*All Things Tech & No We Won’t Fix Your Computer
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While you're at it, this is just a hell of a blog if you're dependant upon Exchange like most of us are.
You Had Me At EHLO! The Microsoft Exchange Team Blog
and really all things considered, Exchange doesn't completely suck anymore. Just remember it could be aleays worse, you could be running Notes/Domino.
Technorati Tags: Microsoft, Exchange, Blog
We’ve been hard on Dell before, but they should get Kudo’s when they get something right. Last week I needed to deploy a new laptop fast. We have fleet of latitude d-series laptops, and I often switch hard drives around when one gets a. infected with virii and spyware, or b. goes bad (which laptop drives do often).
Anyway I pulled out a d600 that I had kept back and found that the hard drive carrier and hd was missing. HD’s are no problem, I had a couple of spares and one hd carrier, but it was for a d800 and not a d600, and they don’t mix and match. doh!
I remembered that we had completecare on these. Highly recommended. You can run over the laptop with a truck and they will send you a new one, no questions asked.
So I called them up, told them the situation and asked if they would ship me out a new hd carrier. Well, completecare does not cover loss or stupidity, so they would have been entirely in the right to tell me to go pound sand. But instead, the tech, on his own authority, without clearance from anyone, takes the initiative and ships me out the carrier. The whole phone conversation lasted ten minutes.
That’s how you keep loyal customers. Dell gets it right most of the time. I should also note that I’ve called Dell a couple of other times on questions about poweredge servers and each time got a quick response plus an answer to a question.
Things have been getting a little crazy at work. When I first started things were slow enough that I could go by the time trusted remembering things and then dealing with them as they cropped up.
If things got a little heated I’d make a list and add the newest to the bottom.
As of late those two methods are not working. I have a personal goal of 100% follow through meaning no requests got forgotten. Dumped, re-prioritized, pushed aside, but not forgotten. This book really helps get that done for system administrators.
I’ve read a lot of time management books and most of them don’t spend a lot of time on the particular issues of the sysadmin. Prioritizing things is nice, except when your day is punctuated by a continuous stream of requests. So prioritization has to be constant. And if you are spending your time prioritizing, when’s the work getting done.
From the Jacket Review:
Time Management for System Administrators understands that an Sys Admin often has competing goals: the concurrent responsibilities of working on large projects and taking care of a user’s needs. That’s why it focuses on strategies that help you work through daily tasks, yet still allow you to handle critical situations that inevitably arise.
Among other skills, you’ll learn how to:
Manage interruptions
Eliminate timewasters
Keep an effective calendar
Develop routines for things that occur regularly
Use your brain only for what you’re currently working on
Prioritize based on customer expectations
Document and automate processes for faster execution
What’s more, the book doesn’t confine itself to just the work environment, either. It also offers tips on how to apply these time management tools toyour social life. It’s the first step to a more productive, happier you.
I haven’t applied the whole book so far, but last week was a particular hectic one with several emergencies and with this system I managed to deal with the emergencies and get a lot of things done as well.
CmdrChalupa Stamp of Approval:
Wow, this would be a sweet thing to have. It would potentialy put a lot of little mail server companies behind the 8 ball.
Google is apparently thinking about (or about to beta) a product to let you provide their service as mail for your server/domain/service.
Nice if done properly and end sites don’t necessarily know it’s Google at fist look and can easily ban your users or prohibit them from registering with your email addresses.
Too many companies now have added gmail to the same list as yahoo, and hotmail accounts to the list of free accounts they won’t accept.
But I welcome the opportunity to shift my mail burdens of end users off to them. Provided of course I can still manage them and drop deadbeat users. The beta page shows a control panel and the same 2 gigs we’re used to. I welcome the spam filtering, etc, etc.
This is huge for some of us, but the general public won’t care.
Technorati Tags: GMail, IT, Free Mail, hosted, tech
It started out innocently enough. A couple of users mailed in and said that conference rooms were not accepting meeting requests.
While exchange is generally a great product, and is truly bulletproof, the functionality for resource scheduling is a pile of disgusting crap so vile we shall not speak of it in polite company. Since no one’s polite here, I’ll drive on.
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The Poohbah’s Endorse Cacti: The Complete RRDTool-based Graphing Solution
Cacti is a complete network graphing solution designed to harness the power of RRDTool’s data storage and graphing functionality. Cacti provides a fast poller, advanced graph templating, multiple data acquisition methods, and user management features out of the box. All of this is wrapped in an intuitive, easy to use interface that makes sense for LAN-sized installations up to complex networks with hundreds of devices.
I set this up the other day on our generic network administration Fedora Core 3 box and it took about 30 minutes from downloading to the first graph. Truly an excellent package. No programming necessary, everything can be run through the web gui. Full effectiveness does require a knowledge of what you are measuring and why.