Test everything!
May 8th
A while a go, I wrote down some personal rules to what I should do as an admin. First and foremost, and underlined about six times was this: Test Everything. It seems so simple, but you have to consider, if it’s not tested, and verified, it’s not working. Simple. Oh, it may be working, but it may not be. “May” is not good enough. So when I roll out a new server, I test and test and test. When I make a change, I test it. If I do reboot a server, I watch logs to make sure that the services are working. If the logs don’t show that everything is working, I manually test things.
Juniper JunOS Learning Opportunities
May 5th
If you wanted to learn how to use Juniper networking gear, and especially get some exposure to JunOS, their network OS based on FreeBSD that you need to configure almost all the Juniper devices with, there are many free or reasonable learning options available.
Website gets a facelift
Apr 28th
and goes on a diet.
A leaner, faster website was part of the goal of the redesign. And we got that.
Changing our CMS was part of it to tell the truth. CMS Made Simple was our workhorse for years but we decided to make changes and pick a new CMS. We chose WordPress if only because we have a lot of experience with it. Load balancer wasn’t changed so any perceived lower response time really is the difference in the CMS and has nothing to do with the web servers on the backend. I say perceived though the reality matches perception – it is faster.
Better search functionality was also achieved. WP just does a better job of this than CMSMS ever did.
Web Hosting and IP Addresses
Apr 27th
IP address allocation for web hosting isn’t really a new topic, it has in fact been pretty well resolved for over a decade. But it’s still a point of confusion to some people, so here we go.
Websites have a hostname, like www.iphouse.com. When you click on a link or enter a URL into your web browser, the browser extracts the hostname from the URL and opens a connection to it. But the network doesn’t work with a hostname, it works with numeric IP addresses like 3522190849, which is usually written 209.240.94.1. So the web browser first has to look up the IP address for the hostname through DNS, the Domain Name System. Once it has an IP address, it can open a connection to the server and request the file.
