Hello TechRepublic…
I am a small-time mostly self-taught IT person, and unfortunately the only person in the small company I work for who knows what “IP” or a “file extension” is.
I have developed an Access/VBA database application for my company over the last 10 years or so with generally great results, including text exports to external accountancy packages etc. Due to expanding the network to include 2 remote sites connected with VPN (yes all done by self-taught me), these last 2 years I have moved the back-end to MySQL on Linux and modified my application to support it with great success (and a lot of info on how to came from here), but now the remote sites are constantly complaining about it being too slow (I don’t think so – it is about the same as most web pages)… So I suggested that I try replicating the MySQL database. Success, but what if the link goes down? So I am now trying to get the Linux-HA heartbeat thing working so that if the main db server is not available, the remote sites can not do writes to the database. Now I realise I am way beyond my level of expertise and I want to explode. The question is: Does a company of only 15 people need all this? Are they being greedy? Am I biting more than I can chew? Should I admit defeat and get them to employ a consultant? If so where would I find a good one who isn’t trying to sell something?
Apologies if it seems a rant, I did list it (my first TR post) as off-topic… 🙂
I just thought I’d ask while my head is hot… 🙂