Tag: work

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Rage

There are some people who really infuriate you. Like this one who makes you almost want to bash her face in. She talks like she knows it all and she won’t hear of anything you say. In fact, she’s insultingly dismissive when you try to talk to her.

But I did get to talk to her and it was surreal. She knows that a RAID server is about striping (all except RAID 1) and mirroring (RAID 1) but how could she think that RAID has something to do with her PC’s disk being mirrored to the RAID server? I tried to interrupt her and tell her that she was misinformed. Tried to tell her how it actually works. But she won’t have any of it. She even told me I wasn’t talking like an IT person. WTF?

And then she goes on about RAID being generally slower than non-RAID disks and that she shouldn’t be using it because it will slow her work down. To set the record straight, RAID 0 is faster. The other RAID levels are indeed slower but that because it’s the price you pay for data integrity. And no, your work is not slowed down because of using a RAID drive for backing-up. Not even if you wait for your backing-up to finish before going back to work. Sorry, you can’t use that as an excuse.

And finally she goes “Now you’re surprised at my IT knowledge.” I was incredulous. Yes, I’m surprised alright. Surprised at how someone could possibly get it oh so wrong. I mean really, how could you? Talk about the difference between knowing and understanding. As if that’s not bad enough, she goes on “I don’t even have a master’s degree.” Where the heck did that come from?!?

I felt like I was talking to a crazed spinster. Oh wait a minute! I was!

And I’m sure I’m not the only one who feels this way. If someone told you in front of other managers: “I’m willing to work with you on this, the question is do you?” Wouldn’t you feel the same? You would, right?

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RAID Blues Continued

Just when you think it couldn’t get any worse. We were almost done with the restoring of files to the RAID server when two more drives failed. We had to hurriedly buy extra drives from Gilmore and rebuild the RAID server. This effectively negated one week’s worth of backup restoration.

And that’s not all of it. Later in the evening, as I was connecting the backup drive to the newly arrived Buffalo Terastation Pro 2, the drive suddenly started smoking! I was able to quickly disconnect the power. It turns out the AC adapter failed and was probably feeding a higher voltage to the drive.

I needed to see if the drive is okay so I tried mounting it on Windows. It can see the disk but since it has a Linux EXT3 filesystem, Windows couldn’t see the files. Still it was a good sign. I then tried mounting it in on Linux but it really can’t see the disk!

Why is this happening to me?

UPDATE: Hallelujah! It works! I brought Selene, my now-Linux-based Thinkpad X22, to the office to see if it can mount and read the drive.  And it did! I’m so glad and relieved. Whew!

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RAID Blues

Just before the holidays, the RAID server at the office suddenly died. Not one but two drives failed. The server has RAID Level 5 so the loss of one drive should have been easily recoverable. But no, two drives had to fail. Fortunately, Alex was able to resurrect the two dead drives but it seems there were corrupted files and possible longer term problems so we had to reformat. But first we must back up everything. The next problem then comes up: The external backup drive is also dead! So, we had to use a spare drive. Guess what? The SATA-to-USB adapter was also dead! I had to bring my personal SATA-to-USB adapter so we can backup. And that’s why I’m here at the office with Alex and Aby (misery loves company) on a nice Saturday morning when I should be soundly sleeping in bed. Not looking like a good year. Tsk.

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LinkSys WRT54G Version 7

The LinkSys WRT54G is a ubiquitous router. In fact, I have one at home and two at the office. The one at home works fine but the same can’t be said for the two at the office. Every once in a while, you can’t connect to the WiFi network and you have to reboot. And often, you can’t access the web based administration console at all. Normally, the solution would be to upgrade the firmware. But if you have a WRT54G version 7, which is the case, you’re out of luck: LinkSys also does not provide firmware updates for this version. Or so I thought. So it was pretty hopeless for a while. But this morning, I learned that apparently LinkSys provides firmware upgrades for Europe. You can get it here. We’ve upgraded the routers at the office and everything is going smoothly so far.

UPDATE: It didn’t change anything. Darn!

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SetACL: Deliverance From Windows ACL Hell

We were wrestling with a weird problem in Windows the whole day. We were trying to transfer access rights to files from one user to another but we keep ending up with some directories that still can’t be accessed by the new user. We were stumped for quite some time before we found out that some directories can prevent inheriting access rights from its parents via an option that disables inheritance!!! How this came about we still can’t don’t know. But because of this option, the built-in ACL manager of Windows can’t completely assign access rights to all subdirectories. Neither can other Microsoft utilities like CACL (Change Access Control Lists) or XCACLS (eXtended CACL). There is definitely no way you can go from affected directory to affected directory removing that option. Thankfully there’s SetACL. Among its features: Reset permissions on all sub-objects and enable propagation of inherited permissions. Open source rocks!