petergwilson · Monitoring Specialist · ✭✭✭✭✭

Surely some buses could be replaced in the short term and, when the electric battery tech improves, the longer routes can be looked at later. Now we just have to find some way of producing all the extra electricity it will require. If only there was some way of generating it from fossil fuel.

Elon Musk is / was in a position of responsibility and should have been careful every time he made comment whether spoken or written. This time he made a really bad mistake. Most people in his position who do this get penalised. Part of his vast pay should have been for his ability to think before doing something stupid /…

I received some interesting feedback from my manager recently. She said I shouldn't point out to people why their solution to a problem was wrong. I politely disagreed and told her why her feedback was wrong. She didn't get the irony.

I have tried to write some general rules to help people work through log files, alerts etc. to diagnose issues but it is impossible. There are too many variables. What you really need is a warm body with years of experience and something resembling a brain (sadly lacking in a lot of IT folk these days).

The "Smart Lock" appears to be neither smart nor a lock. How can you take something that already exists (a lock) and make it worse. Oh yeah, I know. Add technology.

Glad I made you smile. I must be old though. I still think in feet, inches, miles, pints etc. (especially pints - usually of good english warm beer). Although, to be fair, I'm just back from Bordeaux where I was drinking lots of red wine. Still in pints though .

Outsourcing by another name.

It would be difficult to remove Zukerberg given he is the majority shareholder with 60% of the company. 

In my last place someone decided that VMWare NSX was the answer so we got it. Eventually it was installed and configured. The only thing it couldn't do was the one thing it was brought in to do. All that happened was that an extra layer of complexity was created. I can see where it would be great but it isn't the great…

Not sure if I would trust a Firefighter I used to work for the London Fire Brigade. Most of them couldn't be trusted to tie their own shoelaces. Still, I wouldn't trade places with any of them. Bloody heroes.

Cheers. I see what they were getting at. I've put Solarwinds into my current client and have been putting together cost saving estimates but I have been adding in all the cost savings, not just the one they were looking for here.

We have a 'Head of IT Security' who is always on at us to patch everything and a management that only allows us to patch one third of the servers each Tuesday morning between 07:00 and 09:00 on a three week cycle (with no overtime). Funny how no one seems to be available out of hours. Systems do get patched though. Just…

Currently several large SANs but we are moving to a Hyper Converged solution on Dell VXRail so the new storage will be a part of that made up of SSD and disks with loads of data deduplication and compression. It will be interesting to see it in action.

Sorry but I couldn't disagree with you more. If the "correct" answer has a typo then it is incorrect. How are we to know it isn't a trick to catch out the unwary (as has happened so many times in the past). If you want to take that route then there are 3 answers which could be correct if you allow for a single character…

Using them to work towards SCP.

Yep, there's been a few like that this month. I was ready to explode when I started to read the pop up box today after answering the question correctly. I've had to do quite a lot on GDPR lately so todays question was a no brainer.

Respond and resolve are two different things. Response can be near instantaneous. Resolution may involve server reboots etc. which need approval from the affected department(s). Network issues need to be carefully managed as restarting a switch may affect multiple departments that don't have any issues and I'm really not…

Monitor everything. It's what you alert on that is important. If you are monitoring everything it makes it easier to diagnose when you have years of data to show what is normal and therefore highlight the abnormal. It is also very useful in trend analysis for disk capacity, memory and CPU requirements. It's also very…

CEOs of IT companies.

'Non-native English speakers'. Does that include Amurkins.

Yes, got that here too. We have one guy who is always getting praised for being here after 18:00. Problem is he is supposed to be here between 10:00 and 18:00 but rarely turns up before 11:00 and then charges overtime for anything after 18:00 (and usually takes well over an hour for lunch). I may have found evidence of…

Yes, totally agree. I can see the payoff. Little effort, get a couple of grand, move on. All they have to do is break in, gather enough info. to pretend to be the boss, find out when he / she is away and pretend to be him / her. Contact finance and get them to 'pay' a supplier (which is actually an account they control. If…

I realised it about 5 minutes into their presentation about the great DR solution they had. The noise of the bubble bursting was quite loud.

Spectre, Meltdown. Not really a surprise. No one does full product testing any more. It's too complex. I wonder how many other vulnerabilities have yet to be discovered.

Would like all. Would settle for the 1st two for now with the other to follow.

That's a dangerous thing to say. If you do you will get everyone asking you to fix whatever IT kit they have. I tell people I look after servers and infrastructure and still get people asking me to look at their PC / tablet. When I say no they get really upset. They don't understand that I really don't know that much about…

Well you say NASA put a car on the moon but did they really do it..........yes.............. probably.

I take the approach that if I monitor everything I will have the data. I can then decide what to stop monitoring when I don't see any need for the data. As the data is stored on a third party's storage I don't care about how much there is. Setting the alerts correctly stops all the noise and the historic data helps with…

Did anyone else think that Google would be listening. I did but I am cynical (and usually proven correct). Big companies have no morals. That's how they became big.

Good stuff there. Where I am working they don't really get it. They do see the need for regular and emergency patching but will only give us a patch window out of hours but won't pay overtime for anyone to do it. They bought Netwrix for GDPR compliance and allowed me to install and configure it but no one looks at the…