A reminder of why I started using Untangle

[sky-knight]

I got a phone call from a customer around 7:00pm, they were reporting a server failure.

Client reports e-mail from the exchange services halted around 4:30pm. Why they waited to call me I have no clue. But the office manager was on her way to the site with the "downed" SBS server.

She arrived on site to discover the SBS server was online and happy! The Internet appeared offline. By this point I was noticing that firefox was hanging up trying to log into their Untangle's Remote Administration page.

So I drive over there, the Untangle server was sitting there with a hard drive light lit solid. After attaching a monitor, keyboard, mouse, and rebooting the thing it was hanging up just after POST. Another five minutes and I've got the access panel off the server and I can smell toasted electronics. Disconnect the 32gb SSD and hit the power button, unit roars to life.

I've got a dead six month old SSD... drive back to my office pull the 32gb ssd I had in my dev box, install it in the client's UT server, reimage UT, reconfigure UT based on my documentation of the site, drive back, plug it in, drive home.

Critical services restored around 11pm. It's now 1am and I've got all three VPN tunnels back online, spam filtration humming along, and a very happy network. I'm sure tomorrow will bring a set of wrinkles that need to be ironed out, but I can deal with that.

So thank you Untangle, for providing software that can be used on whatever hardware platform I choose. Because of this flexibility, I'm free to deploy the software on whatever platform I'm comfortable repairing. It frees me up and allows me to ride in on the white horse when all heck breaks loose.

Cisco? Sonicwall? I'd be waiting on these guys to ship me a new box! Doing things your way I have the unit back in service before the business lost another day.

That's the power of Untangle!

Now, to get these guys to buy support for their units so when the crap hits the fan all I have to do is restore a backup! I'm getting resistance there, have been for months. It's frustrating.

[pazza3564]

and to top that all off, with their online backups, a quick restore

[sky-knight]

and to top that all off, with their online backups, a quick restore

Oh I know, as flaky as the restore can be when things go wrong. The bulk of the time it just flat works and makes me very fat and lazy. Of course I would say that Untangle in general makes me fat and lazy... not that it's a bad thing!

[agit8or]

I agree with this post! We have focused more on selling UT because of features like this.

[jcoehoorn]

I'm just waiting for the day when SSDs are actually reliable, and the risk of a 6 month failure is something more reasonable.

[sky-knight]

Have you had one fail before? This is the first SSD I've ever had fry.

My gut tells me they aren't the wonder the market says they are. They just fail differently. It's always told me that they have a lower risk of failure vs a mechanical drive, but the odds of an unrecoverable failure are considerably higher if the drive fails.

[agit8or]

I would agree with that. We have had two SSD drives go bad. Both had complete data loss/corruption that was unrecoverable. IMO, they weren't worth the added cost for the few benefits.

[mooseracing]

I'm just waiting for the day when SSDs are actually reliable, and the risk of a 6 month failure is something more reasonable.

I've have a couple hundred deployed from Intel, Samsung, and Kingston. These are all in desktops and laptops. Knock on wood but no DOA or failures yet.

IMO, they weren't worth the added cost for the few benefits.

I'd say it all depends. In our environment with the software that is being compiled, hardware sims, and FPGA builds; it gives us significant boost in productivity. Now if the software writers would catch up to multicores, we could see even more savings.

[sky-knight]

Yeah, if you're in an environment that can benefit from the absurd read/write performance on SSD, it's makes a ton of sense to use that tech.

We chose it for the power savings, as well as thermal resilience.

Reliability had nothing to do with the decision. All technology is weak, something is broken somewhere. SSD tech is just so new that the industry really hasn't gotten it figured out yet. I don't think we'll have a real idea what SSD is all about for another 5 years or so.

[Mathiau]

I'm just waiting for the day when SSDs are actually reliable, and the risk of a 6 month failure is something more reasonable.

SSD are more reliable then mechanical drives, IF you buy good ones, like intel and stay away from OCZ and those.

Also if your going cheap and buying desktop SSD's for a server, it will kill them pretty fast.

when you said re-image your UT box.. when you get a new system up and running do you just do a clonezilla and then use then online back up