Practical Technology

None of us saw it coming.  I'm still scratching my head about how this is even a problem. APC rack.  2x Tripplite PDUs (managed, metered).  Mounted in the APC toolless 0U panel at the back of the rack, side-by-side. As-is, there is no way to remove rear-facing network equipment that mounts using rack ears.  i.e. Physics prevent you from removing said equipment.  I'd have to remove both PDUs to get anything mounted w. rack ears in or out - e.g. if a switch fails... Maybe you just can't do that - maybe all equipment you want to remove must be mounted from the front.  Did some more looking (to be sure), and both the APC and Tripplite models we can use are pretty much the same physical dimensions. Unfortunately I wasn't able to meet directly with the datacenter manager (flight was delayed), so we came to the conclusion that our only real solution was to dismantle the rack entirely so we could move the vertical mounting flanges.  Doing so would gain...

So you are finally doing it!  Moving everything to a colo site - so exciting! So much redundant input power!  So much reliable A/C! So much latency between sites. It made so much sense to move EVERYTHING over that the only consideration you gave any thought to was DFS/Folder Redirection (which does, indeed, stink over the WAN).  One other small fuzzy area you forgot about was AccPac (Sage ERP 200). DFS/Folder Redirection - at least this was a known potential issue.  It's slow, but users can live with it if they must (and $ dictates wait they must).  But AccPac!  It's so un-useable at this point that immediate measures must be taken. Latency, you ask - how awful is it?  27ms.  (both sites on 100mb fiber) Yep, 27ms is enough to bring AccPac to its knees.  It turns out that AccPac is a rather old application, and has a neat feature called 'DBspy' that displays its age nicely.  If you watch the 'DBspy' monitor screen, simply clicki...

Posting this because as an operations person, this whole 'learn to be a dev' thing is a random and wacky journey, so why not post it for future people to use against me. Rather than learn the Thoughtworks Go Feeds API (I am not a developer and did not have a lot of time), I figured that this wheel must have already been invented. Google search terms: thoughtworks go dashboard github And boom:  https://github.com/LateRoomsGroup/GoDashboard Looks pretty nifty, so thought I'd give it a try.  Cloned it to my local machine, then tried to open the solution.  Error!  "The project type is not supported by this installation" LMGTFY: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2745988/the-project-type-is-not-supported-by-this-installation/8809433#8809433 http://www.codeproject.com/Reference/720512/List-of-Visual-Studio-Project-Type-GUIDs After cross-referencing the .csproj GUIDs with that handy list, looks like his project requires MVC4 to be installed!  Googling ...

It's pretty straightforward once you've googled it, but here's a quick how-to: Speak to management about TFS CAL licensing, because you require one (audit requirement, not functional blocker) - as of this post, MSRP for one CAL is ~$500USD. Install Team Explorer 2013 (this should also install a bare VS)  http://www.microsoft.com/en-ca/download/details.aspx?id=40776 Install VS Power Tools 2013  https://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/f017b10c-02b4-4d6d-9845-58a06545627f Open VS Foundations to see Team Explorer, connect to your TFS server Download a copy of whatever project you're working on to a local folder Using Windows Explorer, brows to that local folder - you should see new icon overlays, and have a 'Team Foundation Server' context menu (right-click). If you don't:  HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\explorer \ShellIconOverlayIdentifiers Change the order by prefixing (renaming) the TFS keys with 1, 2, 3 - then r...

Well, as of yesterday afternoon, we have one website and one database actively onboarded into our automation system.  Unbelieveable amount of work, but totally worth it. What was chosen as the candidate for this pilot is our primary web front-end (referred to as WebUI here on out) and (one of) it's accompanying databases ('the database').  I'll try and describe what we're doing and how it's getting accomplished. Pipeline overview ...as of today, anyways... Database (pipeline group) Database Build (pipeline) Builds the SQL scripts - we have pre/deploy/post scripts - pre/post are data transformation, 'deploy' is functionality-related.  Dev opted to use the VS equivalent of SQL compare - we will be using the Prod database as the true reference.  The 'deploy' scripts are automatically generated - pre/post scripts are done by hand and are optional. Database Deploy (pipeline) Snapshot script - 'reverts' the snapshot, takes anothe...

Initially when we started looking at ES I had grand visions of months and months of accumulated data.  Unfortunately, you need a big hardware hammer to deal with that amount of data, so after living with 60 days of log data and having 5 nodes (4GB heap each, 8GB RAM) constantly piling up to 80-90% heap usage, we decided to drop back to 30 days (still adequate for what we're doing today). I would caveat that statement with 'well, that's what I know today'.  For all I know, it's supposed to be running at 80-90% heap usage.  If that is the case, seems strange that tools like 'kopf' show red at 80% heap usage, however - and ES docs indicate that anything past 90% is BadNewsBears. Curator Also re-read the Curator docs after seeing that optimizing helps get a little bit more performance out of the cluster, and sure enough there is an 'optimize' switch. Our cron job list now looks like this: 20 0 * * * /usr/bin/curator --host camasves01 close --ol...

First - this is 100% worth the $20.  I submitted a question and within 72 hours he had written a new feature in, plus commented on a solution to a situational problem I was having.  Well done, sir. Second, this is a voluntary plug; I'm just a happy customer. We have a glorified PC that has two big ol' Matrox cards, currently powering five 50" TVs around the office via HDMI-ethernet converters.  It's not a great 'video server' solution, but it works (you can't see what's on the remote TVs from in the server room...so WindowsKey+arrows!). Anyways, each department has their own TV and I'd like to start rotating pages.  We're using Grafana which has a playlist feature, but that's limited to ' on the playlist, not on the playlist ' functionality.  We have multiple TVs that need different sets of pages displayed.  Furthermore, we have a pile of other pages to display (simple-nagios-dashboard, kopf ES plugin, Kibana dashboards, etc) th...