I usually draw a fluffy cloud shape and outline a couple computers and servers on a napkin and explain how the cloud describes the almost infinite wires and connections between computers that is called the internet.  And I describe how servers are designed to answer requests from thousands of clients.

In any case, people tend to like pen and napkins when explaining things and usually I get an aha or two.

The NY Times magazine today goes into some more detail, and goes so far as to call datacenters, the cloud, which is a slightly different focus I'll keep in mind on my next napkin session.

June 14, 2009 - via The New York Times

Alberto Molina SureTech.com Sun, 14 Jun 2009 15:12:04 -0400 http://www.suretech.com/12664/Some_Attention_to_The_Infrastructure http://www.suretech.com/12453/We_re_Populer_I_guess We had a problem Saturday morning (4/4/09) with all of our websites that use any of our databases. It appears that someone attempted to hack into our site by trying various standard attacks and while, to the best of our knowledge, none of those attacks worked, the number of requests overwhelmed our server. I'll write a technical post about this soon when we've had a chance to more fully understand what happened. But I did want to let people know that we are back up and monitoring the situation. We apologize for any inconvenience. If you have any questions about the outage, please feel free to contact us.

I'm told by my friends at some more popular sites that this type of thing is standard for them. I guess that means we've become popular.

I investigated and found the email in his outbox.  I also found that it was over 4MB and the end recipient's email box would not accept it.  I thought it important to highlight some key email tips in the current world of spam blocking email inbox overload:

We offer best in class email solutions for you.  Its simply the nature of email now (versus 5 years ago) that with so much spam and in turn spam software email is not as reliable as it once was.  Almost 90% of email out there is spam!

A few good measures to follow to ensure your message gets across are:

*       never send large files through email.  Always send them as a zip file

*       if you send a mission critical message, be sure to call to follow up that it has been received

*       if you send a file to have on hand at a business meeting, bring a copy of it on thumb drive as well to be safe

Weve always said that Managed Services for IT is usually a flawed business model.  Pretty much the better job you do the less you make.  Kinda like lawyers, I guess, except at least we talk about it!

13 hours to reformat and upgrade a client laptop is the perfect example of providing GREAT service at a TERRIBLE value.  I worked over a long day and night replacing the hard drive of this particular laptop.  Theres no question the client got a lot of benefit.   3.5x more storage space, 3x improvement in speed.  And almost no worries he handed me the laptop in the morning and came back for it the next day fully upgraded.  I couldnt save him from a couple headaches, though he had to hunt down passwords that needed to be reached in his browser .... and he had to see my 13 hour bill!  Which points to the value problem the work took 13 hours, but no one wants to pay labor of 13 hours for 3.5x space and  3x speed.  Think of it this way the 320GB drive cost less than $100 and the 3x speed was just getting the computer back to the speed it was the day he bought it.  Who wants to pay almost the cost of the computer to simply set (or in this case reset) it up?

Ill tell you: nobody.  But whats the alternative?  It takes hours and hours to set these things up so we as a Managed Services Provider are stuck either provide poor value by charging for our time or give ...

Ive been thinking a lot about backups recently for a variety of reasons.

First, Ive been involved in setting up a fund to honor the high school teacher who first taught me the importance of good backups. He hired me to help with the high school mini-computers and one of my major jobs was to backup the system every day to magnetic tape. When we lost a hard disk (lighting and computers just dont mix well) we always could recover with a recent tape. I learned a lot of lessons from that first job and one that particularly stuck in my mind was the importance of regular backups and taking backups off-site. Because of that job, I can be a bit maniacal about backups and archives.

Second, I had to recreate a website we worked on a couple of years ago. We had archived the source when we decommissioned our source control server just a few months ago. But when we shut down the website, wed not remembered to download a copy of the database. In my development work, however, I knew Id had at least one copy of the database on my development machine while we were working on it, but Id deleted it a year or two ago. However, I make it a practice to burn an archive DVD of my work at the end of each year before I clean off files that are no longer needed so I had a good feeling that I had some reasonable version of the database archived. I pulled out my archive from a couple of years ago and found the database pretty easily. With that and the source code, we were ...

For SureTech employees, the script is saved away in my user directory on the backup domain controller. You'd want to run this by typing: 

cscript wupdate.vbs

That's pretty much the price of excellent service these days.  If you outsource your service to a place that doesn't care about your customers ...  - view comments

Thankfully, I do keep the CF cards in their plastic case, but I was dubious about whether the card would make it through. I looked the card over and it didn't look damaged. So, I plugged it in to my card reader thinking that it might actually work and - surprise, surprise - it did. The audio looks just fine and I'll get it edited shortly.

Using Google to search for "Compact Flash cards in water" turned up this story about a much more abused card than mine. Guess I didn't really have any reason to worry about it working.

The FSUTIL utility requires that you have administrative privileges.

At which point I wanted to scream - But I Am an Administrator.

So, I looked around to make sure. Yes, I was in the Domain Admins group which was in the Administrators group. Looked like I was good to go. I had logged in with my admin account rather than my normal user accout. Hmm, what was up?

I searched on Google and thankfully came across a comment in this post that reminded me that Windows 2008 requires you to explicitly run the command window as an administrator. I right-clicked on the cmd icon, selected Run as Administrator, and voila! the fsutil command ran. Not that it gave me the information I wanted, but it ran.

While I have over two decades of experience with computers, I am a novice with networks and I appreciated the chapters on switches, VLANs, routing and Quality of Service. It was written well enough that I could understand the basics and the graphics he used helped me understand the concepts.

Donahue has some great comments in the back about how to sell your ideas to management and how to be more professional (instead of just a techie).

Overall it was certainly worth my time reading this. If you are interested in a better understanding of how networks and network transports work, this would be a useful read. If you're a network expert and don't need to deal with Cisco equipment, it's probably a waste of time.

I was installing a new VPN client on my main machine and, foolishly I will add, had two different VPN clients (one using IPSec and one using SSL) connected already. When I installed the new VPN client, about halfway through the install both of my current connections were severed and my machine went into an automatic shutdown. No problem I thought, I'll either uninstall and reinstall the VPN or just continue the VPN install and I'll be fine. Well, this install leaves something around to let it know an install was in process. Perhaps I could have figured out what that was and cleared it, but I figured it was a safer bet just to restore the system to the point before the install. Sure enough, there was the restore point waiting for me. I restored back to that point in time and re-ran the install (not connected through the VPN this time!) and everything worked out nicely.

By Alan Cohen from Law.com
Corporate Counsel
October 31, 2008

If there's one tried-and-true way to tackle a problem, it's to make it someone else's problem. It's the strategy that's given us plumbers, fluff-and-fold laundry and lawn services. Yet for a long time, corporate computing didn't really lend itself to the pass-the-predicament model. Sure, you could hire consultants to troubleshoot your hardware, patch your software and get all the PCs and servers talking to one another. But at the end of the day, it was your system -- and your headache.

Delegators take note: The times are changing. An increasingly popular software model tries to make things simple by -- get this -- literally making things simple. Known as Software as a Service or cloud computing, the idea boils down to this: Instead of running an application yourself, using your own equipment and IT staff (not to mention ...

Organizations are increasingly looking to next-generation social networking tools to conduct sophisticated business intelligence and analytics. In many cases, they are mining data and looking for trends and patterns, such as which salesperson has the relationships to pull off a deal or which customers seem to have the biggest influence with others online.

Cloud computing environments will contribute to the expansion of SaaS into areas beyond ERP, CRM and HR management systems. Rob DeSisto, analyst for Gartner, says organizations increasingly see the benefits of moving large-scale software expenses from the capital budget to the operating budget.

Saavy IT managers are now looking for ways to automate and embed security and compliance processes across the value chain, including on mobile devices. Surprisingly, a key challenge is one of perception, not technology. Companies must get over the idea that security and compliance systems are simply insurance against problems, and that they dont improve the business in ...

It's powered by Postini, so the back end looks good. But, I like to try these things out before rolling them out to customers. So, I decided I'd sign up my business domain for the service. I get a little bit of spam, generally it's caught by the filters in Outlook or on my server. I was using StartLogic, which I'd been signed up with for about five years. To make a long story short, after much gnashing of teeth and trying different things, it turns out that StartLogic's mail servers can't handle the Google Message Filtering service. I believe it has to do with the way the MX records are described and how StartLogic figures out which domain the mail belongs to, but I'm not sure.

So, I decided ...

I have nothing against corporations or even republican conservatism. But neither the means nor the end ever seemed as important to me as the manner of the journey; and love, equality and justice have always felt like better principles for a manner than achievement, winning and owning for their sake alone. These fundamentals that ring so true in every heart seemed absent often from the rhetoric of success Id often hear.

But sometimes getting out into the sun reveals more scenery than you guess. I met two brothers yesterday, who described themselves as the original LinkedIn. Though they sold insurance, most of their day was connecting people and businesses to each other and to funding. Their courting of VCs and VC target companies was strategic, to be sure, but a complete indirection to selling insurance. The direction was to expand their network, to participate in community and thereby simply by being known, succeed at insurance.

Almost be existing they are flourishing, Sum Ergo Sum.  This strikes me as a lot more productive than fighting to convince a client of my value. By sharing it is easier to receive, and we get to more malt syrup or is it? Its easier to believe in love and sharing when everybody with ...

As programmers, we have often been tricked into thinking that we should be writing code all the time and anything less and were not being productive enough. I know I often struggle between writing code which I enjoy, have some skill in, and can easily see my results and doing other important project tasks.

When I was working on Word for Windows 6.0 (and there's a whole 'nother story about why it was numbered 6.0 rather than 3.0, since it followed Word for Windows 2.0 the short quote is 6 is larger than 3) Chris Peters (who has since left Microsoft and brought the PBA back into prominence) at one of our team meetings made it clear to us that, in order to ship Word 6.0 we needed to remember that our job wasnt to write code or test code or any of those things. Our job was to ship Word 6.0. Now often that would mean, as developers, we should write some code (or fix some bugs) but we needed to think each day about what we could do that day to help ship Word 6.0. Some days that would mean not writing new code (and new code is the worst it has to be tested, localized, documented, etc.). Sometimes, the best way to finish the project would be to talk with our program manager and see about cutting a ...