The Grumpy IT Admin

I do a little bit of scripting now and again, simple stuff to set permissions as part of silent install, copy some files or bulk update AD entries but nothing too drastic, I don't have the right kind of mind for all that, I am a visual guy and work best with images, long lines of text just don't do it for me, unless they can save me a lot of time. Since we moved to Exchange 2010 and due to being involved in VMware, more and more of my time is wasted trying to work out what I am supposed to be typing in to some command window. I’m sure if I spent all day every day making Exchange or VMware bend to my will I would probably get quite used to it and be able to reel off the required string in seconds but in a world where I have to also fix printers, deal with users, set up new server, make Backup Exec work and all the other stuff, trying work out a couple of lines of text with some really poor documentation and unhelpful error messages is not really a good use of my time. I c

We are struggling with one 3rd party supplier that insist that our iSCSI solution is around 5000% slower than our previous solution. They have also stated that they would not support any speed related issues with the product if we moved the DB on to iSCSI. No just to fill a few details, the old storage was a HP EVA 8000, a big beastie if ever there was one and the current is a Dell EqualLogic which is more utilitarian to say the least. Now anyone with half a brain cell will say the EVA is going to be quicker than the EQ. Any test you throw at the the two solutions will back that up to varying degrees of excess. Now everyone accepts that, so where may you ask is the problem? Well, what we should be asking is not how fast is our choice of storage but is it fast enough and how does it affect the end user experience? If the storage is runs at half the speed but this represents only 1% of the time an application takes to respond to the user then to be honest the user is not really

I didn't expect to have to revisit this but my recent DR test has highlighted another issue along the same lines. Trying to recover the same server again and the drives once again were not writable. No problem I know how to fix that. In to Diskpart and ...oh no hidden volumes. What is going on? A quick check and the volumes are set to read only, but are not showing as hidden. A quick look through the list of commands available in Diskpart revealed the Detail command, running Det Vol on an affected volume gives a listing of all the attributes something like the following Read-only                          : Yes Hidden                               : No No Default Drive Letter    : Yes Shadow Copy                    : Yes I had a look at some other drives and it would seem the 3 Yeses should have been 3 Nos, or at least all the drives had a full house of Nos. So I ran Attributes Volume Clear Readonly Attributes Volume Clear ShadowCopy Attributes Volume Clear NoDefa

I have not been terribly nice about Dell, but a recent problem with a disk that failed which started badly with some poor communication got much better and ended with a complete star called Anne from Ireland who really couldn't do enough for me. She even got a list of all the contact details I would ever need, checked they still worked and tested the correct key press to get through the automated queuing rubbish that seem so prevalent these days. It was all above and beyond and fills me with a little hope for the future. I just hope Dell can now live up to my expectations that have been so expertly raised by the rather nice Anne from Ireland.