Okay guys and gals, I have been looking for a good IT forum but can't seem to find any that I like. I have been to techrepublic and computing.net but they take too long to respond. Any IT sites with member quality and depth comparable to HAN where I can ask basic IT questions.

 

The Basement :chuckles:

I never frequent those types of boards.... they are too full of "just read the new PC Gamer while taking a shit now I can diagnose everything" type people. I just can't put up with it.

 

check barnes and nobles, or borders. they have books for those types of questions

 

there are pretty knowledgeable techy people here

 

Well, I'm a one person IT man/ Collections Manager / Pretty much everything else man, for a chain of doctors offices and I need to bounce stuff off people every now and then and the only other person I know in IT are my folks and they are way too different in their thinking so I can never get a straight answer. I never went to school for IT stuff I have just had a computer since the dawn of time so I have pretty much done everything in a normal business environment except write code. My company was paying and outside company an outrageous amount of money to manage everything computer and phone wise until I came onboard over a year ago and was like WTF? 30 copies of Office 2000 pro and no disks or lisc. and 40 or so computers running win 2000 with one win 2k disk and a lisc. on site. I won't go on but this company was getting paid to do dick, except reboot a server or replace a mouse every now and then. needless to say, I have saved them several thousands of dollars by offering my expertise (yeah right). I get paid extra for the extra responsibilities but they also understand that there are times when I cannot fix things. I can pretty much do anything in windows but I have two old systems (Unix & Novell 3.xx) that I don't know much about so i really on the wonderfull internet to get me by and make me look good

Oh, yeah, they had'nt backed up the medical software data on our Unix server in four years (thousands of patient's data). That says a lot for Unix's stability though. That's when I finally called this management company and threatened to report them to MS for the office scam and OS scam they were running. The doctor that runs the show does'nt know jack about computers so if they told him he needed something he just stroked a check. The guy at this company was shittin bricks by the end of our conversation and I made him cough up like 16 new copies of Office 2k pro. it's sad that there are IT companies out their that take advantage of people like that. Same as any other business that scams I guess huh?

 

as i work for Adaptec I am appalled that such an important data has no been back up in over 4 years. It's not a question of how stable Unix is, it's a question of how weak everything else is. typical life span on a hdd is 5 years. after which you can suffer multiple drive failures.

so even if it's on a RAID5 array with a spare drive, you can be screwed. I would suggest backing up at least the medial data.


as for Novell 3.xx. the same applies. also if you don't have to upgrade then don't turn that bish off!

 

This reminds me of when one of my customers had no backups whatsoever and he was the IT manager for a hospital. I ask him what they use the server for, he says "the hospital's financial records and the patient's records" :doh:

 

No, niether the Unix server nor the Novell server are on a raid. Scary huh? I back up the the Unix server daily and I back up the Novell server once a week but the problem is that the medical software that runs on the Novell server is obsolete and the company that created it is out of business so if the software fails we can kiss accessing that software again goodbye without spending mucho dollars. but next year I'll be able to dump the Novell server all together so that will be one less thing to worry about. Oh, and Adaptec rules. I have never had a problem with any of the numerous Adaptec products I use.

 

hardforum.com is hosted by hardOCP and it owns.

webhostingchat.com is a very very busy international forum with 4x as many members as HAn.

 

medical places are AWESOME for tech people. doctors are by far THE worst minds when it comes to tech. Dont get me wrong, i couldnt change a heart to save my life, but it amuses me that such smart people are dumbfounded by computers.

anyway, it is my wet dream to do tech for a hospital, it will be cushy and i will be depended on.