Karl B

Just a short post made from work because I’m amused.

A tool staff member walked into the IT room today and said “I need to get some data off a Jaz”. Those of you who were involved with computers in the mid/late 90′s may remember the failed Iomega Jaz drive. Apparently this person has some client data back from 2001 (a year before the Jaz drive was discontinued) which he needs to get off the cartridge.

The conundrum now is whether we charge him the £200 that a data recovery service would, while buying an old drive off ebay for £20 or not. Decisions, decisions.

I really don’t know what to say about our fire alarm at work, and the people who managed it. Actually I do, and it involves language inappropriate for work.

It’s like this; the fire alarm test is done 4:30pm, every Friday. Due to the strains of our current economy Friday isn’t the fun happy day, it’s just a more stressful version of every other one day, people are tired, trying to get last minute work done then all of a sudden the fire alarm goes off. Not only does it go off, it is loudly announced using a pre-recorded message that everyone hates, then the alarm goes off for 30 seconds, then a message is played again. It always causes a lot of grumbing and anger.

Now the whole crying wolf part. Over the last two weeks the fire alarm has gone off almost every day, and it has been a false alarm. It has got to the stage where we just work through it. Today when it went off, which ended up up being due to water leak, I kept making calls until someone came in to actually tell us to leave…and we were still the first ones out of the building. Sigh.

Since I’ve become employed here, and perhaps more so since I was offered a full time contract (starts late April and lasts until the end of my working visa), I have fallen back into the worker ant mentality. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. Because of this a friend last night gave me a challenge, a mission of sorts, to post photos of myself at Stonehenge within two weeks.

I have accepted, but thought I’d make it a series and start out with something more interesting.  April 1st, the day before the G20 summit starts there will be a protest infront of the bank of England. As it so happens, I work within 300m of said bank, so tomorrow I plan to come to work (we’ve been told use an alternative site)  in a suit (we’ve been told to dress down), carrying a camera and snapping photos in the midst of the crowd.

If you have any ideas for things to do in my spare time leave a comment, I still plan on going to StoneHenge as well.

To Mum: I hope I speak with you tomorrow evening before you read my blog, if not, sorry!

So after a long time in the UK and applying for at least 167 jobs (that’s how many I logged, I was applying for some before I started logging jobs) I have been offered a job. Horray!

So here I am and I just had my last exam today, yay, it’s also the first post I’ve made since I started university. I’m so amazed that the below prediction came true.

Anyway, if by some chance you stumble across this epic blog you’ll probably notice a flurry of postings in the next couple of weeks and then it will die off as a realise I don’t really want to tell the whole world what I’m doing.

Anyway, as an update on my plans:

1. I’ve handed in my resignation at work and I finish some time August, the finish date is a little hazy as it depends on whether they can’t live without me want me back for awhile as a contractor.
2. I’ve applied for my Visa to travel to the UK, I should have a done so earlier but it should still arrive before I leave my job.

After mulling over my previous post where I talked about server monitoring at work a thought came to me. I’ve been wanting to get back into programming as I haven’t done any serious coding since I was at university over 4+ years ago (I feel that I’m stagnating in the learning department) so I took the rant and decided hey, a project!

My thought is this: Monitoring agents should not really be needed on a server. From my workstation I can bring up a list of events from a remote server using eventvwr or a list of services by managing a server so why can’t monitoring tools?

I busted out Visual C# and after bumbling my way around for awhile I found System.ServiceProcess.ServiceController which you can use to find all the services and their current statuses on a local or remote machine that you have permissions on. In the coming weeks I expect I’ll be talking more about this as I try to write some rudimentary monitoring software.

Karl Out.

PS: Please don’t point out free software online which already does this, I’ve been trying to think of a good project for awhile and now that I have one I don’t want to lose it.

Lately I’ve become more and more  disillusioned by the server monitoring at my work.

I work in the IT department of a company which has a couple dozen servers supporting ~500 people. For reasons unfathomable to myself (politics) an out sourcing company does the monitoring/patching/etc of the servers at our work, something which I know we’re perfectly able to do.

I’ll give you some examples of poor monitoring

• Drives failing in raid arrays and not being picked up until one of the staff on site goes into the server room and notices the error lights and then notifies said out sourced support.
• Services dying on important (database) servers and no one being notified about it, only for the staff to find out about it on Monday morning and having to scramble to fix it.
• Using ping as a (sole) check of whether a server is available.
• Insisting that monitoring agents be installed on servers to monitor them and once they are installed the monitoring still being substandard(/non existent)

And what’s worse is all that happens is they get a slap across the wrist (a talking to) when on multiple occasions they’ve broken the SLA.

Rant, rant rant. (Please note: These are my opinions only and do not represent the thoughts of my employer)