Author: Adam Fowler

Do You Trust The Cloud Yet?

Posted on by Adam Fowler

The Cloud – Monkey (from Monkey Magic) had one, should you use it too?

Has your CIO/CEO/IT Manager done this?

Do you trust the cloud?

I would be surprised if you whole-heartedly said ‘yes’. Firstly because you’re talking back to a blog post which is quite strange behaviour, but secondly because there’s a lot of media attention going on in this space.

Just to rehash the last week, there were two major events, one from Google and the other Microsoft.

Google:

Wednesday 8th September (ish, it’s hard to gather what timezone they’re all talking about) saw a Google Docs outage. The outage lasted 52 minutes: 23 minutes from being alerted to kick off a rollback proccess which then took 24 minutes to do. Add an extra 5 minutes – the time it took for “the additional capacity restored normal function”.

The cause was due to a change they had implemented to improve real time collaboration, but the heavy load of the real world exposed a memory management bug.

Microsoft:

Wednesday 8th September again (although later in the day in America, so the 9th for Aussies) it was Microsoft’s turn. Office 365, Dynamics CRM and some other non-enterprise level services (Hotmail, Skydrive, Live stuff) were down for a few hours. This one was not as clear cut – the outage itself was for the North American data centres, which meant genereally that Australians were fine as we use another based in Singapore. The fix was an update to DNS servers, which means we all have to wait for replication of the new records around the world before everyone everywhere is without issue.

The cause for this is a bit less detailed than Google’s, with ‘DNS issues’ being claimed as the cause.

That’s scary, how do I cope with these outages?
So, would your business complain about these outages? OK yes, you probably have someone who complains about their keyboard clicking too loudly when they type, so of course someone will complain about this.

If you wanted to jump into the cloud, I’d suggest to look at a hybrid solution. This isn’t news to many readers I’m sure – multiple paths of redundancy for “everything” which includes your servers and services. For emails, you can split between your local Exchange (or even hosted) and Google Apps. Postini replays everything that goes through it to Google Apps, so your users can jump onto Google Apps in the event of an Exchange outage and continue working. Then, you’re not missing out on the feature rich options of Exchange, but the business critical emails have full redundancy.

My Conclusion:
The real summary here is – go ahead, use the Cloud. BUT – do what you should already be doing (i.e. redundancy, are you paying attention here? Good.). A single provider in the cloud is not reliable enough at this stage to be trusted for it’s own inbuilt redundancy. Trust two clouds, or one cloud and the other half on-premesis.

If you’re a small business with a portaloo full of staff, then it becomes much harder to justify. Also, is there a manual process that can be used in the event of a service failure? Business Continuity should dictate what’s required for redundancy. Maybe writing things down for a day is a completely valid way of coping with the outage, with little or no loss to the business? There’s no reason to spend money on redundancy in that sort of situation.

Google Apps and Office 365 both guarantee 99.9% uptime – sounds great, but that’s ~42 minutes a month they’re allowing for. How much would your business lose if nobody could do their computer based work for 42 minutes during the day, every month on average? Over a year, that’s slightly over 1 full working day. If the cost of that outweighs the cost of getting a second cloud service or some other means of redundancy, then it’s already paid for itself. Getting a service refund after the event isn’t really what people care about, they just want it to work.
Sources:

Google Docs Blog – http://googledocs.blogspot.com/2011/09/what-happened-wednesday.html
Google Postini: http://www.google.com/postini/continuity.html
Windows Blog – http://windowsteamblog.com/windows_live/b/windowslive/archive/2011/09/08/current-hotmail-and-skydrive-issues.aspx
Office 365 Tweet – http://twitter.com/#!/Office365/status/112008132443648000
ZDNet Microsoft Outage – http://www.zdnet.com/blog/microsoft/outage-hits-microsoft-crm-online-office-365-customers/10359

Group Policy Preferences – What Takes Preference?

Posted on by Adam Fowler
How do you know if one Group Policy Preference occurs before another?

Hi again everyone,

Today I’m sharing something that I have just found out about, thanks to the very helpful Alan Burchill (Twitter) who is a MVP in Group Policy. Thanks Alan!

So, I’ve talked about Group Policy Preferences before – wonderful, and not widely used enough yet – but they’ll do pretty much anything you could do with a login script with the added benefits of high granularity, GUID and targeting based on almost any criteria you can think of rather than writing complex scripts and error reporting in event viewer.

I came into a scenario where I needed to delete all of the files in a directory, then copy several files back into that same directory. As I created this, I then wondered how I’d make sure that the delete occured before the copy. If it happened the other way around, the end result would be an empty directory!

If you’re doing multiple settings of the same type, then they get an Order number as per the screenshot below. You can move the order around, to make sure things occur in their proper turn. Something like environmnet variables may need this, since your second variable may use the first variable as part of it’s path, and if it was the wrong order then you wouldn’t have the first environment variable set before it was called:

gppenv

Simple enough. But, what if you need an environment variable in place before you map a drive using that variable? The next screenshot is from the same policy, using one of the variables above to map a drive. But, if you look at the order number, it’s also a 1. The order is only relevant for items in that same area (as per this example, Drive Maps).

 gppdrive

 

 

How do you know what will happen first? This is what Alan Burchill found out for me. There is a set order in which each client side extension runs, and to view this you need to delve into the registry at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\WindowsNT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\GPExtensions

 

gppreg

The order is based on the GUID. I’ve highlighted the second one, which is Group Policy Environment – the environment variables. They’re all self explanatory once you click on them, or you can search what you’re looking for and then ensure that they are in the order you need them to be. There’s one exception to this, which is {35378EAC-683F-11D2-A89A-00C04FBBCFA2} but that’s a blank entry… possibly so you can force something to be first if needed? We’re not quite sure on that bit!

I hope that helps you if you ever run into this sort of thing. There are other workarounds you can do, such as creating two seperate GPO’s and put those GPO’s in the correct order, but best practise is to have as few GPO’s as possible.Anyway, for my example above, the environment variables come before drive mappings which is {5794DAFD-BE60-433f-88A2-1A31939AC01F} so we’re safe.

How I started in I.T.

Posted on by Adam Fowler

Hi,
I thought this would be a good discussion point. I’m sure we have some readers who have a passion for I.T. but may not know where to start for their career, and there’d be some interesting stories on how some of us managed to get our way into the industry.

Personally, growing up I wasn’t really sure what I wanted to do – but I did know that I liked computers, and spent a lot of time on them from a very young age. My Dad was a computer technician in the hardware and building PC’s sense – so I sort of assumed I’d do that. After doing some work experience with him, and being put on a production line (he was higher up than that) being told to sort out a box of screws to different sizes, I decided I probably didn’t want to be a computer technician after all.
After finishing high school, I then had an opportunity to do two weeks work at my Dad’s new place of employment, where he was the systems builder and tester. I was excited to be earning $13 an hour back in mid 1999 but the job was pretty much just building PC’s out of components, installing an image and testing that the basics worked. Again, it put me off being a computer technician, but I had no idea what else to do.

I then decided I’d do a TAFE course in Diploma of I.T. It would take 3 years to do, and from what I can remember, the first lessons I had were: Programming (something I knew I didn’t want to do), Networking (Interested in this but was too basic so lost interest), Flow Charts (this wasn’t what the course was called, but that’s all it seemed to be and was incredibly boring) and I don’t even remember the other two. I didn’t last long, dropped out and gave up on my IT career as I still didn’t really know what I wanted.

Jump forward 6 months, and I ended up applying for a call centre job. It paid well for a 19 year old ($28k back in late 2000) and thought I might as well give it a try and see how it went. 3 months into this job, and IT role came up in the company, to support the call centre itself. I considered applying, but missed the deadline and thought I won’t bother because I have no experience. The job came up again, as no suitable applicants had applied yet. This time I thought that I might as well give it a shot, and actually got it! From then on, my career continuted to be in I.T.

That’s how my I.T. career started, and despite my efforts, I landed a job. Part of it was dumb luck, part passion of a hobby, and partly being able to demonstrate the right skills and knowledge requierd. I had no qualifications or formal training either!

So, what can I tell you from all this? Aim to do what you want, and if you don’t know – just try something else. You might find a job you like, but even if you don’t it will open up more opportunities, contacts and experiences to help your career along.

Hopefully some of you can share your stories below as myself and others would love to read.

How did you get into I.T. ?

Posted on by Adam Fowler

Hi,

I thought this would be a good discussion point. I’m sure we have some readers who have a passion for I.T. but may not know where to start for their career, and there’d be some interesting stories on how some of us managed to get our way into the industry.

Personally, growing up I wasn’t really sure what I wanted to do – but I did know that I liked computers, and spent a lot of time on them from a very young age. My Dad was a computer technician in the hardware and building PC’s sense – so I sort of assumed I’d do that. After doing some work experience with him, and being put on a production line (he was higher up than that) being told to sort out a box of screws to different sizes, I decided I probably didn’t want to be a computer technician after all.

After finishing high school, I then had an opportunity to do two weeks work at my Dad’s new place of employment, where he was the systems builder and tester. I was excited to be earning $13 an hour back in mid 1999 but the job was pretty much just building PC’s out of components, installing an image and testing that the basics worked. Again, it put me off being a computer technician, but I had no idea what else to do.

I then decided I’d do a TAFE course in Diploma of I.T. It would take 3 years to do, and from what I can remember, the first lessons I had were: Programming (something I knew I didn’t want to do), Networking (Interested in this but was too basic so lost interest), Flow Charts (this wasn’t what the course was called, but that’s all it seemed to be and was incredibly boring) and I don’t even remember the other two. I didn’t last long, dropped out and gave up on my IT career as I still didn’t really know what I wanted.

Jump forward 6 months, and I ended up applying for a call centre job. It paid well for a 19 year old ($28k back in late 2000) and thought I might as well give it a try and see how it went. 3 months into this job, and IT role came up in the company, to support the call centre itself. I considered applying, but missed the deadline and thought I won’t bother because I have no experience. The job came up again, as no suitable applicants had applied yet. This time I thought that I might as well give it a shot, and actually got it! From then on, my career continuted to be in I.T.

That’s how my I.T. career started, and despite my efforts, I landed a job. Part of it was dumb luck, part passion of a hobby, and partly being able to demonstrate the right skills and knowledge requierd. I had no qualifications or formal training either!

So, what can I tell you from all this? Aim to do what you want, and if you don’t know – just try something else. You might find a job you like, but even if you don’t it will open up more opportunities, contacts and experiences to help your career along.

Hopefully some of you can share your stories below as myself and others would love to read.

CCNA – CCENT Study Experience

Posted on by Adam Fowler

I thought I’d share with you my experience with taking the first steps to be Cisco certified. I didn’t really know what to expect when I started, but hopefully for anyone else considering doing their CCNA (Cisco Certified Network Associate) or CCENT (Cisco Certified Entry Networking Technician).

This is part 1 of 2, as I’ve only gone so far as doing CCENT. It’s half way to becoming a qualified CCNA, and a lot of good fundementals in general networking. To explain further, the first half of the CCNA course is called CCENT 1 (which is just CCENT) and the second half is CCENT 2. You can either do a seperate exam for CCENT 1 & 2, or just a full CCNA exam which contains questions from both courses.

At this point, I’ll quickly mention that if you’ve done your CCNA pre 2007, the course changed and became a LOT harder. So if you see someone’s resume listing CCNA, find out when they did it. Also, Cisco certs are only valid for 3 years unless you do another exam!

So what did I do? I started by getting my employer to pay for me to do a week at DDLS (Dimension Data Learning Services) to study in a classroom environment. I really enjoyed this. The general topics covered were:

  • What is a Network?
  • OSI 7 layer model
  • TCP/UDP basics
  • Ethernet – LANs, Switches, Hubs, Routers
  • Wireless basics
  • Subnetting and Binary
  • Cisco basic router configuration
  • DHCP router configuration
  • Static and dynamic routing
  • WAN basics, including NAT
  • Management and security of Cisco routers

This is actually a lot to take in for a week. You might look at this list and go ‘yeah I know all that stuff it’s easy!’ But this course really gets down to the whys and hows, not just ‘Do X and Y happens’. You start to understand what’s really involved when you do anything on a network – what data gets put into a packet, how the packet gets from A to B, what changes and stays the same… many people have a general grasp to get by, but you’ll get a proper understanding of how data goes down through the 7 OSI layers and back up again at the other end. What’s the OSI model? Have a quick read here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSI_model

Anyway, I got through the week and was keenly learning the whole time. I thought I pretty much knew it all, and was ready to go sit the exam. A few things happened, and it ended up being 2 months before I sat it. A few days before I flicked through the books provided to refresh myself, and confidently went in to take the exam.

Now, there’s a few things about the exam you should know. Firstly, it’s 1 1/2 hours long – and you’ll pretty much need all that time even if you know what you’re doing. Secondly, there’s labs in the exam – so it’s not just multiple choice, but you have to log onto routers and switches, run commands, work out what the answers are and pick the correct choice. Thirdly, you can’t go back once you OK a question. This means time management is really important, as you can’t just fly through once then go through again to re-think your difficult questions, or try and work out answers based on previous questions. You can’t even go back and look at what you answered previously.

Despite all this, I had been told subnetting was a really important part of the exam, and that’s what you should focus on so you can calculate it all in your head. I practised and managed to do this, so walked in confidently…and failed. I was also told, people can do these exams 2-4 times on average, so don’t expect to get it right first time.

I took another week to study, and failed again! I’d learnt everything I wasn’t sure in the exam, but the second time I took it none of those questions even came up, and there was a second bunch of questions I really wasn’t sure of! Even more annoyingly though, I failed by ~1 question.

Third time lucky? Yes. I passed, and was very relieved to get it behind me. I can tell you this is a very difficult exam, and you need to know a huge amount of stuff (both logically and just brain dumps of terminoligies and acronyms) to be able to pass. For example, DHCP – you don’t need to just understand what it’s for, but you may need to know what TCP commands are sent between the server and client, and what order they’re in. You’ll need to have a full understanding of the contents of a TCP packet, and what information changes in it depending where it is on the network. You’ll even need a full understanding of a Cisco switch and how it’s configuration might have security risks, and what you’d need to change, plus remember those commands off the top of your head. You’ll need to convert IP addresses like 192.168.1.44/29 into the network mask 255.255.255.248, and know that the network address is 192.168.1.40 with a broadcast address of 192.168.1.47 leaving you 6 available hosts (I hope that’s right as I worked it out as I went along :) ). What are the channels available on wireless, and which ones should you use and why? What are all the differences between 802.11a, b & g?

So the point I’m trying to make here is there’s a lot to know, but it’s all really good information to have. Once I did the course, I went back to work and really had a much better understanding of what was going on generally, instead of just knowing ‘if I put this here, it works’ I now know why.

You don’t need to go to a classroom though, there’s some great books available, as well as resources like CBT Nuggets which are training videos, very similar to a classroom setup.

I’d recommend this course to anyone who deals with networking, even on a fairly basic level. You’ll need to commit yourself to studying and knowing the contents of the course inside out, but you’ll come out the other end much more knowledgeable and confident of what’s happening on the networks you use.