Oh yeah, they’re in top form!

So today, our system monitoring package took a dump. Why did it do this? Well, because someone didn’t pay the monthly bill on it. That’s right! Someone didn’t send a check to this company, and thus our product key was rendered invalid.

“But Uncle Bob,” you ask,”why don’t you use Nagios? It’s free, extensible, robust, and the industry standard.”

That’s a great question! I’ve asked this on *many* occasions. So has our Unix/Linux admin. Actually, he’s already got an instance of Nagios up because our current monitoring package doesn’t interact well with Unix/Linux variants.

But no! See, here at the offices of FCGenius, we’re afraid of the non-M$ world. We can’t handle anything that has installation procedures more intense than “Next Next Next Next Finish”. Oh, and we don’t like anything that’s (said with great disdain) “Open Source”.

See, if you buy food and they hand you the recipe and cooking instructions, there’s obviously something wrong with the food, right? I mean, what possible benevolent reason could they have for such openness and honesty? The mind does boggle!

I can understand just saying “I don’t know enough about this product to recommend its use.” Perfectly understandable, and it even opens the implication that with education, this stance could change. But that’s not what we’re getting. We’re getting people making ignorant claims about it because they haven’t the foggiest clue. You know would have made me flush with pride? Hearing them say something like, “You know, I looked at the product over the weekend and don’t like it for reasons 1) 2) c) 4).”

All of the gripes on this blog are showing that we don’t just have idiot managers. We have people with fundamental misunderstandings and misconceptions about the very industry they’re supposed to be a part of. And *that* is so much more dangerous than a run of the mill reject from HeeHaw who “knows ‘puters” because they can use more of the Office Suite than just Word.

I’m thinking about lighting a candle instead of cursing the darkness (when I’d much rather light a flame-thrower), and trying to sneak in a Nagios implementation under the radar so I can go, “Hey, why don’t we use Nagios? We’ve already got it up and running,” and then show them the nice dashboard.

Hot Swappable Drives

Remember when hot-swap devices were new and could sometimes cause shorts, crashes, and other catastrophic hardware events? Yeah, I remember 1994 too.

But it seems our leadership isn’t aware that enterprise level hot swap SCSI devices are designed to be, well, you know… hot swap.

“But can you guarantee with 100% certainty that it won’t cause the machine to go down?”

You know what, jackass, I can’t guarantee with 100% certainty that a truck won’t crash into the building, a plan crashes into the building, or that I won’t reach across the table and pull your tongue out of your ass. The world is full of uncertainty.

I had to deliver a PowerPoint presentation to these chowder heads explaining the pains that IEEE has gone through to make sure that the power connections don’t throw sparks like an arc welder. You know, things that anyone in the IT field (who hasn’t been in a coma or suffered some head trauma) should be aware of.

Yeah, this blog is gonna be 20 TB by Christmas.