I’ve had a very busy last few weeks, working on some different project for at work, and finishing up finals for my night classes. I’ve learned several interesting things in the past two weeks at my job.
The first thing that I learned was that Dell support people will bug you until you fix your computer. A hard drive went bad in one of our production servers. So I called Dell Gold support (which thankfully has american techs.) to get a replacement. After a lot of discussion, the tech told me to run a firmware update which would fix the issue. So I had to explain to him that it was a production server, and to do the fix he wanted would require me to schedule downtime and then go in to the hosted environment on a Saturday and perform the fix. So finally I got him to send me a replacement drive. But even since I have explained to him that the server is in a hosted facility an hour away from my office, he still calls me everyday to find out if the drive worked. I hate calling Dell tech support. But I have to to get parts under warranty.
Another thing I learned was that biometric fingerprint scanners do not recognize your finger if you have a cut on it. To access the hosted facility where our production equipment is kept, I have to have my right index finger scanned. I had a bad paper cut on it last week, and the scanner wouldn’t pick it up. Fortunatly there was a security gaurd there who accepted my photo ID and let me in. Seems to me like that could be a flaw in biometrics.
Another lesson is that high transactional SQL databases should be built on a Fibre Channel san instead of an ISCSI san. We have been researching a san solution from EMC for our database for several months, and have been recently evaluating an Equallogic ISCSI system. It is a sweet system that is easy to setup and maintain and doesn’t perform well with sql server. They gave us a demo unit, which we were able to get running with our database in very little time. But after testing it out and comparing it to our current system, which uses the SCSI drives in the server, we found it to be slower than our server. They told us some special tweaks to do, but that didn’t make it any faster. After some discussions with some smart EMC engineers, we learned a bunch of things that explained it. This is definitly something to remember for the future, and something to keep an eye on in the industry.
The last thing that I learned was that big relevant new articles can be annoying. This has happened to me several times, but not as bad as last week. Slashdot discussed an article that claimed a huge security hole in a particular version of RealVNC. Since we used to use RealVNC on a regular basis, many people panicked. I had noticed the article several days before when it first came out on a different website, and took the time to verify that the one server we still use vnc on did not have that version. We were completely safe. Then Friday morning, my inbox was cluttered with emails from people asking if I had seen it, and would we get hacked. I had to answer numerous emails explaining that we were fine, we didn’t even use VNC anymore, and besides, we already had other security features (like hardware firewalls, and vpn) which would assure our security even if we had the vulnerable software. It is pretty annoying when well-meaning people, who have no idea how the system is set up, make a huge deal over something that I have already seen and looked into. But I am sure that is something that I will have to deal with for the rest of my IT career.
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