Posts by Ross Luker

Did I or did I not ask you to double-check that the socket was on? Now I've driven 15 miles, what have we found?

So common

Once went to Paris (from Oxfordshire) to discover that, actually, they were correct - the network cable *was* plugged into the printer. It was not, however, plugged into the wall...

Finally, a wafer-thin server... Only a tiny little thin one. Oh all right. Just the one...

PSU fun

My favourite ever support call to Dell: "The PSU on this server's failed, can you send a replacement?"

"Sure, we just need to run some diagnostics and collect some logs...."

"Don't need that, just send a new PSU"

"Well how can you be sure it's the PSU without collecting the logs?"

"Cos when I connect a power cable blue sparks and smoke come out of it"

"....OK, I'll just arrange a replacement now...."

I heard somebody say: Burn baby, burn – server inferno!

My favourite tale of aircon woe is actually adjacent to the server room - in the mailroom there was an aircon unit which, as it turned out,didn't drain to the outside, but to the adjacent room. If you cut the power to it, instead of siphoning the water away, the water just overflowed in the other room... through the false floor...to the floor under the server room....where some wag was running 2 racks off some Argos-standard 4-ways.... The company employed a new cleaner, who dutifully turned off the aircon in the mailroom on her first night - cue hi-jinks :-(

New Windows Servers are like buses: None for ages, then two at once!

Seriously, who would do an in-place upgrade of a DC?

You can survive the migration from Windows vCenter server

Re: SSL Certs

Can't stress this one enough. I inherited a setup that seemed to have been upgraded OK, only to find SRM completely borked due to the certificates not working post-upgrade. Eventually even VMWare gave up and told us to just rebuild the SRM instance from the ground up... :-(

Secret weekend office bonk came within inch of killing sysadmin

I've had an almost identical experience - spent a week walking into a server room to find a soaking wet floor, with no explanation why. Eventually discover, hidden behind a partition, the drain for the aircon in the adjacent post room - the aircon that the new cleaner not just turns off, but cuts the power to every night (no, I don't know why the aircon unit had a massive cutoff switch next to it) and dumps the water onto the server room floor...

I see you're writing a résumé?!.. LinkedIn parked in MS Word

Re: Could be a positive thing

I might consider it if LinkedIn's job search wasn't the most piss-poor excuse for a search engine going. Oh, you're a security engineer in Birmingham? Here's an advert for a part-time gardener in Nottingham...

Tesla's Elon Musk v The New York Times, Round 2

Re: Facebook on wheels?

Since they first had bad "unfair" reviews from the press, Tesla's media loaners have extensive logging set up on them to prove what liars journalists are (that's how they knew the car in the Top Gear test hadn't actually run out of charge). No-one's ever mentioned if that's set on the production models as well though....

Journo says Elon Musk apologized for Tesla battery fiasco

Re: Yes but - @Thorn

The point to the average punter is, I have a car that does both my commute and a cross country trip quite happily. Why would I replace that with something that only does one of those things, and be expected to shell out extra cash if I want to go visit Grandma at Christmas?

Dozen more cities to get ultrafast broadband cash in gloomy UK budget

Ultrafast broadband for the cities, very nice - how about something above "dog slow" for my village?

Chuck Exchange mailboxes into the cloud... sysadmin style

Probably about the same as the wide range of tools Google provide for moving away from Google Apps - ie none whatsoever. We found that out after head office signed us up...

'Selling your citizens to foreigner is not acceptable!'

Re: 'Selling your citizens to foreigner is not acceptable!'

Would it be acceptable to sell your citizens to Journey?

Learning about chip design from Silicon Roundabout

That hair...

...is magnificent.

Virgin Media to add 500k homes to cable network

They might actually finish the job then

About 15 years ago C&W ran cable down all the major roads in our town (including one about 40ft from my front door) - and then never turned the network on. Maybe now I'll get more than 1.3Mb download...

Software generated attendance letter about dead pupil

Not the computer's fault

The Capita system may have printed the letter, but it wasn't the numpty that stuffed it in an envelope without looking...

Obama insists on FOI

Nice one

Can we send a copy of this to Wacky Jacqui? Not that she'd do anything but "carefully consider" the idea, but still...

Samsung Tocco SGH-F480 touchscreen phone

Rubbish aerial

I'm now on my 2nd Tocco (heading for my 3rd), and I've seen several other people in forums who've been through 3 or 4. The phone itself is nice enough, and handles most things fine - with the small exception of phone calls. About 40% of my calls drop out within 15 seconds for no apparent reason. This was a problem that was known in the first version of the firmware but was allegedly fixed in the second. Since both my phones have been v2, I'm guessing it's either not fixed properly or Vodafone's custom firmware broke it again. This problem with signal (the strength bars can wander between 1 and 5 while standing in one place) also extends to 3G - 95% of the time the phone will choose GPRS, but if you force it to use 3G it finds a 4 bar signal).

In short, nice phone, very usable but not that reliable as a phone. Pity really...

Balls blames parents, computers for English literacy slide

Must be the parent's fault...

...despite the fact that my 6-year old's teacher hasn't listened to her read for over a month - apparently teaching to read is solely our responsibility...

Not happy with PC World's customer service?

Been doing that for years

I remember 10 years back I bought a PC from Curry's, only to be told there weren't any in stock (after I'd paid!) The manager made a phone call and I ended up picking my PC up from a guy waiting outside PC World...