Well, it's Monday all right

[cdybedahl]

Monday morning. Nothing on the beeper, amazingly enough. Instead, I get a phone call from the boss of the internal IT group. Who says that during the Sunday, our Exchange server ate its own guts, that she and one of her technicians have been working for 26 hours straight trying to get it back up again and could I please check the status of the backups from that machine?

Yay.

Anyway, I get to work and we start looking at it. Now, I'm no Windows expert by any stretch of the imagination. I gleefully left that world behind back in 1990, and have done my best to stay the hell away from it ever since. This morning has been a wonderful confirmation of the wisdom of that policy. We came up with, oh, ten or fifteen different ways to try to fix the problem. All of them failed because Windows simply would not do something that should be trivial. Like copying data from one disk to another (yes, really, and I don't really want to know why). Or try to tell Exchange to look for its data somewhere else (apparently it wants to see the old, broken data before it'll deign to look elsewhere, and we lose again). Remaining solution? The tried and true Microsoft Way: wipe and reinstall from scratch.

And once more I wonder, why do people put up with the disease-ridden heap of dung that is Microsoft Windows? Worse, why do they pay for it?

Comments

[seaya.livejournal.com]

Heh. Perhaps your office should get rid of Microsoft Sexchange.

That being said, Sexchange is much worse than other Microsoft products, the other ones function most of the time.

For servers, unix is better, no matter what kind of office computers you have.

[cdybedahl.livejournal.com]

For some reason it seems that Microsoft is exempt from the principle "If it doesn't work, stop using it" that all other vendors have to live with. It doesn't matter that Exchange has an availability under 90%, It Shall Be Used Or Else.

And I know quite well how much more pleasant Unix machines are; the machines I admin all run Solaris. Most of them have uptimes of well over a year. But I just got to take over the server taking backups of the MS machines, so suddenly have to care about those... things.

[teanna.livejournal.com]

It's luser friendly. They think. (and the sheep look up, like in that novel)

[cdybedahl.livejournal.com]

"The Sheep Look Up" is the pollution one, isn't it (alongside "The Shockwave Rider" about computers, "Stand On Zanzibar" about overpopulation and "Jagged Orbit" about urban violence)? Wonderfully cynical novel, if I'm remembering the right one, anyway. Maybe I should re-read it. After the anthology of lesbian vampire erotica I finally managed to get hold of.

[teanna.livejournal.com]

Yep. that's the one. John Brunner was a very, very clever man. Also completely out of it, in some respects. I was upset when he died, some years back - he should have been better known.