Did I already mention that I hate customers?!

All the last few days I had to deal with a customer and a bigger project coming up with all kind of problems and issues forced by their more than loosely planned project. Thanks god I can honestly say and confirm that it wasn’t me making this plan and  right from the beginningI had some serious worries about they will be able to do that planning job by their own.

Today now the disaster went nearly perfect with customer empolyees were messing up a critical 24×7 database and corrupting the underlaying filesystem on disk and it’s content (database files) as well.

And what did they do then? They called me!! Why me?!

Now I’m sitting here since hours trying to get  …. sorry for that …. their shit recovered and fixed again, while they asked me whether or not it would be still necessary for them being around…… :-((

Pardon! BUT DID I ALREADY MENTION THAT I HATE CUSTOMERS? At least TODAY….. grrrrrrr

It is still a time of me getting familiar with my shiny new little toy. Even it works very well with us both and after a few days I feel more and more familiar with all there is still this feeling left not being finally familiar with all.

But within just a few days I also have found nice and neat new stuff I really started to enjoy and wouldn’t like to miss anymore. And also all  those tips of my friend were great and made quit a big difference for sure getting me a better start.

Today I found LittleSnitch an inexpensive little helper which really helps to improve your security in my eyes. And I also have spoken about SuperDuper before which has archive to become my most liked backup solution now.

By the way speaking about SuperDuper … curious as I am I have for sure to test and play with all. Can you imagine how disappointed I was finding this SuperDuper backup-ed external usb2.0 disk not able to boot? Searching their forum didn’t bring any clue for me what might have gone wrong.

Thinking about I decided to follow an idea I had installing a new clean OS on that external disk which I had anyway planned to do getting familiar with that procedure at all. After installing the OS and verifying it would boot, I started SuperDuper again switching to "smart" backup and was surprised everything now working fine.  Thats quit a relief … now I’m able to fix it again whenever needed.

Last year I started to play a bit with a really interesting little device from Cisco called NSLU2. It is a so called NAS storage device offering server functionality for disks attached via USB within a LAN.

It is a really inexpensive way to serve disk space within your local LAN at home. And as for the device has become famous for tweaking and modding world wide, with a special replacement firmware (Debian slug) and a bit of knowledge you can even modify and run it as full featured Ftpserver and Webserver (supporting a LAMP environment) accessible from the internet.

Being fascinated by this little device myself, I shared all the info about with a friend living at OZ and it ended with me buying a 2nd device and shipping it over (it is cheaper to buy here than there) and doing a full remote setup over the internet this weekend.

That is what I call a successful remote System Management! Thats Tops!!