The Operations Manager

I had a small problem that has been bugging me re time sync on my home PC’s. The underlying problem was that the time sync on my Small Business Server 2008 (SBS 2008) server was drifting from the external time source (time.microsoft.com). The root cause was that I hadn’t opened UDP port 123 on my firewall to allow NTP traffic to my server. A quick firewall change and a w32tm /resync and everything was working correctly again. More instructions can be found here - http://www.smallbizserver.net/Articles/tabid/266/Id/71/How-to-fix-time-synchronization-errors.aspx

Came across this today when someone wanted to know how to create multiple email test accounts without involving their IT department (don’t ask!) or managing multiple free email accounts. Gmail allows you to create aliases for your email address automatically. For example, if your Gmail account is joe.bloggs@gmail.com then joe.bloggs+test.case01@gmail.com will work for your account – anything after the “+” sign can be used to create an alias.  These emails will be delivered to your normal Gmail inbox. So when you are testing you can use +test.case01, +test.case02, +test.case03 and so on as your test email addresses (assuming that your application doesn’t get upset at the use of the “+” in an email address. It shouldn’t, its a valid character in the RFC http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3696#page-5 ) So lets say you want to filter these test emails and label so they don’t get lost in your Inbox. Easy, just use a Gmail filter and search for a whatever common “stem” you used ...

Just a reminder that the first London Web Performance Meetup will be taking place on Wed 19th January! http://www.meetup.com/London-Web-Performance-Group/calendar/15729259/?from=list&offset=0   The guys from Seatwave have kindly agreed to present a case study on their performance improvement project for www.seatwave.com. Perry & Ged have some great "real world" information on what worked for them from a technical perspective and how they managed the project overall. Please RSVP on meetup.com if you are going to attend! See you there from 6pm.

I was doing a bit of research for an article and I started compiling a list of high-profile website crashes in 2010. Pingdom have published a list here - http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/major_internet_incidents_and_outages_of_2010.php as have Alertsite here - http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/12/29/the-biggest-web-outages-o_n_801943.html But I decided to compile my own list from a more UK-centric perspective and came up with my “baker’s dozen” below. # Site Date News Link 1 National Rail Jan-10 http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/01/05/rail_chaos/ 2 Outnet Apr-10 http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/blog/2010/apr/16/outnet-sale-website-crash 3 Apple (iPhone 4 Launch) Jun-10 http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1286756/Apple-iPhone-4-pre-order-Website-crashes-new-iPhone-goes-sale.html 4 ITV.com (World C...

HI all (and long time no chat for many of you I am sure!), This Movember I've decided to donate my face to raising awareness about prostate cancer.  My donation and commitment is the growth of a moustache for the entire month of Movember, which I know will generate conversation, controversy and laughter. Prostate cancer is the most common cancer in men. One man dies every hour from the disease in the UK. This is a cause that I feel passionately about and I'm asking you to support my efforts by making a donation to The Prostate Cancer Charity. To help, you can either: -    Click this link http://uk.movember.com/donate/your-details/member_id/585776/ and donate online using your credit card or PayPal account . Or, -    Send cheques and CAF vouchers (made payable to 'The Prostate Cancer Charity Re Movember') directly to The Prostate Cancer Charity, First Floor, Cambridge House, Cambridge Grove, London W6 0LE. Be sure to include the person's name on th...

"Steve Souders who art in Google, hallowed be thy name. Thy books did come, whose rules we run, on our sites as it was at Yahoo. Give us each request our cache-control headers, and forgive us our static cookies, as we compress those who request against us, And lead us not into CSS Expressions, but deliver us from Universal Selectors. For thine is the ySlow, the PageSpeed and the Smush.it (ok… Stoyan and Stubbornella) for ever and ever. Heck yeah!"

I recently had a rash of email come in through my SBS 2008 (Exchange 2007) server purporting to be from eBay, Amazon etc. They were, of course, phishing emails but they were “close enough” to the real thing to get low SCL (Spam Confidence Level) and PCL (phishing confidence level) and hence were not rejected by the anti-spam features in Exchange 2007. They were however marked as “fail” or “softfail” by the SenderID checks (Sender Policy Framework aka SPF defines which hosts are allowed to send mail “on behalf of” a given email domain). Since the spammers weren’t on the allowed list, the email was failed the SenderID check. So, how do we ensure that emails that fail the SenderID check don’t get delivered to the user’s inbox? Well, the more dramatic solution is to just reject or delete any emails that fail the test. You can read how to do that here - http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb125259.aspx   That was a bit drastic at this stage so I found another solution h...

The Grand National is one of the largest events in the UK horse racing calendar, and that means hundreds of million of pounds at stake for the online bookmakers and gambling sites. It also means a major headache for the web operations teams as they deal with the inevitable traffic spikes hammering their sites, at a time when availability and performance direct equate to money won or lost. Site Confidence monitored the home pages of ten of the top ranking online gambling sites on the Grand National Saturday, and some fascinating patterns emerged in the lead up to the race (16:15 BST). Firstly, lets look at the Contenders…   You can immediately see a range of availability and performance, with some of the traditional “bricks and mortar” bookmakers considerably slower than the pureplay dotcom’s like “DotCom #1” and Bet365. Option 1 – Do nothing… and #fail The first option is to “do nothing and hope for the best” approach, as seen in the graph above for William Hill, a traditional “Hig...

Whilst re-compiling and re-deploying your entire .Net website application is the “safe” solution to avoid any nasty version conflicts etc its also slow (and a sledge-hammer to crack a nut). If you are running a live website you often just want a quick patch to fix the issue at hand – often just a single assembly. If you are lucky (like I was) you have a good build manager to do all this for you… but I have found that people are not always aware of the options available – they just use the Visual Studio GUI to re-compile the entire solution every time. If you are using Visual Studio to do the build there is no requirement to re-build the entire solution (.sln) every time - you can just rebuild a project (.proj) within the solution so you get just the single assembly. Note that "Build" will only compile changes anyway, "rebuild" will re-compile everything whether it has changed or not. It's worth moving away from using the GUI (if you haven't already) ...

I put together this quick overview on web “user experience” KPI’s for a client but I thought it was worth re-posting it here for future reference… what they wanted to know what “how long did a given page request take on the website”, with the idea of defining certain KPI’s e.g. login must take less that 5 seconds, or saving your user profile less than 10 secs etc. “I had a look at some of the end-user KPI's that were requested for the web side of things so I thought I would drop you a quick email as I have a fair bit of experience in this area (when I used to run www.totaljobs.com website). There are basically 3 ways of doing this - external site monitoring, page tagging (javascript) and appliance-based. External site monitoring is basically where a 3rd party simulated a user page request every 5 or 10 minutes and records how long it took. Basically they "GET" a web page URL. Companies such as Site Confidence (UK), Gomez or Axzona are leaders in this area. "P...

This is a question I posed on the BCS Elite group on LinkedIn.. What ways to BSC Elite members ensure quality (and performance) in their outsourced software development projects? I have only worked with in-house dev teams and we ensured quality by having a top-notch technical architect, well developed coding standards/processes and a strong QA function at the end (not that quality can be "inspected in" but knowing that little was going to get passed QA ensured better deliverables end-to-end). But what is the best "formula" for an outsourced development project? I could see how you might split the project between different vendors (effectively like we did in-house), with someone doing the design, another the development and another the QA and each acting as checks and balances on the other but I suspect that this would be (1) a contractual nightmare and (2) a recipe for "finger pointing" if things went wrong. I am thinking in particular of SME...

Is the gap between "good developers" and "bad developers" getting wider? At one end of the scale we have people like my former colleague Glenn ( http://vanderburg.org/Blog ) who are doing such esoteric software stuff that I am not even sure what he is talking about anymore... things like "domain specific languages" i.e. to solve the problem, first write a new programming language optimised for that problem domain... okay... and at the other end we have the vendor who coded this: Select column1 from table1 where userid=varLoginUser Select column2 from table1 where userid=varLoginUser Select column3 from table1 where userid=varLoginUser Select column4 from table1 where userid=varLoginUser Select column5 from table1 where userid=varLoginUser which took 140ms to run when "Select column1, column2, column3, column4, column5 from table1 where userid=varLoginUser" took 15ms... Sure, rubbish code has...

Hello all, Somehow I have been conned into doing a Charity Cycle from Buck Palace to Windsor Castle... a bum-numbing 45mi (72Kms)! The standard “blurb” is below but if you could click on the link and donate something, however small, that would be good, as the Prince’s Trust is a great cause (despite Prince Charles being loopier than a rollercoaster... oh well!). I'm taking part in this year's Palace to Palace bike ride and cycling 45 miles from Buckingham Palace to Windsor Castle to raise money for The Prince's Trust. Please support me by visiting my fundraising page and making a donation. Click on the link below: http://my.artezglobal.com/personalPage.aspx?SID=270127 thanks & all the best, Steve

So what else does Operations do? Well, there is a whole organisation run by the UK govermnent to help answer that question! ITIL , or the IT Infrastructure Library, is a library of best practice information that basically tells you everything you need to do to run an IT department. Similarly developers have development methodologies such as RAD, JAD, Agile/XP, and Project Managers have PM methodologies such as Prince 2, PMBok etc to cover off their areas in more specific detail. ITIL breaks it down into 7 key areas: Service Support - deals with the actual provision of IT services such as the service (help) desk, incident management, problem management, release management etc Service Delivery - deals with ensuring that you can continue to DELIVER the service support functions with things like contigency planning, capacity management, service levels etc The Business Perspective - helps to ensure that the IT function is aligned with the organisation's business strategy and that how to...

Since the title of my blog is "TheOpsMgr" I thought I should at least define what an "Ops Mgr" (Operations Manager) actually IS (or at least in terms of my current job). Because I work for a small-ish online publishing company (about 200 people, with about 35 people in the Technology team) the Operations role is best defined as by a negative - "Operations is everything the Developers and the Project Managers DON'T do...". Most people have a fairly instinctive grasp of what Developers and Project Managers do - developers "develop stuff" (that becomes the new websites in our case) and PM's "manage stuff" (the projects that the developers work on). But what about the rest of the job of managing the day to day operations of the websites (or any other IT system)? The Operations function that most users would be familiar with is the "help desk" (or service desk as it tends to be called these days) but this is only the visibl...