Category: A Matter of Opinion

Surviving a Provider Outage

Last year, EIG (or the Endurance International Group) suffered a major outage in one of their facilities in Utah, impacting a number of customers on their Bluehost, Hostgator and Hostmonster brands, possibly among others. Today they have been down for close to 6 hours and counting leaving customers with services ranging from a small shared …

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Employee Satisfaction

I have this theory which roughly states that an employees loyalty to a company is directly proportional to their satisfaction level. This seems obvious, but there are many things which apply to this which aren’t often taken into account, because the number one thing we consider is remuneration – I think this is wrong. Sure, …

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Diagnosing Internet Issues, Part Three

This is the third and final installment (for now!) in my brief series on Internet issues. This time we’re addressing throughput, because it’s another one that comes up occasionally. So here is the scenario, you’ve had a rack of equipment in a datacenter in New York for the last few months, and everything is going …

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Diagnosing Internet Issues, Part Two

Last week we covered traceroutes, and why you should gather data on both the forward path and the reverse path. This week we are looking at MTR, why you should use it, and how to interpret the results. ‘traceroute’ is a very handy tool, and it exists on most operating systems. If it isn’t there …

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Diagnosing Internet Issues, Part One

Having worked in the support team for a Network Services Provider, it’s fairly common to see customer tickets come in complaining about packet loss or latency through/to our network. Many of these are the result of them running an MTR test to their IP and not fully understanding the results, and with a little education …

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Read Only Friday

It was about 2 years ago I first heard the concept of Read Only Friday. I thought it was great then, but having worked in a customer-facing role for the last year, especially in an organization that doesn’t practice ROF (and part of my customer-service role includes weekend support), the more I see the shining …

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Term Pronunciation

Something I’ve noticed in my time working with systems is that the vast majority of our terms are written down 90% of the time, it’s very rare that they are verbalized. This leads to interesting divisions within our community where we develop different ways to pronounce things. One of those that seems more common is …

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Coincidence

I’m typically not one to believe in co-incidence, but I’m also a fan of correlation not necessarily proving causation, while also not disproving it. We run a large number of Tripplite PDU (power distribution unit) devices in customer cabinets in our facility, they are largely how we determine power usage and billing for overages in …

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Communication and It’s Relation to Customer Satisfaction

As systems administrators we work in an environment where everything we do provides a service of some kind. Whether it’s providing a shared hosting server to multiple users at a low cost, managing racks of servers for a client for thousands of dollars a month, or maintaining an Active Directory infrastructure for a small business …

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“If It Isn’t Documented, Then It Isn’t Done”

Wise words from a Senior Sysadmin that I heard today, fortunately not directed at me. We hear this often: comment your code, document your processes. How many of us actually do it, and do it in a way that someone else can follow? Documentation is important for many many reasons. Primarily ensuring that someone else …

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