petergwilson · Monitoring Specialist · ✭✭✭✭✭

I worked in one company who thought disaster recovery was restore the data from the untested backup tapes piled on top of the servers. We ended up with data replication to disks on another site, that then backed up to tape for remote storage and a contract to lease servers and desktops at short notice should the need…

Myspace. If it was important why would you NOT have a backup or another copy somewhere. I'm sure Myspace didn't have unlimited storage space and probably thought it was about time it deleted a lot of the cr@p that was on there. Necer used it so have no idea of the T&Cs. 

There are also considerations as to whether you can store data in the public cloud. We have contracts with clients that expressly forbid this. 

Laptop (or phone) batteries. I still get people telling me I should fully discharge then fully charge batteries. Why they think I, an IT professional and ex hardware engineer, need this advice is beyond me. It also doesn't help that they are wrong. It was only early generation NiCad batteries that suffered from the memory…

Yes. Monitoring is seen as very low priority here until there is an issue. Then it is always "Why didn't your monitoring flag this up". Fortunately I look and sound very scary when angry so they usually just shut up and go away.

We would find this useful. I'd like to be able to schedule something which would stop alerting on a server, reboot it, detect when it is back up and re-enable alerting. Might also be nice to unmanage it so the RAG screen doesn't display any yellow but still retain the data showing the server was down (for evidence that the…

I've been lucky to have had occasion to travel, through business, all over the UK and Ireland, to several places in the USA, Germany, France and India. For pleasure I've travelled to France, Italy, Spain, Egypt, USA, Maldives, Japan, Continental Micronesia and the Netherlands. What got me through a lot of the travel was…

Data Centre » BOFH • The Register

The problem will always be the forgotten box in the corner that has become mission critical but no one knows about it. Good documentation and a monitoring solution that can perform thorough discovery will show up this box. Then you can harden it.

Signed up for this presentation. I'm from a SysAdmin background but frequently see network issues before the network people because I believe in monitoring and they don't. 

Now that is a bit naughty giving the wrong hint. Fortunately I was stuck in a meeting and saw the comments before I selected my answer so got it right.

Whilst I do agree with this there is just one major sticking point. Money. IT wants (and needs) to upgrade the network to protect the business but the non technical management at the top who control the money can't seem to understand the need. It doesn't matter how many ways you tell them, they just don't believe that it…

Thwack is such a good place to start. Pity other vendors don't have similar.

Another feature that we would find very useful.

The WhatsApp one caused a lot of concern here at work where it is used extensively for team communications. Even the IT team use it for out of hours problem solving. I have been telling them not to put passwords in messages when someone asks for access to a system but this problem was much worse.

We have a hybrid solution with 50,000 students on Office365 and 5000 staff on prem Exchange 2010. The student migration went well. We are now planning the staff one. That will be much more complex with all the distribution lists, public folders etc. Once they are gone we will upgrade the on prem to Exchange 2016 and keep…

After the last few questions I started to doubt myself. Eventually took the plunge and picked the answer I first came up with. It was correct. No trick in this one.

Baltimore ransomware attack. Apparently they have set up a special task force to look into this. It is being headed by James McNulty with help from Lester Freamon. Main suspects are Stringer Bell and Avon Barksdale. The Wire - Wikipedia

There's so much information about each and every one of us on the internet. Anonymizing one set of data won't really help.

Amazon made $5Bn in revenue but how much of that was profit. How much was ploughed back into the business to make it grow. How much have they already spent to get this revenue. Context would be nice. I guess the rise in Prime cost is just them repositioning after finding how much it really costs to run. Or maybe it IS just…

Yep, the UK is going to be an interesting place to be for IT people from the end of this month. I'm based in London for a global org. so should have some interesting challenges. 

Munich. Why not just go for a hybrid solution like everyone else where you use the best tools for the job. Most places I have worked have this. When the Linux / iOS machines couldn't be supported in house we just paid an outside company to do it and got on with the Microsoft support ourselves. It really isn't rocket…

Yes, All done before I got here. I'm in the process of showing them how to do things properly but there is sooooo much stuff done badly that I may be retired before I sort it all out (or behind bars for killing someone who is too stupid to understand even basic common sense).

Still don't get Q18. Two of the answers are word for word in the hint yet the question only allows for one answer.

It's getting too complicated and widespread for humans to manage. Automation and machine learning will have to take on some of the workload to allow humans to focus on the more oddball problems. Look at SolarWinds. I find it useful to set alerts up to "fix" known problems automatically whilst I concentrate on 'new' or more…

No thanks to being microchipped. Have they proven that the chip can't be hacked. What if someone was able to clone your chip. They would have access to everything you had and there would be no proof that you didn't do it. The only chips in me are made from potatoes.

Absolutely correct and what I've been saying to management here. Unfortunately they have brought in an outside 'expert' company. Net result, I have had to do most of the work as the external company seem to get everything wrong. They sent me a list of 500+ 'Linux' servers they couldn't connect to. Unfortunately about 90%…

It would be good to know when new servers are added or servers are upgraded. Not everyone in the team remembers to let me know.

I've got a full race exhaust on my Honda CBR600F Sport. Titanium end can with twin ports and baffles removed. Everyone hears me coming. Also adds 15bhp when combined with a Power Commander and a custom fuel map.

Standard response these days to a browser issue is "Try it in Firefox or Chrome". That usually does the trick. Edge is just poor and IE's security setup is far too convoluted.