This sounds like the scheme we used to use when I was at Vivendi Universal. It was very successful even if the names weren't quite memorable.
I definitely like the idea of using CNAMEs to give department servers fun names for their groups; but I wouldn't go overboard. Most end users I know don't really care to name their servers, they just need a page they can look up to find the right server name. Which brings me to my next point...
No matter what naming you choose, create and maintain an IT department wiki. The instant you create a server, open up a new wiki page for it and make notes on whatever you did to the server. If stuff fails or if it bombs out or needs to be rebuilt, keep a running log on the wiki of what happened to it. Makes disaster recovery much easier and gives everyone a solid place to go to for documentation.
At my startup company, we named servers after notable videogame characters. It was quite nifty when we had three servers; it stayed fun for years. But when we reached 30 servers, gradually problems crept in. One machine needed to be rebuilt and the name kept getting reassigned. Similar names were confusing.
Server naming schemes are cute until you outgrow them. Hint: Determine for yourself when you outgrow them. We now name servers by their function and their sequence number.
Some executives tasked a junior guy with forecasting how much usage their new network would get back in 1997.
He wrote a spreadsheet that multiplied the "expected number of users" by the "expected data amount per user."
He produced three forecasts for each: high, medium, and low. The end result was a tic-tac-toe board of "here's how much network we'd have to build for each of these nine forecasts".
The resulting 3x3 grid was tossed into a board meeting where uninformed executives argued "this is too high" or "this is too low" mostly because of how much money they wanted to spend, rather than how realistic the numbers were.
Then they published whatever number they settled on in their contract. And as soon as their competition thought they could get a leg up, the competitors issued a press release "We're 1GB/month more than the other company!" until rapidly everyone settled on the same number.... Or am I too cynical about business?
I concur with what others have said. There are numerous services, being provided by Azure, that are completely unreachable, and have been so for longer than seven hours.
AT&T is scheming that they will be able to trick customers into paying more for their data. Their "choice of plans" approach penalizes everyone except those who know what their usage will be in advance. This shouldn't be permitted; it's a form of taking advantage of unsophisticated consumers.
A good regulation would say "If you offer a choice of multiple billing plans to your customers, you must automatically switch the customer at the end of each month to the plan that would charge them the least." Then AT&T can charge whatever covers costs most effectively for their business, but consumers don't have to expend effort every month figuring out when to change their plans.
Or, heck, just insist that data providers move to packet-based billing like a water meter or an electricity meter. That seems fair.
It stays on my belt out of the way, along with my personal phone...
This is the key bit. Very few companies nowadays spend money on a separate work phone for executives. Over the past decade, virtually all companies I know have abandoned the "Company provides you with a separate phone" policy and instead gone towards "key executives get reimbursed for their personal phone expense," or "company provides an iOS phone".
When people buy iOS devices and Android devices for their personal use, and when an iOS / Android devices provide more functionality than a blackberry device, a company would be stupid to pay for a second phone for each person when there's no need to double up.
Thank you for this post. I always enjoy reading Slashdot when I get a stray comment from someone who is knowledgeable about a topic.
It did crush my little 10-year old spirit a bit to realize that the Space Shuttle couldn't go to the moon and didn't have the thrust to get much beyond LEO. But every time I'm lucky enough to visit JPL and see the amazing things people can do with carefully tuned science and technology, I am glad to be able to watch some of the things people like you do.
Re:"Quikster" split a dumb move to begin with
on
Netflix Kills Qwikster
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Netflix subscribed to a management theory called "eating your own lunch." The idea is that any business, if you wait around long enough, will get mummified as you keep trying to protect the revenue generated by your ancient business model. The theory says that, as the big company keeps struggling to keep its moribund business alive, a younger, hungrier competitor with a slightly different business model will steal your lunch. So, the theory goes, you should eat your own lunch and embark on your own variant business models. That way, when the business world shifts, you'll still be in business.
The theory points to such past projects as the CD industry, Blockbuster, and others. The idea is that such industries failed because they were too wedded to their ideas to change.
The trouble is, Netflix went overboard. They had two different business models running perfectly smoothly side by side. There was no mummification, nothing preventing them from being innovative or seizing on the new streaming business. In fact, their DVD-by-mail business was helping them wield great power in the movie industry, and helping them to get deals for streaming content.
So if they were paying attention clearly, the only reason to kill off the DVD-by-mail business is if it was scaring off the customers, starving the company of funds, or somehow preventing innovation. None of those were true. I'm glad to see they came to their senses.
This guy got caught up in his metaphor and the article doesn't impart much useful information. There's probably a few nuggets of worthwhile advice there about documenting or specifications or vendor lock in. Next time, focus on the IT part and less on the "Dante's Inferno" part.
You are a jerk. Stop behaving like the mere idea of regulation is inappropriate.
Regulations make our world better. Virtually all of them are good. Some of them are idiotic or generate more nuisance than benefit. If you are willing to engage with the government and view our social contract as a two way street, you, yes you, can influence laws and encourage better regulations to be written.
As other people have noted, government safety, environmental and fuel consumption regulations are for mass produced street legal vehicles. Exemptions exist for people who want to produce prototype cars or vehicles that don't meet these regulations. In most cases you simply have to pay an extra fee to make sure you are being responsible for your vehicle.
Really, do you know what you accomplish with your hatred of government? You are destroying the social contract of our society. The reason our country is great is because people work together to improve our lives. I'm really scared that people like you are somehow winning the argument, and that eventually you will infect everyone with the idea that other people are "opponents" rather than citizens to be treated equally. Every time you express disdain for the government, we get one step closer to being a wild-west, free for all Somalia-type country where anything goes provided you have a gun in your pocket to back it up.
Do you know who won in the wild west? The lawmen won. They had guns just like the bad guys; but when they came into a town with no law and no government they improved it. Your ancestors would be sick to hear that you are so upset over taxes and regulation that you're willing to throw away all civilization to be free of them.
Where did you find a 160MB driver? The last HP printer driver I downloaded was 534MB. And yet for some reason it wasn't an ISO, it was a single executable file that took 15-20 minutes to install and unpackage.
They had an alternative 4MB driver that only included the printer definition. However, the 4MB driver didn't include the scanning capability.
Also, I've noticed that HP printers take about 1 minute to come in or out of standby mode; so printing a single page takes ~2 minutes. On any other modern printer the same page is virtually instantaneous.
Back in the '90s I refused to buy any printer other than an HP; nowadays I only buy no-name rebadged printers from Dell and high performance network copiers. It's sad how far they've fallen.
FileZilla - Their FTP client is wonderful for all the partners I communicate with. Their server is also fantastic although it doesn't host SFTP. WinSCP - Just like FileZilla, but scriptable from the command line. The user interface is less nice though. ImgBurn - Replaces all those crappy CD-burning programs that vendors love to pre-install. 7-Zip - A bit better than ZIP, compresses a bit more, runs a bit faster, and it reads all those lame formats like RAR plus awesome formats like.tar.gz. Notepad++ - The best text editor out there. FFMPEG - Command line conversion for videos! PDFCreator - Much nicer than Adobe PDF and free. Putty - Many of you have said it, but it's still awesome.
Stuff that's free but still useful, well, mostly Foxit Reader.
That Windows Phone interface just looks terrible. It's supposed to give me a nifty "at-a-glance" view of everything. But because each tile has its own layout and style, no two tiles looks similar and it makes it impossible to get an easy overview of what's pending.
Also, what kind of a guy thinks of the idea of having Metro half-off-the-screen at all times? There are clearly better ways to communicate "there's more, scroll right!" without looking ugly.
I agree. Since I hate reading six page articles in tiny chunks I forwarded to the end and missed this. I will remember to be more skeptical of Phoronix in the future. Comparisons of operating systems without identical hardware just aren't appropriate.
Next time, find the greatest common denominator hardware and do a real test.
What's the process to go about using this if I'm currently using round robin for say 10 servers? Do I need to switch to a DNS server that can obey your extra tag and select the correct closest IP?
Correction: Leave JPL alone to do what it is good at. The rest of NASA couldn't bang two rocks together to start a fire.
JPL is a microcosm of everything that was ever right about the United States Space Program.
In case you're wondering: * JPL does all the robotic missions. You know, the ones that last ten years on Mars when they were only supposed to last for 90 days. * JPL develops the awesome planet-exploring craft. The ones that learn something new. * JPL manages the successful spacecraft that were launched decades ago and are still going (i.e. they are responsible for the remaining pioneer and voyager data and craft)
Check them out. If you have a chance, visit their "open house" day. You'll see more awesome robots than you can shake a stick at. http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/
Governments can do good things. Just because you grew up in a time after government solved most of peoples' major problems doesn't mean you should now turn against government.
A hundred years ago, people were suffering under the lack of a social safety net, unregulated robber barons, unfair working conditions, and virtually no government investment in infrastructure and science. During the 1900s, we accomplished many things by careful, measured application of taxes, investment, and regulation. Many of these things are good; some of them are poorly designed and should be revised. If you and your kind succeed in repealing every regulation, tax, and investment, our society will collapse.
Sensible government investment and regulation should be supported, not railed against.
I am sad that anything that involves lasers is automatically an Austin Powers Shark joke. Real Genius is by far the better and funnier movie. Please help endorse the correct kind of nostalgic references.
This is clearly objectively correct and in no way affected by my bias for and love of Real Genius. I don't care that it was probably the only movie I've ever seen that included real hacking and appropriate technology references.
MVNO means "mobile virtual network operator", which describes someone who buys bandwidth from AT&T, TMobile, Sprint, Verizon and uses it to run their own brand of phones. All those little companies you see are basically MVNOs.
Just keep in mind this isn't an RPG, where saved data prevents you from seeing the beginning. This is a shooter game where your high scores and unlocks are permanently saved to the card. I suppose it's sad that you can't restore everything back to its original locked state and get the pleasure of unlocking each item individually, but I doubt it's as bad as everyone fears.
Many comments to this post say "You should have read the fine print, tough luck." Or another variation: "I'd never trust a corporation enough to work for shares." Or "When you left the company you should have expected that this would happen."
Why do we as people allow big corporations with large legal staff to just add "gotcha" clauses into their contracts? In theory, this country and this law system are supposed to be tools to ensure that everyone participates on a level playing field. Why can't both sides of people who signed a contract deserve equal justice? Why should it always be the huge corporation who gets to leverage their advantage in a contract?
It's not a good idea to constantly blame individual people for their failure to anticipate these problems in advance. Do we really want to create a "gotcha" society where people who fail to read every single line of fine print can get horrendously screwed at the last minute? Should each corporation be allowed to insert a "gotcha" clause into their contract to reclaim everything they promised? How about if GM had a gotcha clause that allowed them to repossess cars if they were ever forced to declare bankruptcy?
Gotcha clauses in contracts aren't nice and they really shouldn't be legal. Contracts between a company that handles hundreds of similar contracts each year and an employee that does one contract in a lifetime aren't likely to be fair unless there are some rules in place. I am okay with capitalism having rules.
I'm the guy who posted (accidentally sent it in via anonymous).
1) I like the idea of programs like DenyHosts and Fail2Ban; as some people mentioned FileZilla also has a nifty "auto-ban" option which I've used too. I specifically like using a shared list of bad hosts; that was really what I was asking for, so thank you all! Totally answered my question.
2) Switching from FTP is indeed an option. I originally started by using FTPS, which is nicely supported by FileZilla but not by many other programs. The trouble was that a many users had routing difficulties and were unable to reach the FTPS server from their location. The worst part was that many routing difficulties were transient: when they were at the office it would fail, when they were at starbucks it would work, when they were at a hotel it would fail, etc.
3) I would wager that SFTP is pretty much the right solution. I figure I'll get started on looking for an SFTP replacement for FileZilla server.
Interestingly enough, Randy Pitchford's super successful game Borderlands was probably partly successful due to its multiplayer co-op, which was tons of fun.
I'm truly saddened to see so many people took this article summary so literally. If you read TFA, it's actually a very bright, intelligent, humorous example of programming insight. I found it a very delightful read and I wholeheartedly felt that the article presented its thoughts lightheartedly and without expectation of seriousness. To hear all the commenters here, it's as if the article ran puppies over with a steamroller.
Please guys - I'm all for silly commentary. But read the article if you're going to pretend to write something clever. It's thoroughly tongue-in-cheek.
Slashdot Mirror
This sounds like the scheme we used to use when I was at Vivendi Universal. It was very successful even if the names weren't quite memorable.
I definitely like the idea of using CNAMEs to give department servers fun names for their groups; but I wouldn't go overboard. Most end users I know don't really care to name their servers, they just need a page they can look up to find the right server name. Which brings me to my next point...
No matter what naming you choose, create and maintain an IT department wiki. The instant you create a server, open up a new wiki page for it and make notes on whatever you did to the server. If stuff fails or if it bombs out or needs to be rebuilt, keep a running log on the wiki of what happened to it. Makes disaster recovery much easier and gives everyone a solid place to go to for documentation.
At my startup company, we named servers after notable videogame characters. It was quite nifty when we had three servers; it stayed fun for years. But when we reached 30 servers, gradually problems crept in. One machine needed to be rebuilt and the name kept getting reassigned. Similar names were confusing.
Server naming schemes are cute until you outgrow them. Hint: Determine for yourself when you outgrow them. We now name servers by their function and their sequence number.
Some executives tasked a junior guy with forecasting how much usage their new network would get back in 1997.
He wrote a spreadsheet that multiplied the "expected number of users" by the "expected data amount per user."
He produced three forecasts for each: high, medium, and low. The end result was a tic-tac-toe board of "here's how much network we'd have to build for each of these nine forecasts".
The resulting 3x3 grid was tossed into a board meeting where uninformed executives argued "this is too high" or "this is too low" mostly because of how much money they wanted to spend, rather than how realistic the numbers were.
Then they published whatever number they settled on in their contract. And as soon as their competition thought they could get a leg up, the competitors issued a press release "We're 1GB/month more than the other company!" until rapidly everyone settled on the same number. ... Or am I too cynical about business?
I concur with what others have said. There are numerous services, being provided by Azure, that are completely unreachable, and have been so for longer than seven hours.
AT&T is scheming that they will be able to trick customers into paying more for their data. Their "choice of plans" approach penalizes everyone except those who know what their usage will be in advance. This shouldn't be permitted; it's a form of taking advantage of unsophisticated consumers.
A good regulation would say "If you offer a choice of multiple billing plans to your customers, you must automatically switch the customer at the end of each month to the plan that would charge them the least." Then AT&T can charge whatever covers costs most effectively for their business, but consumers don't have to expend effort every month figuring out when to change their plans.
Or, heck, just insist that data providers move to packet-based billing like a water meter or an electricity meter. That seems fair.
It stays on my belt out of the way, along with my personal phone...
This is the key bit. Very few companies nowadays spend money on a separate work phone for executives. Over the past decade, virtually all companies I know have abandoned the "Company provides you with a separate phone" policy and instead gone towards "key executives get reimbursed for their personal phone expense," or "company provides an iOS phone".
When people buy iOS devices and Android devices for their personal use, and when an iOS / Android devices provide more functionality than a blackberry device, a company would be stupid to pay for a second phone for each person when there's no need to double up.
Thank you for this post. I always enjoy reading Slashdot when I get a stray comment from someone who is knowledgeable about a topic.
It did crush my little 10-year old spirit a bit to realize that the Space Shuttle couldn't go to the moon and didn't have the thrust to get much beyond LEO. But every time I'm lucky enough to visit JPL and see the amazing things people can do with carefully tuned science and technology, I am glad to be able to watch some of the things people like you do.
Netflix subscribed to a management theory called "eating your own lunch." The idea is that any business, if you wait around long enough, will get mummified as you keep trying to protect the revenue generated by your ancient business model. The theory says that, as the big company keeps struggling to keep its moribund business alive, a younger, hungrier competitor with a slightly different business model will steal your lunch. So, the theory goes, you should eat your own lunch and embark on your own variant business models. That way, when the business world shifts, you'll still be in business.
The theory points to such past projects as the CD industry, Blockbuster, and others. The idea is that such industries failed because they were too wedded to their ideas to change.
The trouble is, Netflix went overboard. They had two different business models running perfectly smoothly side by side. There was no mummification, nothing preventing them from being innovative or seizing on the new streaming business. In fact, their DVD-by-mail business was helping them wield great power in the movie industry, and helping them to get deals for streaming content.
So if they were paying attention clearly, the only reason to kill off the DVD-by-mail business is if it was scaring off the customers, starving the company of funds, or somehow preventing innovation. None of those were true. I'm glad to see they came to their senses.
This guy got caught up in his metaphor and the article doesn't impart much useful information. There's probably a few nuggets of worthwhile advice there about documenting or specifications or vendor lock in. Next time, focus on the IT part and less on the "Dante's Inferno" part.
You are a jerk. Stop behaving like the mere idea of regulation is inappropriate.
Regulations make our world better. Virtually all of them are good. Some of them are idiotic or generate more nuisance than benefit. If you are willing to engage with the government and view our social contract as a two way street, you, yes you, can influence laws and encourage better regulations to be written.
As other people have noted, government safety, environmental and fuel consumption regulations are for mass produced street legal vehicles. Exemptions exist for people who want to produce prototype cars or vehicles that don't meet these regulations. In most cases you simply have to pay an extra fee to make sure you are being responsible for your vehicle.
Really, do you know what you accomplish with your hatred of government? You are destroying the social contract of our society. The reason our country is great is because people work together to improve our lives. I'm really scared that people like you are somehow winning the argument, and that eventually you will infect everyone with the idea that other people are "opponents" rather than citizens to be treated equally. Every time you express disdain for the government, we get one step closer to being a wild-west, free for all Somalia-type country where anything goes provided you have a gun in your pocket to back it up.
Do you know who won in the wild west? The lawmen won. They had guns just like the bad guys; but when they came into a town with no law and no government they improved it. Your ancestors would be sick to hear that you are so upset over taxes and regulation that you're willing to throw away all civilization to be free of them.
Where did you find a 160MB driver? The last HP printer driver I downloaded was 534MB. And yet for some reason it wasn't an ISO, it was a single executable file that took 15-20 minutes to install and unpackage.
They had an alternative 4MB driver that only included the printer definition. However, the 4MB driver didn't include the scanning capability.
Also, I've noticed that HP printers take about 1 minute to come in or out of standby mode; so printing a single page takes ~2 minutes. On any other modern printer the same page is virtually instantaneous.
Back in the '90s I refused to buy any printer other than an HP; nowadays I only buy no-name rebadged printers from Dell and high performance network copiers. It's sad how far they've fallen.
Stuff that's truly open source:
FileZilla - Their FTP client is wonderful for all the partners I communicate with. Their server is also fantastic although it doesn't host SFTP. .tar.gz.
WinSCP - Just like FileZilla, but scriptable from the command line. The user interface is less nice though.
ImgBurn - Replaces all those crappy CD-burning programs that vendors love to pre-install.
7-Zip - A bit better than ZIP, compresses a bit more, runs a bit faster, and it reads all those lame formats like RAR plus awesome formats like
Notepad++ - The best text editor out there.
FFMPEG - Command line conversion for videos!
PDFCreator - Much nicer than Adobe PDF and free.
Putty - Many of you have said it, but it's still awesome.
Stuff that's free but still useful, well, mostly Foxit Reader.
+1 thank god someone's willing to say it.
That Windows Phone interface just looks terrible. It's supposed to give me a nifty "at-a-glance" view of everything. But because each tile has its own layout and style, no two tiles looks similar and it makes it impossible to get an easy overview of what's pending.
Also, what kind of a guy thinks of the idea of having Metro half-off-the-screen at all times? There are clearly better ways to communicate "there's more, scroll right!" without looking ugly.
I agree. Since I hate reading six page articles in tiny chunks I forwarded to the end and missed this. I will remember to be more skeptical of Phoronix in the future. Comparisons of operating systems without identical hardware just aren't appropriate.
Next time, find the greatest common denominator hardware and do a real test.
What's the process to go about using this if I'm currently using round robin for say 10 servers? Do I need to switch to a DNS server that can obey your extra tag and select the correct closest IP?
Thank you for your contribution towards making all the things I appreciate nowadays work ;)
Correction: Leave JPL alone to do what it is good at. The rest of NASA couldn't bang two rocks together to start a fire.
JPL is a microcosm of everything that was ever right about the United States Space Program.
In case you're wondering:
* JPL does all the robotic missions. You know, the ones that last ten years on Mars when they were only supposed to last for 90 days.
* JPL develops the awesome planet-exploring craft. The ones that learn something new.
* JPL manages the successful spacecraft that were launched decades ago and are still going (i.e. they are responsible for the remaining pioneer and voyager data and craft)
Check them out. If you have a chance, visit their "open house" day. You'll see more awesome robots than you can shake a stick at.
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/
Governments can do good things. Just because you grew up in a time after government solved most of peoples' major problems doesn't mean you should now turn against government.
A hundred years ago, people were suffering under the lack of a social safety net, unregulated robber barons, unfair working conditions, and virtually no government investment in infrastructure and science. During the 1900s, we accomplished many things by careful, measured application of taxes, investment, and regulation. Many of these things are good; some of them are poorly designed and should be revised. If you and your kind succeed in repealing every regulation, tax, and investment, our society will collapse.
Sensible government investment and regulation should be supported, not railed against.
I am sad that anything that involves lasers is automatically an Austin Powers Shark joke. Real Genius is by far the better and funnier movie. Please help endorse the correct kind of nostalgic references.
This is clearly objectively correct and in no way affected by my bias for and love of Real Genius. I don't care that it was probably the only movie I've ever seen that included real hacking and appropriate technology references.
Won't somebody think of the children?
Also get off my lawn.
Mod parent up - this is the key.
MVNO means "mobile virtual network operator", which describes someone who buys bandwidth from AT&T, TMobile, Sprint, Verizon and uses it to run their own brand of phones. All those little companies you see are basically MVNOs.
A more nuanced description of the save game system is here:
http://gamasutra.com/view/news/35476/Capcom_Used_Sales_Not_A_Factor_In_The_Mercenaries_Save_System.php
Just keep in mind this isn't an RPG, where saved data prevents you from seeing the beginning. This is a shooter game where your high scores and unlocks are permanently saved to the card. I suppose it's sad that you can't restore everything back to its original locked state and get the pleasure of unlocking each item individually, but I doubt it's as bad as everyone fears.
Many comments to this post say "You should have read the fine print, tough luck." Or another variation: "I'd never trust a corporation enough to work for shares." Or "When you left the company you should have expected that this would happen."
Why do we as people allow big corporations with large legal staff to just add "gotcha" clauses into their contracts? In theory, this country and this law system are supposed to be tools to ensure that everyone participates on a level playing field. Why can't both sides of people who signed a contract deserve equal justice? Why should it always be the huge corporation who gets to leverage their advantage in a contract?
It's not a good idea to constantly blame individual people for their failure to anticipate these problems in advance. Do we really want to create a "gotcha" society where people who fail to read every single line of fine print can get horrendously screwed at the last minute? Should each corporation be allowed to insert a "gotcha" clause into their contract to reclaim everything they promised? How about if GM had a gotcha clause that allowed them to repossess cars if they were ever forced to declare bankruptcy?
Gotcha clauses in contracts aren't nice and they really shouldn't be legal. Contracts between a company that handles hundreds of similar contracts each year and an employee that does one contract in a lifetime aren't likely to be fair unless there are some rules in place. I am okay with capitalism having rules.
I'm the guy who posted (accidentally sent it in via anonymous).
1) I like the idea of programs like DenyHosts and Fail2Ban; as some people mentioned FileZilla also has a nifty "auto-ban" option which I've used too. I specifically like using a shared list of bad hosts; that was really what I was asking for, so thank you all! Totally answered my question.
2) Switching from FTP is indeed an option. I originally started by using FTPS, which is nicely supported by FileZilla but not by many other programs. The trouble was that a many users had routing difficulties and were unable to reach the FTPS server from their location. The worst part was that many routing difficulties were transient: when they were at the office it would fail, when they were at starbucks it would work, when they were at a hotel it would fail, etc.
3) I would wager that SFTP is pretty much the right solution. I figure I'll get started on looking for an SFTP replacement for FileZilla server.
Interestingly enough, Randy Pitchford's super successful game Borderlands was probably partly successful due to its multiplayer co-op, which was tons of fun.
I'm truly saddened to see so many people took this article summary so literally. If you read TFA, it's actually a very bright, intelligent, humorous example of programming insight. I found it a very delightful read and I wholeheartedly felt that the article presented its thoughts lightheartedly and without expectation of seriousness. To hear all the commenters here, it's as if the article ran puppies over with a steamroller.
Please guys - I'm all for silly commentary. But read the article if you're going to pretend to write something clever. It's thoroughly tongue-in-cheek.