The Grumpy IT Admin

I am quite a strict parent when it comes to PC usage. Being someone who understands how PCs work and how to get around bad programming, I just make my kids ordinary Users on their PC not Admins. this means if they need to install anything I have to do it. I did at one stage give them the password but they used it to change the clock on the PC to circumvent the allowed times they were allowed to log on. This required a password change, unfortunately due to the large number of passwords we all need to remember these days I forgot what I set it to. Now the only real Microsoft supported ways out of this is the previously created recovery disk (never created one of those personally), do a system restore or failing that to rebuild the PC, this is not something that particularly bothers me, I often rebuild my PC every 3-6 months to clear out all the accumulated junk that builds up, though I have to say that, despite it's own bloat, Windows 7 seems to be more resilient than XP in losing...

Licensing is a nightmare for any admin. We hate it and we even hate the bloke that has to make sure we comply. A distant vaguely related subsidiary of ours recently got hit with a million pound bill for license infringement by Microsoft. Bow whatever you feel about Microsoft or their prices or anything it is for the most part black and white when it comes to paying for licences. You use the software you, know how much of which bit of software you are using and you pay (through the nose) for it. That’s the deal. If they come calling as they are allowed to under the terms of their licence agreement you get charged full whack for everything that is installed that you haven’t got proof of licences for. The subsidiary in question rather ineptly decided to make everyone a local admin of their PC/Laptop so they could get all the badly written bits of software running. That is stupid in itself and sign of a weak IT department. Not surprisingly the users installed everything going on their lap...

What is it with developer that they feel the need to do completely stupid things without a though for the consequences, just as long as it works? Are they just lazy perhaps? I have come across a couple of instances in the last couple of days where developers have created shares on servers and left them wide open to abuse by anyone being a bit nosey on the network. When I say wide open, I mean barn door wide open. Yes they put the Everyone group in with full control on both the share and NTFS permissions. Yes that’s right, I couldn’t believe it either; they even went to the extent of removing all the other users from the NTFS permissions. Complete and utter thoughtlessness and madness.  I quickly created some groups added the users I was aware of that need access and added that in to the shares and NTFS permissions after I reset it all to defaults. This not surprisingly caused some problems as users that were expecting access no longer could and the support/developer people got th...

Users never cease to amaze me with the decisions they make. We bought, at great expense, an e-mail archiving system so we could keep our exchange systems lean mean and responsive. We went with Enterprise Vault as it was the only real player in town back then (version 5 and the KVS days, then Veritas now Symantec). Yes it is a bit clunky and probably wouldn’t be my choice if we were to pick a solution now, not just because it is Symantec but that would be a big factor. Anyway back to the users, all they have to do is leave everything as is and the Vault will drag off all the stuff more than 4 weeks old and leave a short cut in place of the e-mail, it is all pretty transparent to user, if they get a big email they can manually archive it with a couple of clicks. All simple stuff, all emails and attachments are indexed and there are some simple and more complex search methods, which are really quite quick considering the 6TB of emails and attachments we have archived, and an IE based...

Here's the thing, if I order something physical like a computer, router or network switch the supplier has to send that to me in a box. When I order something less tangible like software or a license to use something or even swap money for some virtual points (Microsoft Live points etc.) I don't actually need to have anything more than a license key or at most a PDF that says I am ok to use that item and somewhere to get the software from. You may be saying yes that sounds about right to me, however, as astounding as it may seem in this day and age, many things are still delivered as physical when a simple e-mail with a license key would suffice. I recently purchased a couple of XBOX live gold memberships with 800 MS points (don't get me started on that rip off) from Play.com and had to wait 6 days for the four 25 character keys to be delivered by Royal Mail. Why? Just e-mail them to me, save some carbon and I get fulfilment in 2 minutes and everyone including the frogs...

Just been over to Anandtech where Anand has a review of the latest Sandforce controllers in a beta of OCXs Vertex 3 drive. http://www.anandtech.com/show/4159/ocz-vertex-3-pro-preview-the-first-sf2500-ssd EDIT: That was in fact the Enterprise version, here's the skinny on the consumer SKU and what the differences are. http://www.anandtech.com/show/4186/ocz-vertex-3-preview-the-first-client-focused-sf2200 He clears up the issue of SSD life span very well. To sum up the original spec for 50nm Nand was 10,000 erases, 35nm is generally around 5,000 and the new 25nm is around 3,000, this doesn't sound like a lot of lifespan but once you understand how these things work yu will appreciate it is quite a long time. SSDs only wear when individual cells are wiped so basically the controller tries do everything it can not to do that, however the wipe cycle takes time so there is a balancing act between wiping early to avoid slow downs and leaving it to the last possible minute to a...

Did you know that if you snapshot a server in VMware the snap files are kept with the server? So what you say. Well if you have some tiered storage and your nice super-duper SQL box has system drive on some slow SATA storage and your Logs and Data are nice fast SAS or FC storage when you snap all the writes will go to the slow storage and your SQL box will run like a complete dog, not a greyhound but three legged pug with a bad hip. You can if you so wish specify where VMware stores it’s snap files but you will always see performance problems as it switches between locations to provide the latest data. VMware snapshots should be seen as a very short term thing, i.e. snapshot, do update. does it look ok, remove snapshot or revert, anything more than a couple of hours and you are starting to go in to dodgy performance territory particularly on SQL boxes and I would guess nything else running a database like Exchange or Oracle. One useful tool to have in your armoury is RVTools w...