Punk Rock CTO

Tech

It seems like every month a friend or family is having a premature baby. It's bad enough that these preemies are struggling for their life daily, but they are also separated from their parents for long periods of time. Most people don't realize a preemie may have to stay weeks and sometimes months in a NICU (neonatal intensive care unit), long after most maternity/parental leave.

I'm glad to see technology is helping out with this. www.NICView.net has created a webcam system that allows parents to view their bundle of joy from anything that can surf the web.

Tech nicu, nicu webcam, webcam, preemie

Sorry for not posting anything over the last little while, but crazy busy does even begin to describe it. What have we been up to? Over the course of seven nights, eight hours each night, we successfully moved the following:

Just under 2000 servers (Ranging from brand new to ten years old)
50+ Foundry switches
3 Compellent SANs
2 EMC SANs
Misc Core Networking Gear
Partridge in a pear tree

We knew that moving two Datacenters full of equipment was no small feat. To put it into perspective before the move we spoke with Dell. We just wanted to see what they would charge to come in and do it for us. They quoted us 4 million dollars and told us to expect a 12% failure rate of equipment.

With an amazing crew of a dozen or so, we pulled it off with a failure rate of barely 1% (20 servers). The failures ranged from RAM issues to a motherboard literally blowing up. Some issues were as simple as replacing a single component. Only a couple of the servers had to actually be rebuilt.

I couldn't be prouder by the fact that we didn't have a single customer cancellation directly related to the migration. I feel the reason for this is simple:

Communicate with your customers in an open and honest fashion. If you know their server is going to be down for a minimum of an hour, don't tell them it could be back up within 10 minutes.

There is no such thing as "over communicating" with your customers. If a notification is applicable to them, send it. They will let you know if you are being too chatty.

If you screw up, don't try to cover it up. Own up to it and take care of the customer. If you don't continue screwing up this honesty will  endear them to you.

Spend twice the amount time you think you should planning, but don't make it so ridged that it is set it into stone.

Have a Plan B and even C but more important have a plan that allows adaptability. Over the course of seven days we dealt with everything from snow, broken down trucks, and trips to the hospital. You can't plan for everything.

Lastly, force people to get rest. This is something I was guilty of not doing. I would move servers all night and drive home. Then I would crawl into bed setting my alarm for 3 hours of sleep. After a shower and the legal limit of coffee I would get up and start working until it was time to move servers again that night. Rinse and repeat for six more nights. This was stupid on my part.

Some of our migration process contains proprietary information but a lot of it is not. If you have a move coming up of 1, 10, or 1000 servers email me and I can give you some tips that will make you say "duh, why didn't I think of that?"

Tech server administration, datacenter

There is a ton of confusion about what smooth streaming actually is and what it does. I Figured I would try and write a quick breakdown.

An introduction to Smooth Streaming

What the heck is Smooth Streaming?

Smooth Streaming is an extension to IIS 7 that enables the streaming of media to Silverlight clients over the web via adaptive streaming. It makes true HD streaming a reality and is extremely scalable. This was put to the test during the 2008 Summer Olympics.

Ok so what is adaptive streaming and how is it different?

Adaptive Streaming is a delivery method of media where rather than having to download the entire file and play it, a series of short HTTP downloads are delivered to the client. With these short bursts a client can dynamically switch from higher and lower quality depending on available  bandwidth and CPU power.

Sounds great, how can I use it?

Clients viewing the media would require Silverlight 2 or greater. For Linux viewers Moonlight 2 also supports Smooth Streaming.

If your encoding software does not  support the Smooth Streaming format you will have to upgrade it. Personally I use and like Microsoft Expression Encoder 3, but there are others you could use.

On our Elastic Shared Product MaxESP Smooth Streaming is already installed and ready to use. For steps and a video showing it off on MaxESP take a look at the video at the bottom of this KB. If you are running your own IIS7 server you will need to install the extension for IIS7 .

What about my old content?

Unfortunately to take advantage of Smooth Streaming you would have to re-encode and upload your content.

IIS 7, Tech smooth streaming, iis 7

I kept hitting my head against a wall with an FTP issue on IIS 7 that I thought I would share incase others are seeing it too. In my situation I was using IIS 7 in a shared config setup.  When creating a new site, either through appcmd or through the GUI, we were seeing an odd behavior with FTP.

The website would work fine but FTP acted wonky. Through any ftp client when you try to connect you would get "530 Valid hostname is expected." If you look at the site in IIS and Go to Manage FTP Site if you restart, start, or stop you get the popup error:
There was an error performing this operation.
Details:
Element not found. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80070490)
 
Strange thing is there are a hundred sites on the servers that you can connect to and restart FTP fine for. It was only an issue for new sites we were creating. Unbeknownst to me the problem was IIS had lost connection at some point to the file server (the server was rebooted) where IIS is pointing for the shared config.

So here was the fix that I came up with. Anytime the storage location "disappears" for IIS 7 in a shared config (File Server reboots, Clustered Volume fails over, network issues, etc.) you simply need to reset the ftp service. Previously on IIS 6 you could do this with a simple IISReset, on IIS 7 you will want to run "net stop FTPSvc" and then "net start FTPSvc".

Hopefully if you are running into this same issue this article was helpful to you.

Tech, IIS 7 ftp, iis