IT Tips - February 2012

It Tips – February

                                                                          

It’s February. It hasn’t been much of a winter thus far; you are all heartbroken, I’m sure. Why not drown your woes in the effervescence of this month’s IT Tip?!

What’s Inside:

Tech Section

·         Is it Spring?

·         Restart your BlackBerry or iPhone

Is it Spring?

It seems as though Mother Nature is giving us an extended spring rather than a snowy, blustery winter.  Why not play along and do some spring cleaning?! Spring cleaning is almost as exciting as the re-release of Star Wars in 3D! (Emphasis on ALMOST)

Alright, I’ll play along, but what is it that we’re cleaning?

My desk! I can’t seem to keep this thing from overflowing! Just kidding (maybe)!

The wonderful Iredale family seems to always be growing (hooray!). Accompanying our growth as a company is growth in used server space. So to answer seriously: we need to clean our network drives. They have really started to grow exponentially; and while I understand that much of the data is important, I know that we can trim some of the excess.

That means our lovely F: Drive, U: drives and department drives are filling up. Let’s put on our hard hats and tackle this beast now.

What do you mean the network drives are filling up?

We have a terrific device in the server room called a ‘Netapp’.

Netapp's grill

The Netapp is a high-performance array of hard drives that houses your shared-drive data. The data on your network drives is redundant and replicated on multiple hard drives to prevent data loss. That means that even if a hard drive in the Netapp fails your data should be safe and sound.

As an additional layer of protection, particularly in the event of a disaster, we back up the Netapp files to data tapes that I then bring to the bank. We do so to protect your files even if the building were destroyed. Of course, we hope not to ever need to use those tapes.

OK, that array-thingy is filling up, what can I do?

Never let go, Jack!

Delete old files – Most of us are guilty of this: we have old files on the shared drives that are obsolete. You may have old back-ups on your U drive, obsolete files on the F and department drives etc… They’re using space that could be used for relevant data. I know it’s hard, but we can’t hang on to old (unneeded) files forever. 

Delete duplicate files – We have a lot of duplicated files on the server.  Perhaps you have something on your U drive and department share, or maybe on the F drive and your department share. Try to think of which single location makes the most sense and remove the other.

Delete irrelevant files – Does that picture of your cat really need to be on your U drive? I know – it’s really cute but we all have to make some concessions; I had to delete my Darth Vader wallpapers... In all seriousness, the server space should be for important files. If you have files that you can’t live without then make sure they’re backed up to the U drive (or your department's share if it’s something other people need). Let’s save room for the good stuff!

Let’s see how much we can trim down!

I have done a full analysis of our current used server space. Our statistics as of today (2/9/12) are as follows:

F Drive – 137,359 files consuming 158GB of storage space

User Drives – 277,870 files consuming 413GB of storage space

Department Drives – 79,825 files consuming 226GB of storage space

Next month I will run another scan and report how much data we have cut down. Exciting, I know!

Restart your smartphone

Smartphones are tremendously handy devices. We can get our email, update our calendars and even make a quick Google search to settle a debate. There are times, however, when they decide not to play nice. Your phone may sometimes start misbehaving and not function properly. When that happens you can always try a reboot!

Hard-reset a Blackberry

·         Leave the device powered on

·         Remove the batter panel to expose the battery

·         While it’s still powered on remove the battery

·         Wait 20 seconds

·         Reinsert the battery and power the device back on

Hard-reset an iPhone

There are two primary buttons on your iphone:

1.       The lock button (top-right)

2.       The home button (front-bottom-center)

Hard-resting your iPhone is very simple:

·         While the device is powered on, press and hold both buttons simultaneously

·         Continue holding the buttons until the screen goes black

·         When the screen goes black release both buttons

·         Wait a few seconds and power the phone back on (using the lock button)

Have a great month, everyone!
-Keith

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