Wiley IT Manager Saving on Microsoft Licences

It is late 1998 and I observe one of the smartest PC acquisition steps ever; the company I work for is reequipping every one using a certain application to a new specification machine.  This means a major purchase and roll out for those of us in IT.

A little background first the company I work for has one customer, just one single customer, this may sound crazy but at the time it made perfect sense and the customer was a reassuring British stalwart of the high street the business was rock solid.  They were however also extremely protective of their brand and selling our whole product line exclusively they knew they could tell us how to do everything.

One of the key things they specified was a hard encryption model to their stock and control system software, we had to run the software they provided, we had to run is with "secure" physical dongles performing periodic security authorisation checks and we did all this on a specification of machine they laid down to us.

So it was in 1998 a new version of this software was hoving into view, the specification leapt from a mere 486 running 25hmz to a Pentium III running at or over 120mhz.  The RAM requirements went from 4MB and windows 3.11 for workgroups to the then brand new Windows 98.

So it was my boss (shout out to Dave) set about working out the best platform for this.

He had previously been in charge of the purchase of new server stack from Compaq and with a positive impression he turned to them.

With a little wrangling I believe he had a roll out of 30 machines, with three years support, for £890.  In terms today this is approximately £2000 a seat and was just for the machine a 17" monitor, keyboard, mouse and windows 98.  Nothing else.

Folks had to do other tasks on these machines, not just this customer software, therefore he set about buying Office.  Homogenising the previous smorgasbord array of different spreadsheet and word processing software variously in use.

Adding Office 97 SBE unfortunately pushed the machines up another £80 per seat, this included £19 off for bulk purchase, but it was a crazy price.

But then Dave taught me an extremely valuable lesson, to play the edge cases.

Could you get Office 97 for les than £80?  Yes, you could get it for £49.95 a seat.  But only if it was an upgrade.  Hmm, what could we count as an upgrade from?

Well, it turned out Office 97 could be an upgrade from MS Works 95.  At the time Works was my go to office package, I've never felt the ease and familiarity with office ever again since.  But works was canned by Microsoft; probably because of Wiley IT managers like Dave.

For a full new copy of Works would be had for just £12.95.

Doing a little mathematics, £12.95 + £49.95 is a mere £62.90.

The company was already duty bound to pay me as part of my regular services, so installing Works and installing Word over the top, taking hours to get through all the machine did result in quite a saving.  About £400 for the whole project; meaning Dave was well under budget and everything worked as intended.

It did however leave one literally huge problem; for the next working year our already tiny IT office was overrun with these dozens of double boxes of Works and Office upgrade, just in case Redmond came knocking asking about licenses.

No Rack, but definitely an IT mistake

I sat down to write this on Christmas Day, but things went wrong... so here it is a mere month late!

It has been twenty years, so I feel comfortable sharing this one with you.

Christmas Eve afternoon my landline began to ring and ring and ring, foolishly, rashly I answered to hear an unfamiliar accent telling me to explain to them the complete inner workings of an intranet web service.  No hello, no explanation who they were, just a desperate voice asking, nay demanding, this information....

It took me a few minutes to collect my thoughts and realise what they were talking about.  At the time I was contracting in short sharp sprints between projects for various folks, I'd actually written three different web based systems in the prior three months; so i was trying to figure out which of the recent ones it was..... Only to then hear the name of the company and realised this voice was asking about a project I had been contracted to write nine months prior.

It was a very long ways away in my memory.

Not only was my memory foggy but I had ensured everything asked for in the contract was documented,  all the work was carried out at their offices, on their own machine, I didn't even hold a copy of their system.

Above all it was Christmas Eve!!

I explained that not only was I not contracted to support the project (a sore spot, as I usually made as much money supporting a project as doing it at that time); but this project had actually been a bit of a squeeze, for it had been two weeks work and absolutely no more.

Long story short I'd been contracted by one chap, the manager, because his in house analyst was overwhelmed and unable to cope, so he'd had me to quickly deliver this project for them.  It was a simple view over data on a few pages, driven from a server that the analyst knew and who deployed it out for himself.

The manager and this analyst signed it all off as I went, and I documented the whole thing, critically including how to edit the pages... So they only needed to know a bit of HTML, JavaScript and CSS to change any part of it as they felt suited themselves... and I left.... Getting my money a month later and never hearing anything from them.

On a shoe string I thought I had delivered them a real bargain!  Not hearing anything for all that time had made me confident they were happy.

So what was this desperate emergency?

The colour!  The guy wanted to know how to change the colours in the cascading style sheet...

It is Christmas Eve!  And this £100k per year analyst is calling me to ask for a crash course in CSS!!!

To say I was not amused is perhaps the understatement of the decade!

I politely explained that I was available (at an extortionate price her hour) from December 28th onwards and then regular rate January 3rd onwards for contracting, but right now I was not available.  And all this was available through my then solo contractor company.

The reply?  To be honest he was quite rude, at which point the telephone was returned to its cradle and the TV remote rediscovered.

The trill ring carried on until I unplugged the phone... and my mobile started to ring, my inbox fill, and my patience ran wafer thin.

But I was simply not going to be talking to this guy, my opinion all these years later was that the guy was a paper suit, he sat there getting others to do all this work for him, not even delivering to his own manager and said manager was just accepting of this for some internal political reasons I could guess at, but which were lost on me at the time.

I decided however to be proactive, I wrote up a couple of paragraphs on my headed PDF, attached the original contract, attached a proposal for employing me from the 28th for 2x8 hour slots and then from the first week back in January for 5x8 hours as a starting point.  I put this all together, with an estimate and I sent it in triplicate.... To this analyst, to the manager and to the HR department at said company through whom I had worked for them.

I then had the most interesting email, which only reaffirmed my paper suit opinion of the guy.... For this email was from the manager saying "Why are you sending me this on Christmas Eve?"

And I replied "because your analyst <insert name here> is contacting me, phone off the hook on Christmas Eve to ask me about that work I did in March".

I heard nothing more.... Until the week following the week back, I was at another contract and my mobile rang... It was a very polite voice, the manager, he wanted me to come work for them.... because Mr Analyst had left his role.

I asked a few poignant questions; essentially the chap was earning an absolute fortune (for 2002) at nearly £136,000 a year and he did nearly nothing, nothing.... he'd sat on projects, say on code, couldn't script, couldn't program, couldn't even communicate properly.  Quite how he'd got into the role I will never know.

I however simply kindly declined, I was due to go to Egypt on Holiday so I did that rather then try and fix that guys mess.

Story Time - Fantastic Rack Mount Mistakes - Part 33 and 1/3

It has been a very long time since my last story time, and so this one comes to you with an unknown number, I am however well beyond any possible NDA or secrets for this one, so I can finally share (it's been 20 years yesterday).

I had a job in a data center, nothing too special, but I loved it.  The loud room, the air conditioning, the rack upon rack of machine, I absolutely loved it.  We're talking 2002 here, these were the 2U high style of machine I use a lot today, the odd 4U or 8U JBOD box too, loved them all.

I had all my wiring terminated and was beautifully dressed, I wasn't in charge of the whole place, just one isle, but I took my time whenever there was an issue to run new cable bundles beautifully dressed along the cabinet runners into each cabinet top, seven cabinets to a row, two face to face on the cold row and then the back of these into the hot, I had a hot row run by a lovely guy called Jerod next to me, he was French I think, lovely guy (shout out to Jerod if you're reading!).

The other side I had the work bench, a coveted space, between the hot and cold isles were thick plastic strip drapes, like you'd get in a meat packing plant.

We would patrol our isle, identifying any issues or disks showing physically bad, schedule them in for late night fix ups and then to into the communal office where we each hot desked.

Each of us had a laptop and would sit and connect into the monitoring suite remotely, with a big screen we connected via VGA to our laptops and dozens of spare keyboards we could quite often spend the night shifts doing nothing but playing games; Medieval Total War was the order of the day for me at the time; some of you know of my origins in the "game industry" take me back to hacking about and modifying MTW (Sorry Tom, whom I now work with, for fishing about breaking your baby).

Anyway, about three months into this job another tech on the day shift came to me about Isle 4, the far end of the room, he was getting drop outs at intervals during the day, but none at night, he was trying to figure out what might be causing it.

We took a look at his logs and sure enough on his disks he had 250-700ms delays for seek times on his platters, he also had a higher than average fault rate on disks, apparently he was also rebuilding raid arrays a lot.

He asked us in the night team to watch over the kit live; which we duely did.... Quiet as a mouse, nothing not an issue ever in about three months of monitoring.

Meanwhile in day light he was tearing his hair out; I've got to admit to genuinely not remembering his name, but he had long greasy black hair and was from Northampton which he told me more than his name... "Hello I'm <forgetable>, I live in Northampton".

But forgettable as he was I can't forget the day he handed that isle over to me.

Stumped as to what was going on, and frankly pulling rank, he shuffled Jerod down to Isle 3, himself into Isle 1 (my isle) and all new machines were coming into isle 2, which mr senior with disk failures was going to be setting up.

This really irked me, my isle was by far the best presented, when sales wanted to show new accounts around they showed them my isle and they all laughed over the name of the cabinets; we couldn't name the machines, most of them belongs to customers, but we could sticker and name the cabinets themselves, so they all got Bond Theme names.... Jaws, Octopussy, Moneypenny, Q and M all had simple servers, processors more or less and my two JBOD cabinets were Sean and Roger.  Stencilled on in lovely white enamel paint.

So I was hoofed off to isle 4, dark, at the back, no work bench... and immediately set about making it my own, I redressed the cable bundles (which annoyed Mr Senior, though he loved my already done ones, my dressing his was seen as an overt declaration of war).  It's so simple too, cable tie around five, cable tie through the middle to break them into three and two sets then pull.... Today you can get cable combs and I find them so sexy.

Anyway, dressed to impress what was not impressing was the fault rate, and instead of it being the accepted norm; as it had been for Mr Senior for months; it was now a big deal because I was in charge of the isle.

I set about trying to work it out, I could not figure it out.

At night, when I was there it was all fine, the day guys saw nothing; they pretty much just tended the machines remotely, no maintenance happened between 7am and 7pm so it was up to the night guys like me to swap disks, rebuild arrays, fix cables and install new machines.

So after two weeks with the log I got showing all these faults, like what was causing a disk which had worked all night and most of the day suddenly to show 500+ milliseconds seek!  It made no sense.

Anyway, 2002 was coming to a close, December 21st rolled around and I offered to cover a couple of the guys shifts, they had kids it was nearly Christmas and we worked Christmas Eve and half Christmas Day, one guy on on guy off for 6 hours at a time those two days, I took two shifts back to back.

Alone in the office, I watched the monitors and played games.

No spikes.... What gives, no spikes on the DAY I am actually here.

Hold on, I'm here, but no-one else is.

Could it be human interference?  I checked electrical circuits for noise, I checked lights, I checked if the air conditioning was affected outside and in.  I checked everything, no signs, no peaks, no noise.

HANG ON.  NO NOISE!

Spinning disks can be affected by loud noises, specifically by vibrations, I'd seen this demonstrated when doing my Compaq certification training.

There was no noise, could it just be vibration?

We were on the first floor (for anyone in the US, this is the floor above the one on the ground) so we are one storey up.  There was the main reception below center of the room, to the right where isle 1 is would be a hall way void with offices leading off it, under isle 4 would be a toilet and a changing room.

I went down, put the shower on, came back up.... Nope.

Then I took my laptop with me, no wifi, but I could plug it into various office ethernet ports around the place as no-one was in.

There I am Christmas Day, banging doors, flicking lights, flushing loos and then pouncing on my laptop to see if it affected any of the disk activity I was artificially running up.

Nothing.

Defeated I logged my time, handed over to Jerod and went to have my Christmas dinner.  I had 12 hours to think of something for Boxing day.

I walked into Mr Senior asking why there was CCTV of me "Dashing about with my laptop in random offices".

I just said I was trying to check light circuits for his disk issues; he made it abundantly clear they were my disk issues and left me to it.

Boxing day, the sales had started, the building was at the corner of a large commercial estate, there being a newly built Ikea across the road as the crowds rolled in and their stock levels fell they would be due a delivery soon.

I still poked around the office and the eureka moment came on the 27th December 2002.  For a large lorry was rumbling past the office, I had to wait for it to pass, a massive blue IKEA clad lorry.  I went into the office, logged into the monitoring and sure enough there was a trace of a large disk issue.  Times 4 minutes before; when that lorry went past!

I didn't hear it, I didn't feel it... But had the disks?

I waited and watched when a few lorries passed during the fairly quiet week between Christmas and New Years, nearly every heavy lorry going back resulted in some affect on the disks, vibration was being carried into the ground and I guess up through the building.  I will be honest, I could not tell.  But every spike I saw was timed with a lorry.  In fact I soon let Jerod in on my idea and plan to fix it and so he watched and I monitored and when he came in I could tell him when a lorry has passed!

I was not about to shout about this to Mr Senior, instead I set about fixing it.

I ordered a mat of 1 inch thick rubber, the stuff you mount washing machines on in your kitchen.  I already knew the racks pretty well, they were bolted at each foot, I'd need a torque wrench to unbolt them and I could use two of the hydraulic scissor platform lift trolleys we used to move machines about to lift the rack ever so slightly.

I didn't want to do this alone, so Jerod was roped in with the promise of a take away pizza from the glorious; but long gone; parlour we loved.

Mr Senior handed over to me and Jerod that night, it was not uncommon for two of us to be on at night, especially if there was work to do fitting something out.  It was normal to have two people when we were lifting machines too.  But Mr Senior would have been apoplectic if he'd know what us two kids were about to do.

I unscrewed the first rack from the floor, swept the dust out and used a wooden baton to bridge the lip to the metal of the scissor lift and I cranked it.... The cabinet moved, I nearly wet myself as it looked like it was going to topple, then Jerod jacked his side up on the other side and it came level, with an inch to spare I slipped in two of the pads.   He slipped in his two and at a shout over the loud AC we lowered.

I then used a phillips head screw driver to puncture the rubber and a knife to dig a bit out through each bolt hold and fastened the bolt back through, not too tight, just tight enough.

It was sweaty work in the hot isle as I was, but we did the first three of seven that night.

I went home and decided to pre cut the squares and use a drill to cut the middle out of them,the next night all seven were done.

Our disk fault rate when to zero.

That was my last time as an IT minion; I went back to programming soon after, and Mr Senior never was told what we did... His training should have told him.

Great Rack Mount Mistakes #7

Today's story in the annuls of problems in IT comes from a guest editor... Mr B.... And Mr B (no relation to anyone in other stories given monogram names) works as the sysadmin and developer for the whole set of systems with his employer; unfortunately this means "it's all his fault".

So what went wrong?  Well, over night the site had a power cut and though they have a nice server, they don't have a power back up, so that server went off.

The server is essentially a java host, specifically hosting Tomcat, and it reaches out to connect to a set of third party endpoints via a restful API.

You'd think no big deal, start up get running and keep running, except that third party don't force a disconnect upon a new edition of their interface API, if you're connected to version 1.0 then you can and they will happily leave you connected to version 1.0, even if they release interim updates, add new calls and quite what got Mr B today remove a call or two.

Your session ending, and then I presume all sessions of that old version, would free their server provisioning to de-allocate the old version.  But to force users to migrate upwards in the chain their published API (so think the end point here in whatever flavour you wish) declaration changes.  Such that you re-download it upon re-connection and that's your new flavour of the month API.

The problem?  It didn't work.

So Mr B had to set about debugging this on the fly, in a live environment, which was down.  And he went through the three stages of technological grief....

1) Denial:    "This is completely illogical, my code brings down their interface, which is the only thing we connect to, it must be right, they can't miss-match them, so this must be my side or the gods are against me".

2) Investigation:  "Read the logs, make a change, nothing seems to work, the gods are definitely snickering behind that cloud of steam now".

3) Realisation:   "If it's not me, and it's not the system here, it must be their side, the huge multi-billion international must have published their API spec with a mistake or miss-match.... click.... YOU FUCKERS!"

What was the actual problem?  Well, the third party published API was actually wrong, the downloaded specification still contained several calls which were removed, when the services Mr B had written came up they checked each end point and found several calls defined which did not respond and so his software, correctly, reported that the endpoint was offline.  They were, they didn't exist anymore.

His fix was to literally tell his stuff to ignore the multi-billion dollar international service providers API spec and to "download" a copy which he hosted locally, with his own edits to it.

Now, he's a tiny fish in a huge pond here, even if he reports this miss-match said multi-billion dollar international isn't going to hear him, and by the time he does they maybe several months down the line, and other folks may have spotted this problem.  He maybe listened to, but he essentially doubts his voice would be heard.

The problem of course being how to abate this issue in the future?  How to avoid this stress?  For at one point he did say "the company is done for", because literally everything was offline, all their services were down.... And of course everyone will blame the little guy doing all the IT, they won't think that the multi-billion behemoth entity could possibly publish a wonky API spec, most of those shouting at Mr B with mouths frothing wouldn't even know what he meant when he explained this to them...

The fact that he's identified this issue, resolved it, and everything is back up within two hours won't be remembered, the glass will remain half-empty, and so it'll only be remembered that on the 3rd September 2020 Mr B's IT suite went offline.

Computing Education 2017

Here in the UK there have been several waves of trying to educate new generations as to the art of compute science, this started when I was a boy with the BBC Computer Literacy project and concluded soon after with a drought of interest from non-technical educators and politicians a like through until fairly recently.

The BBC reports that there has been a low amount of uptake of new Computer Science GCSE studies.

And I can believe this, however the neither the BBC nor government seems to even point as to why this is, they talk about pupil disengagement or lack of interest.

I however contend that the government and educators and indeed the BBC completely fail to spot the elephant in the room, kids study not for jobs or skills, however they do study what is emphasised, IT has always been an "also ran" topic, it's not Maths, nor English nor seemingly as important in appearance as any other topic out there.

In my day this was the case because few understood computing, today however it seems IT is still an unimportant subject, today it's seen as unimportant because of it's ubiquitity.  Kids see easy to use computers, they walk around with them on their wrists, on their pockets, they are the always online generation.  If they need now know how to do more than turn the wifi on why should they care?

Likewise the educators see using a modern computer as easy, so why should it be a subject of study really?

And finally, the basest of problems, is the employers, if employers are willing to employ a programmer who studied horticulture, why should one study computing?  If the employer will take on an IT support operative who has no qualifications but whom is handy with a screw driver and knows how to plug the right parts of a PC together, then why should they bother to get formal qualifications?

Ultimately, for computing to be taken seriously, you need a passion for it, you also however need a reason to study it, and until that reason exists in the form of accessible all tier jobs that actually require a formal computing qualification there is little hope in pushing back up the chain to educators or government that computing is important and needs to be studied.

My Moroccan Work Week

Many moons ago, when my then boss knew I was the dogs danglies, I used to get sent to work at offices all over the world, and today I want to tell you the story of one of those journeys to and from the "office".

I live and work out of Nottingham, and this one time I had to go work out of Casablanca for a week.  Now, for those of you not aware of this, I do not mean I went to work in a black and white film... Casablanca is a real place, a city in fact, in the North African country of Morocco, exotic... Maybe, if you like that thing.

Anyway, I was in my early twenties and sent on this trip, I spoke broken GCSE French, and was handed a few thousand French Francs (yes it's that long ago, France still had a proper currency, with a history and everything).

The journey began at an indecently early hour, a driver to take myself and a pair of cow-orkers to Heathrow, no big deal, though the driver had a tin of sweets which he was really really over proud of; he was also sceptical I wasn't the son of the two other passengers, as I was so young.

Arriving Heathrow no big deal... The flight fine and dandy... I saw sail boats in the Straits of Gibraltar...

When we landed and were in arrivals we had our bags back, and there was a driver for me, or for my then company... Not the co-workers whom were a different company - merger in progress as it were - so we all went to get in this one Merc... Now, I immediately went to the wrong side of the car, going to the British passenger side, which was the Moroccan drivers side; this baffled the driver.

But getting into the car we immediately found there were no seatbelts... the clip was engaged, but there was no strap.  Asking the driver he said, "no-one uses seat belts here, so we cut them and put the pegs in to stop the car beeping as we drive".

He then proceeded to drive like a loon, on pitch black desert roads from King Mohammed V airport into the heart of Casablanca.  By the time we arrived at the hotel we were ready for a bit of food, maybe a drink, the bar looked at my french francs like I was mad... "Charge it to my room"... silence.

This was meant to be a dry country remember, but the bar was there serving alcohol... Anyway, bed early, a morning start... My suit had just about survived being packed into a back-pack, but someone had taken the batteries out of the side pocket, which had my alarm clock... Sorting out a wake-up call was a bit of a nightmare, but I got there in the end.

Fun fact, order English Breakfast tea, they bring it to you with hot milk... URGH.  I sent it back first time around... I am such a noob.

The fun began mid-week, when I had an afternoon early ending, and got to spend sometime at the hotel, the Hyatt near the Port.  I went for a walk about, and was soon approached by a pair of Moroccan lads who invited me to "come to the bazaar, great café, show you hasheesh"... I declined their kind offer, seeing it as a mix of either illegal, or simply an attempt at kidnap.  he surprised me however by pulling his wallet from his pocket and showing me he'd spent time in Manchester...

The hard week of work ended, and I found myself back at the airport...

But there was no plane... Royal Air Moroc had no plane... There was myself, the two co-workers back from their site, and then one German chap, waiting for a whole 737... Royal Air Moroc however hadn't planned for this.

An hour late they "borrowed" a plane from Air Egypt, and the four of us boarded, this empty plane.

I have no idea why, but the staff insisted that the three of us sit together on one row... a little cramped, whilst the German chap was sat up front waving back at us all alone for the duration.  They really didn't want us to move seats.

The pilot (or it may have been the co-pilot) came back after take off and introduced himself to us, ah the days before they locked the flight deck.  I remember he had a white cotton scarf around his neck, my memory tells me this was on a wire so it stood up like biggles... But I may just be mentally elaborating...

The meal came around about this time... The offer was "Chicken or Goat", seriously... I had the goat, it was nice.

They then wanted to sell us drinks, and I panicked... Trying to ask for a "1664".. In French... instead of just asking for "un bier"... This brain fart haunts me to this day, but I was young, I was an idiot, I wanted to speak French, to a very pretty Moroccan Air hostess... Or maybe she was Egyptian....

I remember that the air hostesses didn't cover their air, a mark perhaps of days gone by?  I don't know, maybe someone can tell me.

The trip was rounded off when I got back to the chauffeur car, to come back from London to Nottingham, and he looked at me and said... "You're not on my list to come back with me".

My co-workers didn't say "lets take him", or anything as I had done in Morocco with the car sent under my company name, oh no, they just got in the car, with me standing there looking (I'm sure) a little green he added "but I'll take you as well".

We set off back to Nottingham.

Other images of Casablanca I remember are of going through the bazaar and a chat in a white tiles store asking me "You want my daughter, she cook, she clean, very clean girl".  She was 12, he didn't mean sexually either, he wanted her to be my house keeper and my take her to the UK.  I politely declined.

I was also accosted from the street, whilst I walked in the Hotel Perimeter garden, a voice from a man carrying a battered looking AK47 and a dead cockerel shouted to me... "Are you American?"  With a distinct twang on the last word.

"No I'm English" I replied...

"English?"  He beamed with his one remaining tooth "I support Manchester United".  I wondered if he was the granddad of the lad who'd accosted me mid-week, I really did.

Good times, quite sad that I sit in an office all the time now.

Sys-Admin/Dev Ops : Assumption is Danger

As a systems admin, or dev ops, or whatever your job title might be, never ever assume that the person you're handing a system to has a clue.  This might seem harsh, but it's true, and proves itself true time and time again.

"Assumption is the mother of all f**k ups"

About a year ago I deployed a system which automatically sent requests to remote machines (via SMS) getting those machines to report their status or send back error information, but also to gather some basic information.

It has run happily for a whole year, it has been all pretty plain sailing, the hours and hours of work I put into it, to automate it and keep it self-sustained have paid off, zero faults, zero down time, self-regulation is the way forward for me; even if it took slightly longer to put the system in place, it has needed no human input for nearing a year!

However, the unit needed to move, about a week ago, it needed be physically picked up and taken out of my small server room and into the official server room, a dark cupboard basically controlled not by myself or my cohort, but the IT boffins.

Fine, I notified the customers, went off to the IT area, sorted out who I was to hand it to and physically delivered it to the chap, I watched him start to plug it all back together, power, wires, boot, fine....

I assumed he'd do this seamlessly....

Until this morning, well a morning last week, as I post these with a date in the future.  That morning was hell, I walked into a wall of customers not being able to get to their machines, the Easter weekend was looming, performance needed to be monitored, customer sites didn't have regular staff, explaining to temporary cover staff that system would be off was not a prospect I relished. 

To be frank, a lot of flapping going on, more than I expected... IT reported the system back online, but customers didn't stop flapping... Indeed, none of the estate seemed to be able to connect in... 1 hour, 2 hours, I've asked the boffins to check it time and again "It's fine", they tell me.

I look locally, I can't see the controller machine on the network, I can't see it through the remote management console... Where the hell is the machine?

I assure the customers I'll have answers within the hour, I hit social media with the same, this is going very public, and I'm rather annoyed as for a whole year things have run seamlessly; but been ignored, now its offline for a scheduled purpose and everyone is complaining, I do not want my success wiping away in a flood of negative press.

I call the IT boffins... "we'll look into it"... No, no no, you'll get onto it right now, not look, not glance, answers are needed.  Action from you is needed before my Re-Action goes nuclear.

I wait, five minutes, I was willing to give them ten.... My phone rings...

Them > "Hello?"...

Me > "Answers?"...

Them > "Yeah, you know when you brought it back?"...

Me > "The Machine?"....

Them > "Yes"...

Me > "I remember, why?"...

Them > "Well, it has power"...

Me > "Good"....

Them > "Not really"...

Me > "Why not?"...

Them > "Because that's all it has, it's not been plugged into the network"

I hung up.  They plugged it into the network, I had a slew of data come through... The customers were pacified.

I however was not.

I've had an on the spot review, firstly the IT bod who did this was held to account, second I was held to account for not noticing.

In not noticing I admit that having had it run cleanly for a year I had turned off the performance reports and I admitted I had assumed a network machine being handed to an IT bod would be plugged into the network.  People were not happy, least of all me, but that was the fall out.

However, I then had to do a tertiary clean up and after the Easter break I spoke to three of my main customers, trusted operators, the actual folk who should have been using the machines at the remote sites; not temporary staff; I asked them why they had not noticed.  The replies...  "Because it had worked for so long without an issue", "like you make it work, so we just guess it always is" and "we didn't notice it was offline".

They were very much putting everything into my court, assumption on the part of all parties was to blame.

The lessons learned for me are to now keep checking, keep monitoring, use my automation to report status, to fix faults and if human errors creep in, to let me know.

I'm now off to spec up a service I can run on one of my own servers, just to ping the network machine which went AWOL and receive a report from it to let me know what its up to, this might be a bit of python or just bash on a cron task, but it's going to be something rather than nothing.

I will NOT assume again.

People : Do you Talk the Talk?

Having recently been speaking to some technical and none-technical people, both relation to staff I need, and indeed myself looking outwardly, I have come to the conclusion most people interviewing, in the technology sphere, today sadly fall into two general categories...

1. Those who talk the talk 
2. Those who don't...

What is the talk?  Well, as a general technologist I don't talk in specifics, doing so I've always found overwhelms the listening.  For example, "Network Connection"... This is perfectly sufficient to communicate to 99.9% of listeners what I mean, I can draw it on a piece of paper, make it an arrow or communicate it's meaning very simply.

However, I was asked (last week) "what so you mean by connection"... The Socket... The Client-Server connection... The handle to the I/O buffer within my application to the TCP/IP Stack on the machine?!?!?

None of my replies seemed to mollify them.  Knowing this was clearly my not using the correct form of incantation from the necronomicon of buzzwords, I asked them what they thought I meant... Their reply stunned me, a little...

"I mean the post stream packet set from after the first packet, containing the Syn flag, and the following series of packets over the TCP Pipe".

I think I actually laughed, asking them, if that's what they really meant to ask as they were testing me, or that's how they seriously expected me to express myself... They didn't have an answer to this.

"Network connection" was perfectly adequate to express the object of our mutual attention, but clearly this person had no wiggle room, no faith perhaps that they were not talking to a moron; despite their apparently having read my humble blog pages here.

So, where did this confusion come from?  I think, putting it simply, I don't want to compartmentalise technology, I don't want to say "this is the interface", "this is the control", "this is the communication" and only one person or one team be involved into that one area.  For a development team, or a single project, this can lead to almost an incestuous proclivity to sharing information with others.

Rather, I see technology as a huge ecology within which we all live and work, move a team member to other libraries, or other parts of a project now and then, if they're not confident in the graphics slowly make them a junior member of graphics, if they are a strong outward thinking communications body, let them lead communications but have them chaperone those less confident with it through the same code.  Share tools, and time and attention on one another.

This means perhaps means I don't talk "the" talk, I never jump to nuts and bolts, it's not how I want to communicate technologically, and was never how one communicated when teaching Karate, you had to build one another up to the same level of understanding, both at a personal and a working level.

So, I will never talk about the raw metal, or the raw software libraries, instead I'll talk about "building the Exchange layer", I won't talk about "the CCTalk byte code interface" I'll talk about the hardware abstraction to simplify all these calls, and give it a name, such as the namespace within the code, so those driven and interested can go take a look at it.

If you take a look around this blog you will see the hundred of posts, they do explain an awful lot of information, sometimes they contain my opinion; I think today they're more professional looking, and perhaps are for a niche audience, but they will contain a lot of technical information... They don't contain "the talk"... But over 300 people read these pages every day, and most of the feedback I receive is about how clear the tutorials are, or how clearly I've expressed something about development, which was previously hidden in layers of this "talk".

If you speak to me about technology, I will want know what you are talking about, rather than buzz words, acronyms, or specifics.  I don't know what you are working on, it could be PDF file generation from Geographic data, it could be time and attendance clocking systems, it could be automotive displays.  The unifying thing isn't the minutia, it's being able to be generic.

Is this my problem?

Well, no, this is my blog and my little corner of the internet so I can pretty much say exactly what I like... I make you welcome to talk to me in the comments below, and I'm pretty sure with the hundreds of comments and hundreds of thousands of visitors we've each understood each other.

My question then is, why do some IT related folks, when they invite you into their little corner of the planet, why do they not understand me or even one another?

They seem to jump immediately to a check list of words they desperately need, to hear, they don't listen, they don't engage, they (I'm pretty damn sure) just want to follow their script rote to complete their task.  Where as I want to speak to people who are as enabled and interested in technology as I am, without having to experience ten years working in a room with them before we synergy.

Likewise, I'd like to think presented with all these pages, knowing they were going to speak to me, that they would do me the courtesy of visiting this; my humble corner of the inter-webs; before asking me to engage in their merry dance around the knives of indifference.

What TLA are you today?

TLA... TLA... A kingdom for your TLA... That's three letter acronym by the way... Well, strictly three letters is not the limit, but I'm extremely annoyed this week at hearing all these random seeming strange acronyms being thrown around...

I've heard....

CCNA, ITIL, MSCE, CIT, BACCT and EMECH today alone...

Some I have heard of, some I've not, the last is so generic as to be equivalent to "I read a book, once".

So lets cover my opinion of  a few of these, the Cisco certification, it's clearly fine and required to work with their kit, I've always found reading Cisco manuals to be a torture; but as a pfSense convert I no longer have many issues with Cisco kit.

ITIL, I actually myself started to read this course, it was... It wasn't that useful, practicality wise at least, it relied a lot on Microsoft specific software, run to Linux and be set free!

MSCE, this was the classic "well you did graduate a few years ago, but now you need this" qualification.... However, now... Not so much, at all... Especially when you use a compiler other than Microsoft's more often than not!

The rest, well... I'll be honest I'd never heard of them... However, I don't take an effective CV as being one containing a whole bunch of these acronyms.  I am not the kind of reader, or reviewer, to just think "shit I don't know that acronym the writer of this CV must be real smart!"... No, I actually look it up, and you know if I google for your qualification and can find only adverts for places offering the course, I think the course is only good for those selling it, it's not actually very good for those of us trying to decipher your ability....

Lets draw a line under this discussion and just focus on something else...

I just talked about your ability, if you want to quantify your ability go right a head, but I'll personally take your worth, how much do you value the work, how do you communicate your wish and will to succeed?... That's more important than any paid to read cookie cutter course in my opinion.

Selling Infrastructure Today, to the Mindset of Yesteryear (IT Provisioning Talk)

Today, I'm going to talk about presenting, or selling, an idea to internal management.  How to sell them the idea of a capitol level expense without having it rejected.  Because in 16 years of professional development, I've seen the world change, when I began working the age of the Internet was in full swing, the dot COM boom was about to burst, but in infrastructure the world had two sides of a divide, "big iron", with big costs or PC's which were relatively cheaper.   Today however, that same PC class hardware (though in a different form - the wrack mounted server) is ubiquitous in the work place, however the costs for major infrastructure are ever growing.  To sell a purchase is a challenge, and this is how I've dealt with that challenge, and would like to continue to challenge it in my office today - if only I were given chance to help.

If you work in an environment where those above understand the value added to a business by having decent infrastructure, then you need not read any further nor know anything more than I envy you!

In a large business, or situation where funds and a core understanding for the need to invest in your IT infrastructure is understood, it is very easy to justify and secure funding for the right storage solutions to suit the business needs, be that a decent Network Attached Storage solution in a small office, or a large scale Storage Attached Network at the capitol expense level.  The key to getting either end of that scale of investment is not really explaining the hardware & what it does, though that is very important, but instead it is communicating multiple smaller pieces of the over-all jigsaw as to how this investment will impact and improve the company.

One can cherry pick topics, or even name drop them, "total cost of ownership (TCO)", "return on investment (ROI)", you can demonstrate the value of IT, the value of this hardware investment to justify the cost, and how integrating it with the business will potentially improve performance.

Anyone whom has tried to explain this the lay man, or just a stubborn audience, can find themselves on the loosing end of the battle, even with added credibility (such as your being ITIL certified), if your audience doesn't understand, nor buy into your vision of the future, or even if they're the kind of work collegue who likes to see the world burn, then you are going to struggle to put your point across.

This is something I wish to discuss with you today, for it's something which dogs the infrastructure around me, both professionally and personally.

We all understand that spending money today is hard, but those of us looking at what needs buying, sometimes we do know more than those who just look at the bottom line cost.  So seeing the price of new equipment as a cost, rather than an investment is the first hurdle to cross.

Before any jargon, before any numbers go on spreadsheets or slide shows, you need to set the mind of your audience into the correct frame, and this needs careful phraseology from yourself, and careful use of easy to handle concepts.  A practical example is also of good use.

Always when approaching this topic, I begin by never speaking of costs, or expense, I always talk about investment and better yet expansion.  Sometimes you may want to create a whole new system, such as a Storage Attached Network, this maybe many thousands of pounds, and if your audience has no idea what a storage attached network is your task is made more difficult.  So, immediately drop any technojargon, a none-technnical audience is going to feel more at ease with simple phrases and careful handling.

Introduce the technology later in your presentation, but initially talk about Storage over the network, or storage over the wire, talk about internetworking the machines in your company and a pool of storage.  Then explain the pool is to be stored on equipment known as a Storage Attached Network Array.

This jogging with the facts, and altering the terminology thrown out makes you appear less as though you are educating, rather you are introducing old thinkers to something new, and doing it gently.  All this introduction should take two to three minutes, no more, and have a big picture.

The best case scenario you can assume occurring is that they simply are looking at the price, the worst is that they think they know what you're talking about and that they know how much it should cost, by abating their feeling antagonised by your testing their knowledg with techno-jargon, you immediately stop their feeling alien from presentation.

Plus, they will one-day be one of the users of your new infrastructure, to include that, and the benefits of going the extra mile now in the implementation will improve their working environment for three, five, maybe ten years is worth keeping in their minds eye.

Once you have explained to them what is the target of your investment, you need to quickly give them a price break down, I recommend starting with the solution you want, it's cost, and a maximum of three bullet points about why... For example:

SAN unit, twelve disks, giving all the storage we need:

* Easy maintenance

* Brilliant Performance

* 3 years vendor provided assistance & service

Don't yet put the price, next give the maximum price example, and make sure you include the price as a negative, so they become aware you have checked above the realistic price point for a good solution...

Gold plated magnetic frizbee

* Again Easy Maintenance

* Best in class performance

* Most expensive solution

State boldy, this most expensive solution has no benefit over the previous mid-priced example... Remember you're trying to sell the idea more than the hardware, you're the buyer of this equipment, and you will be using it to furnish IT Service to the audience you are now addressing, they must realise they can pay more for something better, even if you do not want this top of the range performance and costs.

Finally, you should give a lowest spec variant, this should however, still be something you can manage, but do point out the added costs of your having to be there to trouble shoot, to coax it along, to keep it on the straight and narrow.  In todays world we do run a multi-facetted high availability model of computing.  Unfortunately in many middle of the road businesses the funds come from staff who's experience and idea of large scale computing is just that, large!  They remember the era of Big Iron of mainframes, they do not understand why a 1U sized server should cost multiple thousands of pounds, and they don't care for you explaining it.

But they do care that you show due dilligence in researching the costs of these items, and what you want to sell them is the idea that they are picking your best option.  So make sure there are more negative points with the least performant option...

Stone Tables

* Extremely slow to store data

* Difficult to source new media for

* Will require constant monitoring by staff to operate

The next piece of your presentation should focus on the price, but still avoid calling it a cost, a price is the "price of success", or the "price to deliver", never ever call is the "cost of ownership" or the "cost to the business", I believe this is the most erroneous part of courses such as the ITIL qualification; and yes I understand you need to explain the "cost" to a business of their IT services, but calling them a cost when you are trying to get investment in them from those above is ludicrous, address the costs of running later, today talk about the price, get the price out there as simple as possible.

A table is a good solution, the options you present in the order presented left to right, with your preferred column highlighted a slight different colour.

Include yearly maintenance, hardware maintenance, licensing & your estimated costs in salary terms, don't be specific with that last item, just let them know:

SAN Frizzbee Tablets

Capitol Investment £8,500 £11,850 £2,300

Maintenance/year £250 £530 £1,200

Additional* £500 £1,200 £2,400

Staff Overhead** £2,400 £3,800 £4,500

* One off costs related to installation or delivery

** Annual cost, estimated against staff time & pay grades, to operate the system in house.

Make it clear that you are presenting the best solution for not only the performance of the services being provisioned, but also in your own time, you are trying to make sure you are free to help the business expand.

The maintenance/year costs is also an area you should leverage, make it clear to the audience that you want to provide a continual improvement program, include that value here, and call it a value, never a cost.  This is one of the good clear items within the ITIL concept, that you have a continual cycle of improvement, if you never factor that into the cost of modern infrastructure, then you are as guilty of living in the past as those member of your audience stuck on the idea of "big iron".

To conclude your presentation, recommend your desired solution, explain you have gone both above and below the price point selected, and state this is the best solution for the business, make reference to specific things within your business process; and if you find yourself wondering what the business process is, then scrub your talk, you are not ready to deal with any queries regarding the business yet!

So, why am I talking about this?... Well, this is a problem relayed to me second hand from the office, there's a current effort to upgrade the whole network.  The server infrastucture has already been done, without my input, however, the next item is all about the network which is very much in my sphere of interest.

There are highspeed, high availability SAN's available on this network, however the back-bone is a mix of gigabit and megabit unmanaged switches, there is no separation of departments with VLans, there is a domain which I believe needs rebuilding as it sometimes struggles and there is a lot of network chatter all the time, from myriad devices.

All problems which could be solved with decent wiring and decent switching equipment, managed smart switches being one of the key infrastructure requirements... Are we getting decent switching equipment?... Unfortunately not.  And the poor soul who had to try and fight this good presentation fight, and whom lost, was simply beaten down in their request by old-hat thinking, indeed the quoted reply when they asked for managed versus unmanaged switches was "They all do the same bloody thing".

A bloody minded reply which pretty much set the tone of what was being delivered, for this being perhaps only the third major network infrasturcture investment in 53 years it's extremely disheartening to see the investment only going as far as replacing like-for-like, instead of actually leveraging value for the investment.

Is going from a mix of unmanaged switches going to solve all the problems in the business, no.  Is it going to solve some of them some of the time, yes, but only with lots of staff input still.  Would fully managed switches been worth the investment?  Yes!  Would they have saved on staff over head and solved more of the business challenges at hand?... Yes.

Unfortunately, and ultimately, the presenter of the idea was not talking to an audience whom were on the side of the technology, nor an audience willing to buy equipment for seemingly its own sake.  The audience was hostile, they were firmly of the belief that the problems would best be solved by working around them with a human, rather than with better equipment.

How do you argue against mind-sets like this?... Being qualified is one way, having qualifications to back up your argument is fine, but it only goes part of the way, and in my experience to go all the way with these arguments, you have to approach them in the manner we've talked about today, to bring the potentially hostile over to acceptance, and do it gently, do it by stroking their ego and making them feel part of the process, that they're really doing more than you ever will to benefit the company, by their accepting your advice, for the greater good.