2007 May | benking.me.uk

Autoglass the next chapter…

May 31

Ben KingBusiness, Internet Business, Interweb, Web/Tech 7 Comments

So the Autoglass comments keep coming on my blog entry about my (good) Autoglass experience, you can read it here.

Now I have had an interesting email through from a really nice guy called Gavin Jenks, who works for Autoglass and has commented on my blog more than a couple of times.

Gavin has asked me if I can delete a comment he made, because he doesn’t want to get in trouble with the powers that be at Autoglass.

I am really sorry Gavin mate but I have thought about it a lot and I just don’t think it would be right, heres my reasoning:

The only thing with a longer memory than the Internet is the taxman, so even if I delete it, the comment will still exist on archive sites, etc. and just put into question other content here.
If Autoglass don’t give staff guidelines on this sort of thing then really they can’t do anything against you.
If the Autoglass marketing people are any good, they will long ago have discovered these blog entries and read them and if they were concerned about your comments they would have already taken action.
I just don’t think its in the spirit of blogging.

Gavin, if you want to retract the comment, please feel free to post a retraction and I will ensure it gets published.

Big Brother…

May 31

Ben KingLife Big Brother, Life No Comments

… still watching

Espionage Scandal…

May 31

Ben KingBusiness bit10, Business, Systems, Web/Tech 1 Comment

Commenting on: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/04/20/vbi_triscan_blag_espionage_fears/

Wow, you know you have hit the bigtime when one of your clients gets in The Register with a full on bit of espionage.

To cut a long story short a client of ours, VBi Limited, got broken into a load of kit stolen under extremely suspicious circumstances.

The ‘baddies’ broke in, gained access to the server room within minutes (the server room, located in a highly unobvious location), and whipped in excess of 30 drives out of the servers.

Sunday 1st April, the phone rang, I will never forget the moment I had a particularly aggressive hangover, ‘Hi Ben, its Chris here, we’ve been robbed!’ (well he used something a little more aggressive than ‘robbed’, but I am trying to keep my blog relatively expletive free’).

We broke out the disaster plan, the first hour was assessment i.e. sent the client, Chris, in to find out how bad it was – meanwhile i engaged on a major recovery program of my own, consisting of Berocca, bacon of eggs and enough water to drown an otter.

A couple of hours later the verdict came back, we had lost pretty much every removable drive – so that’ll be a full on recovery then.

Monday 2nd April, Les and I were in the car at 6am on the road to rainy Blackburn, enroute trying to acquire 30 odd replacement hard drives, Dell frankly were as much use as a server without hard drives, in fact we couldn’t even find the right phone number to get someone who could vaguely begin to think about the merest possibility of helping us within the next week let alone the next few hours.

Fortunately our good friends at Serversource, in Northampton, came to the rescue and had all the drives complete with caddies, with us in Blackburn, by lunchtime. Good work fellas!

Thanks to Les and I working our magic, by the end of play Monday we had restored the AD, all servers base restored, by the end of play Tuesday we had completed a full recovery of all services…. CRM, Intranet, Exchange, the whole works.

Thanks for coming!