Life of a Sysadmin 12 2007

Promises, or Zimbra down to the wire

Version 5 of Zimbra was originally announced to be released late in 2007. The first official date put forth by the company was the 17th of Decemeber. That date was pushed back the 31st. The open source version was released on the 20th of December. A variety of forum posts from Zimbra employees said that the commercial version would be released before 2008.

The announcement of the commercial version of Zimbra 5 was made about 4pm on the last day of 2007 That's kinda cutting it close.

A classy tin of cookies, or more vendor loot

CDW sent me this classy tin of cookies for the holidays to thank us for being a customer. Let's see, over $100k in purchases and we get a $50 tin of cookies.

The office manager (to whom the bills are sent) thought that it should have had her name on it. My boss (who's name is on the account) thought that it should have been address to him. Not that it really mattered, as there were plenty to share; although they didn't make it through the day in the kitchen.

Data recovery, or a review of Kroll Ontrack for disk recovery

A manager came to me with a report of what sounded like a failing hard drive. It didn't take me long to see that there was something seriously wrong with the drive. I offered him three options; expensive ($500-3000 with Kroll Ontrack), the inexpensive ($300-700 with Gillware), or the extremely cheap (me trying things that have worked for me in the past).

A call to Kroll Ontrack got me the address to ship the drive to and the information that needed to be included with the drive. It would be $100 to diagnosis the drive. That gets a list of files they can recover and a quote for what it would cost to get the data back.

For this particular drive, it was $1500 to recover the data. It was extra for media to get the data back on. $10/dvd, $2/cd, or usb/firewire drives at about twice market price. The drive turned out to be made by AMS and was shipped in a custom labeled box just for Ontrack.

Between first call and recieving the data back on a drive it was 14 days; several of those days were spent by me getting approval to possibly spend the money, by our lawyer reading their paperwork, and by our accounts payable person arranging payment.

Everything about my experience with Ontrack was well executred. I had a single point of contact for all matters. I was kept in the loop about the processing of the job through the various stages of work. All in all great experience and I would happily recommend them.

Dell laptop ram, or idiocy by some system builders

Let's say you order a laptop with a gig of ram. Let's further suggest that you paid extra to have that gig in the form of one stick of 1gb instead of two sticks of 512mb.

Now consider that many laptops have one ram slot under the keyboard and that slot is often annoying to get to, while the other slot is often readily accessible with the removal of a single screw on the bottom of the laptop.

With this knowledge, which ram slot would you expect the ram to be installed in? Can you guess which one Dell puts it in about half the time?

Fine Tec Computer Wine, or woot vendor loot!

The delivery driver for our whitebox vendor came by earlier this week with three small boxes. A coworker looked at the boxes, looked at me and commented, "Nothing we ordered could fit in those boxes."

Turns out each box was a bottle of wine from the private celler of Fine Tec Computer (it's actually a nice bottle from Kendall Jackson with a custom label).

If you are in the Bay Area and need computers for a business, I would happily recommend Fine Tec. Prices are great. The warranty is great. They deliver. They will happily build very custom systems. The one warning I would give is that you need to double check that their suggested configurations will indeed meet your requirements.

Server video cards, or a cheap hack

That picture is indeed of a half height AGP video card with the mounting bracket removed and the connector cut off. The surgery was performed to cope with an annoying problem of many x86 systems; that of requiring a video card to be present to boot the system.

I have of course never used this card in a production system.