Comment Re:Permanently modified? (Score 2, Informative) 426
http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=918
Also, they've done a KB explaining what happens when you change cards:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2450831
At my place we've got a bunch of MS stuff but the management and my colleagues all seem to be open source wannabe's. When I got here, the place was in a terrible state, the Terminal Servers were bluscreening multiple times a week, the file servers were thrashing constantly, basically our major incident board was lit up like a Christmas tree. Every time something went wrong, everyone would be "Bloody Microsoft, never works!!!!, viruses, malware, blue screen of death LOLLLZZZ!!!!"
So anyway I've set to work straightening everything out (nothing magical, mainly patches, firmware etc) and we've not had a terminal server bluescreen since July '09, and the helpdesk has received exactly 2 calls this afternoon, one was for a LOB app error, and the other was a user training issue. It's been this way for months. I can't actually remember the last time I've seen a helpdesk call directly attributable to the Microsoft platform. Now we're only a small org of 80 servers worldwide, so I know this run of good fortune probably wouldn't scale to some of the badass networks you lot are running, but it works for us, and works really well.
You would think this would have earned at least a little credibility on my part? Nah. I'm still the office whipping boy because I happen to think MS prods are a strategically good idea for the business. Every time something isn't working, they still straight away blame patches, Microsoft, a virus - when demonstrably the cowboy coding of our integration engineer, or a network issue or one of our LOB apps has got a bug. Pisses me off no end. We've actually had more issues with HP drivers/firmware than we've had with the MS stack, which surprised even me!
We're looking at some border gateway stuff right now, and the boss is rejecting anything without iPhone and Mac compatibility, even though it accounts for under 4% of our userbase! I'm also trying to virtualise some of the estate, but am hitting a brick wall because he wants to use anything but Microsoft, which we don't have the skills in house to properly administer. Insanity, IMO! Then again, he does insist on referring to our server cupboard as a 'datacenter' in front of vendors, I really cringe when he does that!
So anyway, don't always count on the fact that even if you come in and make all the right moves that you'll get any credit whatsoever. People's ingrained beliefs are hard to change, even when they have been proven wrong smack bang in front of their faces.
Wrong! A BSOD is caused by any unhandled exception which might cause corruption if the system is allowed to continue executing, such as some buggy software attempting to write in to kernel memory space.
The rule on staying alive as a program manager is to give 'em a number or give 'em a date, but never give 'em both at once.