Moving Machines …

Last week we moved our Live server from our Old data center to a new one. The data center is in a remote location and we had to manage the show remotely ( of course, some one was out there physically moving the machines).
It was just one Machine. It was already such a challenge.

The planning began almost a month back. The entire planning pivoted around the question “How to keep the downtime to a minimal … And what this minimal would be?”

For any reasonably sized company such things are trivial, taken for granted. But more than a technical exercise, I felt it was a good exercise in Planning and Execution.

We reasoned out thus …
“If downtime should be minimal, then you cant pull the plug and move the machine. which means a clone of the current live machine should be moved first”.

And this automatically leads to
1. Clone the existing machine.
2. check for any IP address hardcoding in the code.
3. keep the clone in continuous sync with the live.
4. move the clone.
5. re-sync the clone with the live.
6. Up the clone and down the main.

Thats about it (I have omitted the specifics).

True to the Murphy’s law “Anything that can go wrong, will”, certain things did go wrong.
But the planning helped in overcoming most surprises. This experience also pointed out some areas where we
could have done better. Overall, I would say it was a smooth transition.

From a technical point of view, I learnt, from A, about the Internet Registrars, Domian servers, the “dig” command, DNS propagation, pointing the Registrar to a new Domain server and stuff like these.

We plan to move the other servers in another two days. We are lot more relaxed and more confident this time.

my new laptop

Thanks to VC, I came to know about this deal on Acer TravelMate 5720.
A bit about the config
Processor : Intel Core 2 Duo Processor 1.8 Ghz T5670 processor/ 2 MB Cache / 800 Mhz FSB
Memory : 2 GB DDR2 shared 667MHz (max. 4GB DDR2 shared 667MHz with 965GM)
Chipset : Intel 965GM
Find the rest of the details here

I formatted it and installed Ubuntu and in another primary partition , installed Mac. In fact, it took half the day of A for him to install all these. Many thanks to A.

The world is still not windows free. For that, I have virtualbox – WinXP.

For my work I use eclipse, python IDE (IDLE or some eclipse plugin), JsEnv (for javascript) , vim ( mainly for text processing) and bash shell. All these on Ubuntu hardy (8.04).

I am planning to devote some time getting used to Mac as well. Would like to give it a shot and let me see how I am going to like it.

On Learning

Earlier, when I was was working for Big S, an ERP major, I was pampered by the eco-system.
One’s area of work is so compartmentalized that you hardly get to know anything outside unless you make conscious efforts to do so. Help is very easily available and it denies “learning the hard way”. There are, of course, some exceptions.

Now, my source of learning is from my colleagues and the Internet. Sometimes I wonder if it is any advantage at all to be “knowledgeable” about something, as Google makes information painlessly available. I am indeed convinced that searching and finding is way different from understanding, but then, merely searching and finding the right stuff is indeed a big deal and it is a breeze.

To help understand things, I turn to forums and discussion groups. People are always willing to share their knowledge. Questions that others ask trigger certain lines of thought that never occurred before. It enriches the overall learning experience.

Recently, I had some really dumb doubts regarding MapReduce and its infrastructure. Click here to read the discussion. Many thanks to Benjamin Manes.

I’m twitted

I too jumped into the twitter bandwagon this weekend.

I am not sure if it would be useful for me. I can see its need for some people. But i am more or less sure I am not one among them.

But it was a breeze to get started. Simple registration and you are on. Then it was time to look for tools. Oh … there are a hell of a lot of them. I am keen, nowadays, to look for “mouseless” solutions. To my surprise I found this cute curl based script that allows me to twit from my command line. The sheer ease of being able to twit and the enforced brevity of the message encourages me to twit more.

After all these, one obviously looks for an RSS feed and then get the last 5 feeds on to the blog … and that explains the “My twits” widget on the right. Let see how it goes.

I am still sure, twitter is not for me. I use it because it is soooooooo easy to do so (and of course, free).

PS : To read my twits, you don’t have to click on the links. The tooltip shows the entire message. So simply mouseover !

Its Official now !

Its official now.

On this day, 15th Of Aug 2008, India’s 61st Independence day, I launch this blog officially.

The primary focus of this blog would be web technologies. I wish to blog about those things that I have
done as part of my work. Then there would be, in lesser proportion, some posts about Project management and Technology business.

This blog has been around for two weeks and some of my friends & colleagues have given me
valuable feedback. They said,
1. The writing style is too narrative.
2. May be you could put some more meat into it.
3. Technical explanations are difficult to follow.
4. Make proper use of punctuations.
5. OK … keep writing, ( who knows ) you might improve.

It is true that I had written some of the posts in a hurry to seed the blog with enough stuff.
From now on, I would try to improve my writing. May be lesser posts but ( hopefully ) of good quality.

Feels Great to be Indian !