Contrary to what some people would have everyone believe, Microsoft don’t screw up very often. However, when they do screw up, they seem to screw up with style.
This Christmas I was off work from 18th Dec to 28th Dec inclusive – quite a long time and also a bargain, at only 5 days of annual leave for a total of 11 days off work. It was nice to be away from a computer screen, only returning to check email and play a few games. Anyway, I digress.
This evening Outlook started bouncing emails back to me with with the following message:
None of your e-mail accounts could send to this recipient.
The recipient was a hotmail.co.uk address, and the problem only occurred for this address; other hotmail.co.uk addresses were fine. What’s more, my mail server logs showed that Outlook didn’t even try connecting to the server to send the email – so how did it know none of my addresses could send to that recipient?
Yesterday I posted on the frustrations of trying to send MMS messages using an HTC Desire that syncs with Outlook.
In a nutshell, the HTC Desire won’t send an MMS message to a contact number containing spaces, and Outlook forces a space immediately after the country code in any contact phone number. Thus, when you sync with Outlook, your contact numbers contain spaces and you can’t send MMS messages to them.
There are plenty of people around who will happily slate Microsoft (sorry, that should be Micro$oft), Windoze, and Internet Exploder. The majority of these people will, unprompted, extoll the virtues of Linux.
I won’t lie, I like Microsoft. I think Windows is the best all-round family of operating systems available. And I use Internet Explorer as my default browser, even though I have Firefox and Chrome installed.
But I also run a Linux server. It is a modest beast. It has a Sempron processor, three hard disks around 200-500GB each, and about 1GB of RAM. It doesn’t need much, even though it acts as a mail server, a web server, and a DNS and network file server for my home LAN. It runs Fedora 11, which is actually quite nice.
I started using Linux with no experience, and with the help of some patience, a few good Internet resources, and good old intuition, I pretty much know what I’m doing.
About a week ago, my Internet connection started to die sporadically, at unpredictable intervals, for no apparent reason. I traced the lack of connectivity down to the DNS service on the Linux server not responding to requests, and this led me to realise that the server would not respond to any kind of request at all: SSH, HTTP, or even ping.
So imagine my surprise, when after a lot of investigation (and I really do mean a LOT of investigation) it turned out to be Samba, the service which handles network file shares.
As soon as RAID controllers started being built into affordable motherboards, I decided using RAID for my home PC was a good idea. For the last 6-7 years, I have used RAID on every PC I have built.
There are several RAID configurations. RAID 0 (striping) utilises two or more identical hard drives, and splits each file equally across them, yielding much faster disk performance (limited by the throughput of the disk I/O controller) as the disks read and write at the same time. The total available storage is the sum of the individual drives’ capacity. RAID 1 (mirrored) could be considered the opposite of striping, in that each file is written to all disks. This effectively provides realtime backup since the content of all drives in the array is identical, with no performance cost.
I’ve only ever used RAID 0. For a home PC, RAID 1 doesn’t offer any real benefits that cannot be achieved with a half-decent backup policy, but effectively doubles the cost of disk space if you use two disks.
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