Problem parking

I'm eagerly waiting for our new desk for our new office, allowing the three of us to cooperate better. Every time a truck stops to deliver something, I peek outside. Coud it be our desk? No, not this time. Then it happens.

At the exact moment the unloading lift touched the ground, a van pulls up, partially on top of the lift, making it impossible for the trucker to unload or even raise the lift again. The van driver jumps out and runs away, leaving the trucker stuck, not able to do his work.



There is something awfully familiar about this situation. You work on one thing, then you get interrupted by someone who just wants your attention, but rendering you unable to do any constructive work until they are done with a job they don't really need your help to complete.

This can also be said about mess left behind on servers from various software installations. While you were planning something different, you suddenly find yourself cleaning up something that should never have been allowed to pile up in the first place. User profiles are typical victims of this phenomena, slowing down logons, eating up disk space and increasing backup sizes.

For this reason, I wrote a small piece of software to clean up some of the typical problem areas on a system. The original had references to specific problem areas on various servers in my old job. These references make no sense any other locations, so I reduced it to go for the typical problem areas on a stand alone computer.

This has already been used with great success in my new job, reducing the daily backup size to be reduced by 65 Gigabytes. I now have another year to introduce a new backup system, instead of one month.

This "reduced" version is available for free on my Trollsilm website, though I'm working on an Enterprise edition specifically to run smoothly on servers, taking only a few % of your CPU power. And best of all, it will be completely configurable to meet your organization's needs.