SandyTech

Like seriously, what's wrong with a lazy weekend? Yes, there's some things that need to be done around the house (trivial stuff like a water filter that will "expire" while we're away or some outside lights that need their day/night sensors replaced) but we're going to be spending the next six weeks bouncing between a customer's datacenters in Miami, Chicago, LA, Montreal and London. None of that will matter to us while we're away and it'll give me a nice weekend of puttering around the house to unwind with when we do get back.

Dealing with boomers is fun. Dealing with boomer employees is extra special fun. Especially when they are not willing to let go of the notion that they are not in charge.

Recently bought out a smaller competitor as the owner was retiring. I'm in and out of the shop working to align their (massively outdated) business practices with the way I do things and meeting with customers to keep them happy and ease them into the transition. As part of this I put one of my managers in charge of the new office. Jane we'll call her does not have the best technical skills. But she does have great customer service skills and is one of the most organized people on the planet and has earned enough trust to

So my company owns the 4th floor of an office building and it's home to one of our data centers. Normally to get the elevator to stop on our floor you have to enter an access code on a keypad in the elevator itself, but that's broken. Again. It happens often enough, so I've even got a sign out in the little elevator landing/reception area that points out you're on the wrong floor.

Most people seem to take the hint and get back on the elevator. But not boomers, oh no. They come up to the call box (for letting vendors in mostly) in a huff and get all kinds of upset when they find out they're on the wrong floor. Today's gem:

"I'm here for my appointment to see Dr. So and So." This, after sp

Pretty much like the title, customer wants to add an offline archive tier. It's not much data over all, the initial would probably be 10-15TB and probably another TB or so per year. My initial thought was let's just get a couple tape libraries and be done with it, but I wanted to make sure I wasn't missing a trick somewhere.

I'm aware of Glacier from AWS, but the customer has decided for internal reasons that they don't want to use cloud/hosted offerings for this.

So I have a feeling I'm hunting for a unicorn, or I'm really sucking at google today, but here goes. I'm looking for a combo breaker panel & ATS box so we can update some of our network nodes to having permanently installed stationary generators. Don't need much power wise similar sites only have 5 circuits and the 80% load is around 13a @ 120v IIRC. Do you guys have any suggestions in that line?

One of my customers got a call from "CDW" claiming their account was corrupt. Which is of course BS as they've never used CDW before (and don't intend to going forward).

I suppose it could be an elaborate spearphishing attempt, as the number rings back to an auto attendant/announcement with a voice that sounds like their regular one off the toll-free. Or a new variant of the classic Microsoft calls.

I've got a project coming up where I'll need some industrial switches that I can mount in controls cabs for a customer. Specs wise, within the cab there is 12vAC, 24vDC and 24vAC available for power, I'll need at least 4 (but preferably more) RJ45 ports and two SFP cages & VLAN support.

I've been looking at Phoenix Contact & Moxa switches, but I thought I'd reach out to the hivemind and see what it had to say.

Like the title says, does anyone have a particular favorite colocation provider in Ireland? One of my customers is looking at spinning up an EU based subsidiary to handle their EU operations. They've decided to park their home office for EU & operations in Ireland and we need a home for their servers.

And before you ask, their LOB applications are not really suitable for cloud deployment so we aren't considering it right now.

The machine in question is a Husqvarna Viking Designer SE.

I distracted my mother while she was changing a needle and she dropped it into the bobbin case of her machine, and when she went to fish it out it went springing off deeper into the machine instead. If you give the machine a gentle shake (maybe not one of my brightest ideas) I don't hear it moving about any. And the machine turns freely with the hand crank knob on the side . Haven't been bold enough to turn it back on again for fear of it binding up and making expensive noises. Any advice on where to go looking for this rogue needle and how to fish it back out again would be appreciated.

A couple of my clients have decided it's in their interests to lease instead of outright purchase their PCs & Laptops for their next hardware refresh cycles. Fair enough I guess, but this is new territory for me. Are you whitelabeling it somehow? Or are you having them deal directly with say Dell Financial or something along those lines?

So for context, I found out recently that one of my employees suffers from particularly bad menstrual cramps. I've let her know that if she's not feeling up to working, she's welcome to take a day or part of a day as she feels the need and that I wouldn't count it against her leave.

And it got me to wondering if there was anything else I could do for her, and the rest of my female employees for that matter, to make their lives easier during that time.