After working for 3 months for my new employer as a system administrator, a disaster finally breaks out on one of the mission critical server last weekend before I had time to implement any preventive measures. This breakdown could have cost the company to shutdown its business if we were not fortunate enough.

Outdated IT Structure

In this company, we have a very outdated IT structure. There are about ten file servers and each of them stores a different set of data for different departments. All of the servers are at least 7 years old. The one with the highest capacity could only hold up to about 150GB of data. It was probably when a server’s hard disks are full, another server is installed to hold more data.

Since each server holds a different set of data, there were no redundancy of the data. The server that broke down last week holds the most critical data in our company. We produce a new product everyday based on those data. Without them, we wouldn’t be able to make it and we could lose all our clients at once.

Improper and Insufficient Backup Plan

There are also two tape backup devices, one external and one internal. Each tape backup device is responsible for backing up data on a group of servers. There is a software that we use to perform the backups every night. The software has its own database to store information about what has been backed up. However, the device that backs up the data on the broken server happened to be on the same machine. The result? We couldn’t retrieve the data from the backup tapes because the backup software’s database was inaccessible. Even if we were able to retrieve the data from the tapes, we wouldn’t have enough time to do that before our deadline.

Whose Fault?

The cause of the whole situation was determined to be a bad memory stick. The server had 2 sticks of 256MB PC133 ECC memory and one of them had gone bad. The server requires two sticks at a time to operate and we were unable to find any spare RAM of the same type in our office. After many hours of thinking and searching for a resolution, we ended up pulling one stick of RAM from two other servers and install them on the critical machine temporarily until we get replacement memory.

My (And Your) Learning

It was a simple problem but evolved into a deadly situation due to several factors.

• Insufficient stocking of spare parts, especially for outdated hardware
• No real-time redundancy of critical data
• Backup device installed on the same machine as the data being backed up

The first point can be easily countered if you keep spare parts on hand. However, if the hardware is too old, it can be very expensive to purchase spare parts or they may not even be available. Therefore, it is justifiable to upgrade your hardware to newer technologies after certain period of time, especially when your old ones are still working at this moment.

When planning for data backups and redundancy, it is important to factor in the amount of time it takes to retrieve data from the backup media. The importance of real-time data redundancy is relative to how critical they are to your daily business operations. If it is highly critical, then tape backups are not sufficient to keep your data online all the time.

If your company have a similar IT structure like mine, then you should start looking into the three areas listed above immediately before anything goes wrong, which will happen very likely.

If you are still using an older version of the WS FTP Pro client and all of a sudden your remote system pane has disappeared, there is a very quick way to solve this issue.

Click on “Tools”, then “Options”. On the “General” tab, click on the button that says “Reset Window Locations”. By resetting the window locations, the remote system directory list will reappear.

Sometimes, when a user is using Outlook Express to receive an email that was sent from Outlook, the email attachment may seems missing from Outlook Express. If you check the size of the email, it is quite large for a plain text email and the attachment is actually there but you just can’t see it. This is a common problem with Outlook when it is set to compose email in Rich Text format.

Solution 1:

There are two ways to solve this issue. The easier way is to ask the sender to configure his/her Outlook so that emails are composed in either HTML or Plain Text format.

1. In Outlook, click on “Tools” > “Options”

2. Under “Mail Format” tab, change the message format to either Plain Text or HTML.

Solution 2:

The second option is to use other program to extract the attachment from the email.

1. In Outlook Express, drag the email to the desktop. You will have a .eml file.

2. Open the .eml file with Winzip and extract the “winmail.dat” file.

3. Open winmail.dat with fentun.exe and you should see the original attachments of the email. (You can Google on fentun.exe and you should be able to find a download link of the utility.)

After leaving this blog on its own for over a year, I have decided to blog again. The first thing I have done was to upgrade Wordpress from version 2.6 to the newest version 2.8.4. I simply followed the 3-steps suggested by WordPress and the upgrade was done successfully. I then have chosen a new theme (currently using it) to give it a more professional look. All of these were done within an hour.

Stretched Visual Editor

When I was writing the first couple sentences of this post, I realized that the Visual editor has been stretched so wide such that it went under the Publish box. After quickly googling for the problem, I found that it was due to the TinyMCE Advanced plugin that I have installed when I first started this blog. The Visual editor is back to normal after deactivating the plugin.

Looking Back…

Looking back at the traffic statistics for the past year, I am surprised about the consistent amount of visits per month it has generated even when it has not been updated for well over a year. I am even more surprised that some of my posts got ranked in the first page in Google for certain keyword combinations. For example, searching for “telus modem” in Google and my post is showing up in the first position. I think this is one of the cool things about blogging as you can get lots of visitors all of a sudden with just one weird post.

Before you actually start building a website for your client using Joomla, you first need to understand the requirements and have a general idea of how to meet those requirements. So you will need to sit down with your client and ask him a number of questions to help you gain a better understanding of the website. The following is a list of questions you should ask.

1. What is the purpose of the website? Is it for selling products? Is it for selling products and services? Or, is it for conveying information?
2. What are the big sections on the website? (e.g. Home, Products, News, Contact, FAQ)
3. Does it support multiple languages?
4. Does it have restricted areas where only registered users can view the restricted content?
5. Will it send out newsletters to subscribed users?
6. Is there a theme color representing the company?
7. Are contents updated frequently or are they pretty much static?
8. Will there be any video streaming contents?

This is just a very short list of the questions you can ask but they are some good questions to get started. Some questions will lead to more questions, depending on the responses. For example, if the purpose of the website is to sell products online, then you will need to ask about the payment and shipping methods, return policy, customer information, and so on. Remember, the more information you can gather and the more specific the information is, the easier for you to build the website. The gathered information will determine how to configure Joomla, what plug-ins you need to use, what kind of template to choose, and so on. So it is important for you to spend the time with your client to discuss all the requirements of the website.

Research Domain Names

At this stage, you should also ask your client what domain name they want to use. Most likely it is somewhat similar to the company name. You should provide a few choices for your client to choose from. However, before providing the list to your client, you should first research on the availability of each domain name. If a domain is already taken, then don’t include it on the list. To check the availability, you can search for the WHOIS record of a domain using some online WHOIS lookup tools such as the following:

http://www.internic.net/whois.html 

http://whois.domaintools.com 

You can simply enter a domain name in one of these sites to search for its WHOIS record. If the WHOIS record exist for a specific domain, then it means the domain is already taken and it will tell you who the registrant and registrar are. If the WHOIS record doesn’t exist, then it means the domain is available.