February 2015

So we have a new customer. They have decided to invest heavily in an Apple solution, lots of iMacs, lots of MacBooks and Apple Xserver and Apple RAID, all good you would think except both Xserver and the Apple RAID are end of life with no replacement available from Apple since they withdrew from the server market. Their solution of installing server on a Mini Mac is not really a commercially viable option in a mission critical environment, however I digress.

What backup procedures do you have? I ask, “Oh we use Time Machine on the server, then we take a backup of the Time Machine files as a secondary backup”.

Really I say and how reliable would you say that is. “Its very reliable,” came the response, “we have never had to do a restore.”

Wait a minute I say, that is not what I asked, what is the reliability of you backups, are they sound are they free from corruption, is the backup media is a good state, how do you know the backups will restore when you need them if you have never had to do a restore. He looked perplexed, we have never had to do a restore so everything is good.

No it is not I reply, I suggest you try restoring some as soon as possible, not only that, but you restore from a backup of your time machine. He still hasn’t done it yet, I’m keeping my fingers cross that they don’t suffer a catastrophic failure any time soon. I will keep reminding him until he has done it.

Had a rather annoyed customer wanting to return a nice new HP notebook/tablet the other day.

Whats wrong with it, it is no good he replied, when it boots up it keeps asking for a password.

At what point is it asking for a password?.

When its booting up its rubbish, it never used to ask for a password, send it back and get it replaced.

Let me take a look I ask.

So I get my hands on the nice new laptop in perfect working order and sure enough it does ask a password, after it boots up and his son tries to login. His son had being playing around and set a password on his account but couldn’t remember it, so as far as they were concern the laptop was broken and no good. More amazingly his dad who bought the laptop to me uses a laptop for work, I was going to suggest that the best coarse of action would be to find the box, package it up, sell it and return to pen and paper, but I guess it keeps me busy.

Back on September 17th 2014 I wrote about a customer waiting on some BT hole diggers to dig up their carpark ready for an installation of Fibre. Well, they finally turned up and guess what, they had a bit of soft digging to do, basically across a bit of flowerbed to the wall of the office and they removed a few block pavers, and there was BT saying they would have to dig up the carpark, this that and the other, hence the dispute with the landlord and when they finally arrive on site it is nothing like was predicted. So much for the BT surveyor that had turned up previously an said what needed to be done.

So the cable is installed, but talk about the easy route, they placed the incoming connection in the middle of a meeting room wall about 300mm up from the floor a real eyesore. No trunking either.

Why didn’t they route the cable to the corner of the room or where the existing BT services enter the office near to the DP. There was already ducting in place for that.

BT subsequently rock up to do their bit, sadly I was not on site because they would have had a rocket had I been there. The company was installing some CCTV around their own premises and routing the cable back to the server room. This involved removing a ceiling tile to access the roof space and bring the cables in. So the BT engineer (I use the term loosely) decided, in his infinite wisdom, it would be acceptable to drop the fibre tube straight through the same opening, straight through the top of the server cabinet and install the hardware, what a complete mess, there it was a piece of white tubing hanging in mid air resting on the suspended ceiling frame, not in trunking, not clipped to the wall, not routed along the floor and up through the bottom of the cabinet as is the normal method.

When the 2nd BT guy turned up to fit the final bit of hardware he was told not to do anything until he had routed the fibre cable correctly. Much to his annoyance he did the job, but he could not disconnect the fibre as it wasn’t his job, so there he was trying to manipulate a 1U rack mounted fibre unit through all the other cables and hardware in the cabinet, you couldn’t make it up. He was getting grumpy, but I reminded him that he wouldn’t be doing this extra work if his colleagues had bothered to install it correctly in the first place.