Otherwise titled: “The Danger of Repairing Computer Systems Instead of Replacing Them”

We sent a one year old Sony Tape library out for repair. Was it worth it? It seems impossible that a three thousand five hundred dollar device should be scrapped that quickly. But in critical networks, it’s debatable if this equipment should be used again. (more…)

The virtual server is a flexible method for testing critical application upgrades, since new test environments can be created almost instantly. The conventional approach would be to back up your application or make a complete server backup. Each of these backup methods do not guarantee that a roll back will work if the upgrade fails. Deploying real hardware for testing is expense, but once you have a Virtual Server environment, you can quickly test, retest upgrades with minimal cost.

Duplex mismatch is a hidden problem on many networks. On an Ethernet network each device has a duplex setting, half or full; when two devices disagree about duplex, a duplex mismatch occurs. This degrades network performance. In business networks ISP’s usually manage routers and end users usually manage firewalls. Does either party check the duplex setting of the others device? Usually not! The result is collisions and performance issues. A typical cause of this problem is when one device (often the ISP’s router) is hard coded to full duplex and the end users device is set to auto-negotiate. One would expect the auto-negotiate setting to be capable of matching the setting of the ISP’s router, but it is not. This combination will result in a half duplex connection and less then optimum performance. Auto-negotiate works best when both devices are set in this mode. If your devices are connected to a managed switch, see how your devices are linking up to each other then correct the duplex setting if necessary. If you are NOT using a managed switch it will be more difficult to see or correct this issue.

Fragmented packets are not always easy to detect and many people do not realize that this can cause significant network problems, especially with VPN tunnels. Selecting the correct MTU size in Site-To-Site Tunnels is critical because an IP packet with a size of 1500, which is the standard ethernet MTU size, will often be too large. The encoded VPN packet is somewhat larger that the origiaal packet size, resulting in fragmentation. This fragmentation can cause VPN tunnels to drop, and is hard to detect.

Using the “ping” command you can test to find the optimum packet size and then adjust the MTU accordingly. There are a number of PC programs that will also adjust the MTU.

Typing ‘ping -f -l 1492 www.google.com’ where 1492 represent the packet size, will display the ping response time and will also display a message if the packets are too large and will be fragmented. You can adjust the packet size up or down in 8 byte increments until the best response that does not get fragmented is produced.

Micro-Point has been using Super Micro Servers for the past five years. The New York Times has just published an article about this company. Super Micro is thriving because it offers state-of-the-art technology and superior performance. Companies such as eBay and Yahoo rely on these servers.

In January Micro-Point will launch a new help desk system that allows users to email service requests and track their open service issues.

Clients can enter their own tickets in a web interface or by email
Tickets can be autogenerated by our 24X7 monitoring system

More details to follow…

Oekaki- in Japanese it means ‘doodle’ or ‘scribble,’ but it is really a term to describe the act of drawing. Now, while a good deal of Oekaki boards are indeed in Japanese, there are plenty in English as well. A good example of a collection of oekaki boards in English is Oekaki Central www.oekakicentral.com. (more…)