management

How to Troubleshoot Unreliable or Malfunctioning Hardware

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My post on Intel X710 NICs being awful has triggered a lot of emotion and commentary from my readers. One of the common questions has been: so I have X710 NICs, what do I do? How do I troubleshoot hardware that isn’t working right? 1. Document how to reproduce the problem and its severity. Is it a management annoyance or does it cause outages & downtime? Is there a reasonable expectation that what you’re trying to do should work the way you expect? That might seem like an odd question, but sometimes other people do the procurement for (and without) us and there are gotchas they didn’t think to ask about. In my case with the X710s I felt I …

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Minimum Vacation

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Sysadmin1138 has a post today on minimum vacation policies, an interesting twist on the unlimited vacation policies many startups now have: The idea seems to be a melding of the best parts of unlimited and max. Employees are required to take a certain number of days off a year, and those days have to be full-disconnect days in which no checking in on work is done. Instead of using scarcity to urge people to take real vacations, it explicitly states you will take these days and you will not do any work on them. Sysadmin1138 expounds on several ways this is a cool idea. I agree. There are real benefits to forcing employees to go (and stay) completely away for …

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The Lone Bookshelf: The Macintosh Way by Guy Kawasaki

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(This is the inaugural post of my Lone Bookshelf series. Find more posts using the “Books” category) Last summer my family moved to a different house. By itself, moving isn’t that big of a deal. Take everything out of the old house, put it on a truck, unload it into the new house. What is a big deal is sorting. At the old house all of our stuff had a place, carefully curated and filed and sorted and stored. At the new place our stuff had piles in the middle of rooms. Ugh. I have three large bookshelves from my college years that needed a new home in our new home. Bookshelves are a particularly pernicious piece of furniture. By themselves …

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