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Feb 22
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 …
Feb 15
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 …
Feb 08
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 …
Dec 22
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 …
Dec 12
Nagios 4 on Ubuntu 13.10
Last night I installed Nagios 4 on an Ubuntu 13.10 VM running on my VMWare ESXi machine. I followed through the steps listed here, which worked overall: https://raymii.org/s/tutorials/Nagios_Core_4_Installation_on_Ubuntu_12.04.html I did run into a small number of issues which should be documented for anyone trying this on a later install of Ubuntu, but raymii isn’t allowing …
Oct 06
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 …
Aug 18
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 …
Aug 10
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 …
Aug 08
“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 …
Aug 03
Handling Outages – A Lesson from Hostgator
Yesterday Hostgator had a major outage in one of it’s Utah datacenters which caused a number of customers to be offline for several hours. The outage actually impacted Hostgator, Hostmonster, Justhost, Bluehost, and possibly more, but this post regards the Hostgator response specifically. These companies all provide shared webhosting services. I am neither a client …