2 hours and require 5 people be involved.)
--ibbieta
The formula was derived by Fischer Black and Myron Scholes and published in 1973. They built on earlier research by Edward O. Thorp, Paul Samuelson, and Robert C. Merton.
What is interesting, to me at least, is the people mentioned as providing "earlier work". Edward Thorp is probably more popularly known as the guy who wrote the first real Blackjack strategy book, "Beat the Dealer". After a short stint proving the validity of card counting strategies for Blackjack in real casinos, he went on to apply much the same mathematical reasoning to financial markets where he has had reportedly found more success.
Paul Samuelson has a much less colorful biography than Thorp but his name being included here is interesting because Samuelson's work has dealt mostly with "welfare economics" by studying and trying to apply mathematical methods to social problems/solutions. Finding his name included as helping work out the possible future values/present cost of stock options is somehow amusing to me. Some really great stuff in his work and he also wrote a very readable introductory textbook for economics.
I never looked too closely into the Black-Scholes valuation formulas but when I would read about them and their applications, I always thought the idea sounded familiar. I could have easily guessed Thorp because I read some of his financial articles and those cover much of the same ground but I would never have guessed Samuelson.
I'm surprised that Joel does not reference one of his earlier rants about people wanting to feel in control. When the results of each decision is unknown then people start to feel like they are losing control and seek happier pastures elsewhere. When people fully understand the implications of a choice, they feel in control and are happier.
A choice between "sleep" and "hibernate" is great when the person making the choice knows what each option does. Most people do not care and do not want to care. This choice is useless to them and even lowers their sense of control over their computer and thus their satisfaction with it.
The trick is not taking away all the choices, like Joel is suggesting, but giving users control over what they want to control. Those that care can select their options, those that don't care get a fairly basic guess at what they want. Joel's guess for the power-off problem with laptops is fine but does not always work for me and probably lots of geeks. Hell, I want my laptop to suspend but keep the 3G network connection and there is no way to do that.
Years ago, back a few jobs, I handled internal user support plus the occational escallation from external clients. Such an escallation comes in but not from a client but from our vendor support people. That's strange, I think, I never get calls from them. Anyway, I'm told that the vendor is having problems logging into our web site and checking his payment status. No big deal, really, since most vendors prefered to get that information by phone from the very person who was transfering the call to me. I just assume that he hasn't been set up for on-line access to his account.
... shit. Stop fucking with my stuff." Then he hung up.
I pick up the line while at the same time checking the database for his information. At the very second I find out that he has been set up for on-line access I get an earfull about how "you guys" are fucking everything up and nothing works. "Total fuckups who can't do anything right. This worked before but then you changed something and now nothing fucking works you ass-hole."
Yep, he is swearing. A lot. This goes on with every sentence and he accuses me personally of screwing it up with some mysterious changes to the web site. Never mind that the site had never been updated since the vendor logon was implimented, I was not the one to make those changes.
I sigh, take the abuse, and lead him through the logon "process". "Yes, I have the fucking right page." "I know my fucking ID number." The ID number was four digits long and I checked that he was using the right one. "My fucking password is my last name, goddamnit!" I look that up in the database (nice security, huh?) and that is true. On my machine I log in just fine and he is still complaining that it isn't "fucking working".
I check the web logs. Bad password. He is connecting fine but typing in the wrong password. I try to find some way polite way to ask if he knows his own last name. He does. It was Johnson. OK. I keep having him try the user ID and password. I lead him through the numbers one at a time, although I could see from the web logs that he was getting that right. I finally lead him, letter by letter, through the spelling of his own last name (not case-sensitve). That worked.
"What the fuck did you change! Well
His heartfelt thanks fills me with warming joy to this very day.
They claim that the Seattle area has unpredictable traffic and to prove it they have this series of examples all taken at 8:15am.
:)
Now, I don't live anywhere near Seattle but every day the traffic looks the same to me. A bunch of heavy traffic in the same places every day. This is supposed to convice me? All this product demostration did was convice me to not move to the suburbs of Seattle anytime soon and if I already had, to try some different routes.
It also just displays four highways with just the promise of "compelling upgrades" in the future should new roads be added to the system. I'm sure the "compelling upgrades" will be much teh same as some software companies who charge for the upgrade and drop support for the old product. Compelling like a court order.
--ibbieta
While reading the article, I read that Optimoz's Mozilla gestures have "Easter Egg" gestures. Since I use this little app I wanted to see the hidden features. Unfortunately, my google search turned up nothing useful but then I thought, "Wait, the code is there for all to see."
I'm hardly a programmer but a quick look and I found the file the sets the actions for various gestures and looked through it for new and exciting gestures.
The only Easter Eggs I found were (for those that use gestures in Mozilla):
Right - Left - Down - Up - Right : this will give pages an "Exploding Backgrownd" which worked best on Google's home page. It is just an animated image of an explosion tiled in the background. Caused my little 450MHz to slow way down but everything was back to normal after exiting that page.
The other is a "V" shape for "Validate" which, I think, sends the page being viewed off for wc3 validation. This is cool because I didn't even know that gestures could handle diagonals.
But the human eye can tell the difference between 30 and 60 fps. Look closely at movie with lots of action and you will notice the individual frames. That is at 24 fps but US television at 30 fps would appear just as choppy if the resolution were higher. At high resolutions, it becomes more important to have more fps to make the action appear continuous and smooth. That is one reason why video cards are getting the gamer's money. The other reason is that when aiming at a fast moving target that is "far away" (smaller image on the screen) you don't want a choppy image or low resolution to cause you to miss out on a frag.
Of course, the human eye will "see" a continuous light when it is really a strobe light at just over 50 Hz (depending on the individual). Movies get around this limitation by "double-pumping" the projected image by flashing each frame twice giving a 48 Hz strobe effect that most adults don't even notice (children's eyes are more sensitive).
So, I predict that the video card market will stop its mad technological advances about the time it can push a steady 75 Hz or so at 1600x1200. Of course, if the average monitor gets bigger than 19 inches, I reserve the right to change that projection. :)
Not the new intelligentsia but perhaps for a former era they would be included. Bruce Sterling's essay almost stated as such. Who would be best included in the intelligentsia of a machine era but those who actively worked on the machines. That we tend to give credit to writers, scientists, and phylosophers does not mean the contributions of machanics should be overlooked nor that they did not have considerable influence.
For a new era based on information and networking it might be a good idea to have those that work on and write the programs to handle information and networks included in the intelligentsia. Of course, good ideas do not always translate into good action, or any action for that matter.
Not when it's NTFS, it doesn't...done on the fly, not on boot.
Of course, that is what is supposed to happen but my experience has been quite the opposite.
We have a rather flakey NT file server at my company that will slowly begin corrupting new saved files. Of the many proceedures tried to fix this problem, the only consistently successful one is to run chkdsk c: /f which will wait for the next reboot and then run a full check of the hard drive before starting up.
This command is more benificial (and worthwhile) than the regualar file checking performed by NT during standard operation.
Ever notice how the real power to Windows NT is accessed though the command line like the file checking command above?
I for sure am not an expert but I did spent some time studying nuclear reactions in college. Take the following with a grain of salt, therefore.
A nuclear reactor relies on a few things to create energy from radioactive decay. Of course, one of those things is Uranium (isotope 235 ususally, some 233, and the very common 238 to create Plutonium). Uranium by itself will not cause a self-sustaining reaction, a "catalyst" needs to be used. Water happens to work quite well as a catalyst (as well as graphite which contributed greatly to the Chernoble thing a few years back).
It sounds like, from the reports, that some suicidal moron added enough quality Uranium into some water to start a chain reaction that became self-sustaining. Now, since water acts as sort of a fuel for this reaction, it is hard to put out once started.
Very simply, somehow someone started his own little nuclear power plant.
I work for a company that uses all Dell machines for the client computers which all have Windows pre-installed. Random Dell computers, when Windows 98 would be re-installed, exhibited this missing .vxd file error. Like you I spent some time trying to fix the problem with limited success. Ultimately, using Windows 98 SE instead of the original Windows 98 solved this problem best. Buying a whole new version of Windows, rather than the upgrade, is not an option for everyone, however so this solution would be useless for those people.
Oh, I have also installed Mandrake and RedHat on the same boxes and using a local ftp server (100 BaseT network) the average install time is less than 20 minutes total (faster than the CD-ROM). Compared to the Windows installs of over 35 minutes. This is for a base installation with network card driver but not video or sound card drivers. Those take some amount of fussing in both OS's to get working properly on newer machines. Windows really likes to be rebooted after each driver is installed. Sure, you can do them all at once but the systems installed that way are usually more unstable. (When I install the OS, it is EXPECTED to be rock solid. Most complaints about Windows instability stem from poor installs, like from the factory, or hard drive corruption due to improper handling by users, like not shutting down properly.)
I forgot about changing network configurations after the install. That requires a reboot with Windows, too. Reboot reboot and reboot seems to be the rule with Windows. But you all knew that already. Why Windows requires a reboot for network services is beyond me because it is the only OS I have used that does.
Yes, please, for your sanity, do not use Exchange unless you have to. It is large and cumbersome and requires a large server with expansive drives for even one hundred users.
I use and maintain an Exchange server (well, three) and the main server consumes 10 gigs of a harddrive and all of a 333 MHz Pentium. This is for about 200 users and most are not that active.
Besides the hardware overhead there are other negatives to Exchange. Namely, it does not route internet traffic well, it has poor error reporting, and it "clusters" badly. I'll take each point one by one.
My company has affiliates in small offices around the world and they have neither the on-site resources or talent to maintain an e-mail server so these offices use our Exchange server as POP3 and SMTP. This creates an open relay and all attempts to close the relay have met with stiff opposition -- users complaining they now have to use a password, cannot remember what domain they are on, and general users resisting change. At the moment, Exchange has no true "Back Office" solution for this problem and I would have to personally configure all of our affiliate offices if I want to completely secure routing.
The error reporting come down to this -- either you log all of the messages passing through Exchange or none of them. I wanted to log the messages that caused errors for obvious reasons and after about 4 days noticed the drives filling up with archives all all the messages, not just those messages generating errors. Microsoft admits this is a problem but there is still no fix, at least not in SP2.
And finally, "clustering". I'm not talking about true clustering but instead about using multiple Exchange servers to distribute the load somewhat. We have two e-mail domains and wanted to start putting people on the second domain to balance the load. Each server runs fine on its own but for some reason they hate talking to each other. The replication services keep stopping (pausing, really) and site connector is more frustrating than helpful.
I have not had many problems with our Exchange server otherwise. It runs forever and reliably. It has the longest uptime of any of our NT machines, only needing a reboot every month or two. However, I'd think long and hard before accepting a job caring 25,000 user's e-mail if the server were NT. Anything over about 1000 users you should look elsewhere if you can.
As a network administrator, most of the problems I face have nothing to do with what I was tested on for my MCSE. There is no way that a simple test could cover some of the problems that I have encountered.
I genuinely feel sorry for companies looking to hire competent systems administrators. Education, testing, and experience are all that hiring departments have to go on in choosing staff yet the most important thing is problem solving abilities. I routinely encounter problems that would never be written about because the problem would not exist anywhere else in the world.
Oh, the second most important asset of a good systems admistrator is a driving need to solve the problem. Which is why, I guess, that so many of us work such long hours. I know that once I have a problem to solve, the rest of the world fades from my mind and hours pass without notice.
Of course, once the problem is solved, I usually think that the time was well spent. Mostly, I like what I do. If there was only some way to avoid the more annoying users.