It seems that the mail server at Old NFO's work place decided that it was working too hard (or something), and chewed up 2 years work of email. Ouch.
But that reminded me of an experience with Microsoft that I had, Back In The Day. You see, our development and test procedure included installing and uninstalling our software to make sure it went on and came off cleanly. It did this a number of times (to make sure). After a few months, we started having strange bugs on those computers. Crazy strange bugs. Not crashes and freezes, but Twilight Zone stuff. We called Microsoft's support number.
After most of an afternoon on the phone with the guys there (and getting up to 3rd or 4th or 5th level support), we got to a guy who asked us this curious question: Hey, are you installing and uninstalling software a lot on that computer?
Blink.
Why yes we are. How did you know?
We don't recommend that. It makes the Registry fragile.
"Fragile". I'll say. Inspires confidence, right there. I guess I'm a dinosaur or something - what do you need a Registry for if you have /usr/bin/local and ~/.foorc?
7 comments:
The Registry was just a way to get lazy-@$$ed programmers to quit writing crap into C:\Windows. The problem was Microsoft's code monkeys actually expected it to work with all those lazy-@$$ed programmers writing crap into it.
Computer failures are like NDs. It's not if, it's when.
Recently some democrats liberated my computers from my apartment. I have everything backed up in three places, a local USB drive, a SAN and Amazon's S3. They left the USB drives and SAN.
One week later I lost a drive on the SAN. It made me nervous but since I have the data in two other places as well it wasn't the crises it could have been.
Alan, as you well know, backups are like carry guns: two is one and one is none.
Yeah, the damn democrats took my carry pistol as well.
Good thing I have backups for that too.
Installing, removing, and reinstalling software did NOT make the registry fragile. The registry is fragile.
It's a feature, not a bug. I am always ready to reinstall. Data backed up (two is one and one is none) and disks ready.
On critical servers, once the absolutely necessary software is installed, that's it, don't add anything, don't edit anything, and don't install Windows patches until they've been thoroughly tested on a backup server.
Fragile. That's a good word for it. Like a stack of Jello blocks.
We run Slackware at our house. Got root?
I got the folks on my (now former) team to start running Eusing's registry cleaner. Went from 10 catastrophic rebuild/restore drive events a year to one, and it was because of a hardware failure.
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