T he parcel having survived the experience of being left out in the rain by the UPS delivery driver I took possesion of the Thecus W5000 just over a week ago. The packaging  looks like it was put together by the Microsoft marketing department, although inside the only flags are a similarly badged, and virtually useless, installation guide and the words Windows Storage Server, with 2012 R2 Essentials in smaller lettering, on the front panel of the device. The installation guide walks...

A couple of nights ago I had a Paragon HDM backup fail whilst processing the spinning disk in my gaming rig with the message "VSS: Can't read volume data. (Source: Hard Disk Manager)". Research suggested that the disk was probably failing and it was just a matter of time. CrystalDiskInfo reported a 'Current Pending Sector Count' of 1 and further digging revealed that that too might indicate a disk on the verge of failing, at least badly enough to confuse Windows. Sadly with Paragon&#...

I suspect that some of my colleagues, who are used to me cursing and blinding at Microsoft and its creations on a regular basis during my work day, would be surprised to discover the fact, but I'm just about to take possession of a Thecus W5000 NAS and since there is little information out there yet for the Thecus W range I thought I'd finally find a use for this blog and record my experiences with the device for any interested parties to read. My existing NAS - a D-Link DNS323 with...

This is a really simple starter for ten, and was the 'failing memory' issue mentioned in the intro article. The command to list the active RACF database is not totally intuitive, although I'm sure that anyone that administers RACF on a regular basis (which I don't) would have no problem remembering it. Just issue: RVARY with no parameters (obvious, eh??). You can issue it from the console, by prefixing with the RACF subsystem command character (which defaults to a hash sign , ie. #RVARY...

I'm really not sure where this is going to go, but after discussions in the office today about failing memories and technical information that is never to hand when you need to use it, I thought I'd start a Blog as a publicly-accessible means of documenting various bits of information that might otherwise disappear off the face of the planet (or the part of it that I allegedly inhabit, at least). Of course, there is then the question of why bother with a blog rather than some other recordi...