We have this saying at Livingstone: "If you think it's expensive to hire a professional, wait until you see the cost of hiring an amateur". It's a quote by Red Adair, and in our line of work I'm sure many can relate to that.
We got a call from a charity who told us that their Server was "dying
and eating up all our files". That description was colourful but it proved to be accurate.What I found was a huge monster of a tower Server, encasing three large and noisy fans. Opening up the box revealed the smallest and puniest motherboard I've ever seen in a server, and two disks clunking away. I could almost feel the data disintegrating from the disks ....
Sensing the worst I tried to pull a copy of the data off the Server, only for it to freeze every few minutes, requiring a reboot.
After a check of the settings in the Server I noticed that it was running Windows Server 2003 (not SBS), in a network with 10 clients. DNS was not configured, DHCP was running from the router, and the Server had never had a single update applied since it's installation over 5 years ago ....
When I realised that the server had never even been setup to access the internet, alarm bells started to ring.
I asked how their current support company looked after the server, and they told me that had to come in any time they needed to do anything (and of course charged them every time).
When I asked about backups, they said "I think the Support company does that for us ... but we're not sure". No, they didn't and they had never backed up a single file in 5 years.
There are lots of cowboys in the IT industry, but really - to sell a hacked-together Server with an inappropriate operating system (which later turned out to be illegal), don't even attempt to configure it properly and continually charge a charity because they couldn't work out how to give it internet access .... well, I am only glad I didn't meet those idiots!
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