I was going to post yesterday asking how long all this would take... but decided to just go ahead with my transfer and report back. 24 hours for me. No bumps.

I already had domains at GoDaddy and NameCheap and decided this was a good time to consolidate at NC. I had unlocked my GoDaddy domain a couple of weeks ago with the intention of dealing with it when I had some downtime over the holidays. I started the whole process this time yesterday. After a few notifications and accepting the transfer on both sides I got an email this afternoon that the transfer was done. Logged into my NameCheap control panel and there it is.

I still have one domain at GoDaddy but I am letting it expire anyway so no reason to transfer unless I decide to resurrect the site.

The partnership helped Dell increased their numbers but customers were always left to sway in the wind. Their sales process was a cluster. Their support for EMC was a cluster. We bought a lot of Dell branded EMC storage. Support came from Dell and their party line was to blame it on EMC but not provide any escalation to EMC engineers who could really help to identify solve problems. Basically all Dell was good for was sending a tech to replace disks that had 'phoned home' that they were failing.

After some major contract negotiations and threats to take all of our Dell desktop, server, and storage business somewhere else (millions a year) they transferred our support contract to EMC so we could get support directly. Considering the amount of time, money, and customer goodwill spent on Dell flubbing this relationship we should have just bought directly from EMC.

Since RDP is a necessary evil for administering remote windows PCs at least change the fracking port...

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\TerminalServer\WinStations\RDP-Tcp\PortNumber

I'm in healthcare IT too, its as close as I can get to blood without getting queasy.

I was a developer for 10 years before I decided to work as a DBA exclusively. When I developed I was always the DB "go to guy" because it was always something that interested me. I wanted to make sure what I delivered performed well and the DB was a big part of that.

I enjoyed software development immensely but I got tired of the death marches and feature creep. One of my CEO's was nicknamed "Two Week Pete" because after visiting a customer he would always promise some 6 month feature in 2 weeks. I still develop software but just the 'fun' stuff mostly personal and open source projects. I'm the only DBA here that has Design Patterns and OO Software Engineering books right next to my SQL references.

While there is a lot of minutae involved in keeping a large DB instance running, generally my requirements are "We need an instance to support X amount of load and we need it by date Y". When I was a software developer I enjoyed producing elegant code. Now that I'm on the DB side I am responsible for producing elegant solutions which include hardware, software, and services. Yes, when its bad its bad. I usually have a couple of bad weeks a year where I get little to no sleep. I use the 'off time' to keep things running as smoothly as possible and try to reduce the episodes of nightmare performance.

It has been good to have a taste of both sides though. There are a lot of developers that are clueless about the DB side of things and a unfortunately a higher percentage of DBAs that have no idea what goes into developing a decent client or middle tier.

-- Dave