SYN; SYN-ACK; ACK; It's that simple. : Random

Sunny days and disasters - get prepared!

chriskil — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 19:35:00 GMT

The sun is shining here in the Seattle area today, and for some reason, it got me thinking about disaster recovery. I guess I'm weird that way, but then I have dreams about command lines from time to time.

Anyway, thinking about how to recover from a major disaster and getting that documented into a plan can be a career differentiator for you. If you already have a disaster recovery plan, periodically reviewing and updating it is a best practice, and there's no day like a sunny day to re-evaluate what to do when the fecal matter impacts the rotating blades.

The online TechNet Library is a great place to find disaster recovery information for many of our products like Exchange, SQL Server, and Windows Server.

More individualized resources can be had in the TechNet Forums, where there are dedicated forums and threads to disaster recovery and high availability for things like SQL Server, clustering, and Windows Server.

Don't see the answer to your question? Just ask a question in the forums, and you'll be able to tap into the wisdom and advice of other IT professionals, including MVPs and Microsoft employees.

Don't forget that disaster recovery also includes your people and physical plant.

The United States government, courtesy of the Department of Homeland Security, has a web site all about being prepared, with a special section just for businesses. While it's what you might expect from the federal government, there are some handy tips around awareness and communication that are worth a look.

Of course, for any disaster recovery plan, you need to start by assessing what your potential risks are, from environmental to political.

Get knowledgeable about your physical environment first, as you're more likely to have a natural disaster than armed insurgents attacking your data center. Here in the Seattle area, our largest risks are earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, high wind, heavy snow and drought, not necessarily in that order. You might be wondering why drought is on that list. Much of the energy generated in the Pacific Northwest is hydroelectric, and extended drought could cause a significant drop in generated power to run servers and HVAC systems.

But each area of the world has its own risks, so get familiar with yours. Running IT in Canberra is very, very different than running IT in Calcutta and is different again from Caracas to Cracow.

Vitamin D deficiency is now pulling me outside, where I'll be able to gaze at Mt. Rainier, and think about where I can source dust masks for when it finally decides to erupt again. ;-)

Chris

FIN

Windows 7 Everywhere - Even on a Mac

chriskil — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 23:13:00 GMT

ars technica has a short article about installing the Windows 7 beta on a Mac.

It's worth a look if you support multiple platforms.

Chris

FIN

New Microsoft Download Center

chriskil — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 01:02:00 GMT

Bits. You want 'em, we got 'em.

And we serve 'em up from the Microsoft Download Center, which has just been refreshed with a great, new Silverlight home page.

Take a peek.

Chris

FIN

Fifteen Years of Port 80

chriskil — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 20:25:00 GMT

In a few months, it will have been fifteen years since I set up my first web server on a spare Mac II at www.hsas.washington.edu using Mac httpd. (You can check Netcraft to see what it's running today.)

The genesis of that box was frustration. Frustration that the job I was doing at the time had no budget to solve a data sharing problem I was hired to fix. Frustration that the solutions I was looking at to solve the problem were tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars and would take years to hit final install.

In two days, I had the server set up with software downloaded from the Internet and it was successfully posting data to a back-end database. Ahh, satisfaction!

I'll never forget the demo I did for my managers, "This is called a web browser..."

They didn't get it, so by the end of the year I struck out on my own and spent the next decade building and maintaining data centers.

I took a brief career break earlier this decade to work for a coffee shop doing corporate communications then plunged back into the web here at Microsoft and have had the opportunity to do some really interesting things along the way.

So why the trip down memory lane? Once a year here at Microsoft we do an annual check-in around careers and career planning, and it's done in conjunction with our managers. I had my check-in on Monday and I met with my team members through last week. It's a great way to sanity-check skills, career headings and talk about areas for growth. In my case, I've had a varied, non-linear career, to say the least.

What has been my touchstone over the past fifteen years has been port 80: the web.

As I think about the next fifteen years, I'm energized by the projects before me at the moment and those that are but faint glimmers in my mind about things we may be able to do in the future.

The cables are calling to me and I can almost hear the electrons and photons singing their ultra high frequency songs as they spin along.

Or that could be all the caffeine I've ingested over the years talking. ;-)

Chris

FIN

TechEd Redux

chriskil — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 20:03:00 GMT

What a week!

It’s always great to be able to get out and talk with you folks face-to-face to get raw, unedited input, and TechEd IT Pro was no exception. :-) I spoke with close to 40 people while I was in the booth, and a few others on the show floor, at parties and on the shuttle bus. Thank you to everyone who stopped by to talk.

Here's what you told me and what I learned:

· You equate the TechNet web site with your TechNet subscription. If you're in this group, take a look at the free, publically available TechNet web site. We have TechCenters organized by product and technology that provide a centralized location for information that you just won't see in the Library or if you're in the subscription area.

· We have a lot of web site features you don't know about. Forums. Tagging. Library annotation (wiki). Social bookmarking. Search refinements. Contributor profiles. And more. I'll blog more about these in the future so you can have a detailed look at what we have that you might not know about, but I describe them a bit below.

· We think our web sites are more important to you than you do. Our sites/centers are just one resource out of many that you use or find via search. We'll be working hard in the coming months to try and make them more useful to you by weaving in more and more of our web platform features into the TechCenters.

Our new Forums platform provides filtering by answer state and coupled with inline preview, you can quickly scope down and examine the needles in the haystacks, without having to do a page reload. I learned that most of you really liked the inline preview feature of forums.

Forums also allow you to do compound tagging and then an application of a filter, and this operates across all of the forums to expose threads you might not see in the forums that you don’t regularly monitor. An oft-overlooked feature I'd like to highlight is that you can enable an RSS feed of those settings to track products or technologies. Many people I talked to thought that this was the “killer feature” on the forums.

Dropping into a Forum thread, you can see our reputation system in action, and many of you liked this feature as it provides a quick way to see the "trust level" of a contributor. From a thread and if you're logged in, you can add it to your personal or global bookmarks. The profile page also is another way to quickly judge the contribution level of a participant. Bookmarking also supports compound tagging and RSS tracking.

Even with all these new tools, finding the stuff you want can still be a challenge sometimes and we are working to make things better on that front as well. The search box, which you'll find in the top left corner of every page, now has many more auto-complete keywords a couple orders of magnitude actually. Try typing in “windows server” and seeing what shows up in the list.

If you do a search on "windows server", you'll have about 3,260,000 results - too many to sort through. Try refining by topic to "Windows Server 2008", this will take the results set down to 89,400 – almost two full orders of magnitude, then scope by "KB and Forums". The result set will now be 3,970 – close to three orders of magnitude from where we started. Go back to auto-complete for “windows server 2008 download” and search again, and you'll have 773 results. Finally refine by "SQL Server", and you're down to the two(!) results where SQL Server and Windows Server 2008 downloads intersect in the forum/KB.

Try our search the next time you are looking for something - you may be pleasantly surprised.

Other than an unscheduled night I had to spend in Chicago on the way back to Seattle due to a weather delay, it was a great trip!

FIN

When coax ruled the world (or, your humble author enters the scene)

chriskil — Tue, 27 May 2008 20:40:00 GMT

I used to work at the Univeristy of Washington (UW) for a guy named Stan who was a home brewing and bungee jumping nut. He also was pretty darn good at TCP/IP networking. When Stan wasn't busy slurping on his ramen noodles, (they were inexpensive and the savings went to jumping off of things with a cord tied to his legs or hops, barley and yeast,) he would explain the finer points of TCP/IP networking.

I learned about IP, TCP, ICMP, etc. and how to troubleshoot all sorts of arcane protocol problems that have since been solved. We've created a bunch of new problems, but that's a different post for a different day!

TCP in particular, with its three-way handshaking, is foundational to the working of the world wide web. Deceptively simple, it's creation by Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn has been compared with Gutenberg's creation of movable type and the printing press. Unlike Gutenberg, these guys are still alive, so shake their hand the next time you bump into them. (Vint's easy to spot, he's always wearing a vested suit.)

But back to jumping - I jumped out of the UW after setting up a web server in the spring of 1994 and have been involved in one way or another with web publishing and communications since. I founded a web hosting business that serves mom-and-pop businesses all the way up to Fortune 50's and everything in-between, including NGOs and GOs.

Today, I am Lead Site Manager for TechNet and the people on my team bring you the TechCenters. I've been with Microsoft now for a bit over two years and I was the Site Manager for the SQL Server Tech and Dev Centers, and most recently have been working to redesign a TechCenter that we'll unwrap just before TechEd.

I'll be using this blog to keep you up to date on what we're doing on TechNet (and sometimes MSDN and Expression) along with occasional forays into rants and opinions about the web in general.

If you have suggestions about how to impove the TechNet web experience, check out the TechNet Web Feedback Forum and join the conversation there or leave a comment here.

Cheers!

FIN

(Fixed typo.)