Occasionally for my work, I have to go out and visit customers. It never fails to amaze me how stupid some people can be.....

Imagine the scenario, a fairly large distributor of components, several warehouses throughout the country, all connected to their main warehouse somewhere not too far from here. All of their stock, ordering, picking, purchasing etc is done on our software, using their servers at the main site.

There I am, in a meeting with the MD in his office, the conversation turns to the servers that they're using. He then points to two Dell towers stacked up in the corner of his office.

OK... not the best of ideas, but not everyone has space for cabinets.

Then I look just above the servers, a window sill.... on which there are several large pot plants.

These get watered every day, using a jug of water, which is kept.... on top of one of the servers

Haha. Brilliant.

Did you say anything?

Phil

Under that pile of old boxes is about £15k of Dell workstation, which was "running slowly". Probably something to do with it having **** all airflow and 2 quad-core Xeons which pretty much run at 100% usage constantly.

edit - arse, uploaded the non-resized pic the first time

Haha. Brilliant.

Did you say anything?

Phil

I did, but I don't think he took the advice very seriously.

Him: "It's been like that for the last few years and we haven't had any problems with it"

Yep, always good. And I imagine it'll your fault when the software doesn't work, due to the server failing

I'd have mentioned one, or all, of the following to him:

resiliency, redundancy and a backup plan

Yep, always good. And I imagine it'll your fault when the software doesn't work, due to the server failing

Yep, that was the reason I was there.

IIRC - 15 terminal server users, exchange for 30, active directory + associated bits, and our software, all on an ancient dual core Xeon with 4GB RAM =

FFS. That's craziness right there.

But it's always someone else's fault that it's not working faultlessly. Just because you can install all of that in one place doesn't mean you should

Also, what the hell is it all doing in the MD's office?! Plants and water aside, I can think of a list as long my arm of other issues....

God knows why it was in there. Even a locked small cab would do, but nope.

At the end of the day, there is only so much advice you can give to people, despite it being crucial for their business that their systems are up 100%.

At the end of the day, there is only so much advice you can give to people, despite it being crucial for their business that their systems are up 100%.

Not in IT, but agree whole heartedly. It's the ones you advise and try and help that seem to cause the most issues and raise complaints. Make you want to not help and do what colleagues and competitors do and turn a blind eye.

Sadly I was brought up better than that so cant just walk way. *sigh*

Currently battling with an ancient quad core Xeon system in work, running a horrible Java web application, with a Postgres backend. Needs constant babysitting to work properly because it's such a bad application, with huge memory leaks. Another two servers run the same app, but they're 8 and 16 cores so a lot better and can handle the crap that app dumps out!

Well this is one of our tidier cabs!

but then we do get the odd decent waste of money to play on, electronic rise and fall desks anyone?

Now I'm jealous. Our tidiest cab is much crappier than that, and our rise and fall desks are manual :(

Now I'm jealous. Our tidiest cab is much crappier than that, and our rise and fall desks are manual :(

I have redressed ones better than that but they never last! I will see if I can dig them out! Also have a thing about getting rack mounted servers stacked in size order!

Those macs are in a secondary school and you don't want to know how much that room cost the bsf pot of money:

I can imagine. One of the student labs on our campus was recently kitted out with between 60 and 70 iMacs. Which are used to run our corporate Windows service 90% of the time, in a rarely used (I think) triple-boot setup with Windows, OSX and Linux. Absolute waste of money IMO, at a time where we're losing funding left, right and centre...

I can imagine. One of the student labs on our campus was recently kitted out with between 60 and 70 iMacs. Which are used to run our corporate Windows service 90% of the time, in a rarely used (I think) triple-boot setup with Windows, OSX and Linux. Absolute waste of money IMO, at a time where we're losing funding left, right and centre...

sounds familiar!

Gonna start taking pics of the server rooms now and start a thread, who's got the best server room/cab!

As I mostly work with Small-Medium businesses they mostly have 1-4 servers so never really get to see proper server rooms with proper cooling and power control. The best one is when you go to site to look at a problem with a rack mounted server in a "server" room and no one has the access code to get in not bad if they are five mins down teh road but when you have driven for over 2 hours it can be a tad annoying.

Todays worst though has got to be, user calls in, their Sage has thrown a wobbly and tehy need to roll back their data. Not a problem says I, just go back to your last Sage backup and you will be fine. OK can you get that off the tape for us? I can but dont you have the sage backups on the share, you know where sage asks you to backup your data EVERY TIME YOU LOG OFF? Oh no we dont do that as it gets backed up on the tape so we dont have to, we havent done that for years. Guess whos data isnt on the backup tape either

What are everyones thoughts on a File server running 4 SAS drives in RAID0? Genius or what? Yes is is dead now as well.

Ahhh Sage.

A couple of years ago, one of our customers who was in for training, casually asked if they could get a copy of the Sage backup they had sent to us the previous week.

Turns out that that their server had somehow caught fire, and their one and only backup drive, was simply an external hard drive, that was sat on top of the server

You couldn't make it up.

Trust me people don't get much cleverer with backups in bigger companies.

We discovered that one of our back up systems was corrupted and was trying to back up everything to the first 10k on a tape. It just kept over writing it until it was done then flagged the job as successful.

No one noticed until they needed to restore....

Edited 9 February, 201214 yr by Aspman

I'm not a huge IT nerd......although one of my stepfathers when I was younger has a high up specifier/programmer put in networks/computerized tills etc for a big supermarket early 70's then worked for ILEA in the late 70's early 80's and got head hunted by DESAC to work on Regans starwars project (which is why I spent a few yrs in the USA when I was a kid)....

Those pics of all those nice £££££ Macs which look as if they raise up out of the tables......007 or what!!!!.........jesus.....I remember the **** Cad stations we had a Uni for Architecture......bits everythere and the IT guys spending half their time just keeping it stable......these kids these days are really spoilt!!!!!

AS for SAge......yeah I use a version of this (TASbooks3).....and yep every time you log of it asks you to back up...also when you log on it asks you to back up if it wasn't done the last time you logged off!!......and I keep a back up on a 2gb usd stick......and every few weeks I make a full disc image of the laptop to an external hard drive which is stored nice and safe....I also have a different external hard drive which I do the same thing to for the desktop.........simples.......

/waits for someone to bring up the old Coffee Cup Holder/CD Drive story......... :think:

Ahhh Sage.

A couple of years ago, one of our customers who was in for training, casually asked if they could get a copy of the Sage backup they had sent to us the previous week.

Turns out that that their server had somehow caught fire, and their one and only backup drive, was simply an external hard drive, that was sat on top of the server

You couldn't make it up.

We're currently doing that :( our servers are due to be virtualised in a matter of weeks and our Ultrium 1 drive has decided that 10 years faultless service is enough, and decided to pack in.

Options are spend a fortune on a new drive to use for about a month before we move to the virtual platform, buy a used one off eBay and take a risk that it might not be any better than the one we've got, or bandaid it by rotating USB hard drives between the server room and the fire safe. We're taking the latter option mainly as it's cheaper and we already have the drives so don't need any big purchasing approvals etc...hopefully it'll get us through until our servers are "in the cloud" and then it's someone else's problem to backup/restore them

our servers are "in the cloud" and then it's someone else's problem to backup/restore them

I really don't like all this talk about "cloud".......clouds can dissapear........to revial and nice vast empty sky....... ...

I like to know where my stuff is...in my control......

It's not a cloud, strictly speaking. We're under pressure to remove all physical servers from our campus and move to virtual, which will be powered by VMWare and various series of blades (yes, I know they're servers as well but they're obviously more geared towards virtualisation and high-density components than a traditional server) in two new, redundant datacentres or "pods", as we're calling them. At that point the backups will be handled via the "Previous Versions" feature in Windows for one-offs, or SAN snapshots or tape archives (last resort) for anything bare metal.

So when I say "cloud", I just mean it'll all be virtual, we won't really know where they're hosted but they'll still be physically on our campus somewhere in one of these two geographically separate datacentres, backed by equally separate SAN storage with replication. It's not a cloud in the sense I'm chucking them out on the Internet where they might disappear, get locked in to a vendor, etc.

Well this is one of our tidier cabs!

but then we do get the odd decent waste of money to play on, electronic rise and fall desks anyone?

That's *tidy*.