I’ve been recently asked to take a look at a couple of servers at a friend’s friend’s small business. He seemed to be doing ok until I actually spoke with him.

It appeared the big thorn in his side was the IT, surprise, surprise. At first, VISA and MC decided that the merchants weren’t secure enough, so they instituted a mandatory software and hardware upgrade. Then the Point-of-Sale software people decided to do their own compliance upgrade, which would probably require upgrade of workstations AND the servers.

To make matters worse, the tech support on one of his software suites ended in May 2005. He’s about to do a major (forced) upgrade requiring extensive tech support. The helpdesk lady said it would be $500 to renew support up to May 2006, then another $500 from May 2006 to May 2007. Yeah, they do it in a retroactively-continious fashion.

Of course, everything would be an out-of-pocket expense for my friend. We’re taking several thousand, like, pushing ten grand. The problem just plopped on his lap, there, you’re out ten grand.

Thus, in the spirit of streamlining the IT, I walked around the location and took notes.

What surprised the most was not the crazy hodge-podge of random workstations homebrewed from all kinds of weird componenets, most stuck in PCI slots and attached to cases by bent paperclips. Neither it was the lack of personnel’s ambition to learn anything about these machines and how they operate. Neither it was a random DHCP router desperately handing out duplicate IPs while being stuck in a switch on the network with all static IPs (yeah, I know).

It was the utter and complete lack of backups. We’re talking, no one has a concept of backing up data.

My friend quickly understood that if his old AMD-K6 Point-of-Sale server blows a power supply and send the hard drive to hell, his business would literally stop. So I suggested getting an external SATA drive, a USB 2.0 enclosure, a copy of Acronis – a pretty good insurance policy for around $200.

He signed. I was just another IT guy trying to beat money out of him “for his own good”. Everywhere he looked, the evil IT folk was trying to shake money off him.

I thought about it, and agreed with my friend. Why is there a need to upgrade if everything is working beautifully? Why are these small business owners forced to pay for upgrades they don’t need?

On that discussion-stimulating note, I’m going to wrap up some quick affiliate marketing news and hit the sack.

• Basement Flooded site appears to be highly lucrative in terms of per-click revenue, not total revenue (yet). While my 300SD site is lucky to break $0.10 per click, the basement site can rake in a couple of bucks. It’s not indexed by Google yet.
• I wrote some php scripts for this site to display revenue. To show correct figures, I pull a couple of figures off AdSense and update them manually every day through FTP. Why? Keeps the site fresh as far as search crawlers are concerned.
• I decided to do an experiment. I will not promote my How To Be Metal site AT ALL (see? no link). I want to see how long it takes to build an audience with no promotion whatsoever by doing a post every 2-3 days.
• V for Vendetta is a very sweet movie. I happened to see it on an IMAX screen, so I was doubly blown away. You really have to go see it.
• You thought I was sleazy with my Basement site? You’re wrong. Check out this sleazeball.

Peace.