Archive for 'January, 2011'

Earlier this January I was taking the Christmas lights off of the front cactus (I heart Phoenix) when I came across an interesting newspaper article. Before you ask, my household rolls individual strands of Christmas lights up in newspaper and then stuffs the bundles into boxes. That keeps the strands from getting tangled in eachother. Moving on.

An article from the Asbury Park Press dated Dec 12, 1999 caught my eye. It was so novel that I scanned it for long term keeping and decided to share it here. The article is a 30,000 foot view of what websites have to be put through to make sure they don’t go offline under heavy load. In fact, it’s more than just a 30,000 foot view. It’s more like looking at earth from Mars using binoculars.

The very concept of eCommerce web sites was so new that the article doesn’t even shorten the term, instead using the uncompressed form “Electronic Commerce”. It’s interesting to note that testing web sites for load problems was a novel concept worthy of a newspaper article just a few years ago.

I will not reproduce the text of the article, but will link to an image of the scanned article. Pardon the wrinkles. It’s been wrapped and re-wrapped around Christmas lights for a decade. Let me know what parts of the article tickle you in particular.

UPDATE:

The Mozy ads that are mentioned in this post are no longer running. On January 28, 2011 a Mozy employee named Ryan commented on this post with the following:

Gentlemen, I would like to apologize for the tone of those ads. It was I that wrote those several years ago in one of those “it seemed like a good idea at the time” moments. And while they actually do convert pretty well, they don’t reflect the appropriate attitude towards our (potential-)customers. And I think that’s more important.

I’ve now removed them from our rotation. I really do appreciate your feedback.

I no longer see those ads on the Jungle Disk keyword. The Amazon S3 keyword has an aggressive, but respectful ad now:

END UPDATE

I use a free Dropbox account to store some project files for a website that a friend and I work on. We’re filling it up quickly and I’m considering our options. I think the best option is to just use a rather large FTP account that we have, but in an effort to be thorough I searched out other consumer level cloud storage providers. The first two that come to my mind are Dropbox and SugarSync. However there’s a third one that I overlook: Jungle Disk.

Because I’m unfamiliar with the product, I googled Jungle Disk’s brand name to find their corporate site. My eye was attracted to a lone AdWords ad on the right side of the page:

The ad is for a competing cloud storage provider that most of us know about called Mozy. I refreshed the page and saw a different and even less flattering bit of ad copy:

I was very surprised at these two ads. Insulting a competitor so blatantly? Self-assigning the title “#1 Online Backup Company”? Attempting to win my business by insulting me with snarky questions? I also found it ironic that they advertised a price that, by my comparison, is not as good as what Jungle Disk offers. I was not amused by the advertising.

I decided to search for the brand names of other cloud storage vendors to see if Mozy was taking this aggressive track elsewhere. I searched for Dropbox, SugarSync, Syncplicity, ZumoDrive and even enterprise cloud storage providers like Amazon S3, Nirvanix and EMC Atmos Online. Interestlingly, I was only able to find Mozy’s insulting ad copy on one other keyword: Amazon S3. That doesn’t seem like a prime competitor to me, but I guess Mozy knows its business better than I do.

In the course of looking at competing advertisements on a service’s keywords, I discovered what I think is a great example of an aggressive yet tasteful advertisement:

Laplink makes a bold statement, but it’s not insulting or demeaning. I didn’t click on the link to see if they backed up their statement (I didn’t want to needlessly cost them PPC advertising money), but presumably they would present at least some facts about their service so a savvy shopper could compare.

Let me describe the kind of advertisement that I think is acceptable. First, I think it’s okay to be confrontational in advertisements. Some might disagree with me on that, and it’s certainly a fine line. If you have a product that is better than someone else’s product, I think it’s acceptable to advertise on their keywords or say “we’re better than this other product!” Having said that, I think it’s a bad thing if that’s your only advertising strategy. Never be defined by a negative. Also, always back up your claims of superiority. I’ve found plenty of good anti-spam and other edge appliances that I otherwise wouldn’t have heard of as a result of rather aggressive ad campaigns on Barracuda keywords.

I also think it’s okay to ask your customers direct questions within your advertisements. “Is your archiving solution compliant?” “Are you sure your DR solution can handle a meteor impact?” etc. Asking questions is very effective in advertisements, but you have to make sure you’re asking the right questions.

So what are bad tactics in advertising? For one, personal attacks against your competitor. It’s one thing to say “Our products are better than this other one and here’s why” and quite another to say “This competing product sucks!”

Even worse is insulting your customers. For example, saying “I hope you’re joking,” when someone is searching for one of your competitors. Not only has Mozy slung mud at Jungle Disk, but they’ve also managed to call into question the intelligence of potential customers. I can’t say for sure if that AdWords campaign is working, but it’s certainly not wooing me over to Mozy.

It is important to note that I don’t take this bit of ad copy as a sign that Mozy is evil. In truth, this ad is one of probably thousands. It was probably written and decided upon by just one person in a much larger organization. I’m sure Mozy has an excellent product and great people working for them. However, most people aren’t quite as charitable and I suspect that most people will think twice about Mozy after seeing that ad.

Advertisers, take note. This isn’t middle school where boys impress girls by seeing who can insult the other with the sharpest wit. Be aggressive if you want, but keep it factual and don’t call anyone names. Especially your customer.

Several years ago I stumbled upon an video that had a significant impact on my career. I have no idea how I found it and I’ve never seen anyone else reference it. The video is from a presentation given by Sergeant David Coughanour about how he ran an ISP in the Sunni Triangle with no pre-existing infrastructure to work with.

David was tasked with creating a troop-run ISP called a “HajjiNet”. The troops themselves pay a monthly fee and with that money a satellite based ISP was created. Everything used in the management of the network from NAS devices, proxies, firewalls, network sniffers, etc. had to be very “creatively” acquired and implemented. As David said, “To get this running, a lot of things fell off the back of a truck.”

The original talk can be downloaded in AVI format at Notacon’s 2006 archive page. You can also get an MP3 of the talk. Sadly, I haven’t been able to find the video embedded anywhere online to make it simpler to share it. It used to be hosted on David Coughanour’s PantherNET website, however that domain went down over a year ago. Fortunately, Notacon releases their media on a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license. As a result I took the video that I got from David’s website a few years ago and uploaded it to Vimeo for all to see.

I highly recommend this video, especially to those starting out or interested in becoming a SysAdmin. It shows how creative a SysAdmin has to be with their resources to solve problems. Take a look and enjoy!

Hajjinets – Running an ISP in a Warzone (Notacon 2006) from Wesley David on Vimeo.

Please spread this video around. I’d love to get this video out to more people especially up-and-coming SysAdmins.

This whole brouhaha over Wikileaks has got me to thinking about just how free the internet really is. Let’s say a person has some important information to share with the world, but fears retribution from either a government directly or those lobbyists and corporations that hold sway over a government. Where can one disseminate that information if the technology infrastructure used is operated within the influence of the feared government?

Here’s a checklist of what I think someone should think on when considering technology placement to host information that might run the risk of being attacked by a government:

• Most obviously, the hardware should not be within the borders of the feared country (this includes supporting infrastructure like DNS – Thanks Jeff!).
• The hardware should not be within a country that is over-friendly with the feared country. You should take a close look at extradition and data-sharing laws between the two countries.
• The company you use to host the hardware should not be headquartered in the feared country. For example, your hardware could be hosted in the Netherlands, but what if the company is headquartered in Canada?
• Blending the above two points, you need to pay close attention to the company you use in case they are headquartered in a country that has a history of extradition and cooperation with the country you fear. For example, if you fear Australia and host your data on servers in Sweden, but the company you use is headquartered in the United States, you might have a problem.
• Try to use a company that has absolutely no presence whatsoever in the feared country. The country you fear could potentially put pressure on the branch of the company that exists within its borders. If your hosting company is in Luxemburg but has a major presence in the USA, you could have a problem.
• Look at the hosting country’s laws concerning wiretapping, data retention, internet log keeping and many other factors. Even if the hosting company has good privacy measures, the data still has to traverse national lines to get there.
• Use the same precautions listed above when selecting your bandwidth provider.

My first thoughts for someone who wants to keep data in a neutral country went to Sweden (unless Sweden is your feared country). However, a Twitter user named Ulf Månsson sent me a link showing how Sweden might not be the best option after all.

Apparently, while the Swedish Minister for Foreign Affairs, Carl Bildt talks a good game about Internet freedom, his country is practicing behavior that is rather contradictory to that ideal. It was so troubling that Google declared it would no longer place any servers on Swedish soil.

While the company that currently hosts Wikileaks, PRQ, brags that it is a “no questions asked” service and that they maintain few, if any, of their own logs (although the ambiguity of that phrase worries me; Which is it? Few or none?) all traffic that comes into or goes out of Sweden is apparently subject to government surveillance.

Again, Ulf Månsson gave me some information. This time about Iceland. Apparently Iceland is an international transparency haven as a result of a July 16^th passage of the IMMI proposal. You can read more about it at Reporters without Borders. The legislation was born out of a frustration with the secrecy that ultimately led to the collapse of Iceland’s financial market as well as being galvanized by the whole Wikileaks controversy. I’ve looked for a downside to Iceland but can’t yet find anything specific. Hey, they’ve considered banning MasterCard and Visa as a result of stonewalling WikiLeaks donations, so I’m still in luff with them at the moment.

A good site that disseminates news concerning internet censorship among many other things is the aptly named Index on Censorship organization. Another good gauge of a country’s willingness to censor free speech on the internet is the Reporter’s Without Borders reports on “Internet Enemies”. Here’s the latest report on internet enemies from March of 2010. At the bottom of the page you can search a list of “Internet Enemies” and “Countries Under Surveillance”.

In researching this topic, so far I have only found a few countries that would seem to be safe for a whistleblower to host their information. Iceland stands out head and shoulders above the rest of the world. It entices me to move there… except I hate cold weather with the burning contempt of ten million cranky supernovas. Why do the most awesome countries have to be so close to the Arctic Circle?

The relatively small amount of internet havens seriously depressed me. Is the Internet already past its freedom-loving prime? Is the Internet not anonymous enough for Freedom to thrive? While I think that the problem with censorship and retribution for well-doing is less a problem with a lack of freedom and more a problem of greed and human selfishness at its worst, we still need strong anonymity to help stave of totalitarianism. Just as running from a fire does not squelch it, hiding from overbearing governments does not solve the ultimate problem. However, one needs a safe haven to fight the fire from and in the same way, we need a safe place to disseminate information.

Perhaps the popular internet has outgrown freedom of information and speech. I’m beginning to think that decentralized, peer-to-peer data havens such as Freenet might be what whistleblowers will be forced to rely on. How sad that those who wish to expose evil are forced to share the same quarters that are also used frequently by those who disseminate it (child porn, pirated materials, etc.).

If you had a virtual whistle to blow, and were worried about a government’s retribution, which country would you choose to locate your “whistle” in? What internet providers would you rely on?

The Steam group “Real BOFH” is organizing it’s first Team Fortress 2 event. Titled “Welcome to 2011 and let’s kill some lusers”, we’re going to assemble together on the event’s Steam page on Saturday, January 8th at 1900 GMT. We’ll monitor the comments section for the event to find a good public server to congregate on. Hopefully one with low ping for the majority of our members, however since our membership spreads from the Western US to Eastern Europe, that might be a little difficult.Yes, organizing the event is kinda low-tech and shoe-string, but we’ll just roll with it for now.

If you’re committed to the group, you can add the tag >BOFH< to the end of your nick. Let everyone know that yes, you are a BOFH. Perhaps we can start a >PFY< group for those among us that are still working the help desk.

If the group can get off the ground we hope to organize our own private dedicated server and who knows what else. IRC channel? Mailing list? Private island? Secret handshake? The possibilities are limitless.

Remember to check the Real BOFH blog for updates.

(Update x 1: Added ten more participants!)

(Update x 2: Added one more participant!)

(Update x 3: And yet more!)

(Update x 4: Oh forget it, I’m not versioning any more of these updates…)

While chatting with some fellow SysAdmins via IM and Twitter, I stumbled upon a (seemingly) worthy 2011 professional goal. To ramp up interaction on ServerFault.com. As a self-employed IT person who leads a somewhat nomadic professional life, I can get rather disconnected from my SysAdmin colleagues. In my days of work, I tend to see systems that are of a rather low quality and then receive a shockingly small budget to try to bring the existing work up a notch or three. As a result, I can tend to get discouraged and lose objectivity when judging the quality of my own work. When an existing environment is a 3 and I leave it at a 6, I tend to focus on having left it in twice as good of a state as I found it rather than the fact that it’s still barely above average quality.

To counteract the mind-decay that can so easily set in, I rely on a few online communities to keep my standards high. I choose ServerFault.com as my primary source of inspiration. ServerFault (SF) is a member of the much larger StackExchange family of sites. After SF comes the SysAdmin Network, Daniel Petri’s forums, hob-knobbing with various SysAdmin groups on Flickr (including my own group “Ghetto IT“), keeping up with some choice SysAdmin’s on Twitter and reading some awesome blogs (see my blog list linked to on the top of this page). ServerFault never ceases to make me feel like a complete idiot. That’s a good thing.

While conversing with Cole Lavallee on New Year’s Eve, we decided to make a 10,000 point pact for 2011. In 2011, we were each going to strive to add 10,000 points to our Server Fault reputation. That challenge spread to a few others on Twitter. So far 7fellow Geeks have pledged to increase activity at ServerFault for 2011. Specifically, to increase their reputation by 10,000 points on New Years’ Eve of 2011. Those users are:

(Wesley “Nonapeptide” David’s Dec 31, 2010 Reputation: 3,581 - [graphic is inaccurate] - )

(Cole “vCole” Lavallee’s Dec 31, 2010 Reputation: 111)

(Jason “obfuscurity” Dixon’s Dec 31, 2010 Reputation: 519)

(Benjamin Krueger; @BlueBen on Twitter – Dec 31 2010 Reputation: 1 )

(Jonathan Angliss; @J_angliss on Twitter Dec 31 2010 Reputation: 414)

(Michael “voretaq7″ Graziano’s Dec 31, 2010 Reputation: 5,684)

(Michael Gurski; @magurski on Twitter Dec 31 2010 Reputation: 1)

Newly added participants:

(Robert Moir; Jan 1 2011 Reputation: ? [waiting a database dump to find precise number])

(Dan Bigbee; Jan 1 2011 Reputation: ? [waiting a database dump to find precise number])

(Brandon Burton; @solarce on Twitter; Dec 31 2010 Reputation: 1)

(Phil “I ain’t no Hollenback girl!” Hollenback; @philiph on Twitter; Dec 31 2010 Reputation: 131)

(Steve the Hedgehog; Dec 31 2010 Reputation: 1)

(Tom O’Connor; Dec 31 2010 Reputation: ? [waiting a database dump to find precise number])

(Paul Friedrich; @lepole on Twitter; Dec 31 2010 Reputation: 1116)

(Sean Johnson; Dec 31 2010 Reputation: 1)

(Scott Pack; Dec 31 2010 Reputation: 2994)

(Paul Graydon; @Twirrim on Twitter; Dec 31 2010 Reputation: 250)

(Carl P; @line3 on Twitter; Dec 31 2010 Reputation: 1)

(Devdas Bhagat; @f3ew on Twitter; Dec 31 2010 Reputation: 201)

(Joe “Helvick” Mansfield; Dec 31 Reputation: 10K-ish [waiting a database dump to find precise number])

(Marc Cluet; @lynxman on Twitter; Dec 31 2010 Reputation: 1)

(Jacob Jernigan; Dec 31 2010 Reputation: 25)

(Pablo; Dec 31 2010 Reputation: 0)

(Robert Novak, Dec 31 2010 Reputation: 0)

(Erik “Holocryptic” Gumbel, Dec 31 2010 Reputation: Awaiting further analysis)

(Philip “Chopper3″ Buckley-Mellor, Dec 31, 2010 reputation: 29,100)

There are a few ServerFault users who have chosen to choose a point target that is less than the original 10K challenge:

(The man (?) known only as Bob; @arclight on Twitter; Dec 31 2010 Reputation: 381; Caveat: arclight is no longer a pure IT person. He has moved to a “hard engineering” position and as such has chosen a 2,500 point challenge for himself.

(Juan Manuel Rey; @jreypo on Twitter; Dec 31 2010 Reputation: 1; Juan chose to do a 1,000 point challenge, but I conveniently misunderstood him and choose 5,000 as his goal. =)

We also have a slight twist to the participants. Not everyone has chosen ServerFault as their target. For example, Cat Esposito is an up and coming IT guru who is attempting to break into the world of 1s and 0s. She is leaning towards development but also has an eye towards operations. The next superstar DevOp? I think so. Cat has chosen Stack Overflow as her platform. Since she’s just breaking into all things development she chose 1,000 points as her goal. I’m raising the bar to 2,500 points without her permission. =)

(Cat Esposito, Dec 31 2010 Reputation: 28)

New participants in the Stack Overflow 10K challenge include:

(Droope; Dec 31 2010 Reputation: 41 )

Ten thousand points in one year comes out to about 40 points gained each workday for 52 weeks. That’s 200 points per week and a little over 800 points per month. Not too bad, right? But what’s the goal in all of this? To inflate our egos? Hopefully not. The goal should be to give back the knowledge that you’ve gained to those who need it. Also, we should attempt to be sharpened as professionals by choosing to be around those who know more than us. I guarantee that no matter what level of proficiency you’re at in your IT career, you will find someone who knows more than you at ServerFault.

Is there anyone else who wants to increase their community involvement? Toss your hat into the ring in the comments below and I’ll add your ServerFault badge to this post. Give back to the community and help grow the competence level of both your own self and those around you. Let’s make 2011 an awesome year for SysAdmins.

P.S. A note of congratulations to BlueBen who, on only his second day of participation, hit his daily reputation cap and earned the silver badge “Good Answer” with this beauty. Good answer indeed.

The Problem:

When Attempting to enable VSS on a new LaCie 2Big drive, I received the error:

Could not apply the settings for the following reason:

The filename, directory name or volume label syntax is incorrect. (ox8007007B)

After clicking “OK”, a second error immediately pops up that says:

There was an unexpected error in the property page:

The filename, directory name, or volume label syntax is incorrect. (0x8007007B)

Please close the property page and try again.

After every subsequent attempt to edit the VSS settings, only the second dialog box is given in response. If you change the volume label you will again see the first error message once, and then after that the second only.

My Solution:

In the “System Properties” dialog box, on the “System Protection” tab (or type “SystemPropertiesProtection.exe” into the Start Menu and hit enter), make sure that there is only one C: drive in the list. If you see more than one C: drive that has protection turned on, either remove protection from all C: drives or leave protection on for the C: drive that has the Windows logo on it. Then once again try to enable the protection settings for the original volume that your were working with.

If that doesn’t solve the problem, try some of the other suggested fixes in this thread.

The Story:

I was attempting to turn on Volume Shadow Copy for a brand new LaCie Two Big hard drive that I have, but was greeted with the error messages already listed above. I wondered if it was because the volume label had a number in it. I changed it with label.exe to remove the numerals but still received the error.

Searching the web for those errors reveals that a lot of people are receiving them while trying to run a Windows backup. This post in a thread at sevenforums.com revealed that there are several possible fixes to the issue. If you’re still having issues even after the above fix, check out the other possibilities in that post.

According to Dell, the error is as a result of system restore points being pointed to a place that does not exist. How or why that situation came about in the first place is still a mystery to me. Also, I still do not know why the restore points of one drive affect the VSS option on a completely different drive.

Are you a SysAdmin? Do you know what SysAdmin spells backwards? That’s right: “Gamer”.

If you’d like to gather with fellow server-room button mashers to pwn some noobs (or maybe even some leets), check out the Steam group “Real BOFH“. With a tagling like “…killing lusers is our day job!” you can’t be in the wrong if you get caught playing at work.

Currently Team Fortress 2 is the most popular group game, but Day of Defeat: Source and Counter-Strike: Condition Zero are also played. The more people join, the more fun there is to be had. You can check out the “Steam BOFHs” blog for updates and more information.

Tell your friends, but keep the friendly fire to a minimum.

EDIT: The Real BOFH group is invite only at the moment. Just get in contact with CyberBOFH on Steam, Twitter or the Real BOFH blog for an invite.

EDIT DEUX: The group is now opened up for all to join!