1st Cunswuppy Supplier

Filed Under Rants

Already the UberServer has had it’s first delivery hiccup. I hoped to post about positive, happy, huggy things but no … this is not my lot in life.

So.. big shouts out to ebuyer who managed to accept my order for a UPS, then two days later send me this email :

Unfortunately the above item on your order, has incurred a price discrepancy, this is due to the item being wrongly advertised on our website, therefore cannot supply this item of the price previously advertised.
The new price excluding VAT is £600.00

I am aware that pricing discrepancies can happen. This is not my major gripe. Though I haven’t a clue what would have happened had I ordered next day delivery … I wonder if they would have come round and said … err, ummm, ooops, may we have it back please?

The problem I have is twofold. One is the 66% increase in price. That puts it from cheapest (and then, only by a few £) to completely and utterly ridiculous. The only reason they got the order in the first place was the free shipping and now they almost double the price! Secondly is the delay – they confirmed the order at 15:00 on the 10th, and finally tell me on the 12th that the price is wrong. Fair enough the price is wrong – but something, somewhere should have happened immediately allowing me to order from someone who had it in stock and are prepared to sell it to me at pretty much the same price.

if ($salesprice < $buyprice){ Alert($Someone, “Potential undercost sale”);}

Ebuyer, I salute you for your cunswuppery. It takes practice to be this shite.

On the other hand, competent companies such as TMC, deliver on time, on budget and ship exactly what they said they were going to ship. </plug>

I’m off to dribble over my server chassis. I’ve re-ordered the UPS from Scan – at a cost of £30 more including shipping. Not an ebuyer £197 difference.

Not entirely unsurprising really. Cunswups.

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UberServer is Ordered

Filed Under News

Well it’s all ordered. Rather than go for an off the shelf solution, Merlijn and I decided to spec it out ourselves and build my new server ourselves. With Inferno’s help when they come over later this month.

After the previous server fiasco, this is of course a risky strategy but I think we have t3h sk1llz to pull this off.

We set ourselves a budget of £5k (exc VAT) and for that – this is what we have managed to get with a little bit of wheeling and dealing :

Dual Xeon 2Ghz
16Gb FBDIMM PC2-5300 RAM
5Tb Caviar Storage
300Gb OS drives [Raptors]
1Gb Switch
2200VA Rackmounted UPS
Hardware firewall with VPN
Adaptec 16 port RAID controller
8 Port KVM
Sound-proofed 15U Cabinet

and much much more ….

I would like to claim a slightly larger role in designing this than I really had, however most of the research and effort was put in my my good pal Merlijn. His wizardly google-fu helped track down the best bang for buck (at least we like to think so) and checked to make sure everything was compatible and would talk to each other. Unlike me who kept wanting to scrimp on stuff like drives, motherboards, memory- just so I could go Quad Core instead of Dual Core. So thanks for keeping me on the straight and narrow. <mutter><mutter>

As it all turns up, I’ll be taking some photos – I’m hoping it will look a little like this :


But since I’m helping put it together, I’m guessing it will probably look more like this



At least I will have Inferno and Merlijn here to help me put it back together and fill in the warranty forms!

I’ll take pictures of the stuff when it arrives and try and keep this bit up to date as we work on bringing UberServer online around the 23rd of July. I hope. Else perhaps this blog will serve as some sort of testament as to how come there is now a very large crater where my office once was!

I will also, as is my wont, moan and bitch about the bad suppliers but for one week only I will also be praising those suppliers that go above and beyond the call of duty. To start with I would like to thank Chris over at TMC for his help with our server chassis that we ordered from them.

Server Chassis Pr0n

Very sexy little number – but Chris has been very helpful, offering to throw in all sorts of cables that we (read:me) may well have forgotten about. So here is my plug for TMC.

If you need a server chassis, or any other high performance server and storage building blocks – call Chris at TMC.

There – who says all I do is moan on this blog.

Fucking knee jerk reactionary government lickspittles.
That feels better 🙂

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A tad more serious …

Filed Under News

“First They Came for the Jews”
By Pastor Niemoller

First they came for the Jews and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for the Communists and I did not speak out because I was not a Communist.

Then they came for the trade unionists and I did not speak out because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak out for me.

The above is a well known poem, oft used to illustrate how people react to government/state impositions on personal liberties. Recently we have had a couple of supposed ‘terrorist’ attacks in London and Glasgow.

I find myself in the awkward position of asking … “Terrorists? Really?”

I find it hard to reconcile the recent events as anything other than terrorism in the strictest sense of the word. And the fact that it is being spun as Terrorism (with the capital T denoting proper terrorism) worries me.

The IRA didn’t find the problem of detonating a car bomb insurmountable. In far too many places in the Middle East car bombs are a near daily occurrence. Yet we manage to get

The nightclub bouncers said they saw a silver Mercedes being driven erratically before it crashed into bins. They said the driver then got out and ran off. A huge hunt is under way for the driver.

In Glasgow we get a couple of idiots who set fire to their car and tried to ram it into Glasgow airport … through the bollards – managing only to get themselves arrested and burnt at the same time. And causing little or no damage to the bollards, placed there (rather unsurprisingly) for the sole purpose of preventing morons driving flaming jeeps into the terminal.

We also have The Sun praising a clamper (that towed a 2nd car away that could have possibly been something to do with it, maybe) as a hero because

“I could smell petrol but the assumption was the driver had broken down and abandoned it.”

Somebody tows a car because they think it has broken down, not knowing that there was anything different about the car apart from being an easy target for towing – he’s a hero? Come on people!

And soon enough that most useful of buzz-phrases (2nd only to pedophile in whipping up Joe Public into a mindless frenzy) – ‘Al Qaeda’. Again – really?

Does this sound like Al Qaeda? To me it sounds more like some fanatical idiots who failed to pay attention in bomb making 101. Does anyone seriously believe that Al Qaeda lacks the necessary know-how to build a working car bomb? This does not sound like organised Terrorist cells. By all accounts they haven’t even got all the components necessary to cause anything more that a large fireball and at best a few casualties.

The driver would have had a higher body count if he had driven the car into the pub through the front door – I used to work next door to Tiger Tiger and that place heaves at night. And the cretinous cunswups in Glasgow would again have achieved a higher body count had they aimed for the bus stop outside the terminal (or it may be a taxi rank – I can’t remember).

But again, sure enough, the government spin machines and red top papers come trotting out with the if this and if that possibilities to show what could have happened if x and y and z had all happened. Yes, if the bombs had been built correctly, if they had an ‘oxidizer’, if they had a working detonator arrangement … something bad may have happened.

BUT – it didn’t. But by God the media and the government are doing their best to scare us that something might have happened that was really really bad.

Bearing in mind that our current government has managed to introduce a new piece of legislation for every day they have been in office and that there is normally little or no heed to the thoughts of those that new laws would affect is taken when considering them – it is hard not to make the leap across from a couple of wingnuts chancing their arm for 72 virgins to needing new laws enacted for our protection from the growing ‘Terrorist threat’.

These days laws appear rushed through with no thinking behind the ramifications because of ‘Terrorism’. Privacy rights are being stripped away under the pretence of “if you have nothing to hide – why do you mind”. I don’t see the need for more laws based on a couple of half witted attempts at ‘terrorism’ – one can never legislate for the lone idiot. Lately it has appeared to me that more and more effort has been put into making the recent attempts in the UK seem part of a wider, more cohesive Terrorist attack. Talk of 90 day detention periods, national DNA databases and other ‘initiatives’ speak volumes to the creeping invasion of government oversight into our lives.

What will happen now? More restrictive laws ‘for my own good‘ based on a ‘manufactured’ Terrorist threat?

We’ll see if this is the case this time – I hope not, but fear so.

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