my-life-in-it-blog

[my-life-in-it-blog]

Ghosts in the Backup

Small business server is a hideous product, it’s pretty much all the big hitters of the Microsoft branded guff slapped together with tape (not even duct tape) and blu-tac. You have your usual suspects - MSSQL, Exchange, Active Directory, amongst other stuff, if you’re reading this you probably already know what I mean.

Once SBS is up and running, from the very get go there are errors in the event viewer, some of these have Microsoft Knowledge-base articles about them and how the fix is to ignore them or filter them out, I’ll add a source for that when I come across it again, it’s a DCOM error of sorts, prolific in SBS2011 boxes. Then when the dust has settled and it’s been running for say… 50 minutes? Give or take, you’ll see that the 512 Gorrilabytes of RAM you installed in it is sitting at 97% capacity thanks to SQL and Exchange, there is a common workaround for the Exchange one, but use it at your own risk. Now that you’re a bit acquainted with the joys of SBS, if you’re a newcomer to IT or just a regular user who’s reading my ramblings, I’ll continue with the story. The client in question - we will call him Zap. Zap had a vigorous routine, he’d run like 4 backups every single day on his SBS2008 box, I mean he had a VERY strict routine, and if he was held up for even a second because his backup wasn’t running - we’d get a phone call and a complaint. Zap, a person who also demanded admin access to his server (not a qualified technician I might add) so he could login in the morning to make sure his nightly backup also ran, if it didn’t log in properly in the morning (as in quick) we’d also get a phone call and a complaint. I personally never started to look at Zap's server until the previous engineer in charge of making sure the backups ran had left the company, and to keep Zap happy, this engineer would wake up at like 6:30am, log in the server remotely so that it was ready to go when Zap got into the office, and checked the backup. He did this every single morning as him and a Microsoft Engineer had went over this server with a fine tooth comb and figured this was the best approach. If the server didn’t get logged in to, the backups wouldn’t run properly. If the backups failed at any point, Zap got really upset and questioned our integrity as an IT company. Think about this for a moment, this guy and all his demands - usually not unreasonable if he’s paying us to support his network, but when you find out how much he was paying you’d think we were nuts. I can’t tell you the amount just in case but I can tell you that our hourly rate for ad-hoc work is higher than the amount he was paying per month for full IT (including on-site) support. Zap always moaned about getting overcharged as well. This is a classic example of why small/medium businesses are awful places for IT, in some cases. I digress. Enter X, this is where I started looking at the server and to be honest for a bit of time I wasn’t sure what to do with it, but I did want to get this issue put to bed so when we came to renew his monthly fee we could increase it. Now this server is SBS2008 and it was put in a long time before I started working for the company, so it’s been backing up for a long time, and it backs up 4-6 times every single day. I’d noticed that over the months of me and the previous technician - every single week the login times were getting slower and backups would fail without the login occurring first. It’s a strange case, not one you would see commonly (welcome to small businesses ladies and gentlemen). Now what could be causing this? I wondered. For days I trolled through Microsoft KBs looking for people with similar troubles, tweaking registry changes and other such nonsensical fixes - thus far nothing was helping. One day, after I had left it for a day or so I was reading a KB article for an unrelated issue that I was teaching myself about and I came across a comment. One comment. No thumbs up on it, no replies nothing like that, but it lit up like a non-energy saving light bulb. I can’t find the comment again for the life of me, but if I could I’d screencap it and print it, frame it and praise it every day. The person described a situation very similar to my own and their resolution was to use a little application that enumerates all the devices plugged into the computer, past and present, and enumerates shadow devices (or ghosts, as the application is called Ghostbuster) - it turns out that whenever the SBS2008 system was backing up it was creating and not uncreating a shadow device of the backup disk. It was doing this every time it backed up. For 5 years. The application actually crashed whenever I tried to remove them all, I had to run it 8 or 9 times and remove them in phases. I managed this at a weekend and Zap didn’t work at the weekends, so I safely restarted his server and it was like a new machine. It logged in like lightning, backups were running fine. There was no issue whatsoever! I did my job as a technician. I could close off the dreaded ticket for Zap. His server was back to normal. 2 weeks later, Zap and his company were no longer a client. They moved away after I put all that effort in and went the extra mile for this, and went away because we put their contract price up by not too much, proving that these small companies don’t care about results or qualities but to save pennies. I don’t mind so much, Zap wasn’t a very nice person, he’d get angry over trivial things and wasn’t very clever. They moved away to a rival IT company who aren’t too keen on yours truly. There are about 5 companies around this area that don’t like me at all. Those are tales for another day. -X

[my-life-in-it-blog]

Small Business Style Migration

One of the perks of working for small companies is that they trust you because everyone knows everyone’s name and there’s no hierarchy of management to traverse, especially when it comes to installation of equipment and access to the buildings. I’m not saying that I take advantage of this for malicious intent (I really don’t) but it does help make things a little bit more comfortable when you’re pulling a weekend shift in an empty building. I was doing a fairly standard job, migrate SBS2003 to SBS2011, easy job, but I knew when I decided that I’d be doing it that it was going to be my Saturday gone, so I decided to make the most of it - I was alone in this old building with access to a kitchen and internet, what else do I need? That’s pretty much the exact same set up I have at home. When it came to the long part of the SBS migration and I had done all the work, all the boxes were ticked and the I’s were dotted, all that was left was the waiting. My shoes came off, my feet were up and I loaded up Netflix on my little Lenovo Thinkpad T61. I had been planning to watch a movie for a while now so I pretty much just sat and watched that, ordered a pizza to the place, and abused the hell out of their Nescafe Gold Barista, it was one of those huge >£15 tubs, so I didn’t feel too bad. With my pizza and my coffee, I proceeded to enjoy watching some Tom Cruise flick, it was pretty good from what I remember. After that day, that Nescafe stuff became my regular go to coffee for when I can’t be bothered brewing some of the nicer ground stuff that I’ve got. The server that I put in has been running solidly since the install - no issues (apart from the obvious one: it’s running SBS2011), and the client has been fairly happy. Remember, if no one’s about, as long as you do the work you can be as comfortable as you want. It’s your life after all. -X

[my-life-in-it-blog]

Hello!

This is my first entry of hopefully a lot! The purpose of this is to just outline some of the situations I come across on a daily basis - IT support and management for small to medium businesses is a different beast from global companies, with the funding and infrastructure, small companies want the same sort of service - perhaps they saw IT on television and decided that’s how we (the company I work at) should act, every single day I face issues with people not wanting to upgrade older systems, spendthrifts, some of the weirdest technical issues you’ll ever see and then downright stupidity on both the end users part and rival IT companies. A little bit of information about me - I’m a technical engineer, for now, not a manager, I work in a small company in the UK that supports other small companies with their IT needs. I’m relatively skilled, quite underpaid and have a sinister sense of humour. What I’d like to get out of this blog is to share my experiences, outline some of the easily avoidable situations I get in and maybe highlight the fact that IT at this level is probably one of the most under-appreciated things a small to medium business has to budget for, despite the technological necessity of today’s working world. I’ll also share some technical advice, so it’s a learning experience! If you follow me, I’ll always follow back! Regards -X