All good points but like I say I didn't get any choice in the matter. However while we are on this topic am I alone in building a FreeNAS storage solution within an Enterprise environment? Would be interested to hear your stories if anyone is doing a similar thing.
No, but those stories were told long ago, and aren't really fun to talk about for the 10th time. You can probably find them in the forums if you go digging deep enough. I've pretty much stopped telling them because I've learned it gives people the impression it's a great idea and totally safe. It's not. In what may a coincidence I've stopped telling the stories I've seen a decline in the number of people that call iXsystems with "zomg my zpool panics the system on boot.. I want to pay for support".
Just gotta kill a large zpool (enterprises never go with small zpools) that happens to have no backup in weeks because something broke and nobody noticed, and the company goes out of business, people end up unemployed, and they never make that mistake again. ;) Kind of hard to make the mistake when you've literally worked yourself out of a job. :p
I've talked to at least 3 companies this year that had that kind of story, and only 1 was lucky enough to see their data again. I know two of them *did* go out of business because when I tried calling them a month later to see how they were doing their phone number was disconnected.
One company I talked to last year had an IT department that was run by a moron. He'd do things like hand the IT worker bee a bunch of inappropriate hardware and tell him he'd better get a zpool on it and working. It had a hardware RAID controller and wouldn't do passthrough. He also was given $0 to make the server work because the IT department head "knew what he was talking about". When I started asking questions the IT worker bee said to talk to his department head, which was on the phone. After listing everything that was wrong, I told him that if I had worked there I would have made him sign a notarized affidavit that if anything went wrong that he would hold me irresponsible for the consequences, up to and including data loss. He got very quiet for like 20 seconds when I said that. I had to ask if he was still on the line and he responded with a very depressing "yeah, I'm still here". The CEO of the company later called me and I told him everything. First, the IT dept head was fired for his heavy-handedness with setting up the FreeNAS box. Then the worker bee was fired because he didn't take his job responsibility enough and go over his boss' head when things were totally off-kilter. They got their data back, but apparently it cost them more than $60k.
The worker bee was a forum user here (not a regular poster, had maybe 40 posts because he asked a bunch of questions and made the same kind of arguments about "gotta do it cause the boss said so"). He talked to me about 2 months after he lost his job, and he said job prospects were in the toilet as a result.
Even when I did contract work for people to build servers and/or maintain them, I had a few strict rules:
1. I got paid up-front until I felt comfortable I wasn't going to be scammed.
2. If I said that something had to be fixed and you disagreed, we were done working together.
3. If I recommended a particular piece of hardware and they substituted without consulting me, we were done working together.
It was not worth my reputation to have some idiot buy AMD, buy a hardware RAID controller, or buy some shotty motherboard that later would eat their data and have them come trying to tell me that it was my fault and try to sue me. It was my job on the line, literally. And I wasn't about to let someone that was only interested in saving a few dollars put my job on the line while they did it. No thanks! Fsck that!
