Clean, Dirty, Fast, and Slow.

Clean: This site. Since I was cleaning up the other site, I thought I should go ahead and apply a simpler stylesheet to this site as well. I might change it a couple times, or play with the code in the next few days, but it's going to be simpler and easier to read than the 'Dots' style I had earlier. Enjoy.

Dirty: Data. One of my users lost his hard drive to a head crash. Dirty little thing. (The disk, not the user.) I got a replacement hard disk from Dell. The tech rep said they could do the data recovery for me off the old hard disk for $80 an hour. OK, set it up, I said. Then next day I get a call from the field tech, asking about the drive. He wants to know if we can boot from the drive. "No, that's why we need the data recovered." I said. Turns out that Dell's interpretation of data recovery is 'copy the stuff somewhere else'. Well hell, if it were bootable, I'd have already done that. So I left messages at Drive Savers, Vantage Tech, and DRG. We'll see what the cost and turnaround time will be...

Fast: LearnFlow has sped up immensely in the last couple of days. For a while, I was getting soured again on the whole idea of distance learning. Yesterday, I was able to attend a recorded class, read lots of review material, and play in a couple of online labs that were pretty cool. I hope the speed keeps up. I'm already quite a bit behind due to the slowdowns over the last couple of days. I guess patience is part of CCNP training. :-)

Slow: Backups. I changed the way backups run around here, and added a couple of additional items to the queue. As it is, I have one backup that's been running for almost 11 hours now. It's an incremental backup based on the archive bit. (Veritas allows you to do incrementals based on the archive bit, or by modified timestamp, if you're on a system using Single Instance Storage.) I chose archive bit, since I want to be able to see at a glance if a file was backed up or not. Since I changed to archive bit, there was a lot more stuff to back up. Also, since I'm now backing up databases directly to tape, rather than backing up the DB.BAK files, I have about twice as much data to do. So, backups run long today, with no sign of stopping anytime soon. Well, I'd rather slow the server down just a bit, than not back it up and miss something. I had my fill of lost data last year, enough to last me for quite some time.

And that's all from the Eastern Front. See you around, geeks.

-D.