Roleplay UK

It's only the cluster running all our local branch DNS, DHCP, SMTP, FTP, Spooler, plus numerous Oracle DBs and other shit. They've all failed over to the other nodes but fml. I dont even work in infrastructure anymore but i'm the local boots on the ground as my colleagues are off. Currently letting the powers-that-be direct me.

Oooh leaving the google-zone? I had a windows phone a while back before i got an android phone and i really liked it - an HTC Mozart 7, great little device, nice OS, but no market share for apps which im sure has changed now.

We use apple in work for business phones (just..dont even start me) instead of the old Blackberry 10 devices we had prior which were awesome. But I have heard that Outlook etc for the end user has come along a great deal since the days of yore.

RE your cluster : HAHAHAHAHAHAHA FUCK !!!! 
There really isnt much else to say sorry bud. 

Yeah google is just plain to creepy now, forcing everything to be done in their cloud, Getting fed up with it tbh The cost now outweighs the benefit :/ 
Last windows phone I had before android was the HTC Hermes (Windows mobile 5.0 Baby !!! yeah and if memory serves me correctly I was able to upgrade it to mobile 6.1 (although I have a shit memory)) App's are still a bit weak on the ground but all the basics are covered, the only one I miss is Teamspeak.

I have to agree about apple, I had to deal with them back in 2005. Imagine trying to get it to work with Exchange back then OMFG I hated those devices. Blackberry were great if you had a server from them (I was working on them when you still had to buy the server !!) and were a pain when configured with POP but worked Amazingly with Exchange when they updated support for it. What didn't help was my old boss at the time, hadn't moved forward in technology from the early 90's !!! 

outlook.com itself is wow just wow atm .... I'm sure given a bit of time I will find niggles and issue's but so far, its amazing to have control of my data and be offered that control back. With google you had to really fight to keep your data yours

Cluster fixed Just a bit of failed memory that came up as a CPU Machine Check error

Talk about that 'Friday Feeling'.

All this nerd talk is a good read!

Zeito, That must of earnt you a liquid lunch on the boss !! 

I absolutley fear a crash on my VM setup right now, I have committed the cardinal tech sin, of Not being fucked to setup backups !!! I will get round to it I promise !!!

Samat, Feel free to chip in what's the worst recovery you have had to do on a Friday?

Alcohol.. hangover...

As the sole member of my department in the office today, i believe i will treat myself to finishing before 6pm on a friday this week!

I have backups up the wazoo on disk and then LTO6 tape with the tapes then stored offsite on something like an 8 week cycle. We're only branch though so if we did lose our DNS/DHCP etc it'd (hopefully) fail over to the next branch using some sort of networking magic i'm not privy to.

@Samatlewissthis gives you some insight unto the endless fun that is IT Fire-Fighting

If you want some good reading Samat - lookup BOFH from The Register, and there's another article series called On-Call or something like that. www.reddit.com/r/talesfromtechsupport is golden as well.

Although that said, Managers are actually starting to see IT as essential to business  

Not as far as giving us preventative maintenance budgets or realising IT is a massive profit center for most companies. It's always viewed as a cost :/
Make sure your phone battery is dead as you walk out that door, no need to feel guilty as I'm sure the failover works fine as it was tested just this morning

Yeah a big dirty cost. I asked for 30k for new in-support Direct-Attached-Storage arrays for my backup server so that you know - they'd actually be under warranty if god forbid, the backplane died or something equally terrible. It had other benefits too, like supporting 12Gbps SAS, larger storage in a lower number of disks. Instead of having 3x 15 drive enclosures of 4TB vdisks, i could get away with 2 enclosures since they could use 4x4TB disks instead of 4x2TB disks to make up the Vdisks.

No budget. There's also the debate of how i do desktop support, not infrastructure - but also maintain the backup server - which is infrastructure. But infrastructure isnt my job/problem. So i can't GET budget for it. When (not if) that backplane dies, i envision a sudden budget increase.

Phone goes on DnD at 6pm. I don't work on-call without prior arrangement. Not my job, not my problem, someone else can sort it on monday

It's a shit attitude i know, but that's what's fostered.

atm, cant get a proper testing VM environment and sad thing is we're a software house

So are we! We actually have our own (in our little section of IT in this office) vm 'test' environment made up of 2 esxi servers, a vsphere server, and some firewalls and switches that mimic'd our old configuration so we could test things out. Not been used in a while so we're decommissioning it

It'll be eerily quiet without the comforting swoosh of the fans.

Feel free to decommision to my house

haha you'll have to pay the WEEE company that 'decommisions' it to ebay. It's still criminal IMO to pay someone to throw it away. If i could, i'd take it all home. Even if i didnt know what to do with it.

Thats ok, we can brainstorm  

I could really do with some Live offsite backup well any backup for that matter  
Was going to use Easus, but cant install without a license as I am running server2012 at home

Got some spare ASA5505 and 5510s, we could set ourselves up the slowest site-to-site ever!

Get yourself an LTO4/5 drive cheap as chips and some tapes for it and then just keep the tapes somewhere else. Like the bank. I think an LTO5 tape holds something like 3TB uncompressed?

You my good sir, have been sniffing the plastic fumes tape backup's indeed !!! 
Dedupe drive backup with live offsite storage. I suppose there is room for tape backup every 6 months you know cryptowall !!! 

Hey tapes are still modern and relevant! 4x LTO6 tapes stores a full compelte bare-metal restore of all our critical stuff in this office! with room to spare!

As fun as a live off-site transmitted backup would be, I can only imagine the years of conference calls and emails i'd have to sit through to get it approved and get the connection bandwidth for it and aw christ even just thinking about it give me the shakes. Tapes all the way. Man with van comes and collects them every week and takes them somewhere far away that i dont have to worry about it.

Drive are all well and good until Headcrash/Backplane failure/CRYPTOWALLLLLLLLLLLLL/Power Surge or Failure/RAID controller failure/Punctured Stripe and Smashed mirror somehow all in one go/<Other IT calamity here>

Tape fumes are good fumes. Breathe it in.

As you breathe deep you feel the fumes consume you. "Join us Lionel..." "Linear Tape is hip.." You feel the insatiable desire to order an Autoloader. You forget all about jams and tangles. 800m of tape is nothing.

You are killed by a grue.

Well I'm probably going to avoid tape, considering my "datacenter" is currently in a house with 3 young boys, and is going to be migrated into the garden shed  

Any ideas on Alternative backup solutions for 2012 that are "opensource"?

All the best technology in Britain comes from Garden sheds.

Not sure about open source solutions. I mean old-school but hard to beat is robocopy on a cronjob. Not exactly feature rich but does the business. At the risk of sounding like i've actually lost my mind to the tape fumes, I use Symantec/Veritas Backup Exec. it actually works pretty well despite everyone (myself included) sometimes thinking the software is the worst thing ever.

ComVault ArcServe is supposed to be good - TriLead is another one we gave a go though it might be VM only.

Well i'm putting technology in a shed, bot sure it counts  

Actually Big fan of backup exec myself used it in plenty of small business sites years ago, with a mix of tape and drive (personally preferred drive tbh) Just looking for cheap and reliable and slightly less work than robocopy, but yes it's an option that i should consider ....

Fyi. if your looking for something at home have a peek at easus, if you like backupexec I can imagine that floating your boat for home environment