petergwilson · Monitoring Specialist · ✭✭✭✭✭

Most advances in technology come from war or the preparations for war. This is no different. I remember Farnborough Air Show several years ago. Some senior American Air Force bod was waxing lyrical about how their new stealth fighter (being displayed for the first time) couldn't be tracked. The British corporal running the…

Always good to show them what they will have to lose if they cut budgets. Hit them where it hurts and if they think it is a bluff, really turn stuff off. It's amazing how quickly the money appears.

Facebook not so good at security. You surprise me.

I hope Amazon enjoy their market lead. Novell dominated the server market until Microsoft decided to compete. We all know that Novell had the better products but they lost. Amazon will lose too unfortunately.

Passive aggressive e-mails. DELETE and put the persons original request at the bottom of the pile. If they have come to me for help then they need me (and I don't need them). It might take them a while to learn but they will eventually. I do love using the phrase "With all due respect". Management still haven't figured it…

Whole Foods. What genius thought that up. Even a half-wit would see that that is just wrong. I guess they'll get promoted.

UK here too so we don't suffer from this. Change freeze is about all we do.

Yep. I used the clearly underlined word to not select one answer. I got marked as wrong. It makes no sense.

I think the movies and book authors have potentially ruined the term AI for us. Now most people imagine computers taking over the world and doing all of us humans real harm. Maybe we need a new phrase to explain computers watching systems for signs of things going wrong and then warning us humans that there is a potential…

Thanks for doing this once again. Had a great time except for the all nighter in between the two days sorting out a complete power failure at a customer site. If you could make sure that doesn't happen next time, I would be very grateful (and a lot less tired on day 2). Seriously though, the Hospital really liked how I…

It's really important that you know why you are measuring and what you hope to achieve. Otherwise you are just gathering data which will never be used.

I like the turning photos from Android devices into data but what I really need is to turn any screen grab into data. There are many occasions where I would have found this to be very useful for reporting from systems where data export isn't available. Fingers crossed for Microsoft to get this done soon.

Might need to update the Thwack landing page. It is showing last month's mission.

We are pretty much running at full at present (with some squirreled away just in case). However, we have just signed off on a £3M kit replacement which will be two HCI (Hyper Converged Infrastructure) systems (one for each on site data centre). This will give us a lot more CPU, a lot more memory, a lot better networking…

They have been scanning faces in the UK at airports for years. Many years ago I had my fingerprints scanned at Narita (Toyko) airport as a condition of entry. This isn't really new. It just depends on what they use it for. Security - yes, tracking known players - yes. Tracking law abiding folks - no. As it is government it…

Glad I don't have to deal with users data. I'm only interested in systems access and the stuff I need to keep the servers running. That's enough of a task. User collected and created data here is huge.

Think of the spec. you could get on a non iOS machine for that cash. Why does anyone buy Apple any more.

We run SAM and WPM through Aurora365. They host the products and I just configure which systems to monitor and set up the alerts, web site monitoring recordings and reports. As such, I don't have access to the customer portal and Aurora365 won't get me access (I guess it is because they offer training at a cost). We don't…

I spent two weeks in Plymouth Minnesota on a training course and didn't notice anything unusual about how people spoke. I had a great time and everyone was very pleasant. Then again I have quite a strong accent (or maybe everyone else has and I'm the only normal person).

Yep, that does seem to be contrary to whay Yum is saying. I'm not sure we should be penalised for not answering a different question to the one asked.

I think automation will just become more and more mainstream. We have fewer and fewer staff to look after an ever expanding set of IT systems. It is almost impossible to provide a good service without automating at least some of it. Monitoring is key. Here we are down to one Infrastructure Support Engineer (me) to support…

If the mapping feature is generating this much confusion maybe someone should talk to the designers. There is clearly a problem. It should be intuitive and not some sort of "dark art". That said, I think it has great possibilities.

Air marshals. Again, only a matter of time. They spend most of their time doing nothing (not that I'd want to do their job - I imagine it is quite stressful just waiting for something to happen and then have to react quickly, correctly and possibly deadly). I guess some beancounter decided they could use their 'spare' time…

Can't wait to see when you make a Fire Angel

D&D has taught me to "Think outside the box" which seems to be doing the rounds again in management speak. Fortunately it has also taught me that I can just cast a spell and kill the nasty IT manager. It needs a really big sword to sort out the head of IT though. Sometimes it's good to daydream. It has also shown me that…

768K Day. Now should I check with our network guys to see if they are aware or just wait to see what happens..

Yep. We have a global infrastructure with Domain Controllers on most sites. I want to put a couple of DCs in Azure and have the remote sites VPN to them, then take away the local DCs as they are getting on a bit. Problem is I can't get a price for what I want which I can use to forecast costs in 3 years time. Cloud could…

Teleporter. Would save me the 1.5 hour each way commute every time I go into the office. Would also replace the drunk taxi that seems to get me home from the pub but I would miss the kebab on the way.

Now that's a shame seeing all those Turkey legs going to waist (pun intended).

Done