On 24/06/2010 16:27, Paul Bird wrote:
Jon Green wrote:
Certainly not a case of a fatal failure within minutes or hours,
although Roland's right that it can sometimes go catastrophic a lot
more quickly.

You would *not* have wanted to be in charge of the radio station on a
cruise ship where one afternoon the ships comms started playing up, with
no new drives onboard, and I spent the evening starting to get a copy of
the data off onto another machine, begged the C/eng to get me a new
drive pronto (we were alongside) which he did thank heavens, got some
sleep, looked at it in the morning only to find it was worse, and got
enough off it restart the system when the new drive came onboard.

You're right -- I wouldn't! I've done enough heroics in my time to want
to prevent rather than cure where possible.

My
experience is the quality of the equipment onboard is in inverse
proportion to the amount of money the pax are paying.

I'm not greatly surprised, TBH. The bigger the money, the more
boneheaded number-crunchers you'll find getting in the way of common
sense, each eager to demonstrate that they've justified their salary by
achieving cuts in "unnecessary overheads". Like, just for instance,
eliminating enough shelf stock that a ship days from port can no longer
remain self-sufficient. I've been in analogous situations, and I know
your pain!

That's why I said when a drive starts to go, it can go in hours. Which
is not funny when it's not part of a RAID setup.

Oh, quite. Any mission-critical kit should have fallbacks planned and
implemented as part of its specification. Even something as banal as
the shipboard radio station is something the pax will notice missing.
If you have to cite "technical problems" as the reason, your bejewelled
and fur-wrapped customers will be wondering what else is badly
maintained. How about the bridge equipment? The escape davits?

Tar, ship, caulking for the use of, ha'p'orth thereof.

Jon
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