In late 2013 we looked around the company and asked ourselves the questions any management team has to ask: what are we doing, where do we need to be, and what’s holding us back from getting there? Because Anchor had grown organically across many years, our internal procedures for infrastructure management were spread across a number of tools […]
One of the big problems we face here at Anchor is the weight of knowledge that we carry around. We’ve been in business for almost 15 years, and the amount of information that we’ve acquired in that time is immense, largely due to the fact that we’ve dealt with many different technologies for many unique […]
It’s an exciting time at Anchor as another big move is in the works. We moved to the current premises at 230 Clarence about 3 years ago now. At the time we thought it was huge and had boundless plains to share, but strong business and steady recruitment has seen us grow to about fifty […]
In a recent post we extolled the virtues of creating your own brand new operators in PostgreSQL. SELECT =^_^= FROM happycats; That’s well and good, but the output was a little lacklustre, returning “meow” for every tuple. We’d like to make it more interesting, and one way to add interesting functionality to Postgres is to […]
A lot of the bughunting that we talk about here is pretty involved, and requires in-depth knowledge of the systems and conventions in play. It’s not exactly conducive to learning if you’re just trying to get started, so we thought we’d take the opportunity to walk through a small bug that we found the other […]
Perhaps you’ve thought I wish I had more cats in my Postgres database before. We certainly have. Just the other day we were lamenting some of the differences between MySQL and PostgreSQL, particularly the way that MySQL has case-insensitive matching using the LIKE operator, while Postgres has LIKE and ILIKE. This got us thinking, it’d […]
Andrew Tridgell’s rsync utility is widely used for pushing files around between servers. Anyone can copy files across the network, what makes rsync special is that it compares the files on each end and only transfers the differences, instead of pushing the whole file across the wire when only a few bytes need to be […]
Most of us have suffered time-related woes, dealing with servers that just can’t keep their clock straight even with NTP. Well we’ve just come across a new one, and NTP isn’t going to save the day – what happens when you have multiple misbehaving clocks? We first noticed the problem when reloading the firewall on […]
Our network admin and ops manager were loading hardware into boxes last night before leaving the office. This is somewhat unusual, so I grabbed them to find out what was happening before they escaped. “We’re off to install SYD3” It’s finally here! We’ve been talking about it for a while, and now it’s imminent. We’ve […]
Log aggregation is awesome-cool, you already know this. There’s no shortage of solutions for doing this, and you’ve probably heard of a few like Splunk, Graylog, Logstash, Scribe. There’s plenty more that integrate and gather data in various ways, and you can always can roll your own. Having all your logs in one place makes […]
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