I was wondering about the same thing, I've never heard about GUADEC before. Thanks for clearing it up.

It might be a bit harsh but still, if the production is critical and you expect it to work at all times you can't be surprised when shit happens if you don't have a good and tested plan. Moving everything to the cloud does not necessarily solve this issue. What if "something" happens to the cloud provider? What if someone hacks your prod system? What if you accidentally delete your data?

You still need a backup, you still need a distaster recovery plan, you still need some sort of HA solution and you still need qualified personnel. Personally I would not trust that my cloud vendor actually does this for me.

I don't really have a lot against the cloud, I have actually set up and used Office 365 for a small/medium business. But I still have local copies of that businesses data and a local Exchange server in case "something" happens.

If a single drunk driver is able to stop your production and that production is critical you are doing something wrong to begin with. While the cloud might (and probably will) offer better HA and DR it will not fix a bad design by itself. The article also states: " I didn't want to create my own internal IT department". I' guessing Andrew Oliver is a PHB.

"Hack it"? Using a proxy or a VPN tunnel is not hacking, its circumventing the restrictions.

Its pretty interesting reading. However he used a carpenter analogy which renders any argument invalid. If he had used a car analogy I would have believed everything he's written.

Without payment or sheep? What kind of entertainment is that?

They still are, at least in MSDN and ActionPack, but I don't think I have ever seen it in retail or actually running at an end-users computer

In an attempt to save some money for my business I bought several WAP4410N's in my office to provide wireless networking. They worked great, the setup was easy, they had good range and nice functionality, they were even quite cheap.

So, based on my good experiences with the AP's, I decided to use them in one of our other offices. I bought three of them and configured them like the first ones I bought. None of them worked..... They crashed at random (but at least a couple of times each day), multiple SSID's did work, RADIUS failed. After some research I realized that the sticker underneath the AP's said "V2", the first ones I bought said "V1". It turns out that Cisco had done "something" to the hardware and called it version 2.

Contacting Cisco was meaningless, the only answer I got was "Yes, we know it does not work, you should have bought something more expensive from us". Hopefully Belkin has a bit more respect for its customers.

I generally just use the location and function of the server. Something like this: Country-Function-Number. So a web server in the US would be US-WEB-1 and the second database in Germany would be DE-DB-2. Makes troubleshooting and looking for a machine a bit easier.

I actually have a PowerConnect 5424 with similar problems. I have to disable STP on ports connected to non-managed switches. As its not easy to control what the user plugs into his/her port i have to disable STP on the switch. As far as I can see on the labeling its Allied Telesys, just with a Dell logo slapped on top.

It's expensive, so management does not really want to pay for new tapes, a disk-based system or cloud backup. It requires personnel, which management does not want to pay for either. It's boring for the persons involved (who likes testing their backup?).

I'd appreciate a link to the print version, like this

Why would a code-monkey write erotic novels?