Posts by Paul Taylor 1 11 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Oct 2009
This nearly drove me freaking nuts yesterday.
Our domain was offline for almost 6 hours in total, no website, and no NS records. We completely dispeared off the map....
Spoke to the same support guy about 5 times during the outage, each time they could not say what the issue was, or how long it was going take.
just glad its over now..
Ive setup hundreds of WiFi links to establish Internet for people that could not get it installed at their house.
Ubiquiti NanoStation 5 is the way to go. Tiny units and only 65 quid each. They will go 8 miles without issue and sustain over 40mb at that distance.
At the lower end i use a CAT5e Lightening Surge Arrester. They cost £90, so more than the wifi unit itself, but offers protection to everything inside the house should you be unlucky.
I personally have no intention of migrating my huge IT estate to Windows 7. Its just pure bloatware, with a install footprint of 2.3GB !
Its good to see that HP still know what corporate customers want. All HP business desktops still come with an XP Pro image as the default install. I hope this continues.
Take a look at some companies with massive PC estates, such as Delta Airlines, or BA for example. What do they use on every unit world wide ?.
NT4 SP6 !.
310mb install footprint, and 80mb RAM consumption at idle. Makes for a rapid and smooth OS on modern equipment. Hence why check-in Kiosks run so nice.
My 2c.
The company i work for is a Vendor within the Theme Park industry. As such i have PC's and servers all over the world, within Theme Parks.
As a vendor we have to put our servers within the "Shops" that we operate, not an ideal environment. Hence i use good ol Tough as Bricks HP Proliants. Typcially ML370 G3's, and now G5's.
Anyway, yearly we run a cleaning programme where by an engineer visits each Theme Park and strips each machine, armed with cans of compressed air.
Last year i visited a theme park in New England USA. To clean our equipment.
I opened the server cabinet to clean our server and the front of the ML370 was not even visible.
There was a 1in carpet of "Stuff" attached to the whole front of the server, completely covering every sq mm.
It was Gross. Any yet the server was still running happily with no temp related issues.
It took 3 cans to clean that bad boy !.
Wish i had some pics, but unfortunately i do not.
As with another poster above, we also have Rat urine issues. They pee over everything, and poop on everything. We now wrap the keyboard within our Server cabinets in a clear plastic bag. So it can be removed when the engineer visits. Nothing worse than typing on a keyboard covered in Rats pee. Trust me....
And for some reason, they love to chew Fibre optics too. I normally have to re-terminate at least 20 fibre strands a yr.
We tend to pass on old equipment to staff for a very small fee.
But ALL hard disks are removed. We have a pretty sure fire way of making disks un readable.
We drill 4 10mm holes through the hard disk.
Trust me, after drilling 4 holes through a disk you do not want to power it on. We tried, it nearly flew across the IT workshop on its own.
This was also the method we used to use in the MoD.
Both my corporate offices always get the latest kit. Typically HP Dc7900 SFF PC's.
However i have nearly 20 locations world wide now that still have old Compaq D500's. Hundreds and hundreds of them. But they just wont die. So last year rather than spending a huge amount of money, we upgraded every single one to 1GB of RAM, and a new fast 7200rpm hard disk. Complete with a new fresh image of XP.
The old Compaqs work like a dream, and handle most tasks thrown at them, even though they are 8yrs old.
Plus older CPU's with big thick Heatsinks are not as badly effected by dust as news CPU's with micro-thin heatsinks that need blowing out with compressed air every six months.
If it aint broke, why fix it.
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