Aside – Other World Computing

 Aside  No Responses »
Aug 042009
 

There’s a company in the United States called Other World Computing, who mainly deal with selling products for Apple’s Macintosh computers.

For the last 3 years I’ve periodically ordered RAM from them for a variety of Macs that either I’ve owned at the time or I’ve been setting up for others. Even with international shipping, OWC have constantly managed to:

  1. Allow me to buy RAM significantly cheaper than I could get in Australia.
  2. Shipped faster than most Australian companies I’ve dealt with manage to ship.

Case in point: last Friday night, Australian time, I ordered 16GB of RAM from OWC. It arrived in Australia on Monday morning, and the only reason it was delayed arriving until today was because of some new FedEx system I’ve noticed where if they get it into their storehouse before the “Expected Delivery Date”, they don’t ship it out until they absolutely have to. (Hint, FedEx: this is an annoying defect in your otherwise exceptional capabilities.) The same money would have got me at most 8GB of RAM in Australia from an Australian supplier, and would have taken longer to arrive!

I don’t get any kick-back from OWC, I don’t have any referral deal or anything like that, so my recommendation comes purely from the second-to-none service I’ve had from them. If you need to buy products for Apple Macs, you should check them out.

 Posted by Preston de Guise at 17:45  Tagged with: , ,

Wish list – Extension to "scheduled backup"

 Architecture, General thoughts, NetWorker  1 Response »
Aug 042009
 

Introduced in the 7.4 series of NetWorker was an option for the client resources called “Scheduled backup”. Normally set to “Enabled”, this can be changed to “Disabled” to allow an administrator to leave the client in all its current groups, but to not be backed up.

The purpose of course is that if a client is going to be temporarily unavailable for a few days (e.g., maintenance operations, etc.), an administrator can turn the backups off for that client without having to later remember what groups it has to go back into.

This is a really good idea, with one exception. Humans forget.

What this option needs is an automated reset function. That is, when an administrator turns off scheduled backups, the administrator should also be able to set a date at which point NetWorker will automatically re-enable scheduled backups for the client. NetWorker should, on a daily basis, scan all clients that have scheduled backups disabled to see whether their “reset” date is up, at which point it should automatically re-enable the backups for the client without any further administrator intervention.

Seeing this added to NetWorker would be awesome.

 Posted by Preston de Guise at 05:25  Tagged with: ,
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