July 2009 - Posts
A sysadmin unpacked the server for this website from its box, installed an operating system, patched it for security, made sure the power and air conditioning was working in the server room, monitored it for stability, set up the software, and kept backups in case anything went wrong. All to serve this webpage.
A sysadmin installed the routers, laid the cables, configured the networks, set up the firewalls, and watched and guided the traffic for each hop of the network that runs over copper, fiber optic glass, and even the air itself to bring the Internet to your computer. All to make sure the webpage found its way from the server to your computer.
A sysadmin makes sure your network connection is safe, secure, open, and working. A sysadmin makes sure your computer is working in a healthy way on a healthy network. A sysadmin takes backups to guard against disaster both human and otherwise, holds the gates against security threats and crackers, and keeps the printers going no matter how many copies of the tax code someone from Accounting prints out.
A sysadmin worries about spam, viruses, spyware, but also power outages, fires and floods.
When the email server goes down at 2 AM on a Sunday, your sysadmin is paged, wakes up, and goes to work.
A sysadmin is a professional, who plans, worries, hacks, fixes, pushes, advocates, protects and creates good computer networks, to get you your data, to help you do work — to bring the potential of computing ever closer to reality.
So if you can read this, thank your sysadmin — and know he or she is only one of dozens or possibly hundreds whose work brings you the email from your aunt on the West Coast, the instant message from your son at college, the free phone call from the friend in Australia, and this webpage.
Read more at System Administrator Appreciation Day
If you appreciate your sysadmin, why not drop them an email and let them know? If you don’t appreciate your sysadmin, maybe you should be working with TiGra Networks instead.
Windows 7 has finally RTMed (Released To Manufacturing) and the buzz is really positive, in contrast to the luke-warm reaction that Windows Vista received. Just check out the Twitter keyword #Windows7 to see what I mean. Here at TiGra Networks, our mission is to be ready to support our customers on day 1, so we’ve been running Windows 7 on all our production computers for several months. Right from the first moment I saw Windows 7 beta, several months ago, I characterised it as “Windows Vista – finished”. While Windows 7’s improvements in performance and stability certainly do give it the feel of a well-rounded product, the characterisation is a little unfair because there is actually quite a lot in Windows 7 that was never in Vista. Things like support for multi-touch screens, virtual Windows XP mode for compatibility, BitLocker To Go for encrypting removable devices, Libraries – a new way of organising your files and of course the fantastic new-look task bar.
Windows 7 beta was the most stable beta product I’ve ever seen from Microsoft and it just keeps getting better. They really got their act together for this one. I recommend it highly and advise you to upgrade at the first opportunity – subject to having appropriate hardware to run it on. Microsoft’s position on that is that anything that can run Vista will also run Windows 7 – but my recommendation is a machine with at least a Core 2 Duo CPU and 4 Gb of memory, plus the 64-bit version of Windows 7.
I wish they’d settle on a naming convention though. 3.1->95->98->Me->XP->Vista->7. That makes no sense, especially when you run ‘WinVer.exe’ and see that the version number is 6.1 (maybe that will change at RTM).
IT Professionals will be able to obtain the RTM bits from 6th August, according to sources, and we’ll be able to start upgrading our customers shortly afterwards. If you’ve heard bad things about Windows Vista and have been putting off the upgrade, now is the time. Talk to us about the ways Windows 7 can help your business or if you’d like to see a demonstration.
There is a growing trend of IT consultants selling online backup solutions. While there is no doubt that online remote backup can work if done correctly and with sufficient investment, it is often done in a way that doesn’t adequately protect servers, or is prohibitively expensive. I think this trend has more to do with the kickbacks that resellers are getting from the commercial backup providers than protecting customers’ servers.
I always advise my customers against online backup solutions. The commercial offerings today are priced per Gigabyte. which creates tension between comprehensive protection and controlling costs. This generally results in customers (often on the advice of their technology specialist) performing only partial backups to keep the costs within acceptable limits. The falsehood is that the operating system and programs don’t need to be backed up, because they can just be reinstalled from the original installation media. Well, let me tell you, if you are only backing up your users’ documents, you are not protecting your server. You can never successfully re-create your Windows Domain from the installation media. For a server, backup needs to be full-volume backup to protect the operating system, the server’s system state and configuration files, Active Directory, databases, mailboxes, log files, user accounts and settings, security settings and file permissions, web sites, and so on. Furthermore, many of these items need highly specialised backup technology to ensure a complete and accurate copy is made. I am not convinced that online backup clients adequately protect all of this data. The only technology I trust to perform this complex operation successfully, is the utility put in place by Microsoft specifically for the 
purpose. Based on Volume Shadow Copy, Small Business Server’s disk-based image backup technology produces a full-system image that not only works, but is in Virtual Hard Drive (VHD) format which can, in an emergency, be mounted and run in a virtual server.
The other question you should be asking yourself is “how long am I prepared to be offline?”. What is the potential restore time of your online backup? A nuts-and-bolts installation of Windows Small Business Server takes me at least a whole day to do before I am happy to take it live and if there is a lot of reconfiguration to do and Line-Of-Business applications to install, could take much longer. Then there is the image download time. Assuming that we’re taking full system backups and we’re prepared to accept the expense of that, then backing up will probably use some sort of differential technique so that only the changed files are transmitted each day. Restore, however, requires the entire image to be downloaded. On a typical 8Mbps DSL connection, that could take many hours, even days for a large server. A 200Gb image would take around 53 hours on an 8Mbps ADSL link, assuming absolutely ideal line conditions, but line conditions are seldom ideal and the transfer would also be vulnerable to networking outages. Maybe your backup provider will give you a copy of your backup on disk to restore from, but it will still take a day to courier that to you.
So if you’re considering online backup, think again. There are better, faster, cheaper strategies for servers. Disk-based image backups can be restored in minutes instead of hours or days and capture the entire server and all its configuration. In my view, this is a far superior solution. Online backup still has a place, but only as a second line of defence.