The Ladder Story This is a story about a kid who was afraid of heights. Somehow, he found himself in a job that required him to paint rooftops, go figure. The first couple rooftops were fairly low to the ground, and were not a big issue. But then there was one that was about 25 feet high. He needed to first climb onto a smaller roof, and then up a shaky aluminum ladder to get to the top roof. The first one was easy, he had climbed that high many times before and knew he could do it. But the 2nd one proved to be much more difficult for him. He started to climb the ladder and got about half way up and looked down. He could see the small cars below, could feel the nimble ladder beneath him, and could see the tiny movements that the ladder took with each step. It was enough to send him back down the ladder. Everyone else that he was working with had already made it to the top of the ladder and were on the top of the roof. All of them were now looking down at this kid. Some...
The Problem I was recently asked to help with a perplexing issue at work. Someone accessed a web page and noticed that they were logged in as somebody else. This is a fairly dangerous issue to have. A customer could potentially be logged in as another customer and have full access to their information. Obviously, this is unwanted behavior. The only solace was that this issue was extremely rare. It was only seen a few times out of thousands of web page hits. Chasing Cookies A team of people was assembled, including myself, and we all sat and thought about the issue. We tried to wrap our heads around what was happening. My immediate thought was that this was a caching issue. But after speaking with our web developer, I learned that he controls which pages are cached and that the login page is definitely not cached. All of us were stumped. We met a few times and each time people became less and less interested in reproducing the issue. It was said by one person, “This...
Business is like steak. Too much fat, and you will not get enough nourishment to function effectively. Not enough fat, and you’ll be bland and undesired.
STOP. Look in the mirror. Proceed. If you are a web developer, the first thing that you need to know about performance tuning is that you have more power than you think. This is not so much a tutorial for you as an eye opening event. Sure you can throw more memory, more CPU power, or more disk space at the problem. And certainly, that will help. But the #1 rule that you should know is that it is unlikely that your code is already as streamlined as can be. You may need to index your database tables, or perhaps enable application caching, or maybe your SQL queries are performing inefficient joins. Whatever the case, look at your code before making your employer take money from someone else’s paycheck to pay for that new SAN and that excessive amount of RAM for you.
First, stop panicking. Openfiler is not magic. It is based on widely used open source software. The key to recovering your data is to understand the foundation of Openfiler. A well designed system has separate drives for the operating system and the data. If you have followed these principles and can no longer boot your Openfiler system, it does not necessarily mean that your data is lost. Let’s consider the following case. Your Openfiler system contains data drives in a redundant RAID configuration, and a non-redundant drive for the OS. The disk for your OS stops working because it reaches the end of its life. It happens. But your data drives are still in-tact. How do you recover? Follow these steps. Swap out the OS drive with a replacement blank drive. Install OpenFiler to the blank drive. DO NOT format any of the data disks while installing. If possible, install OpenFiler on the blank drive while it is connected to a different machine, just to ensure that it...
I recently setup an OpenVPN server. The setup is probably one of the more difficult ones, but one major advantage is that you can select any port of your choice for it to work on. That lets you connect over, let’s say, port 80 (http). The benefit is that if you want to securely browse the Internet from an open access point, you can do so with no problems.
Just got my program guide working again on my FIOS cable box. I configured my Actiontec router to bridge to my Linksys router last week. Everything was great until my program guide stopped working. It turns out that the broadband Internet ethernet port wanted exclusive access to my internal subnet. All that I had to do was assign my LAN ethernet port to a different subnet and then everything immediately worked! Words do not accurately describe the configuration. I am going to have to post a drawing.
One of my pet peeves is when people do not take ownership of their own failures. We have all been guilty of this at times. When I was new to the workforce, it was almost my mantra to pass the blame. But over the years, I have discovered that it is far better to own up your own failures than to blame others. Let’s take a look at what I have discovered are some reasons why it may seem appealing to blame others. Why do people blame others? You are insecure. You are afraid of tainting your good reputation. You want to displace anger and/or negative publicity. Let’s investigate each of those reasons and explain why it just does not make sense to think that way. You are insecure. You blame others because you doubt your own abilities and judgment enough that you defend yourself by blaming others. I believe that this is the most common reason for this behavior. Here’s the thing though. If you really are perfect at what you do, you would not make any mistakes. Nobody’s perfect! ...