strafeonline

Well, the September quarter is done and dusted, and if it weren’t for a few busy weeks of fixing servers it would have been pretty quiet. The past few days however have seen numerous PC failures - it is as if the servers work fine while the workstations have issues, and the workstations work fine when the servers are down. If only the users would work fine 10% of the time

In the past six months I have gone through two serious (one of them majorly serious) failures relating to the same server. I’ve noticed there are two good things to come out of a serious server crash/outage. When I say serious, it is on the level where it impacts the majority of the organization for longer than 24 hours, however only time is lost, all company data is safe.

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One of our clients currently runs an SBS 2003 system on some hardware that has hard its fair share of trouble (one week of downtime earlier this year, and two days of downtime in August), resulting in a decision from management to move the e-mails to a new box, and rebuild the SBS into a vanilla Win2K3 Server system.

For the new Exchange box, we ended up with a Dell PowerEdge 2950 III with two RAID 1 arrays, dual quad-core, 4GB RAM, etc. It arrived about a week earlier than scheduled, and so far has been a breeze to work with. Read the rest of this entry »

After a lengthy hiatus, I had the urge to start blogging again. This time I won’t be ranting on about useless junk, and focusing more on my corporate identity and the challenges, successes, and failures we’ve had along the way.

Since 2003 I have run a small IT company, nothing fancy, and we have several loyal clients who we have worked with since the inception of their company, or have had a significant role in their expansion. They will remain anonymous, as will the identity of my company. I’m sure eventually someone will figure it out though..

We’ve got a number of projects going on at the moment, and with only two staff it is pretty hectic. Two of the projects involve fit out of new offices full of IT gear; one is for around 25 staff and is a branch office, the other involves a fit out for a smaller company involved in research, who in time may expand.

Another project we have going is an on going information and document management trial/implementation of Microsoft Sharepoint (WSS3) for another group. Add in the regular maintenance, trouble shooting, repairs, and medium-level IT management, and you’ll start to get the picture that we’re pretty busy.

Anyway, on to the blogging..