To any other system admins or those working in an area of technical support, may I make the humble recommendation you go away and read this article over at The Register? Whether you’re looking for a series on network overhauls, and what can go wrong, what is needed for it to go right and just how long should you go without sleep, or if you’re hoping for some light psychological insight into why IT bods and users act the way they do, click that link!
Also, on a completely different topic, please don’t be in such an auto-pilot sort of mood that you attempt to mirror two remote drivers to the same destination directory. This afternoon’s transfer of 40Gb worth of data was wasted when I proceeded to then mirror another 2Gb of documents from a different directory on our friend’s laptop. /E in robocopy or xxcopy would have been fine. /MIR mirrors, meaning all the files I had just copied over were removed, as they didn’t exist in the source destination! (Copying over a network as the laptop seems unable to consistently provide enough power to a USB socket for sustained data transfer to a USB (only) powered portable hard drive). Also wondering why a network transfer that is entirely over wires, albeit 100Mbps not 1Gbps is maxing out at just over 2 megabytes a second – never even peaking above 25% utilization. I think I’ll blame the laptop’s NIC. It can’t possibly be hardware I own and look after. Obviously. If I say it enough times, I’ll believe it.