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. …
Category: General
Sep 25
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 …
Sep 11
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 …
Aug 30
Side Projects…
Feb 09
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 …
Aug 12
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. …
Jul 14
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) …
Feb 18
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 …
May 10
VMWare Host Isolation Response…
I learned what “Host Isolation Response” was today. Well I already knew what it was, but I learned that in a VMWare cluster, if you leave it at the default, then if the network goes away between the clustered hosts, the HOST then RESPONDS to this ISOLATION by shutting your entire environment down. Oops. Not …
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