Secure Environments, WinSxS / Dism Cleanup, VPS, Project Management, Toshiba HDD

Post date: Jan 15, 2017 10:19:20 AM

• Sometimes I just wonder what engineers are thinking. As example, why they install in highly secure production environment stuff like AskToolBar aka Teoma Media Search App and then open up firewall for it to be globally accessible. I've got just a few options: A) Yes, average operations engineer is just really that brain dead. They're so stupid they can't be even held accountable. Yet, question remains, why would anyone ever hire such people? B) They're on purpose sabotaging production systems and endangering security, trolling everyone and laughing. C) Something else? It's bit hard to come to any conclusion other than A or B. - This is yet another example of standard system security. Someone could imagine this is a bad joke. But it isn'. It's just how things often are.
• Here's the essential way to reduce Windows 2012 R2 disk space consumption by repacking WinSxS folder content and practically removing previous versions of files. Warning, it takes quite a while to run and the next boot can take a long time. So make sure there's suitable window for next reboot to take up to a few hours.
  • dism /Online /Cleanup-Image /StartComponentCleanup /ResetBase
• Tested some VPS platforms. Virtual Machine Manager by Microsoft (Hyper-V) and compared results with other platforms. Making comparisons is quite hard, unless you've got the "real word" load on servers. All kind of testing is 100% debatable if it's faster or not. As example on this tiered storage system the Hyper-V allows writing to storage up to 1 GB/s speed. For a while, after that it grinds to complete halt and after quite long pause resumes at 1 MB/s and finally to under 100 KB/s. Is that fast or not? It depends, if you won't ever run out of that "burst zone" then the actual application speed can be high. On the other platform the write speed was pretty consistent 155 MB/s and it seemed 'really slow' to begin with. But in reality, it turned out to be faster than the 1 GB/s when writing data for extended periods. One platform got faster disk & network, but much slower CPU and some got really fast CPU but slow storage. Some and so on. Totally normal. Worst part of public cloud is that these values can be instance and time specific. If I now test something and conclude it's good or bad, it doesn't mean that the results would be same after one week or month or year. Sigh.
• We all know how software projects are managed. Someone puts black hood on head, and does something. When the "ready date comes" the result is announced to be ready. That's also the first time the customer sees the result. I've seen projects like office renovation being done in that way, and usually the results aren't great, not even good. But that's the way. Initial design and execution are both extremely poor. Methods where feedback is given during design and negotiated during practical execution, as well the project schedule being monitored with the progress... That's something never heard. Everyone's just blindly expecting spectacular results without any feedback. The perfection just miraculously pops up from somewhere. - Yet that rarely happens, but at least often people are hoping for such miracle. It would be nice if it would be like that, I personally would wish for it too.
• Friend suffered from similar Toshiba HDD failure than I did earlier. Tests run on the drive gave also similar results. So smart data is just one big lie. My tests - I didn't ask full report from my friend, but smart data was all good, but Windows was crashing all the time and badblocks -nsfv showed tons of bad sectors. So typical. Not telling that the drive is broken just makes consumers suffer more because they might do something silly like get a new laptop or waste a lot of time re-installing windows, because they just don't get that the darn HD is broken. Similarly they might lose data, because drive degenerates and corrupts data, but still doesn't clearly say. Drive is going to die soon, copy everything you still can and run to get a new drive. - Thanks