       | For those of you that might have had a concern based on my recent reports of the feline community entrusted to our care, we are happy to report that five out of the six furry beasts have been seen alive and well within the past 24 hours. One was on the roof of the porch, but apparently quite happy there as my effort to "rescue" him was rebuffed. The one that we haven't seen is a bit of a recluse, so we really don't expect to see him. Today started to a pitter patter of raindrops, but the weather never really got busy with making life miserable and it turned out to be a rather nice spin of the planet. We had planned to take it easy this morning at home with some pancakes (with authentic Maine maple syrup) and bacon lovingly prepared by T. Wallace Hinkle. We also worked on our Wii bowling and various strategies for coping with toddler temper tantrums. We sallied forth around 11:00 AM, headed for the botanical garden near Boothbay. Leigh had packed a picnic lunch so we enjoyed a nice, cheap gastronomic experience amidst some premium flora. We hit the trails and found a fantastic path through the forest along the coast. I can imagine how this walk might act as a restorative to one's soul, but having Emily along detracted from that aspect a bit. She wasn't problematic, just a tad noisy. She really enjoyed it and walked much further than we expected. We made our way to a sculpted waterfall, which was quite spectacular. The gardens were a nice surprise--they exceeded our expectations. Another feature they had was a water wall, and a "foot massage" area made with river rock embedded in concrete. As the afternoon ripened, we realized that we had time to catch the cruise that featured lobstering and seals, so we blew the garden joint and steered the Forester toward Boothbay Harbor's tourist area. But alas--all boats cancelled for the day, apparently due to the threatening weather that turned out to be nothing more than a feint. One thing that we did plan for sure was to stop at Red's Eats in Wiscasset. This is the smallest restaurant I've ever seen, but it's reputation is not so tiny. I got a lobster roll (lobster meat on a hotdog bun), Leigh opted for the crab cakes, and Emily settled for a hotdog. While we were waiting in line, the spunky lady that's been working there for 15 years was washing the sign on top. The awning was in desparate need of a spritz, so she asked everyone to either get under or get back. It's this level of courtesy to customers that makes the place tick. Since it was a bit chilly and Emily a bit tired, we brought it back to the house for consumption. Emily actually touched the lobster meat with her tongue, but immediately pronounced it to be unpalatable (we've been working with her on the vocabulary). |
One issue that can occur when using VM snapshots to back up a server with large database volumes is that the server gets paused when the snapshots are consolidated. We like to refer to this a "stunning" because it sounds worse, and it can cause really bad things if you are using clusters and/or availability groups. If a cluster node gets stunned for more than a few seconds, the other node will think that it needs to fail over. Additionally, when the stun is over, the node that was stunned comes back to life right where it left off, and if it was the owner when it was stunned, all this has to be sorted out, and honestly, after working with Microsoft Cluster for twenty years, you just don't want to put it in this situation unless there's no way to avoid it. So, your backup strategy changes, and you set your large volumes as independent disks so that they are ignored by the VM snapshots. This lets you backup the OS and any other small volumes without a stun. Your...
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