@Minion-Queen last time I was at the falls, driving home my GF flashed me and we had a minor car accident.

Hide? Why hide your art.... would you tell VanGogh to put his paintings in a closet?

Heathen.

@Dashrender said:

@scottalanmiller said:

@Dashrender said:

Don't UREs destroy the array?

UREs are never a risk to a healthy array. Only to a degraded one.

Right.

@MattSpeller said:

@StrongBad 2x 300gb 15k RAID1, 3x 1TB RAID5

one of the raid5 drives died, seems to have thrown an error at the controller that it didn't like at all

So it looks like a drive had died.

Aye, got it fixed a couple hours ago by taking it all apart. I mean the whole server. Cleaned it all, made sure all the contacts were good and reassembled. Magic RAID pixies were happy and the thing posted and booted like there was nothing wrong (except the failed drive, but who cares, that is why you have RAID)

@brianlittlejohn said:

Create him two accounts, one for normal use, then a second with administrative rights. You should do the same thing for you and not use the built in account.

Yup exactly what we do here (3 domain admins) - works a treat. Then if you mess up you can use the DA account to fix yours instead of being royally screwed.

@RojoLoco said:

Canadian servers know that there is a holiday long weekend looming in the US, and they are super jelly. They start throwing up errors to get attention. Adjust your repair tactics accordingly.

Beat all the servers to death with roasted bald eagles. Roger that.

@coliver said:

@MattSpeller said:

@coliver said:

I've had a low success rate with startech devices. They are cheap and when they work they work ok... but most of the time they don't. Even if one had been working fine come in the next day and it doesn't work at all.

Exactly my experience, but I will add that the more complicated the product is the lower it's chances of working properly. It's a sliding scale from "meh, yeah, ok" to "possessed by demons" to "complete and utter failure to chooch"

At a former job we bought a serial to USB from them for a PLC once... never again. It did funky things and inserted random characters into programs. We returned it for a replacement... the second one didn't work at all.

Oh sweet jesus those are the exception. NEVER buy one unless it's straight from these guys. Trust me, I spent years doing electronics engineering programming chips and bit banging

http://www.ftdichip.com/Products/Cables/USBTTLSerial.htm

Delirious giggle fit and drooling over the thought of roasted eagle has lead me to believe I need to eat something and probably go home soon after.

@tonyshowoff said:

Looks like a bunch of honey mustard to me.

I think you mean yellow mcnugget lube

@Ambarishrh said:

We should have a section for this! Alcohol, types, great mixes, recommendations!

A whole section for Scotch? Seems excessive but I like the way you think.

I think you're getting two separate things mixed up needlessly.

1. Intentional backups / backup strategy

2. Potential sources of data to recover from

Bottom line, if you're in a position to need to recover stuff it makes lots of sense to look at both 1 and 2. Should you depend on 2? Hell no, that's the whole point of 1.

Monday Day 3: still alive. Exchange beast has slain my friends and family. I struggle on through a wilderness of dark and foreboding errors, ever vigilant to keep the mail flowing.

@Dashrender said in Is Mangocon still happening?:

@Minion-Queen said in Is Mangocon still happening?:

I am working on that (yes I know @Dashrender I have been). But hope to get it done this week.

Boss just won't approve it without documentation of value.. and the only way I can go is if I use my training time, otherwise out of vaca.

Ditto, and I love all you crazy people but MangoCon is firmly in the "work" not "vacation" category.

@Awkward-Gamer life is too short to hate my friend, make a positive change in yours.

@BBigford said in Oh, soft phones...:

Is anyone else using soft phones, or better question... What are people using for VoIP in small-medium business?

Small non-profit - we inherited / were gifted with a full fat Mitel system which alternates between "meh it's a phone" and "the living incarnation of Satan" depending on if it's working or I need to fix it.

For a (rapidly) growing portion of our calls / confs we use skype.

In the future should we move buildings I would leave the Mitel system in place and transition to either soft phones or cell (user owned, company reimbursed). Perhaps both but I would strongly prefer to go 100% cell.

@scottalanmiller said:

@Nic said:

It's built on a 25 year old codebase which is insanely hard for them to update. Again, I'm not making excuses for them, just explaining why.

Can't be that hard. Their competitors did it in no time with a fraction of the resources. In reality, the cost and effort of maintaining software for which there are no skills on the market is far harder. The only benefit that they get is in screwing their customers through fragility and lock-in. If their goals was quality software at low cost, they could migrate easily to a new code base. I say this because their competitors can migrate you to other code bases that are vastly superior with little effort.

We see the same excuses made by custom fitness equipment vendors. They hire a bunch of devs to make their program, then fire them all when they're done. Now a decade later they tell me to lower my desktop resolution to 1024x768 and 16bit color as a suggestion to help their crusty old code run. Boils my biscuits.

I was going to whine about a new luser rubbing me the wrong way yesterday but honestly after reading your rant I want to go hug my coworkers lol

@scottalanmiller said:

@MattSpeller Don't forget me

lol until you commit, I'm only going to pencil you in

Stop using logic, you need to use Microsoft Logic

@BRRABill said:

@RojoLoco said:

And I would expect that sort of thread from a 17 year old. But not a 40-plus w/ some alphabet soup in his title.

Don't go back and read any of my posts.

I'm always afraid someone at SW will audit all the garbage I post and realize there's no way I should be at whatever spice level I am lol

@scottalanmiller @Minion-Queen

Y'all need to figure out a way to get some of them to sign up for accounts