"But it worked before!"

[toxico.livejournal.com]

Only two phrases make the hair on the back of my neck stand on end (which is especially hard since I shave my head to the scalp). For the record, the other phrase is "Your ex wife is on the phone."

Raise your hand; how many people know what happens (or can happen, I should say) if an antivirus product starts attempting to yank data out of an Exchange log file? You are quite possibly looking at reinstalling Exchange, or at best restoring from a backup.

----

Me: What has happened is that [file-level scanner] detected a virus or code that resembles a virus and attempted to clean it as per its configuration; therefore, that log file is now corrupt. You should have had exclusions in place to keep [file-level scanner] out of Exchange's business.¹

Exchange Adminis-traitor: WHAT?! Oh GREAT. What the hell are you going to do about it?

Me: ... From here there isn't anything I can do; if you have a backup you c...

EA: How did this happen after two years?! It has worked fine that whole time!²

Me: There are errors going back several days.³ If you haven't had those in place for two years, you've honestly been very lucky.

EA: So how come this doesn't happen to everyone?! Explain THAT.

Me: Most people put the proper exclusions in place from the offset since they are well documented.⁴ Not everyone's -- or really anyone's -- Exchange configuration, logs, store and what have you are identical.

EA: But it worked before!

----

Listen, jerk-off. I don't give a rat's left testicle if it "worked before." It's not working now, nor will it ever work again lest ye shut the fuck up. Here's an analogy for your dumb ass:

You have worked at the same company for two years. The restrooms are right next to one another; Women's room on the left, Men's room on the right. You've never questioned why the Men's room had no urinals; you just assumed that it was the status quo² and went about your business (no pun intended).

One day the company recognizes its oversight after a woman finally brings up the fact that the urinals in the Women's room shouldn't be in there.¹ Realizing that the signs were just switched, the company swaps them so the restrooms are as they should be. They send an urgent bulletin to everyone about the change.⁴ You don't bother reading it -- because hey, you're YOU -- and you get up, walk into the restroom and whip it out. Next thing you know, security is escorting you out and Suzy from Acquisitions is snickering to her friends about how terribly bored your wife must be. All this because you can't be arsed to pay attention to the signs.³ It worked before, right?

Assdolphin.

Comments

[mystii.livejournal.com]

your analogy was fabulous.

[kizayaen.livejournal.com]

... assdolphin?

O.o

[toxico.livejournal.com]

Prefix "ass" onto the one-word common name of nearly any animal/insect, provided that one-word common name is multisyllabic. Chances are you have a great new insult. Examples:

Assmonkey
Asskangaroo
Assplatypus
Assbeetle

[spacebird.livejournal.com]

I prefer animals with two syllables. More than that and it loses its punch.

[toxico.livejournal.com]

Assdonkeypunch?

...perhaps not.

[xforge.livejournal.com]

Thing I really, REALLY love about Exchange is how it keeps everybody's email, the entire fricking company unless you have more than one Exchange server and split people up, everybody's email is kept in a single. File. One. Single. File. Yeah. Back that up and restore it. Ours is like, 100 gigabytes or so; you got 100 gig we can restore the email into?

[tmesser.livejournal.com]

Holy shit. Are you serious? If so, Exchange is worse than I could possibly have imagined.

[trixtah.livejournal.com]

It's not, if you buy the right version.

[trixtah.livejournal.com]

Um. Exchange Enterprise Edition? Separate info stores? Four per storage group? Separate storage groups? Four per server? Thus allowing you, ooh, 16 separate files to put mailboxes in, if you really really want to.

And, by the way, the database isn't a single monolithic file; you've got the MAPI database and the "all others" database.

If you really have 100gigs of mail storage, then buy the Enterprise Edition. It doesn't cost THAT much more.

[xforge.livejournal.com]

Well, perhaps I'm suffering a delusion; I'm not on the server team, I'm just the deskside hardware guy. The server dudes told me, this was a year or more ago, that if we ever had to restore the corporate email from backup, no way we could do it because we don't (or didn't) have a server with enough concurrent space to put the file in. Who knows, they may have rectified the problem by now. It's a frigging huge corporation so I would really hope they have.

[trixtah.livejournal.com]

Hm. Considering it only costs couple of grand more for the base Enterprise licence, I hope your server admins have done the upgrade. But considering the fact they let a single database grow beyond their restore capacity in the first place, I'm not that filled with hope. Fingers crossed on your behalf!!

[toxico.livejournal.com]

Yep, sure do; the 100 gigs that will be freed by 86-ing what done got fuckered.

If you have a 100-gig mail store then a) you need what is talked about below, b) your mail storage policies are clearly too lax, c) your users are stupid, d) I hear NAS devices are all the rage this season, and e) Exmerge is your friend.

[xforge.livejournal.com]

True, but you gotta restore it *first,* then copy it back into the place the original was. Or if you wanna restore just *one* user's stuff, you still have to restore the whole thing, then open it from within Exchange, pick what you want, and dump the rest. I think that's why they took a bunch of the space on my department's RAID a couple years back - and it's possible they changed their scheme after that 'cuz it was a HUGE FRICKIN' HASSLE.

[the-s-guy.livejournal.com]

I have a lightbulb above my desk. It's burnt out. BUT IT WORKED BEFOOOOOOORE!

[sigurther.livejournal.com]

Now you just gotta tell us why your ex-wife strikes so much horror into your heart ;) Gotta be a good story behind that.

[toxico.livejournal.com]

I have contemplated making mp3s out of the voice mails...

[network-nerd.livejournal.com]

This begs to be metaquoted ....