A New Craptop

Huzzah! My new laptop arrived! The screen is wide and the resolution extra teensy-weensy so I can actually work on my PowerPoint teaching presentations without alt-tabbing. But how to get the data from my old Compaq onto this new machine with no accessories?

Luckily the Stinkpad T43 drive bays work in the new Lenovos, and the IT guy had an extra one which only cost me a cappuccino. Wotta bargain. I opened up the box and along with the tray was an OED-sized user manual in 20-some languages. There was also a driver and back-up software. On a diskette. To install on a machine for which no floppy drive is made.

The Lenovo has one other slight problem: if BIOS is set to boot from the CD/DVD first and you have a hard drive in the bay, it'll decide to boot from that instead of recognising it as a secondary drive. When that fails over to the C: drive which then boots incorrectly, you crash. After a restart it'll boot from the correct drive but by then it's too late: Windows Registry changes have been made. Once you log in it immediately goes to restart. Try safe mode and watch it log you out as soon as you've logged in. Repair requires not only BIOS changes but also drive removal, registry file extraction and changes to that.

At least they didn't have to wipe the drive after I'd finally cleaned up Windows and installed all my software. Oh, and the battery life is excellent although the fingprint reader is pants.

We are about to purchase an additional server to act within the same enterprise. However, our networks department have informed me that there are now no more IP addresses available on the current subnet and we will be given a new IP on a different subnet than

For example server 1 and server 2 will be 172.x.x.x on a subnet of 255.255.255.240 and the new server will be 10.x.x.x on 255.255.255.192.

I don't want to ask, but I had to:

Why does your IT department have your servers on a /28 network which can only have a maximum of 14 assigned IPs?

And I got my answer:

I asked the network engineer your question and he said that using non-standard subnets prevents hacking our system and gives us more fine grain control over the network.

No, all it does is lower the number of available IPs in any subnet, increases the amount of traffic between nodes and increases your damned latency which explains the problems you're having in another ticket you opened for performance problems, you fuckwit.

Solution: change the environment so that all of $OurBigApp's servers are in a single /26 subnet (with 62 available IPs) and make one firewall ruleset for them instead of replicating rules for every single subnet.

Root cause: 17. I'll bet their "network engineer" was previously employed at the Best Buy check-out lane.