@Bill-Kindle said:

I encourage people to try to be even just a little bilingual.

I'm a cunning linguist, does that count?

@Dashrender said:

@scottalanmiller said:

The HP Proliant DL585 G2, the first machine that McAlvin and I designed to take on NetApp in a 10,000 node compute cluster for NFS performance in 2007. Used RHEL 5 and NFS 3. Crushed a half million dollar NetApp tuned by the NetApp team directly for the test. This is the SAM-SD 0, it wasn't called a SAM-SD until years later.

what about your setup do you think allowed this box to crush them?

NetApp was pretty weak in performance back then. They were designed around massive scale out, which broke into the performance.

As someone who works in various "cloud" providers, using this kind of method would not really be worthwhile for us. I've used 3par and NetApp, and now Pure and Compellant for storage. But for SMB, this is absolutely perfect. I used a Dell PE2950 stacked with a bunch of SATA drives for a SAM-SD once. I needed file server space and backup destinations, not SQL IOPS. Thats the beauty of it, stack it with SSDs, you got something close to what Pure can supply. Stack it with SATA, you have a "NAS" that rivals anything out there. It's flexible and customize-able. You just have to decide what is most important for your organization.

Customer sends us a ticket, complaining that they can't browse the internet on their Citrix box, or apparently any other box in their environment.

This customer is well known for f** {moderated] things up so magically, it's beyond belief. They put in a group policy to prevent anyone from seeing the C:\ drive on any host, even as domain admin. But they forgot that if you just put C:\ in the run box it pops right up. We once caught their machines spewing Facebook spam, as in hundreds of thousands of connections to Facebook over just one box. Their bright idea to fix the problem? Put facebook.com in the host file as 0.0.0.0. Never mind that there was still something spewing sh** [moderated], it's fixed.

After a bit of research, a very little bit of research, I think I found their problem:

Shit, that's like a 30 minute job with a goon and a probe and tickler. A few mintues with a labeler to make it pretty, done in no time.

Now, network design and recabling, add a full day on top of that. Not that recabling would be hard for a small place, but getting things in a good state would need some design time.

If I was somewhere near there, and I could run it on an off hour, I would grab A.J. as my goon and teach him stuff.

@scottalanmiller said:

Joint community keg stand time!

I'll take the joint.

@scottalanmiller said:

In the AD integration thread we were discussing the SMB protocol and how nice it would be to have it on mobile devices (iOS, Android, etc.) Not everyone wants it, but many do and the lack of it is confusing. So a couple of questions to discuss:

1. Why isn't there any SMB protocol support on any mobile platform? Seems easy enough to do.

Because that would take critical space in the kernel for something that isn't really isnt going to be used. Think about the morons who never update because they are afraid. Lest some SMB vulnerability comes up.

Do we actually want SMB support if it were available?

F**[moderated] yeah. Right now we have to use third party file browsers to do some basic SMB protocol stuff.

How would we want it to work?

Straight integration into the file browser. Just put it as a "Network Share" and all would be well.

Remember I can hold my liquor.

Just don't let me chug the entire bottle in an hour or so.

@Carnival-Boy said:

It's not possible to know everything!

What? I know all and see all.

Knowing new technology is like anything, take previous experiences and apply them to new situations. I tell our guys this all the time, they get all strange when dealing with a Windows 2012 box. The same old tools that have existed since 2000 are still there, and you can access them through any number of methods. But they get freaked out and afraid to touch anything. You can't be afraid of it. This isn't the Ark of the Covenant, your face won't melt if you gaze upon it.

Lots of the ways to recover a BIOS is based on floppies because they don't believe in ever updating the low level machine code. The reason for the recovery is to access the very basic of things in assembly, rather than bootstrapping up the rest of the BIOS to handle things like IRQ assignments and such.

That said, I'm guessing this laptop, being rugged, has lots of replaceable components on it. Best way to recover a BIOS is not to recover at all but to yank and replace. Takes all of a few minutes, and if you are really hard core, can recover the chip on the bench with tools. But you don't strike me as the type that has access to an EEPROM writer. And the other way would require that the company supply you with one.

Most companies have a method of recovering the BIOS. Lots of the generic ones usually don't apply because of the modifications they make to the code. Worth a shot, but not necessarily gonna work, for the floppy reason a lot of times.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/sager-clevo/326954-case-you-kill-your-phoenix-bios-bios-recovery-methods.html

Extract the KCB.ROM from the KBC.EXE file in the original installer. Grab a USB floppy if you can, which should be able to access the low level FDD commands. That should do it.

Sh** older than crap, might be better to just cut your losses and get a new rugged laptop. Panasonic's stuff has gotten pretty good.

@tonyshowoff said:

@PSX_Defector said:

@tonyshowoff said:

She may be a queen, but she's still paying you and if you run away I don't think there's anything she can do about it, surely not have you hunted down and recaptured.

Have you met the Minion Queen? If it wasn't so blase she would have us all in dog collars and leashes, just to keep us close to her ever changing whims.

I'd be careful, some people may be too into that for comfort

Sticks and stones may break my bones but whips and chains excite me.

@Bill-Kindle said:

Keeping it classy. Caddies only look good if they are black and have a little bit of chrome.

BTW, nice touch with the plate on the front. I'm sure some have that reaction when seeing it

That's actually the dealer promo plate.

http://www.jameswood.com

If we didn't require a front plate I would put on my Netherlands plate I got in US format.

@scottalanmiller said:

at ten users AD is normally overkill

That's why we have Samba. And, with Samba 4, you should be able to integrate the box into O365's AD structure. SSO anyone?

@Dashrender said:

@scottalanmiller said:

Wife of SAM is @Dominica

She remembers you

Uh oh... wonders what was memorable about it lol

Was that the night we lost Scott to drunk chicks and pizza?

I can't remember, as most long term memory was not formed most of those nights.

@scottalanmiller said:

@art_of_shred I'm not familiar with "green" stoners. Most stoners that I know listen to country, not rock, strangely.

You haven't hung around enough stoners methinks.....

@scottalanmiller said:

All major enterprise clouds are Xen except for Azure which is HyperV.

Our cloud is on Vmware. And we got bought up because of our cloud offerings.

@scottalanmiller said:

One of the things I have worked hard to do is to love my job as well as have my job and life be tightly integrated. Disconnecting from one means disconnecting from the other.

@alexntg said it best. You are addicted to working. If you can't let something go coughSWcough that means you have a completely unhealthy relationship. And it brings up megalomania, narcissism, or any number of personality disorders. The existential truth of the matter is that you are not that important. No one is. If a company folds because someone went on vacation means that the company was badly run.

The need for speed!

@scottalanmiller said:

It's not addiction to enjoy what you do and it's not narcissism to take on senior roles that have dependencies.

Can you let go of work? Smells like addiction to me.

It's narcissism when you think you are so critical that you and only you can possibly be involved with things.

I received a card the other day from a certain vendor. Instead of the old school ones I used to receive hand written and with schwarmy copy I got a sales pitch for a conference.

@Hubtech said:

Maybe we are doing what we want to be doing. Maybe everybody is different? Maybe the reason you're so up in arms about this is because you dont like what you're doing.

Again, it's a means to an end. I really don't care what I'm doing or whom I'm working for. It's a job. Is it what I want to get paid to do? No. I want to get paid to sit on the couch, smoke pot and play Xbox all day. Shunyata.

And once again, this narcissism permeates into everything. "i'm still looking for someone who will maintain the quality of service I provide" Really? Have you even tried? Have you found nothing but morons who can't hold a mouse? Are you really so much better than anyone else that if you let someone into your circle who doesn't meet your warped sense of capability you would lose all your customers? It doesn't matter if you have enough business or not. If you are small enough not to require a second person, you don't have enough customers to justify 24x7x365 coverage. And odds are, you are most likely not charging enough to justify this service level. So when you finally keel over and die, they will come into a rude awakening when they find out that everyone else charges twice as much for the level of support they are expecting.

I see this within our organization as well. People wrapping their arms around their specific client, not allowing anyone to perform really any substantial work because they want to control it. They are afraid that if any of our goons start working, they might do a better job than them.and they will be out of a job. This mentality is dangerous and self destructive, both from a business perspective and a mental health perspective. Hoarding isn't considered good, but look at what you are doing. You horde work hours.

Everyone is different, but this work non-stop even while on vacation is not normal. Don't act like it is.