* Posts by John Jc

8 publicly visible posts • joined 26 Feb 2015

And so we enter day seven of King's College London major IT outage

John Jc

In a previous life , I designed storage / backup solutions for environments like this. Virtualised or purely physical wouldn't make a lot of difference if the whole infrastructure was based on a single, shared, storage array. The SLA in place would determine the amount of availability / redundancy needed here. For the systems described, maybe an 8-hour outage would be "affordable"... which should easily be achieved by a traditional Backup / Restore mechanism.

Of course , if the common storage failed completely , was out of support ...and no replacement could be easily sourced...then I could believe a 7-day outage, awaiting hardware for the restore ;) This is a management issue, not an IT issue.

Jc

Marc Benioff apologizes as Salesforce NA14 instance goes TITSUP

John Jc

Re: Definition of "successful"

To be fair, it appears the failover worked... then something else broke

Jc

Dear Windows, OS X folks: Update Flash now. Or kill it. Killing it works

John Jc

The number of time a story like this appears just amazes me. Forget FLASH - this is just an application. Why on earth does the underlying OS (and this applies to Windows and IOS) allow an APPLICATION to do this?

REAL Operating Systems [I worked with VMS for many , many years] worked hard to ensure user code couldn't do damage outside areas it was allowed to. Then someone created Operating Systems for the masses! There is the concept of an Administrator and a User , but if a user runs some carefully crafted applications, they can be Administrator. Pah!

Jc

Research: By 2017, a third of home Wi-Fi routers will power passers-by

John Jc

I am a BT customer in the UK and I have no worries about this. Yes, people can share my bandwidth, when I am travelling I get to do the same. As I spend a lot of time on the road, I use this quite a lot.

If the router is on 24x7 , I doubt the EXTRA electricity by someone else using it is measurable.

Jc

Server retired after 18 years and ten months – beat that, readers!

John Jc

VAX / VMS Clusters

I supported these at DEC from before they were launched back in the early '80s, It was common for clusters to have years of uptime, while individual nodes came and went. These were REAL clusters, not the inferior products that followed on!

Jc

Ashley Madison hack – Tory MP Green denies registering account

John Jc

I was curious , so I had a look myself. I have never signed up to AM , but one of my "use for spam" addresses appears in the list of email addresses. I've not looked back through all the junk mail to see if it ever had anything in there from AM. This makes me doubtful that any of the "famous people" are actually real!

Jc

UK's National Museum of Computing celebrates 10 glorious years

John Jc

I combined a visit with a trip to the other bits on the same site. A jolly good day out. Seeing kit I had worked with nearly 40 years ago brought back a lot of memories!

Jc

Britain needs more tech immigrants, quango tells UK.gov

John Jc

A genuine shortage of skills, or just a lack of people wishing to work for the minimum wage?

Jc