The problem: User data accumulates over time. There are many different types of wasted data on a typical company’s network shares. Here are the top four in no particular order:
Users who make a copy of everything as a backup “just in case”. These users will create a copy every time they revise a document. It may not be bad when dealing with a 50K word processing text, but make that a 20MB PowerPoint or a much larger engineering drawing and we are looking at serious wasted disk.
Users who do not trust IT. These are users who, possibly having experienced problems in the past, decide to copy their data to every network drive available to them. Say they have a home directory. They use this to back up everything out of a common directory and everything they touch off of an engineering share. Maybe they use this to fulfill #1 above.
Unauthorized file types. Some users will not listen no matter how many times they are told. No MP3 files on the network, no home videos and personal picture albums, no joke videos downloaded from the net. Etc.
Data no longer relevant. Creating data is easy, but knowing when or if it is safe to delete is a process that requires thought and is not required to get ones job done. What is the incentive for an employee to ever go behind and clean up?
The solution:
User education. Users need to understand the architecture to some degree. It makes no sense to have three copies of the same file on the same SAN, backed up to the same disk, tape, etc. It is no more secure than a single file.
The network drives also must remain consistent. It is easy and, sometimes we as administrators feel, the right thing, to only take down the minimum amount of resources necessary to get a job done. If the users see the home drive down less frequently than a common drive, they will tend to copy data they might just need on their home drive to guard against losing access during these maintenance events. When possible, take everything (or nothing) down for the users when maintenance has to be done.
There are two semi-solutions to unauthorized file times. A manual search and delete, or an automated server-based preventative software. Try to find one that is reasonably priced though. It is important to engage Human Resources and Legal if you are serious about this though. This type of data puts your company at risk.
Irrelevant data is always going to be a manual process. Maintaining tight quotas is the only semi-solution for this. If users perceive they are about to run out of space, and the barrier to getting more space is more than a simple phone call, then they are more likely to look at what they can do prior to demanding more space.
General solutions or best practices:
Installing deduplication software or using a back end deduplication solution will transparently solve #1 and #2.
Storage management software is a good solution for new data stores to allow users to define an expiration date for data retention.
I would love to have someone suggest or describe successful software packages that they used to solve or help with any of these items.
I try to refrain from getting too political here, but there is enough technology in this disaster and I feel strongly enough about it that I need to say something.
Just about every plan that BP has thought up involves recovering the oil. Are they more concerned about tapping the black gold or fixing the environmental disaster?
The expert’s long term solution requires a relief well to be drilled. Can we let another company start drilling this NOW? Why do we have to wait months and months for this to begin?
The US Government’s failure was due to them not enforcing or properly inspecting using current laws and standards. Why create new legislation or standards if we are not willing to enforce the ones we already have?
BP’s executives promised to pay for all the disaster recovery costs yet their liability is legally only $75 million. They have not addressed this obvious question. Do they have insurance? Are they prepared to pay above the $75 million cap, because it’s likely to cost more than 100 times that, and some things will be just impossible to fund enough to clean up.
What about economic losses years into the future as this mess spreads around Florida hurting their tourism industry and up the east cost disrupting fishing and tourism potentially for years?
What about economic losses for other countries such as Mexico whose government may not be as tolerant as the US government is by capping their liability?
What is the long-term danger of these chemicals that they are pumping into the ocean to break up the oil? Where is the openness and who is the oversight on this technology? If the oil is still in the water but we can’t see it, how does that help?
I work with computer servers and technology all the time for a large business. We have a contingency plan for just about every scenario including failures during a recovery operation. We won’t be causing ecological damage while we recover, but we will be losing money. BP is doing both right now yet no one thought about this possibility and developed a disaster recovery plan for the initial blowout or a contingency plan in case that failed? There are plenty of ways an oil rig like that could have been destroyed, many of which do not involve negligence of any time by the oil company or the government. Where’s the plan for this?
Why is BP concealing the extent of the spill?
Why are people still buying BP gasoline in the US today?!?!?
I believe BP is operating this cleanup effort with an eye on profits from the oil rather than the cost of the environmental disaster. This would lead me to believe that BP has no intention of paying the full costs of the cleanup and economic losses as a result because the cleanup will cost more than the value of the oil that has already spilled into the ocean. It would also then follow that if people would vote at the pump by picking other gas stations over BP until they fixed the problem that would speed up the time it would take them to fix the problem. I drove by a local BP station twice today and both times there were cars lined up buying gas even though there are stations nearby who are selling gas at the same, lower, or slightly higher prices. What sane American would purchase gasoline from BP right now? Why would you support a company who views profits above responsibility? I would understand if BP had lower prices and people needed to save a buck, but why do people get off the highway, drive past a cheaper Mobil station, and purchase more expensive BP gasoline? It makes absolutely no sense.
I know my audience is extremely limited, but please if you read this, don’t by gas at BP until they fix this problem. Please spread this message. I heard someone at church today who sounded like they were hearing about this problem for the first time. We need to get this message out or our complacency will allow BP to act in their own interests without consequences. Our votes as their revenue stream at the gas pump will matter more to BP than anything our government is likely to do to them.
My Dell XPS M1210 has finally died. It is a sad day. I’m in the market for a new laptop, and of course would be glad to do any reviews if you’d like to send me one or give me a discount.
I’d really love another XPS M1210 but more modern. The closest thing I can find is the Alienware m11x however I’m not sure I am willing to buy into a Core 2 chip at this point. I’d be much happier if it were a Core i7 or i5. The graphics on the Alienware are very nice, but I’m concerned about performance in the normal things I do such as running virtual machines while browsing and using office type products.
Any suggestions? The biggest I think I’d want is 15″ but I would prefer smaller. The other problem I have with smaller laptops is how hard it is to find decent screen resolution.
Google Voice really didn’t add anything new other than some interface modifications and instructions for mobile users, however it does bring the service one step closer to perfection. Here’s why: Most people are not going to spend the time figuring out how to forward their cell phone voice mails to Google Voice, but a few clicks gives you the exact sequence to type into your phone for your carrier.
Forwarding your cell phone calls to Google Voice for Voicemail enables voicemail transcription as well as the visual voicemail style audio file in an email message. If you have a smart phone such as a blackberry with the Google Voice application already installed, this just adds to the benefit. Now I am down to two voice mail boxes: Email and work. As soon as work converts to VoIP I suspect I can consolidate that to email as well.
The perfect Google Voice feature would be the ability to port an existing number to them. My home phone, for example, I have had for over 6 years. Everyone knows it and I don’t want to change it. I have ported that number from Verizon to Lingo to Packet 8 and then to ViaTalk. The problem is that each move is a time commitment. Each one had a year contract, but more importantly they had my phone number. If I could port my number to Google Voice, then I would have much more flexibility to try new services or multiple services, or even replacing the home phone with a cell phone. In the case of a cell phone though I would not want to commit my home phone number to it. With Google Voice I could simply forward my permanent number to which ever service I wanted to use at the time. Suddenly I could become completely carrier neutral. If I wanted to use MagicJack for a few days I could do that then switch back to ViaTalk, or even get a land line.
I believe that centralization of voice communication is the goal here, and as soon as I’m able to port my number to Google Voice they will have reached that goal.
Of course I’ve been using Windows 7 for longer than three days, but this is the third day having it on my old Dell XPS M1210. I just noticed recently that the poor laptop is coming up on its 3-year anniversary. It had a 3-year warranty with accidental damage coverage. The only stupid thing I ever did to it was to dump a can of soda into the keyboard. I replaced the keyboard by shopping on eBay and the touchpad buttons still have a slight issue, but I’ll live with it. Anyway, back to my story and the reason why this is relevant. The machine I had Windows 7 installed on at work was fairly new, and over its short pre-Windows 7 history it ran Windows XP 64bit and Debian when XP 64 wasn’t stable. Neither of these were installed for more than a month before Windows 7 was RTM.
My laptop, on the other hand, was used constantly for nearly three years under XP and Vista, so I have a pretty good idea of how it looks and performs. Everything seems to look better under Windows 7, and I’m not sure exactly why. I went through the cleartype configuration wizard, which may have been the reason this is better. As far as performance, I haven’t noticed much of a difference, but I didn’t really expect the speed to increase more than I just hoped it wouldn’t decrease. The laptop does run cooler now. Even when I’m doing more intensive things the fan seems to run less frequently and the bottom feels cooler.
Now I admit, these observations are not scientific. I didn’t measure the temperature of the bottom of my laptop after watching precisely 1 hour of HD content in both configurations. People’s impressions always trump scientific data anyway, as evidenced by Vista. The general impression of Vista was negative, so very few people actually tried it themselves. Windows 7 has the potential to be just as negative, especially since there are some big changes to the interface. Microsoft has done a good job of keeping the initial impressions positive, with only a few exceptions. There was an ignorant article on Federal Computer Week that described Windows 7 as Vista with only a very minor facelift, but not enough to be an improvement. It was obvious from reading it that the author either hadn’t used Vista or hadn’t used Windows 7.
Just as with Vista, people who don’t try it for themselves on decent hardware have no grounds to talk on it. Win 7 is a vast improvement over Windows XP and a valuable improvement over Vista. In my opinion there is no value in “upgrading” from Vista, however a clean install from XP or Vista is valuable if your hardware is reasonably fast. If you have a computer over 3 years old, a new computer is the best upgrade path.
Mozy has disappointed me. I have been unable to do a restore, and without a restore all the routine backups are worthless. The client has sat at “Connecting to backup service…” since I kicked it off yesterday. I’m going to need to reboot soon, so we’ll see if that fixes things. Windows Home Server appears to be able to perform a complete backup of this laptop now, so I’m feeling better about that. I’m going to blow away my desktop and try a full system restore from Windows Home Server and if that works I’m going to start feeling a little better about trusting it.
The big question I had was whether or not entering a retail code into the RTM code would work. It did not work for me.
Now that I’m running 64-bit Windows 7 Professional on my Dell XPS M1210, I thought I’d go through a little of the process so far. First of all, I used the upgrade version, but did a clean install. I verified also that the old trick about installing without a key, not activating, and then using the upgrade key still works. I am upgrading from Vista, but I wiped it out first (dban) in order to try since I had heard conflicting reports on the net about that.
So now the reload process is in full-swing. First on were some windows patches that included a driver for my Nvidia GO 7400 card. A previous install I had attempted to find drivers directly through Nvidia. I went through a few attempts to install a version that wasn’t specifically for my card by changing the INF file. It worked, but I see no advantage of that over the built-in driver, and the built-in driver is certainly easier to install. I installed the Windows 7 compatible Synaptics driver as well because I like the scroll zones and a couple other features of the touchpad.
Next on was ESET Internet Security, my favorite AV software at the moment. Note that these things change as soon as a company starts getting the idea of packing their software full of useless additional components that slow a computer down more than help it (Symantec I’m looking at you, which I dropped shortly after 2000, and also Trend Micro which I dropped around 2007, but should have dropped sooner – you can thank a corporate agreement for keeping me that long).
Next on was Office 2007 Enterprise (thanks to work for the home licensing arrangement). Now I’m starting to see a trend of patch, reboot, patch, reboot for Microsoft things. I’ve done this 4 times now, and although Microsoft Update says I’m done, my AV software says it detects missing patches. Interesting.
Next on was TrueCrypt which recently updated to 6.3 for what they call full Win 7 support. I’m not sure what exactly changed, but it works fine. I run full-disk encryption on my laptop. I don’t know why anyone wouldn’t want to do the same.
Next on was Free File Sync, an open source Windows based synchronization GUI which I used to restore my previously synchronized folders from the Windows Home Server that I’ve been evaluating. While that was synchronizing I kicked off the encryption process for TrueCrypt and downloaded Mozy. I remembered that I used my own encryption key and that it was stored in Roboform, so I downloaded, installed, and re-activated my copy of Roboform in order to pull out my custom key. I need to remember to locate and test my offline copy of that key or there’s little point in my using Mozy in a disaster recovery situation.
I made an image of my system with Acronis prior to wiping it out. For reasons I’ll describe later, I still do not trust Windows Home Server completely. I am not going to put Acronis back on for several reasons. First, Windows Home Server is supposed to be able to do image restores of my OS, so I’m going to do some testing to verify that works properly. Second, Acronis does a major release way too often, and I can’t afford to keep purchasing the software. The version 2009 of their software is not Windows 7 compatible, and they want another $30 in order to upgrade to 2010. If I need that image, and I probably will, I will install my license on another PC and use it to restore. Between Mozy, my offline backups, and Windows Home Server, I just don’t need an additional solution.
Somewhere in there I managed to get Firefox installed. The integration between Firefox and Windows 7 “feels” tighter than it did with Vista. It is hard to describe really, but links appear to open more quickly now, and I haven’t had anything strange happen yet.
I have a RTM build of Windows 7 on my work desktop. I brought up task manager after leaving the system on for about a week and found the following:
Now I am trying to use the machine just like I would use Vista or XP except that I, until this point, hadn’t yet loaded firefox to do the majority of my browsing. This machine has 8 total cores and 16GB of RAM in it, so wasn’t experiencing any performance issues using this much RAM, but it still seems excessive. Normally with past Internet Explorer use I try to make a habit of closing tabs and restarting the browser occasionally, but as I said I was trying to treat it the same way I would firefox and put it through its paces.
Anyone else experience this? I’m not sure if the excessive amount of RAM that I have is part of the reason this happened. In other words, would this have happened if I had 2GB of RAM? Are they caching data in RAM such as my browsing history to make it quick to go back?
I was reading about the recent Twitter DOS that also affected Facebook and particularly the comments posted on CNN about how not having Twitter made people feel naked. One person interviewed said that people knew everything about her life because of Twitter.
I have always been a little hesitant to post online status. After all, those really close to me already know what I’m doing, and those who are not so close to me could always fire off an email and/or ask to be put back onto my mailing list. Why does the public in general need to know if I’m heading to the grocery store, or even on vacation for two weeks.
Smart criminals are few and far between, however they do exist. It is not difficult to tie a twitter account or Facebook account to a physical address. If your schedule is half-way routine the smart criminal can take advantage of it, but if it is posted online the criminal doesn’t need to go very far to target your house, apartment, or vehicle. Even more concerning is personal safety and security. Do you twitter about when you are getting off work? Do you have a long walk to your car? Scary stuff.
What it comes down to is our desire as people to be popular and important, but the fact of the matter is that few of us are or ever will be. And if we suddenly were popular we probably wouldn’t be all that happy about it. There isn’t a lot of glamor in having news crews camp on your lawn day after day, and if someone is always around the corner looking for a photo opportunity, there’s little time to relax.
My suggestion to the die-hard Twitter and Facebook addicts: Be safe! Think about what information you post online and how it could be used against you both at your current stage in life and years into the future. Will your kids use it against you? Your relatives? A criminal? If you suddenly did become a public figure? Just think about it – and don’t get so attached to a single entity such as Facebook in particular. I know people who don’t use email much anymore because they can just message back and forth on Facebook’s mail. That’s all fine and good except for when Facebook disappears, suffers a DOS or decides to change their privacy policies. If you rely on Facebook for email, how would you contact your friends if it suddenly went away?
In a nutshell it seems as if the lead developer for CentOS, which is a free Red Hat Enterprise Linux clone, has disappeared. Now, before I begin, I’d like to point out that – and I come into this information late – it seems to me that step one would be to determine if the guy is actually alright and not stuck between a toilet and a door, or something similarly unpleasant. Maybe they have already done this, but I don’t know.
We’ve certainly lost a little sleep with the likes of LinuxNetworx who went under shortly after accepting payment on a 3-year support contract. Then SGI who stepped in to pick up the pieces but refused to honor the contract also went belly up and invalidated all prepaid support contracts leaving our old SGI machines in the lurch. Still, there’s nothing quite as disconcerting as a project as large as CentOS that relies so heavily on one single individual.
This is just a very brief rant, but if you run your business on or with Linux, use something that is supported commercially.
Since I am on vacation at the moment, this touches close to home. Why is it nearly 2010 and we still do not have cheap ubiquitous internet access anywhere? I arrive at my in-laws house and they don’t have a wireless connection, but they do have a DSL “modem” directly connected to a laptop. Makes sense?
Lucky for me I carry a Pocket Router with me wherever I go. Hooked it up and set the laptop to connect wirelessly and the in-law (out-law) didn’t know the difference. In the mean time I have access anywhere in the house which is literally in the middle of nowhere. Next stop on my journey I actually have a cellular signal, so Verizon cell access is available to me at $15/24-hours. It is useful in an emergency, but at that cost I wouldn’t want to use it for days on end. I looked up AT&T since Verizon isn’t available in my home town and they don’t have a pay-as-you go plan for a data card. The same pocket router plugs into an available port on their wireless router. No need to configure a new access point on my computer (or my daughter’s) and there is built-in firewalling and segregation from their network just in case anything is crawling around on it.
The inbetween is where everything breaks down. Sure, almost every truck stop is now outfitted with “free wi-fi” and every cheap hotel has it, so you can just drive into the Super 8 parking lot and get online, but that certainly isn’t convenient when you just want to check your email before going to bed, or if your passenger wants to research hotels or attractions in that town that is 100 miles away while you drive.
So the United States is just too big for its own good. Either that or cell phone providers are afraid to provide affordable connectivity that is not attached to a 2-year contract. My suggestion to Verizon (or AT&T) is to change that $15 plan to $15 for 0.5 – 1GB of data but with a 1-week duration. AT&T’s $60/month plan caps at 5GB so this pay-as-you go would be close to being in line with that but without the commitment. When someone exceeds the limit they could start the week over. For everyone else who really just wants to browse the web or use email it would last a week and encourage that ubiquitous environment that everyone wants.
Now the new iPhone would actually tempt me if they allowed tethering at a reasonable price. Until that point I am 100% uninterested.
with me wherever I go. Hooked it up and set the laptop to connect wirelessly and the in-law (out-law) didn’t know the difference. In the mean time I have access anywhere in the house which is literally in the middle of nowhere. Next stop on my journey I actually have a cellular signal, so Verizon cell access is available to me at $15/24-hours. It is useful in an emergency, but at that cost I wouldn’t want to use it for days on end. I looked up AT&T since Verizon isn’t available in my home town and they don’t have a pay-as-you go plan for a data card. The same pocket router plugs into an available port on their wireless router. No need to configure a new access point on my computer (or my daughter’s) and there is built-in firewalling and segregation from their network just in case anything is crawling around on it.
Entries (RSS)