The Geekery

Bob Plankers of The Lone Sysadmin fame, has an excellent article titled Midnight is Always Tomorrow, which talks about communicating maintenance windows effectively with peers, as well as customers. He describes the confusion between the term of Midnight, and how some people consider it one day, whilst others see it as a different day.

Midnight is 00:00, meaning the start of a new day. Always.

If you’re in doubt, use 00:01. Assume everybody is clueless about time, because they are. For example, a lot of people think in terms of when they go to sleep, not what actual time it is, so if they’re still up at 0200 on Sunday they consider it to be Saturday.

He timed it well, I was thinking of posting about this very subject myself after a similar incident last week. After our QA team had cleared a break-fix release, it was scheduled for that fateful time, on Midnight on Friday. This was discussed at length by several people on Monday. After several meetings, I hear somebody walking past, telling the business units on Wednesday…

Yes, it’ll be released tonight, and ready for tomorrow.

“Tonight” would have been Wednesday night, tomorrow would have been Thursday. Somehow the magical shift of midnight pushed the release forward a day. Fortunately we interjected, and had them corrected.

This isn’t the only incident that is like this, we see it frequently when something gets requested for that time. I cannot begin to count the number of times I’ve had somebody ask me “is the release tonight at 2am?”. This goes into the idea that people consider “tonight” to be anytime before they went to sleep.

Going with Bob’s suggestion, use dates, and 24 hour clocks, if necessary (and always recommended) shift the time by a few minutes to make it obvious which date midnight falls on. Notify customers, tell them the outage/maintenance/changes are at 00:05 on 06/15/2010 (if you work with international customers, use words instead of numbers).

Bob finishes on a perfect example…

“The system shutdowns will commence at 2200 on 4/17/2010, the power will be disconnected at 0000 on 4/18/2010, and power-ups will occur again at 0800 on 4/18/2010. All times are in CDT (-0500).”

Be clear. Be concise. Be exact. Remove as much ambiguity as you can. The customers will be happy for it.

The Nubby Admin has an interesting post, and lesson learnt on the importance of monitoring. The post, titled The Wisdom of Specificity in Monitoring and Alerting. After an outage was caused due to his service provider making some DNS changes due to disk usage issues, Wesley found himself with a broken site, but monitoring didn’t report it as such.

Read more…

I frequently comment on people not making backups, and there are always plenty of examples of corporations missing the mark too (here, here, here, and here for example). The Social Networking Weblog has a post up with an offer code for Carbonite. Not quite sure on the angle for social networking in specific, but it’s good to see somebody else commenting on backups. I’ve been using BackBlaze myself for a while, used it to restore files, and it’s pretty fast too.

Backups are critical, businesses have a financial responsibility for them, whilst home backups have both financial and sentimental value. Get your backups done, get them tested regularly. There are plenty of options for both.

Curious about how long your script took to execute? How about just that cmdlet? Powershell has a built in function for you.

• Open Powershell command prompt
• Use the command Measure-Command like so:

Enjoy the output broken down by days, hours, minutes, seconds, milliseconds, and ticks.

The same works for cmdlets too…

To Nature that is. It’s good to see that NTTA modified their plans, and instead of just messing with the land for other purposes, giving it back to nature. They had originally planned for the land to be used for toll booths, but with their change to ZipCash, they don’t really need the booths any more, and as such, will be doing replanting, and such in the 14.8 acres of land they’re not using.

I’ve been flashing my Tilt2 for a while now, and every time, I finish flashing, WMDC fails to see my phone. Usually a reboot fixes this, but with some group policy issues, and being remote, reboots take upwards of 10 minutes. This evening I dug into it a little more, and I stumbled across a solution right from the WMDC troubleshooting guide. Pop open the device manager, expand the “Mobile Devices”, and tell it to “Uninstall” the USB sync option, unplug the phone, plug it back in. It’ll see it as a new device, reinstall the drives, and WMDC will pick up again.

The Networker Blog has an excellent post on support contracts, coining the term Icarus Support Contract. Preston warns on the dangers of using a using minimal support agreements when covering equipment, and software in an environment that is covered by an SLA.

Read more…

A while back I wrote about The Reboot. Unfortunately I’ve not really had a chance to go back and address some of the things I’d mentioned in it, so I’m going to try getting to that very soon. First thing was working on me…

Read more…

Snowing for about 24 hours now… Okay, so not as bad as up north… but I’m in Dallas, TX, we shouldn’t have snow…

**Statement as of 7:10 PM CST on February 11, 2010** … Greatest all-time calendar day snow on record set at Dallas Fort Worth… … Record 24-hour snow for February set at Dallas Fort Worth… … Record daily maximum snowfall for February 11th set at Dallas Fort Worth… Through 7 PM CDT… Dallas Fort Worth Airport has recorded 7.9 inches of snow. This breaks the greatest calendar day snow on record. The old record is 7.8 inches set on January 15… 1964 and January 14… 1917. This also breaks the record 24-hour snowfall for February which was 7.5 inches… set on February 17… 1978 and February 25… 1924. Obviously… .this shatters the record daily maximum snowfall for February 11th… of 1.4 inches which was previously set in 1988. With the snow continuing… the snow total will increase. An updated record event report will be sent later this evening.

Back in November, a post on SysAdmin’s Journey had a follow-up to a Yahoo document titled Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Website, specifically the fourth section. The author stumbled across an issue with AOL users not being able to see images at all.

The Yahoo document is a great source of little hints and tips, and the SAJ article is a good gotcha on one of those tips. Handy to keep around if you’re planning on tweaking your servers for a little bit of a performance boost for your users. Worth reading the document for some ideas…