Month: November 2009

JEB’s rules of IT

  1. Always have a backup.
  2. Always monitor your backups.
  3. Always backup your monitoring.
  4. Always investigate failures; work out how to monitor it to catch it quicker next time (hopefully before it fails).

Backups without monitoring is no backup at all; if your backups fail, you won’t know until you try to use them.

A note about RAID

Unmonitored RAID 1/5/6/10 is no better than a single disk; as each disk pops, you’ll never notice until the last one goes.

A note about UPS’s

UPS’s fail, OK.

Resilience and cost

Resilient, fast, and cheap; chose any two.

Lies in status messages

Just because something says OK, doesn’t mean it is OK.

More HP DreamSceen Musings

So, it’s been a few weeks, and there still doesn’t seem to be any news about an HP supported SDK or even a hack to get into the HP DreamScreen. More interesting comments on this blog; I concurr with the timings for starting “apps” and navigating menus – way too slow to react.

I think the main point is nicely summed up – when “the community” gets inside this device there will be a possibility of realising the potential of an intelligent picture frame — the kind of self-populating, automatically updating, no-user-input required device that you would give to your parents and siblings to keep in touch. They shouldn’t have to navigate through my Snapfish albums manually – it should just happen!

Sigh.