Users!

[andygates]

Which of these did I actually send tonight at 10pm after checking in on my server migration (after a great night-school session: vertical down outside corner welds, you are my bitches)?

1: "Dear users, the migration of your data to the new, spacious and high-performance server cluster will not go ahead tonight as planned due to technical issues which we'll investigate as soon as we can.  In the meantime, please continue to work on the current server as before."

2: "Dear users, the migration of your data from the creaky old fossil box to the preposterously over-spec server cluster will not go ahead tonight as planned because you've chosen to use such staggeringly long filenames that they crashed my migration routine.  I mean, come on, I'm all for lucid file structures but whole sentences as folder names?  You've saved every webpage you've ever found interesting with its full name, then given a "that huge name - comments" subfolder with more inside that, ad infinitum?  Easy, tiger.  We gave you a namespace but you eated it.  Your linguistic legerdemain did things that Windows, in its deep stupidity, permits but cannot handle, which I shall try to cheat my way around as soon as I can face it.  In the meantime, please continue to create novella-size file structures on the current server as before."

Comments

[n-decisive.livejournal.com]

After much internal debate, a lot of soul searching, and several painful bouts of compulsion, you managed to send out #1. Barely.

[andygates.livejournal.com]

I wish it had been that difficult, but it's like Marge Simpson says, "just curl your frustration up into a little tiny knot and swallow it. You're IT support. You can sit on it for ever."

[teahisme.livejournal.com]

I would think 2 is the more honest opinion. Although I would suspect for the sake of having your job in a few days you picked #1.

for that I am sure there must be a consolation prize... maybe a rotting mouse?

[andygates.livejournal.com]

You score one scary psychic point: I got a fresh Stench when I got home. :(

[arabis.livejournal.com]

Oh dear :(

What were you using to do the migration?

[andygates.livejournal.com]

xcopy, I like to keep it simple. I think I'll just restore from a backup instead!

[arabis.livejournal.com]

might be worth trying robocopy instead? (assuming you haven't already). Though the restore route also sounds like a good plan.

[andygates.livejournal.com]

Ta (it's on our list, along with SecureCopy). Of course to make things easier, it's 110Gb and it has to go between sites. I have a hunch that the sneakernet will be the fastest way to move it!

[skean.livejournal.com]

Hey, I feel you pain bro. I now run a mini helpdesk and have gnawed my arm in frustration at users. Only becase they are in London and I can't gnaw their arm off.

USER: Its wrong!
ME: Jolly good. Who are you, and what are you talking about?
USER: Its me. My report is wrong.
ME Excellent. Now, a user ID...?
USER: What's that?

Oh God, I can't go on, you know the rest of it...

[andygates.livejournal.com]

You can't ever gnaw their arms off. That's the tragedy of it.

[arabis.livejournal.com]

Actually, on a helpdesk, your first response should be
"Have you switched it off and on again?"

Here's the thing

[gedhrel.livejournal.com]

Long file and folder names are _for_ that. If not, why would it let you do it? Far easier to use the inbuilt search facilities to locate files and folders on the basis of the long descriptions you've typed into the filesystem directly rather than any other stodgy and hidden metadata.

Basically, my sympathy is with the users: they're hardly to be expected to magically know that a sentence is too long, what with Office teaching them that a great default filename is the first line from their document. Just because xcopy has path length problems doesn't mean they are doing the wrong thing.

Robocopy or even rsync will help here - the former is more CIFS-ACL-savvy. Depending on what it is, your backup software may be able to do a file migration directly too.

Re: Here's the thing

[andygates.livejournal.com]

You are *absolutely* correct and thank you for bringing me to task on that. My real vexation is with Windows for allowing this situation to occur in the first place. It's 2008! We have flying robot killer drones and LED contact lenses and laptops that fit inside envelopes. The failure to handle an arbitrary namespace for user file names is inexcusable. Especially when we encourage verbose naming to provide context.

There are two strands of stupidity that manifest: first, the user network drive X:\myfiles has a length of 10 characters; S:\userdata\shares\team1\myfiles, the share's root on the server, has a length of 32 characters. It's amazing the number of times that makes a difference and the check isn't performed against the volume root. Second, I can rename X:\myfiles\foo\bar to X:\myfiles\foo_in_modern_society_-_the_value_of_a_placeholder_in_semantic_interchange\bar and it doesn't check downstream to see if it has made anything illegally long.

They're neither trivial to fix, but they are trivial to work around: allow arbitrary large filenames.

Bloody Windows.

Re: Here's the thing

[gedhrel.livejournal.com]

Heh, been bitten by this before* :-) Might find that UNC pathnames and/or the mount/join** DFS stuff will let you set up something that xcopy will work on.

* In about 1995. Even then it was abysmal since remote filesystem protocols a decade older would cope with it.

** can't remember what they call that operation.

Re: Here's the thing

[andygates.livejournal.com]

Shameful, isn't it? Ho hum.

[(Anonymous)]

Damn I feel old.

We used to use Norton Ghost (now Symantec) for that crap.
Got to the point it was easier just to "ghost" it from a personal copy and lie about doing the hard way.
The ability to transfer all data, ignore filenames, AND resize drives on the fly was just toooo cool.


Although used to be an issue for cloning multiple install machines because XP/2k/NT got nasty when multiple drives had the same Windoze Internal ID's or that multiple drives had the same Drive Marker (but they fixed the latter and the former serves cheats righteously)

That and the ability to serve over a network, image whole drives into split files and compress on the fly, and LanManger drive mounting to get remote file images off 100+Mbs networks.

Is there no similiar product any more?
(it was like under 100 dollars a license too)

Re: Here's the thing

[andygates.livejournal.com]

We use Ghost a lot. But it's some data from one volume going into another live volume, which isn't Ghost's speciality - and Ghost looks at 110Gb and says, "excuse me?".