petergwilson · Monitoring Specialist · ✭✭✭✭✭

It might also have a lot to do with the really poor quality air they circulate in aircraft now. Apparently it was so much better when people were allowed to smoke on flights as they had to scrub and refresh the air a lot more.

OK, not enough coffee. Skipped the validation question.

Should be interesting. I look forward with interest having recently moved from a Hybrid IT Public Sector solution to a Hybrid IT Private Sector solution here in the UK. 

This pretty much sums up what I have been telling our management. We are about to implement a £3m HCI infrastructure based on VxRail with a DS60 + DD6800 data domain and all the associated gubbins in an active / active data centre pair. After that we will just need to migrate about a thousand VM servers onto it. Should be…

We had Microsoft come in here and pitch for us to move servers and data to Azure. I pointed out that some of the data had to stay in the UK and MUST not be stored outside. They said that wouldn't be a problem as they could guarantee the data would stay in their Dublin data centre. I quite naturally exploded. Dublin is NOT…

Would be nice to have a question to actually answer.

Cost of making coins. Here in the UK we have had that problem for a while. The 1p and 2p coins cost more to produce than they are worth. However we are stuck with the American invention of something costing £x.99. (It was created so that people would have a 1 cent piece in their pocket and the inventor owned a newspaper…

Beat me to it by a few hours. Looks like everyone else is still in bed. I wish I was.

The only issue I had was whether they were looking for the "All of the above" answer. Always get a bit nervous when that appears.

I have too many meetings and most of the time it is just people talking so that they can hear their own voice. We do have some team meetings where we let everyone else know what we are up to. However this could be done via e-mail. I have been known to call a meeting and remove all the chairs before anyone arrives. It's…

Management come up with a strategy without understanding the business needs. Non technical people go out and BUY stuff to meet the strategy (sort of) and then give it to the IT professionals and say "Make it so". IT professionals look at it, laugh then realise they are serious and start preparing their CVs. Sounds odd. Not…

Also helps with population control as the numbers of people stepping out in front of them, because they don't hear them coming, increases. Seen some very near misses. Some people need all the help they can get to avoid being run over. Probably using their one brain cell to read tweets on their phone.

Good news about Delta and the reclining seats. I hope others follow. I'm 6'4" and, when the person in front of me reclines their seat, I can't see the seatback screen because it doesn't tilt enough. 

That's how I set my last Solarwinds site up (current one is yet to purchase but it will be soon). Application centric displays showing services with alerts to application support when necessary and server alerts to me (and my server team) when there was a server issue. Management got service summaries and some alerts.…

Amazon fake reviews. I find something that I think will do the job. Read all the reviews and get a general consensus (If most people say it is poor and one says it is great guess which I'll believe). I also look for reviews elsewhere on the internet. It's only when I'm happy that the product is OK will I buy it. It seems…

Good article and it all makes sense. However, how many of us actually get any choice in what tool we use. I started my current role a year ago and found a half installed (and half baked) install of Solarwinds SAM. There was no handover as the previous incumbent had left and there was no documentation. I was just told to…

Liked the article but really liked the Readability Tool. Might use this to check my documentation in future. Of course you need to get someone to RTFM first before they can understand it.

Oh no it isn't. AND just remember He's behind you.

Thank you Tattoo

You wouldn't believe what I have found hidden away over the years. I once stepped into a contract role where I was to perform a due diligence on the 30 Netware servers the client thought were on their customer site. I reported on 120 Netware servers all of which were running quite happily. They just didn't know about them.…

You do know it's not real ?

All good stuff. I'm a big advocate of talking to the money makers. Find out what they need to help them make more money and then offer solutions. Talk their language and work with them. Everyone wins. If you can get them to buy the beer too, it's even better. 

Maybe by then we'll have invented something else to keep data safe. Maybe AI will have taken over. Who knows. 

@"undesired_result" Unfortunately that isn't true as not all missions start on the 1st. Hope your monitoring is more accurate. Also, this is the first monthly mission since the new platform became available. Some parts aren't up and running yet (not having a go at the great people at Solarwinds who do an amazing job) so it…

Lucky you. At my last job (a few months ago) I got rid of the last Windows 2000 server and some of the remaining Windows 2003 servers. Glad I'm not there any more. Got lots of 2008R2 servers here as well as 2012 and 2016. No 2019 yet.

Cryptocoin mining. I'm not really sure how this can happen. My anti-virus solution at home caught a bad webpage yesterday that was trying to install one. It was blocked. Surely businesses must have up to date A/V too. I also watch what the computers are doing and any suspicious disk and CPU activity gets checked.…

You mean you haven't got one. I thought all IT techies had one. I used to bamboozle idiot customers by using a toy Star Trek TNG Tricorder when diagnosing faults on Tricord superservers (worked best when I already had the error codes and knew what was faulty). I'd switch the toy on, let it make beeping noises, pretend to…

I've got most notifications turned off as I know they aren't actually important. That way, really important stuff doesn't get missed in the noise.

Of course developers don't use encryption. It's all about churning out code fast and taking the cash. It's nothing new. Y2K was exactly the same. No one coded properly then either (except me, my code written in 1988 for a major client was Y2K ready because I'm anally retentive like that). 

I only discovered this mini mission today so missed out on the first week's prize. Today's question does need to be reviewed. I suspect it's another radio button instead of check boxes problem. Any chance we could get a notification of these mini missions sooner (say on day 1 or before). Thanks for everything you do though.