Posts by wayneinuk 25 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Oct 2019
Time to look at some viable alternatives, I'm sick of Microsoft, they treat resellers like crap already & now to take a bit of the cake we do enjoy away just leaves an even bitter taste in my mouth!!! Anyone know of any real alternatives to MS Office and Exchange these days? I still have a Lotus Notes system going, however, that is aging in time (though never gives me or the client any trouble, unlike the MS cloudy options!)?
Snarling, Knashing of Teeth :-(
We are a small shop as well, we have tended to deploy groups of VMware Essentials running hardware like Xeon Silver & now AMD Epyc, kind of specifications being dual CPU, 256GB RAM, 8 TB of NVMe local storage all of which has worked well for us given the customer base we focus on i.e. mostly Linux hosting.
What other solutions are you looking at? We are exploring Proxmox, XCP-NG, KVM and Virtuozzo.
I'm just interested on views of others at this important junction.
Cheers
Sounds cool, however in reality:-
1. Offline use?
2. Reliant on consistent and good bandwidth?
3. Reliant on Microsoft tech support and the long wait times when things don't work?
4. Forced continuous updates to everything rather than holding back and taking updates when I want them?
5. Less control of the specification & what is deemed high performance by Microsoft might not be the same as my perspective!
6. Third party software support
Just a few thoughts.
It was more than just Virgin Media, Downdetector displayed numerous others including BT, TalkTalk, Vodafone and other non ISP platforms all showing the same trend on the graphs. I have a VM FTTP, a Voicehost FTTP (BT Openreach) and a Voicehost FTTC - all these went down at the same time, given they are different technologies, routes and platforms (VM/OR) I'd say there was something bigger happening. Service came back on, then off a few times, all providers seeming to recover simultaneously & then drop simultaneously. My gut feeling is DNS might have been at work or perhaps not working as it should! Thank goodness for 4G!
We had a hybrid network where the backbone was 10base2 (cheapernet) that connected buildings (portacabins & buildings) as well as a number of Perle terminal servers that connected to the 10base2 network and allowed ICL green screen dumb terminals to access an ICL DRS6000 over 10baseT medium. Next to the ICL DRS6000 I had an ISL MX95 (I think the model is correct) that ran Novell Netware 3.11 for file & print services, Novell was the product of choice back then and in my mind was always far superior to NT/Win SVR, it was the case that Microsoft had the larger development & marketing budget!
The issues I had with cheapernet were mainly due to some GIT (a person and not the platform) working on an early AutoCAD 12 machine in the last office on the site and his tendency to unscrew the 50 ohm terminal resistor that instantly dropped the network as well as sending the dumb terminals into a locked state resulting in our Progress RDBMS requiring manual intervention to terminate locked database sessions! One twist of the resistor resulting in hours of work! After repeated events including finding the resistor at the other end one day in an ashtray I took action, the resolve the issue I placed both the PC's (each end) into lockable steel computer safes that were bolted down to the floor - that sorted it!
The other issue around cheapernet that repeatedly happened was the movement of portacabins, given half our buildings were at the time temporary the company would constantly move them around the site for whatever reason, this usually took place on a Saturday and to combat this we booked Monday's off at the whiff of a suggestion regarding any move of the offices, added to this we inflated the cost of cheapernet cable and connectors to expensivenet which resulted in us having the latest, greatest gear in IT, the message finally got through though our eventual move to 10baseT throughout cut the "gaming" budget.
Those were the days :-)
Dan Gleeballs
It's interesting, you'd think given the images seen on MSM and social media that vast proportions of the tech industry would be offline, presumably shattered, however, I use Site24x7 for monitoring servers and networking and I only found out three weeks ago that one of the monitoring nodes currently monitoring my estate resides in Kiev, this astounded me! I find it incredible to think this node is running from a DC somewhere in or near Kiev and that there is still non-stop communication between it and the kit being monitored.
Obviously, this is only one monitoring node, there are 5 in total monitoring our services, however, this one has not missed a beat since the star of the war!
I totally agree, it was an excellent email platform and NoSQL DB and I still support a couple of sites running it, sites that never give me issues. The security was also excellent! The largest implementation I was involved in amounted to 45,000 users across 80 countries and it worked like a dream.
I have to say Flutter is awesome, the community behind it is equally awesome and I'm so grateful to have jumped on board the project. I also understand it is not for everyone, there are some projects that would be better developed in other ways and I listen to all opinions for and against it - I'm still sold on it and unlikely to look at anything else soon. :-)
I bought all my Amazon devices prior to them "informing" me that they are going to "by default opt me into sharing my bandwidth/services I pay for" - I'm just saying "by default it should be OFF i.e. does not affect me" since that was the situation when I decided to buy the devices I have. All's all and if I wanted to opt in I can, so long as it is me and not Amazon opting me in!
DISGUSTING!!!
I received the email yesterday and spent an hour trying to find a way to opt out on the basis that I have numerous Alexa devices, Firesticks and a Ring Doorbell which I installed around 2 months ago. I would not have purchased any Amazon devices if I knew this was coming and more importantly enabled by default!!!!!!
The tech in me things WOW, a great idea for low bandwidth devices, however, I suspect 500MB will be a starting point, I suspect it will become Amazon's way of providing a BT FON solution!!!
I will be turning this feature off and more to the point I'll call Amazon for support to ensure it is turned off for all devices at an account level and to include new purchased (if I bother now to buy any Amazon products/services).
I suspect there must be a legal barrier in the UK that Amazon has to overcome before the launch here, I did not pick up the fact it was not yet enabled in the UK, I guess that's why I spent so long getting absolutely nowhere to turn it off!!!! Thanks Amazon for wasting my time, I'd send you a bill if I thought I'd have a chance of payment!! My Internet connection is my responsibility and if the UK law was broken through misuse of my connection then I'd be the one potentially arrested and hauled to jail, I guess any potential defense would cost more to prove or highlight my connection was used by someone else and it was not me doing something illegal!!
It's just not right in my eyes, it should be off by default for all devices and perhaps Amazon should provide an incentive for a customer to turn it on. If it is not simple and more important quick to opt out of for all devices then I'll be turning them all off pending careful replacement!!!!
I've been a very happy Amazon customer since the start, I'm not happy now!!!
It would be nice to have a reliable 3G or 4G signal, at times I can get around 80Mbps, 30 minutes later and after several disconnections I'm lucky to get 1Mbps.
Luckily I don't use 4G often, an occasions at home if my broadband is down and this month I've suffered an outage where an Openreach engineer that should have gone to Specsavers disconnected my line and gave it to another new customer in the area - took them a week to get me back online. Only yesterday I had 2.5 hours of downtime for no apparent reason! Other times I try to use it is when working away or on a UK holiday and despite having a Three subscription for 40GB I usually end up putting in an O2 SIM, especially in Wales.
I just wish the services were more reliable and also offered more flexibility with static IP's, I also think the operators from time-to-time try to restrict the use of VPN technologies which takes the p*** when you pay for inclusive GB - you should be able to use that data for any purpose and not what they feel like on the day!
I suspect as well that with 4G and 5G the bottleneck is often the network feed to the mast!
In Finland (Lapland) we stay around 100 miles from the Russian border in December, right above the arctic circle in the middle of a forest and the 3G is excellent both in coverage and speed. Landing back into Bristol airport at around 15:00 into traffic mayhem and overused 4G!!!
Moan over :-)
I had a lovely user in the company Marketing department that was constantly complaining that the monitor she had was blurred and was giving her headaches. Having looked at it several times and finding no fault I retrieved it back to our IT Department where I changed the company asset sticker and returned the same monitor back to her (with a different shiny new asset sticker). She thanked me several times during the week saying the new monitor had made such a positive difference :-)
I took over the system admin of an ICL DRS6000 system in around 1994 running an ERP system based on Progress RDBMS (now Progress OpenEdge). The previous sysadmin has been lazy and quite honestly out of his depth in looking after anything other than a dot matrix printer!
One afternoon I decided to clean up the system and remove ageing old user accounts in the interests of all the right things i.e. security, disk space, performance etc. Little did I know at the time that Mr Keith (the old sysadmin) had changed his "home directory in Unix to /” i.e. ROOT – something that even to this day is far beyond my comprehension. I came to his account, issued the command to DELETE his account, which in turn removes the users home directory and sat there waiting for the Unix prompt, as many Unix sysadmins will know, there is never really a delay on this type of process, that is unless there is something unexpected going on and after several seconds I ran to the server room to listen to the hard work being carried out by the hard disks as the system cleared all my ERP system including data, software, Progress and parts of the Unix OS. Knowing there was something wrong I jumped to the UPS and flipped the mains off switch, the room fell into silence!
Lucky for me only the previous week I’d created the first File Store Repair Tape (used to recover the OS) and complete system backup (ERP software & Progress) in the previous week which got me off the hook, the Progress DB was still intact thanks to my gut instinct & powering off the system and I got away with having to re-create indexes on the DB as opposed to going to the overnight backup.
Whilst you would never expect a previous sysadmin to change a home directory to something like / (root) I quickly learned never to underestimate other peoples thoughts and actions when it comes to this type of work, as a result I’ve always been overprotective over everything I look after, much to the dismay of colleagues.
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