Save Your Precious Data!
Today was my son’s first day of first grade. Like any proud parent, I took a bunch of pictures to document the momentous occasion. Like any digital photographer, I downloaded the pictures to my computer where I have year after year of my life documented in photographs. If you have a digital camera like most other people these days, you also have those priceless photos stored on your home computer. As important as those photos are, they are dangerously close to being lost forever.
All those priceless photos of birthdays, graduations and vacations can be lost in an instant if you have a hard drive failure or virus. A family member could accidentally delete them. Someone could steal your computer. A fire could incinerate your memories, or a tornado could wipe your computer from the face of the earth. Almost all of the possibilities I have described above have happened to people I know. Typically the first question I always ask is: Did you have a backup? Unfortunately many times they did not. What a terrible loss. If they would have only taken some simple steps, the loss could have easily been avoided.
Thanks to broadband Internet access and cheap online storage solutions, you can easily backup your data AUTOMATICALLY for little or no money. Read the rest of this entry »
My love for solid-state drives is SOLID.
I was talking to a colleague today and the topic of solid state drives came up. He had been considering using a solid-state hard drive, but had heard too many “horror” stories about performance or data loss. I was surprised to 
hear this. I have been using solid state drives for well over a year now and have had nothing but success. When I originally investigated using a solid-state drive, I read many poor reviews on certain models of solid-state drives. So when I selected my first drive, I was careful to read all of the reviews I could, and check all of the specs. I settled on a drive from Corsair that had excellent reviews and decent specs for the price.
The first system I built with a solid-state drive was a terminal server for demo purposes. That was the fastest terminal server I ever worked on. The server would boot in about 30 seconds, logins took 2 seconds, and applications would launch instantaneously. From that point forward, I was sold.
I am currently running a Lenovo Thinkpad T500 with a Corsair CMFSSD-128GBG1D solid state hard drive. I swapped out the standard hard drive that came with the laptop. It was as simple as Read the rest of this entry »
Are you down with DIIOP? Yeah, you know me…..
I upgraded a client’s Domino server last night. Today we discovered that they use Axiom Groupware Integration for a service they receive from Rearden Commerce. It is a service that allows them to book flights, rental cars and hotels at a discount and have those items be pushed automatically to user’s calendars over the Internet. It is a pretty nice service from what I saw of it. Here is the website with more info:
http://www.reardencommerce.com/
Here is information on the Axiom component:
http://corp.americanexpress.com/gcs/travel/us/land/axiom.htm
So ever since the upgrade was completed, none of the appointments were being created automatically like they were supposed to be. We looked into the logs on the Tomcat webserver that Rearden uses to submit the appointments to Domino and found this error:
2009-07-22 17:42:57,171 ERROR [groupware] [http-8080-2] – createAppointment error NotesException: Could not get IOR from Domino Server: http://ServerName:63148/diiop_ior.txt
That Tomcat server receives the request from Rearden over the Internet, then uses a DIIOP connection to the Domino server to create the calendar entry. As part of our normal upgrade process, we had hardened security on the Domino server and we had disabled Anonymous HTTP access to the server. It looks like this requires that to be allowed. We turned anonymous HTTP access back on, restarted HTTP, and everything was working again. Looks like we will have to see if there is a way for this to work without the need for anonymous HTTP access. But at least for now they can update their schedules.
Another problem solved!
How much is a petabyte?
I stumbled upon this fascinating presentation by Mozy:
http://mozy.com/blog/misc/how-much-is-a-petabyte/
Not only does it do a good job of visually explaining how big a petabyte is – it also has some interesting facts about the amount of power and storage space our worldwide computing resources consume. Enjoy!
High Availability in the Arctic
My primary purpose for trip was to install a high-availability server cluster running Avance from Stratus Technologies: http://www.stratus.com/products/avance/index.htm. I installed the solution in July when the weather is in the 40s, and the sun shines around the clock. The platform I installed is so dependable that no one should need to visit the site again for a long time. And hopefully no one has to go back in the winter, when the weather can be 50 below and the sun doesn’t come up for months.
To guarantee the uptime we needed, we chose the Avance software in order to have a cost-effective high availability virtual cluster. The solution is so fault tolerant, an entire physical server can fail, and the virtual machines that were running on the failed server will start right back up on the surviving node. It truly separates the running virtual machines from the hardware. Avance monitors the health of the system, all the way down to the status of fans and hard drives. If anything on a node fails, it will automatically migrate the virtual machines off of it and send out a notification.
Avance Arctic Configuration
The Avance software is loaded on two physical servers. That creates a single logical platform to run virtual servers across. Data is continuously replicated between the two nodes. Because of the replication, it doesn’t require a SAN. That not only saves money, but it also reduces Read the rest of this entry »
Mobile LAN Trip Report
Mobile Internet Access
We setup a laptop in the van with a Verizon aircard and then used Windows to share that connection via wireless between the users in the van. We also had an AT&T aircard, and a couple of people tethered to their phones. We have been using aircards for years, but not this extensively, not over this terrain, and not as a mobile shared connection.
Mission control in the van.
As expected, our only issue was data service. We had service from both Verizon and AT&T and both services had major outages on our trip from Cincinnati, OH to Fayetteville, WV. We knew we would have occasional drops, but we didn’t expect Read the rest of this entry »
Another trip, another crazy project
A network on the go.
Our mobile network will provide minute by minute image updates to a public website. We will also be tweeting, using the hash-tag of #lansol so you can follow us. I will be updating my blog with more information about our network as we travel down the highway. I will provide the link to the website once we depart. We also plan on providing GPS updates about our location. We depart about 1:30 EST, so check back then!
Attack of the Arctic Mosquitoes
Today was our last day in Barrow. Our final task was to go back to the research hut and improve the weather station mount. The day before the weather was about 40 degrees with a sustained 20MPH wind. Today it was almost 50 degrees and it was very calm, so we thought we were going to have it easy. Unfortunately, that is perfect weather for mosquitoes. The mosquitoes in Alaska aren’t your typical mosquitoes, either. They are gigantic and swarm around you. It is very unnerving. To ward them off, we wore netting and raw deet.
Giant mosquito
Out on the tundra, there was a 5MPH wind. If I stood in one place I created a wind block so the mosquitoes would gather in that draft behind me. After about 20 seconds I could literally hear the bzzzzzzz of the gathering swarm of mosquitoes in the draft. I was actually wishing for the return of the cold and wind from the day before so I didn’t have to deal with the mosquitoes. Yuck!
After our work was done on the tundra and we showered to remove all of the deet, we took one last tour of the town before our flight. We got to see the northern most football field in the US. The field is Astroturf and is located Read the rest of this entry »
Research Hut on the Arctic Tundra
Research Hut
Our goal for the day was to mount a weather station and multiple cameras on a hut. In addition, we wanted all of these devices to collect data and feed it real-time back to the servers we installed earlier in the week at the BARC. I will provide a more detailed explanation of the data communication systems that are in use in a later post. The hut we went to was located Read the rest of this entry »
Town Festival and Arctic Rainbow
We spent most of the day in the lab staging weather stations today. That was fine with me because the temperature dropped about 10 degrees from yesterday, and the wind is blowing. At lunch we stopped by the city park and checked out the 4th of July Festival. The city park is pretty much a gravel lot. There were food booths, face painting for kids, and some games. We walked around for a few minutes but quickly got back in our truck to escape the chilling wind.
Barrow City Park
We went out again after dinner and got to see an Arctic rainbow. A fog moved in from the ocean, and the sun hitting that fog created the rainbow.
Arctic Rainbow
