I routinely get requests from management like "I need a list of the urls and the sizes of databases for our <product_name> sites!" This, I can tell you, is NOT something I want to figure out by hand (not with 300 production databases and a slew of training, demo, test, etc... databases as well). No, there is a better, more relaxed way...a way that includes plenty of time for me to check my e-mail, go get a cup of coffee, and chat with my co-workers...

A bit of architectural...

Today I discovered quite possibly the most WTF of all quirks in a Microsoft product...the power of 2 failures in SQL Server 2005.

To back up, my company has a ton of aged Win2k SQL Server 2k machines that are about to fall apart. Some time ago, we got permission from the execs to spend around $35k on a server that would replace them all. So we purchase a new machine: 4 sockets (each socket stuffed with a 6-core Xeon), 64 GB of RAM, and 30+ 15k SAS disks. It's on par with the top...

Ok, so I have a dual-head setup at work (running OpenBSD-4.6), and I am usually ssh'd into dozens of machines at a time. My desktop tends to look like a fuster-cluck of aterms.

So I discovered a cool little trick with konsole. Using dcop, you can open new terminals as a new session (tab) in an existing konsole window and then send commands to said sessions (and even rename the sessions to match what commands you sent to it).

But, there's only one problem. I'm running...