Give The Gift of Cloud Backup for The Holidays
Dec 9th
Image via Wikipedia
I’m sure that like me, most of you are the tech support for the family. Every time your creepy uncle goes to a sleazy porn site, you have to stop by his house and clean up his computer’s internet VD (Viruses and Malware). You’re mom calls you because she can’t figure out how to print pictures of her precious little dog, and your dad’s hard drive is crashing every time he plays Farmville on Facebook. We at AskTheAdmin feel your pain.
How many times have you just told your family, “screw it, re-install Windows”? Of course they can’t because all of their precious files are on there, and of course they never ever back that stuff up! Why not give them the gift of backing their stuff up for them? Not just to an external hard drive that will fail in 6 months either. I’m talking about true set and forget automated cloud backup!
Back in August I wrote about how I am using some software at work to backup my servers. It’s called Crashplan. Now Crashplan has some pay versions if you want to back up to their servers, but they also give you the option to set up your own cloud solution for free! Plus it runs on Windows, Mac and Linux! That means no matter what you’re relatives use, they can backup using Crashplan.
I said cloud backup though right? This is where you come in. I recommend buying a relatively low-cost NAS device with RAID, or you can build your own Bauer-Power SAN using Ubuntu, IET, ZFS and GlusterFS. Then you can install Crashplan on your computer at home, and backup all of your friend’s and family to your redundant storage; because Crashplan will let your friends and family backup to your machine over the Internet using a simple friend code. You only pay for your home storage.
With this solution their files are offsite, and you are once again the computer guru that swooped in and saved the day!
Now when they call you after pooching their computers, you can re-install with confidence, and restore all of their essential files. You can also drop off an extra drive at their house, and back your stuff up to them. Ulterior motive? Maybe. Awesome idea? Absolutely!
The cool thing about Crashplan, besides it being free, is it also saves data using deduplication and encryption. That means the files you save for your relatives will be secure and won’t take up a lot of space. It’s a friggin’ thing of beauty!
If you decide to do this for your family over the holidays, let us know about it in the comments!
-=El Di Pablo=-
To Open Source or Not To Open Source?
Dec 8th
At my current day job, I work for a small technology start-up in La Jolla California. We offer web-based solutions for some of the nation’s top banks, and housing lenders. We also provide a database for “closing service” providers, so you can hire people like home inspectors, and exterminators at the best price when selling your house. It’s kind of like the “Orbitz” of the real estate closing market.
Any way, the company is only a few years old, and up until now we are running on a Microsoft BizSpark licensing plan. Now that we’re getting a little older though, and we are using more servers to produce our goods, we need a more robust licensing plan from Microsoft. I decided to go to one of my local VARs to work on some quotes, and what they came back with almost gave my boss a heart attack.
In this post I am strictly going to talk about Microsoft SQL Licensing. Just so you know though, the quote we got for SQL was on top of an already ridiculously high $107K three year quote for server licenses. Before I give you the quote I got for SQL, keep in mind this is only for two physical servers running SQL Enterprise.
So we got our quote from Microsoft, and it was roughly $183K for three years. Yes, for two servers it was almost $200,000! That is because at the time of this writing, they were quoting us based on the number of processors. One of the physicals servers has four processors, and the other has two. Bam! Bend us over for $200K!
On top of that, my VAR is telling me that next year Microsoft is switching to a per-core model of licensing. On my server with four procs, each proc has six cores! On the two proc box, each proc has four cores! Now my boss is starting to hyperventilate.
I’m sorry Microsoft, I know you’re just a mom and pop shop, and you’re just trying to make your way in this crazy world, but $200K is too much to pay for a database. The good news for us is that Microsoft SQL isn’t the only game in town. Good news for my company, I’m not afraid to think outside of the Microsoft box.
After getting that quote, the manager of our dev team and I started talking about moving to an Open Source database solution. First he said MySQL, but since they’re owned by Oracle now they have more strict licensing. I’m suggesting PostgreSQL.
Never heard of it? Here’s a description from their About page:
An enterprise class database, PostgreSQL boasts sophisticated features such as Multi-Version Concurrency Control (MVCC), point in time recovery, tablespaces, asynchronous replication, nested transactions (savepoints), online/hot backups, a sophisticated query planner/optimizer, and write ahead logging for fault tolerance. It supports international character sets, multibyte character encodings, Unicode, and it is locale-aware for sorting, case-sensitivity, and formatting. It is highly scalable both in the sheer quantity of data it can manage and in the number of concurrent users it can accommodate. There are active PostgreSQL systems in production environments that manage in excess of 4 terabytes of data.
Best of all, PostgreSQL provides all of their Enterprise features absolutely free under a Liberal Open Source License! With something like this we can lower our overhead, and use those cost savings to improve our bottom line.
We will have to no doubt do some serious coding changes to make sure our data is compatible with PostgreSQL, but I think in the long run, the cost savings of switching to open source will outweigh the work to get there.
What do you think? Move to an open source database? Stick with Microsoft and suck up the cost? What’s your argument for or against? Let us know in the comments.
-=El Di Pablo=-
New Favorite Packet Analyzer in The Cloud
Dec 7th
Image via Wikipedia
I have been trying to track down a network issue I’ve been having at work for the last month and a half. It’s a real pain because it only happens once a week randomly, and it only lasts for 2 to 5 minutes. Since it’s so unpredictable, it’s nearly impossible to track down how, or why it’s happening.
Anyway, I decided to setup Wireshark on a laptop, plug it into a port on my switch with mirroring enabled, and collect some network traffic. The problem I have with Wireshark is that it doesn’t display information is a way that is easy for me to read.
A buddy of mine recommended uploading my capture files to an online analyzer called CloudShark. This thing is actually pretty cool, and really easy to use. Plus it has easy graphing options so you can get a better visual idea of all the 1’s and 0’s you’re looking at.
Another cool thing about CloudShark is that once you’re capture is uploaded, you can forward the URL of your capture files to some of your Network Engineer buddies to get their take on what’s going on in your network, and they don’t need to break out any analyzers of their own. Everything is displayed right in their browser!
Here is a link to an example capture file: http://www.cloudshark.org/captures/f62e1db77ba0
One thing I did notice is that you need to use CloudShark in Internet Explorer or Firefox. It doesn’t work so well in Chrome.
Know of any other good, free and easy to use packet analyzer tools? Are they cloud based like this one? Let us know what you like to use in the comments.
-=El Di Pablo=-
How to Choose the Right Web Hosting Provider
Dec 6th
The following post was written by Melissa Schraiber of FatWallet.com. We were not paid to post this and apparently we share a love for HostGator!
Check it out below:
In today’s digital world, it is vital to have a web presence. The success of a website is directly related to its hosting, so finding the right host should always be the first step. The following list outlines the attributes of a good host.
Cost versus Value
There are many hosts who promise to deliver unlimited bandwidth and disk space along with 100 percent up-time, for a very low monthly fee. There is no such thing as unlimited in the hosting world and no host has perfect performance. There are often strings and hidden catches attached to such claims, as well.
A good host will have clearly defined limits on resources and will offer several levels of service for different needs. Those just starting out will benefit from GoDaddy promotional codes, which can be found online.
Technical Support
A proper host will offer support by phone, live chat and email. Support services should be available every day of the year, 24 hours per day.
A good way to test the level of a prospective host’s support is to contact them with pre-sales questions. How fast and well the company responds will reveal the quality of the service overall.
Uptime
Uptime is important to anyone hosting a site but especially so to businesses. Downtime equals lost revenue and reputation, so it needs to be avoided as much as possible. It should be noted that equipment and power failures happen and sometimes this is beyond the control of the host.
Quality hosts will offer 99.999 percent uptime over the course of one year, which would amount to roughly six minutes of downtime. This claim will be backed by a Service Level Agreement, which will provide a credit to the customer if uptime slips below the stated percentage.
Scalability
All websites need room to grow and this is where scalability comes in. A host should make make expanding and upgrading as painless an experience as possible.
A stable, established host offering services ranging from budget all the way up to dedicated servers is a good choice. Moving an account to a bigger hosting package or even a new server should take place with a few clicks and little to no downtime.
Along with the above guidelines, anyone considering hosting a site should first carefully consider the present and future needs of that site before embarking on the search for the right host.
What do you use for a web host? Do you have any questions? Hit us up in the comments below…
One Line ASCII Art For IM/Twitter/Facebook Status Updates
Dec 6th
At my office we use Office Communicator to keep in touch with other users in the office. It’s nice to be able to send a quick chat to someone in the next room to save yourself a trip from having to get up and go talk to someone, or pick up the phone to call them. I am a huge advocate of chat and IM.
Well, not sure if my coworkers do this, but I like to use the status update area in Office Communicator to subtly say what I’m thinking about. Sometimes that also requires a little bit of ASCII art.
Do you do the same? Awesome! Here is a list of some simple one line ASCII art you can use to put in your messages:
Ascii Text Animals
Caterpillar ,/\,/\,/\,/\,/\,/\,o
Fish <`)))><
Fish Swimming ¸.·´¯`·.´¯`·.¸¸.·´¯`·.¸><(((º>
Happy Cat <(^.^)>
Kitty cat =^..^=
Koala @( * O * )@
Loch Ness monster _mmmP
Monkey @(‘_’)@
Mouse <:3 )~~~~
Rat (to the left) <^__)~
Rat (to the right) ~(__^>
Sheep °l°(,,,,);
Spider ///\oo/\\\
Ascii Objects
Crayon ())__CRAYON___)) >
Cup of coffee [_]3
Glasses -@-@-
Needle |==|iiii|>—–
Pie fight —=======[}
Rose 1 @-}--
Rose 2 @}}>-----
Rose 3 @)}---^-----
Rose 4 @->-->---
Rose 5 --------{---(@
Ascii Faces/People
Angel ^i^
Concerned (@_@)
Heart <3
In Love <*_*>
Looking at you ô¿ô
Very Happy ^_^
Very Happy 2 [^_^]
Sleeping (-.-)Zzz…
Sleeping Baby w/Pillow [{-_-}] ZZZzz zz z…
Whoa O_o
Miscellenous Ascii Art
Ascii Waves 1 *~’`^`’~*-,._.,-*~’`^`’~*-,._.,-*~’`^`’~*
Ascii Waves 2 `’~,.,~’`'~,.,~’`'~,.,~’`'~,.,~’
Hearts w/text »-(¯`·.·´¯)->TEXT<-(¯`·.·´¯)-«
Robot d[ o_0 ]b
Text Embellishment 1 (¯`·._.·(¯`·._.·(¯`·._.· Your Text ·._.·´¯)·._.·´¯)·._.·´¯)
Text Embellishment 2 ,.-~*´¨¯¨`*·~-.¸-(_Your_Text_)-,.-~*´¨¯¨`*·~-.¸
Not only are these good for IM, but you’ll find that they work pretty good for Twitter and Facebook as well. Hell, you can use these for email signatures if you want. The sky’s the limit really.
Do you like to add a dash of ASCII to your every day? Let us know how you like to insert ASCII into your stuff in the comments.
-=El Di Pablo=-
[Via Squidoo]
Holiday Set Top Box Reviews
Dec 5th
I love this time of year. I live in San Diego, so the weather doesn’t get cold enough to snow, but it’s chilly enough to wear jackets. It’s like the best of both worlds here. I get the cold, but don’t have to do any shoveling or driving on icy roads. Win win!
Let’s be honest though, this time of year is not great because of the weather, it’s great because it is gift giving season. No matter if you are celebrating Christmas, Hanukah, Kwanzaa or Festivus. chances are pretty good that you are shopping for gifts, or someone is shopping for gifts for you. If you are in the market for set top boxes, then you may want to check out the review I did for this month’s Tech Chop!
In this episode I review the Mvix Ultio Pro MX 880HD, WD TV Live Plus, Boxee Box, and the Apple TV. Check it out!
www.TechChop.com
Got any questions about the devices mentioned in the show? Do you own a set top box? Maybe the Roku? Do you like the one you have? Looking to trade up? Let us know in the comments.
