Phone system outage

Published March 31st, 2010 by Davy Jones

On early evening of Tuesday the 30th of March the entire building in which Anchor’s offices are located at 81 York Street Sydney lost power. Our phone system is the only critical piece of infrastructure located in our office that is required to provide service as normal. Until power is restored our phones appear to be engaged to all callers.

If you require support please email us on support@anchor.com.au

If you need to speak with us please email us and we will call you back.

If you are on IRC you can find us at:

  • Server: irc.oftc.net
  • Channel: #anchor

Important note:

The loss of power does not have any effect on any hosted services since all hosting equipment is stored in a separate specialist facility with redundant power systems.

What happened?

Energy Australia identified and confirmed the fault to be within their network overnight and have since been carrying out emergency repairs. At this stage we expect power to be restored today (Wednesday the 31st of March) but no specific ETA has been given.

How are we working around this?

All of our level 2 staff have the ability to work remotely. Access to 100% of our systems including server management, email support, monitoring systems, customer information. All level 2 staff are currently working remotely until such time as power is restored in the office.

Updates

10:00 AM – We have one of two phases of power available. Power to phones and office workstations have been restored. We’re still without lights but otherwise business as usual.

1:00 PM – Full power restored and the lights are on again.

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Belated cheers for the greenest day of the year

Published March 17th, 2010 by Barney Desmond

I think everyone in the office has just about recovered from St. Patrick’s day. Which is a good thing, what with the weekend coming up.

Are we doin’ it right? Honestly, the only glassware in the office is beer steins. This isn’t a problem, mind you…

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Automated server updates

Published March 10th, 2010 by Barney Desmond

This is going to be a contentious one, but here at Anchor we think automatically applying updates to servers is a Good Thing. It’s definitely not for everyone, but in an environment like ours with hundreds of managed servers it’s the only way you’re going to get things done and get any sleep at night.

Sysadmin of note Tom Limoncelli advocates rolling out updates to progressively more machines with prior testing beforehand to mitigate the scope of potential problems (it’s called “one, some, many”). It’s certainly a good strategy for a large number of homogenous computers, but what we’re talking about here is a bit smaller-scale.

Specifically, we have customers with servers that we never touch, we call this Anchor Monitor. These customers often have particular environments that they’re better off supporting themselves, so we monitor the machine to ensure it’s still on the network, and leave it at that. Unfortunately they’re not always kept up to date, so one of the more recent improvements to our process has been to enable automatic updating by default – it’s up to the customer if they want to change this once it’s handed over to them.

We’ve written this into a short procedure if you’re interested. It applies directly to Debian and Redhat distributions, but it’s easily portable to other systems. If you run Windows, it’ll already be hassling you every 20min for updates. :)

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