Rainy day, client meeting out of town, a short lunch break, and I’m starving. I stop at a local restaurant chain where everything is perfectly organized: menus displayed, friendly staff, and a simple system to place orders. Easy, right? And yet…
I park and notice three people – two adults and a child – approaching. One of the adults rushes ahead as if it’s a race. Tough competition, but I’m not in that much of a hurry: I let them go ahead, since I already know what I want to order. When we get to the counter, the unexpected happens. They completely bypass the menus and head straight to the register, only to... pull out their smartphones and begin an extensive, meditative gastronomic analysis.
The cashier looks at me, likely thinking, "Hang in there, not all heroes wear capes." I wait patiently for two minutes, but when it’s clear that this G20 summit on Italian cuisine is still ongoing, I decide to place my order.
Just as I’m finishing up, the explosion happens: "You cut in front of us!" I turn around, startled, and apologize. I explain that I didn’t mean to be rude, but I noticed they were busy consulting digital menus while the cashier was free.
I even offer to treat them to dessert as a gesture of peace. But no, peace isn’t on the menu: one of the adults launches into a tirade worthy of a dramatic film, complete with insults and accusations of rudeness.
At that point, I abandon my inner “calm barista” and calmly but firmly point out that perhaps a little more organization on their part would have helped. The cashier backs me up, confirming that I had already finished my order before they had even decided between tagliatelle and lasagna. I pay for my meal, without including any “complimentary” desserts.
Meanwhile, the theater continues: as their turn finally arrives, I hear the fateful question: "What are you getting?" followed by, "I don’t know, let me look at the menu." Yep, still at it.
Meanwhile, I enjoy my lunch and reflect: sometimes taking a step back can help avoid pointless, harmful arguments. But other times, there’s just no winning. On the bright side, I saved myself three desserts. And the kid? He looked at me with a kind of friendly disappointment – probably hoping for that dessert I offered.
#EverydayStories #LunchBreak
"Thank you for sending your invoice, which has been paid upon receipt. We appreciate your services and feel lucky to have you with us."
Messages like these can turn a grey, autumn Monday into a beautiful day.
#MondayMotivation #MondayMood
Ok, here’s my first IT Horror Story of the Saturday night. It's a bit long.
I was at a client, a healthcare facility, to replace some hard drives. They didn’t want to spend money, so we had to keep the current setup running, which was outdated and unreliable.
Now I can say it: they didn’t want to spend because the general manager’s goal was to give work to a company of his friends, who were already providing support on two VMs, and he wanted to hand everything over to them. The IT manager hadn’t yet understood the financial interests of these people and still believed everything was in good faith, that they really didn’t have the funds. We were holding everything together with duct tape, but it was working and stable. I had set up a "cluster" with OpenNebula and GlusterFS for storage (later replaced with MooseFS and then with Ceph), using all available hardware.
We scheduled an intervention and notified everyone to disconnect and shut down the machines by 12:30. By 13, we had completed the backups, aiming to start the intervention by 14 and get the work up and running by 15:30. The goal was to update the systems and check the disks. We shut down all the VMs, had everyone disconnect. It was lunchtime.
We updated the servers, rebooted them. One of the disks started throwing errors. GlusterFS, for some reason I never really investigated (I have my theories, which I’ll share later, but from that day forward, GlusterFS no longer exists for me), decided to overwrite both that disk and its replica with zeros. I hadn’t changed anything.
Panic – there were backups, but on a USB 2 disk (old servers, no USB 3)! I immediately stopped everything. I was almost fainting. The IT manager didn’t understand what had happened, so I explained it to him. He announced to everyone that we would cancel the rest of the intervention, restore from backup, and have the work back up by 15:30 as planned, prioritizing the most critical VMs.
The "competing" company reached out. They had powered on one of their VMs and started "doing their own interventions." Even though they had been warned not to do anything. And they complained "we" had lost some of their data. Of course, the manager and those guys went "carpe diem": they put me under accusation, saying I had undoubtedly made a mistake that led to "lost data." I wrote a technical report explaining what I had seen, noting various SSH logins from those guys during the intervention. The "history" had been erased. Of course, not by me.
They continued to harass me for a while. The last thing they asked was for me to go to a meeting "to explain in person." They tried to schedule it the day before my wedding. And they knew it.
They threatened to ask me for an unspecified (high) financial compensation for 'the lost data.' What lost data? The ones that, allegedly, the other company would have entered in the meantime.
Final result: no problem for me (I hadn’t done anything wrong), the backups were fine, they only calmed down when I proved (logs in hand) that I wasn’t the only one connected to that machine, and my witnesses (two colleagues and the IT manager) had seen all my actions, confirming I hadn’t done anything wrong.
In the end: I realized they would do it again and I left the client – even the IT manager decided to resign and change jobs. The general manager managed to install, at astronomical figures, the company he wanted to place. After two months, they got their hands on the system and broke it. They asked me for assistance, which I refused. At any price.
After a few years, I found out that the general manager ended up in jail for corruption, bribes, and for favoring his friend companies in many sectors.
That day, I celebrated.
#HorrorStory #ITHorrorStory #ITSupport #TechTroubles #SysAdmin
This window was my view from the room where I worked in the 'old' house, from 2008 to 2015.
Many of the projects I have up and running today were conceived, studied, implemented, and understood from that room, gazing out of that window. It offered me peace, relaxation, and focus, with its bucolic, green backdrop, connecting me with nature and a slower pace of life.
#FensterFreitag #WindowFriday #ThrowbackThursday #WorkSpace #NatureViews #Inspiration #Mindfulness #Tranquility #Italy
I really struggle to understand the direction of today's society.
For years, we've been saying we need to reduce emissions and consumption, removing chargers from smartphone boxes "to pollute less," then the "AI" comes along and we reopen fossil fuel power plants, increasing consumption and emissions for... well, who knows why!
We make people feel guilty for not switching to an electric car (or one with high energy efficiency), yet we fly for pure leisure, just to get "a few more likes" on YouTube.
We create increasingly efficient electronic devices, focus on the consumption and emissions of data centers (local or remote), and then stop optimizing code and dependencies because "there’s autoscaling" and "resources are cheap."
To me, these are ideological short circuits.
#Sustainability
Wednesday, for me, is the day of the sea
#Photography #Photo #Sea #MeerMittwoch #Blue #Sand #Relax #SeaWednesday
In recent days, I've received a few messages and noticed some posts regarding my articles on the blog. The criticism is mainly about the fact that, in some cases, I don't document "every" step but assume a basic understanding of the topics discussed. For example, if the article is about "how to install Y within a FreeBSD jail," I don't document how to install FreeBSD, what jails are, or how they should be managed, etc. In some cases, I refer to previous articles, but my aim is never to create "for dummies" tutorials. I believe that self-hosting, if done without awareness, creates more problems than it solves.
I’ll probably need to publish an article specifically about this—and maybe link it to a menu at the top of the page to explain it. My approach has usually been to provide tools to understand how I solved a problem, not to hand out "ready-made solutions"—the goal is to help people understand, not to mindlessly copy without comprehension.
After all, the blog is called "IT Notes," and they are my notes, turned into articles, mostly related to direct experiences I’ve just had. It’s not called "IT Course"—those, when necessary, I create in other ways.
#ITNotes #BlogPosts #Blog
It's been a long day. Today I spent some hours at office and, when out, I found this nice surprise.
#Photography #PhotoMonday #FotoMontag #Christmas #HolidaysApproaching #December #Ferrara #Italy
