It was meant to be tongue-in-cheek. Failure is additive when you
depend on services or systems outside your control. I've seen backups
fail because DNS was unavailable for example.

On the flip side, I've seen TSM loose out in a competitive situation
because it doesn't integrate into AD as well as some other products do.

This week, someone suggested backing up the Decru LKM (Lifetime Key
Manager) to TSM. I had to point out that in a real disaster, we'd
need the LKM to rebuild that dataforts to read TSM tapes. And if the
keys are stored on the tape?

Fun stuff. [RC]

On Mar 22, 2007, at 12:13 PM, Allen S. Rout wrote:

On Wed, 21 Mar 2007 17:09:21 -0700, Robert Clark
<Robert_Clark AT MAC DOT COM> said:

So when they call and ask us to restore the LDAP server, I can say
"I can't login, cause the LDAP server is down.".

I think you're confusing the tail and the dog.  If you're in a site
emergency like that, you can stand a momentary outage to permit
SERVER_CONSOLE to update RCLARK to use native authentication.

If you're in normal operations, having IDs and passwords consistent
across services saves many many people much time and confusion.  Far
from the least of these is the time and effort of the TSM
administrator who has to do a lot of commo to reset passwords for
rarely-accessd IDs which are out of sync with single signon.


- Allen S. Rout
- Wag, wag, woof.