Simon Butcher

For all but the extremely lucky in the IT world, there comes a point when you realise that your backup procedures are somewhat inadequate. Backups are often not taken into serious consideration by management, and with the modern more-with-less attitude to IT departments, nobody really has the time to maintain backup procedures.

I had my wake-up call yesterday, mid-afternoon, when we suffered a series of unexpected and unlikely failures that ultimately combined to cause serious file-system corruption on the disk that houses an important database's master database file (.MDF). With the database gone, but the previous night's backup and the transaction logs (.LDF) intact, recovering the database to the point of the incident wasn't particularly easy for someone who's not a DBA.

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Every Christmas, a whole bunch of presents arrive from our various vendors at the office, quite often chocolates, or some chocolate related theme.

I seem to wind up receiving a new toy to play with at the office around this time of the year too: Last year it was the Google Mini 2.0, and this year it's a pair of Sun Fire X4600 servers.

I've always had a penchant for Sun hardware, and while we're normally an HP shop at work, I was able to convince the powers-that-be that these two servers would be ideal to replace our horrible ML350 G4 based SQL server, which was chosen before my time.

Continue reading "Sun Fire X4600"