Posts by Brent Ozar

When a mission-critical server dies at a business, the timeline can best be described using the first thing that a person says when they call your cell phone. It went something like this: Day 1: “I wouldn’t be calling you at 5 AM unless it was really important….” Day 2: “You won’t believe this, but…

Total Commander 6.5 came out yesterday from Ghisler. It’s my favorite Windows shell program – it replaces Windows Explorer, and it’s a lot like the old Norton Commander from the DOS days. I wrote a review of Total Commander a while back when I was writing for HAL-PC Magazine, and I’m an even bigger fan…

Picked up a drafting table last night for $25 off CraigsList, an online classified system. I’ve always wanted one of these: I like to work standing up, and this will let me set my laptop and some papers out in a comfortable way. It’s got tons of character, too – the last guy who had…

When I was in high school in Michigan, we had a black Jeep CJ7. I loved it – I thought it was fun, rambunctious, and laid-back. I remember driving Melinda Scott around in the snow, thinking I was king of the world. A few years ago, when I moved to Texas, I briefly owned a…

Here’s a photo of the decorations. The place looks like a New Year’s celebration. You can’t help but smile in this office.

I came into the office last night to check up on my fantasy football scores (thank you, Priest Holmes, you record-setting devil you) and found that my office had been TP’ed for my upcoming birthday. They did a masterful job, down to hanging TP from the ceiling as streamers. I couldn’t stop laughing for several…

Last week, a few of the programmers got together (it was Lan’s idea) and, uh, “decorated” Julian’s cubicle with aluminum foil, post-it-notes, and balloons. We originally wanted to fill the cubicle with balloons, but we didn’t have quite enough time and got bored after inflating a few hundred balloons. Gallery of Julian’s Birthday Cube That…

Just got back from a week up in Dallas where I had all kinds of fun. We trashed Julian’s cubicle for his birthday, complete with balloons, aluminum foil, and post-it notes. I’ll put together a separate photo gallery of that this weekend. Erika drove up to Dallas and surprised me on Thursday for dinner. She…

You know you’re a geek when find five separate keyboards in a closet, none of which have been hooked up to a computer for any discernable length of time. The big black Toshiba has to be at least six years old. I got it when I was working as a network admin and we got…

After using an Audiovox Thera PocketPC phone for what seems like forever, I’ve ordered matching new phones for Erika and I. The Thera was pretty cool, but it had two strikes against it: it’s friggin’ big, and Verizon no longer lets you use data minutes out of your voice pool. They’re making you pay for…

When I went downstairs this morning to make my second pot of coffee, I opened the kitchen blinds and saw a little creature in distress. This fella got his legs caught in the boards of my back fence overnight, probably while walking along the top, and was stuck. He was still alive, thank goodness, and…

Some blog authors use their blogs as a cross between a public information source as well as a private one: for example, John Dowdell will often make notes in his blog when he wants to save information for a later date, in an easily searchable format, that other people may also find useful. I’m going…

I’m so frustrated that I’ve gotta take a few minutes and vent. I rarely air my work laundry here on the personal site, but at the moment, I’m so angry it just doesn’t even matter anymore. Seven months ago, when our company decided to move development to Java, I found out that my personal laptop…

Wow, about time. The site’s finally moved over to Linux. Ended up using PHP just to get it to go live quicker & smoother – I can always play around with Java on other sites. Besides, I don’t edit the code on this one much now that I use MovableType. Lots of things going on.…

OK, I give up. This morning I figured I’d take another shot at setting up a VPN client, this time using SSH like a guy at my company uses. I got started, got about an hour into it, and it doesn’t work on Xandros because the kernel doesn’t have the PPP module built in. Sure,…

I’ve been running Linux on the desktop for a little over a month. I’m using it as my mail server and DNS server, and now it’s time to start migrating my web sites over from ASP to JSP. Most of the translation should be pretty straightforward – there’s hardly any dynamic code in brentozar.com, for…

A few days ago, the RIAA announced that they were suing another 477 people who shared MP3’s. I had a fake Yahoo press release rigged up so that people could put in a friend’s name, and it would generate an official-looking link that they could send to their unwitting friend. The friend would read the…

Three solid days of work have given me the ability to both send and receive email using Courier under Linux. Something that takes literally ten minutes under Windows (well, and a pirated copy of various software programs) finally works under Linux. I succeeded in getting SpamAssassin working to filter my email, too, thanks to these…

After what can only be described as a struggle, I now have smtp mail working – meaning, I can receive mail. I can’t send it yet, though, because it keeps saying my passwords aren’t right, even though I know they’re right and I can log in correctly. At least the mail is coming in, though,…