…It’s faster and more responsive running a full-screen remote desktop session with a computer a thousand miles away than it is running its own desktop. Note to self, needs more memory 
It’s common knowledge to everyone in the IT industry that the goal of any server is to run as long as possible with no interruptions, keeping reboots to an absolute minimum. Why, then, does Windows 2003 require a reboot to install Windows Updates? I mean, this OS seems to know better in every regard, but to require a freaking reboot for patches that don’t affect the core of the OS (read: IIS patches)?
Perhaps it’s because Windows Update on 2003 is the same code as on XP, which requires a reboot for patches that don’t actually do anything (read: “Malicious Software Removal Tool” du jour)?
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I have a 48″ widescreen HDTV, and I’m watching a VHS movie on it :-\
I’m not sure why, but despite my disdain for Windows Vista, and the fact that I don’t actually work in tech support or plan to do so, I keep ending up in situations where I have to support this godforsaken mess that Microsoft calls an “upgrade”. The first time was when the super-needy client I’ve mentioned before bought his overpriced Sony laptop, and ignored my advice to buy it before Vista came out (he got it the week after). The second time, I helped a local Unitarian church build a new computer for their office, and in addition to my commission on the sale, they bought my support services for a year, but the particular Dell model they wanted didn’t have XP as an option.
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In the process of this server project, I’ve encountered some rather bizarre problems with the various PHP applications hosted on Lupinia. In particular, moving things from the old environment to the new one has a tendency to break things, and none of the problems I encountered seemed to be in the documentation for the particular application in question.
Now, I expected problems when I started the migration process, since most of these systems are highly complex (Gallery2, in particular, boggles my mind in its complexity). What I didn’t anticipate was the utterly abysmal support response from every open-source application I had issues with. In the last couple of weeks, I’ve started at least a dozen new threads in various support forums. And in all of them, I’ve either had no responses at all, or the only response was someone questioning basic configuration/permissions problems that I had already checked, and I had stated as much in the initial post.
What’s even more frustrating is that a lot of these problems were fixed by a few extra lines of code to check for a particular contingency that needed to be addressed. Several more required a touch of database configuration/table adjustment that wasn’t covered in the documentation, and the Gallery2 problem mysteriously fixed itself after viewing the code of a couple of its files, without actually changing anything.
Now, I realize that these are volunteers providing support, and I also realize that PHP on IIS/Windows isn’t the most common server environment. But when every other thread on a support forum receives multiple posts that attempt to solve the problem, while mine receives none, there’s something very wrong.
The one good experience I’ve had so far with supporting web applications has come from the company that wrote the helpdesk software we’re using, Expinion. It’s an ASP-based application, and I had to pay for it, but that money was well spent. Right after installation, I noticed a very strange issue with the ticketing interface, and I submitted a support request on their site. Turns out, the problem was related to the fact that I was running it on MySQL instead of MS SQL, and the guy who responded to the ticket actually wrote a patch to fix it on the spot, and had it working by lunchtime. That, my friends, is excellent tech support, and I will gladly recommend their products to anyone because of that one experience.
Hello everyone! Apologies as usual for my lack of updates, you know the drill.
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I ate a banana last night
