Why oh why can we build skyscrapers which stand tall for decades, yet the technology which we rely on every day falls to pieces so often?

I've got a network KVM to fix, it has been programmed with the wrong IP and now I can't get into it, it doesn't use DHCP, it doesn't broadcast anything, so I've resigned to configuring another machine to IPv6 and playing with that, but after four hours of messing around with different NICs and different cables, I still can't get the damn thing to work. Why on earth is there no external reset button!? Why do I need to use it!? Ah, that's an easy one, because whoever makes the motherboards for our x86 workstations don't seem to think it's necessary to include a serial connection

I've been trying to email a PDF to the printing department, the mail server was complaining it was over 25mb (the PDF was 27mb), OK, I zipped it up. Now weighing in at 19mb, the mail server still says it's over 25mb in both Thunderbird and Apple Mail...I tar'd it up and gzip'd it up, still the same problem...In the end I had to split it in two as I didn't want to reduce the quality and the print room won't download from anywhere (internet or file share).

We got a load of HP ProLiant kit in yesterday, I know some of the servers I work with day in day out aren't engineered to the highest quality, but these servers had horrible plasticy fronts with bits that snapped of if you weren't careful enough, bits got stuck or wouldn't fit back where they came from...
On the plus side, their rack mount kits are wonderful! They don't lock which is a bother, but they just clip into the rack, no need for screws!

I've got a server which won't output or turn on, nothing, no serial output, no graphical output, it's quite old, it's one of the first AMD 64-bit servers we sold, I try to order a new system board (Monday), got a call yesterday saying the part number wasn't valid, got another call yesterday to confirm my address was somewhere in Amsterdam! Today I got the same two calls from the same person! *puts head into hands*, finally I have a result: They are sending me an entirely new system...How bloody inefficient is that!? The extra packaging, the less room in the delivery van, etc etc...

Thunderbird has crashed about five times today because Firefox opened a new tab Gah!

Technology can be brilliant, but sometimes I think that the people who come up with all this stuff should stop and think, and maybe slow down abit to make sure things work, and they do what they should do...

</rant>






Sorry, that was longer than I thought it was going to be

My god don't suggest that it would mean most of us wouldn't have anything to do !

Can’t you just FTP the file? That’s a massive amount of data to email - I’m not surprised that servers are crapping out.

Nope, gotta email...

I did offer to put it on some central storage thingy, but they didn't like the idea of that...I'm going in with a CD tomorrow as the server doesn't like me sending 2 12mb file separately...

Email needs to be reworked I've decided. It's how Average Joe transfers something from here to there electronically.

All you'd need to do, surely, is add a wrapper to the email? The wrapper overhead would SMTP the text and ftp any file over 500k.

Surely not that hard?

Indeed, sftp would be safer, but I agree, it shouldn't be hard, but getting a solution that is backwards compatible is key!

That's exactly what I was going to say.



I didn't understand a [LIFTED] word of that