Category: Uncategorized

Don’t Panic

The noise your phone makes on an alert-based SMS. The ringtone when the office is calling. “Waiting for controller to initialize” hangs on startup. Don’t panic. The key to resolving any issue quickly is to slow down and think it through. I had this this morning. Two new servers were installed on my desk and …

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RAID vs. Backup

Occasionally you hear the words “I don’t need backup, I have RAID!” or similar phrases. You may have even used them yourself once or twice. They are not the same. Though both are intended to maintain uptime, they perform two different functions which serve two different purposes. Both of them are defense mechanisms against disaster, but …

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Centralized Logging

We all know how important logs are, I use them regularly to find why the automated firewall blocked an IP address or to figure out an error in the apache config or the problem with the Asterisk phone tree. I also know that our network engineers use them to identify problems with switches or routers …

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Migrating Home

My “Personal Project” for a long time has been small web/mail hosting, primarily for myself. For the last year or more I’ve achieved this with a group of small VPS services. It started out back in 2008, I think, with a 256MB Xen machine, hosted by ezVPS (no longer in business). Eventually I picked up …

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Hello world!

It’s a startlingly appropriate title for this blog. Here’s the deal. I am a Jr. Systems Administrator. I work for a company that provides hosting services, anything from shared web-space to multiple-cabinets of colocation space. If you have a hosting need, chances are we can meet it. But this blog isn’t about my employer. It …

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