May 2007 Blog Posts
I think I'm coming to the conclusion that RAID can be more of a problem than the ones it tries to cure. I've long been a fan of RAID, having used it in the mid-90's on corporate servers, when it was veryy, very expensive, but invaluable in saving our butts when discs failed. For general machines, if possible, I'll try and mirror the discs, giving me redudancy, but on my main server (domain controller, exchange, etc), I bought an 8 channel SATA RAID card, 8 discs and two drive caddies (not all at once). The first caddy was RAID 5...
There's a growing trend of enlightenment happening, but not to the big boys. I've been away quite a lot recently, on the West coast of Ireland, training ASP.NET. The first trip was in Tralee, in a smallish hotel with a large bar (my favourite kind) and the other trips have been in Galway, in a very modern hotel, not really finished (the rooms still smell new, there are no leisure facilities yet, etc). But both of these had free wireless, with excellent connection speeds and signals. I'm currently sitting in Galway airport, a tiny place, but which also has free wifi;...
The Microsoft Kids initiative - http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/express/beginner/kids/default.aspx.
Go get it here. I remember talking about this with Mark way back at a conference, before they started work on it and the ASP.NET bits look sweet. Due to my current bandwagon, I love the CSS refactoring.