On Mon, 30 Sep 2013 17:51:35 Peter Nunn wrote:
At the risk of starting a thread that runs for months, how do you overcome microsoft FUB in the education sector.
http://progressivedirection.com/wrong-cloud-nec-ultranet-victoria The above page is worth reading. While there is a difference between cloud services and local application the same principle applies. One issue with applications is licenses, if the license is determined to be invalid then software stops working, for example I believe that all recent versions of Windows make it really difficult to take hard drives from a broken system and put them in a working system to resume operation. http://vaaconsulting.com/ Another issue is proprietary data formats. If you have a corrupted NTFS filesystem then you will probably find it difficult to find someone with relevant skills to try and extract data. For Linux you can directly hire people who have contributed code to the Linux filesystems in question (see the above for an example). You can also hire people who have read the code and know how it works. For example some years ago I fixed a couple of Linux systems for clients which had ext2 corruption that couldn't be fixed with e2fsck (it seemed to be a combination of a kernel bug and a e2fsck bug), I didn't have any great knowledge of ext2 (I've never contributed a patch) but I have read the source. If one of my clients has a corrupted NTFS system then I know that I can't read the NTFS source or hire anyone who's contributed code to the NTFS project. I do know people who've reverse engineered NTFS code and I could try tracking down contributors to the NTFS drivers for Linux, but that wouldn't be as good as talking to MS employees. The same applies all the way up the stack, I've got the source to MySQL, PostgreSQL, and LibreOffice and I can probably hire people who have experience working on those projects. Some years ago I was in the first week of a new contract when I had to track down a problem with Veritas VXFS corruption on a filesystem that had an Oracle database. Everyone else in the sysadmin team didn't want to touch it so I volunteered (it was one of those jobs where you get 1 month's pay and a security escort out of the office if you mess up). Fortunately VXFS mostly fixed itself (the Veritas support people weren't very helpful) and then Oracle came good once the filesystem was fixed. But I had no good options for fixing such things myself. -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/