Category: General

The Frustration of Verizon Wireless Network Coverage

In an increasingly connected world, reliable and extensive network coverage is crucial for seamless communication and accessing online resources. However, for many Verizon Wireless customers, the network’s coverage has become a source of frustration and disappointment. I work remotely, I do not have a land-line. I depend on my Verizon mobile device for literally everything. …

Continue reading

Pi-Hole in the home….

Been a while since I’ve posted anything, so I think I’ll restart with something fun. So a buddy of mine sent me a youtube link…and I like youtube links…especially when it’s a chance to learn something techy… I spend most of my day with techy websites and such playing in the background…(it occupies that ADHD …

Continue reading

HomeLab – The Next Generation

This is the “Lab” I’ve used for probably the last 5 years or so. It’s a Dell Precision T7400 with 64G of PC5300F memory and Dual Xeon X5460 Quad-Core Processors, 8x 2T Seagate SATA Drives, 2x 500G Samsung EVO850 SSD disks, and runs VMWare ESXi 6.0 nicely. Not a bad toy, in the grand scheme. …

Continue reading

Star Trek: Discovery (nerd-post)

So… My honest take on StarTrek:Discovery last night. So far, so good. Compelling story, GREAT effects… Cast seems to be fleshing out nicely, though I anticipate some dramatic changes in the first couple of episodes. Because of the delay in programming they were a little rushed at the end, which meant you really didn’t know …

Continue reading

On Backups…

A friend passed away recently… On going through his computer files, we found years worth of photos with a .ccc suffix… Ransomware… With two teenagers in the house, my biggest fear is some network replicating bug that takes down my entire network. Apparently it hit him a while ago, and he didn’t tell me. (I …

Continue reading

Side Projects…

I built PC’s back in the 80’s, then stopped for some reason. Here’s what happens when I got back into it…

Losing the cloud… (Part 1)

There’s a Dilbert comic strip that I found hilarious a while back… The hilarious part is there is that the chance of this happening in real life is non-zero.  Not that it is likely to happen, but it’s impossible, statistically speaking, to completely rule out the idea. Now there are “big” cloud providers like AWS …

Continue reading

Slowly Draining Away…

Plumbers define a slow drain as one in which your teenage-kid has tried to wash clump of hair vaguely resembling a tribble down. Ed Mazurek from Cisco TAC defines it quite differently: …When there are slow devices attached to the fabric, the end devices do not accept the frames at the configured or negotiated rate. …

Continue reading

Recovering from a windows AD failure…

A couple of years ago my PDC died.  The only physical box in my environment and the one physical server died. I was 2,700 miles away.  I wasn’t going to be back any time soon, and stuff was broken.  (Thankfully, customer data was on the Linux Webhosting environment, so nothing lost there, except their backups) …

Continue reading

The quest for 100% uptime…

Are you the type of IT shop that won’t take downtime?  I mean won’t take downtime to the point that there are EOSL applications running on EOSL hardware, redundancy gone because an HBA has failed and a replacement simply isn’t available, (or is and you won’t take the outage to replace it) It got me to …

Continue reading