Year: 2012

Recently Amazon announced, (see also) “You can now create Hardware VPN connections to your VPC using static routing.”  This is great news as it greatly expands the type of devices from which a point-to-point IPSec VPN can be created to your Virtual Private Cloud.  Previously only dynamic routing was supported, which required BGP and a […]

I’m not much into self-aggrandizement, but WTH, here goes. This evening while watching a disappointing baseball game I wrote a little about what I do at work, which includes overseeing a network of systems that served over 58,000,000 page views yesterday (a new single-day record for us with much more traffic soon…). To load our […]

Recently I wrote about some code improvements we deployed that had a huge impact, causing our web services calls to be answered much quicker and saving us a fair amount of money each month. In that post I talked about using Cacti to graph server statistics (like CPU and IIS stats), and service response times. That […]

A week ago today we pushed out some code to our IIS and MS SQL servers that has had a huge impact.  In a good way – a very good way. First, a little background. I work for an online video company that has “widgets” and video “players” that load on thousands of websites millions […]

Call me old fashioned.  Say I’m stuck in the past.  Whatever.  I just don’t like a lot of the things Microsoft has done to the Windows interface/desktop over the years.  Every time I get a new computer or start up a new server certain things have to be done to make it usable, i.e. not […]

I regularly find myself trying to find the owner of a domain or needing other information, like authoritative name servers.  A few command line whois.exe programs exist out there for Windows, but the one I like best is the one by Mark Russinovich at Sysinternals.  You can visit the previous link to download or use […]

About 2:15 EDT today I began to get alarms from some of my monitoring software that it “can’t resolve hostname to IP address” for a couple of our lesser used domains.  So, after a little digging it looks like GoDaddy DNS (and other services) are down currently.

Enough is enough!  I’ve intended to write this review for some time now, but have neglected.  Now is the time. I don’t usually do product reviews but this must be said. SPOILER ALERT: DO NOT BUY the Blinc M2 with FM Tuner! And don’t expect any kind of customer support or service from Quickline Motorsports! I […]

Previously I wrote about a great Amazon AWS management tool, Elasticfox, which is, or was, an extension for Firefox.  I started using Elasticfox a few years ago when I started using Amazon’s EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) service.  At the time Amazon’s Management Console wasn’t all that great; it lacked many features and was a little […]

Have you ever wanted to have a larger root EBS volume on an EC2 Ubuntu instance?  With these steps it’s easily accomplished with minimal down time.  (Some of these steps were gleaned from this post at alestic.com.) I’m setting up a new “base” image for some servers I’m starting in Amazon’s us-west-1 region.  I started […]