IPv6 is something that’s been coming for a long time now, to address the shortage of IPv4 addresses. If you’re not familiar with the problem, it goes like this: Networked devices need addresses to find and talk to each other. When the internet was invented there was capacity to address up to 4 billion devices. […]
Devops Downunder is just two weeks away now, and Anchor is excited to be a gold sponsor. In addition to being a sponsor, our very own Geek Supreme Matt Palmer will be speaking. If you’re a regular reader you’ll know that we love us some APIs, and Matt will be talking all about building a […]
One of the traits of a great sysadmin is writing good documentation. Good documentation means all the important stuff isn’t locked away inside your head, which is a Very Good Thing. Some might say that keeping it to yourself is great for job security, but it’s pretty short-sighted. Writing it down means you can: Delegate […]
Dell is a weird, weird place. A little while ago we had a server with a bad motherboard, one of the 5-volt lines was out of whack. No big deal, we’d just get a replacement part and swap it out (getting a Dell technician into Globalswitch datacentre is more hassle than it’s worth). Our datacentre […]
A lot of the support work that we do here at Anchor involves looking at websites. You could say that we’ve seen a few websites in our time. Something we come across pretty frequently is inadequate protection when it comes to handling user-submitted form data and URLs. This might not seem like a big deal, […]
The past year has seen substantial adoption on the web of a new protocol called SPDY (pronounced “speedy”), mostly being pushed by Google. If you haven’t heard of it, SPDY aims to improve the use of HTTP, the usual protocol for delivering web pages from servers to browsers. SPDY is exciting because it should make […]
Hardware failure is a fact of life when it comes to computers, which is at odds with trying to keep a service running 24/7. No one can guarantee absolute perfect uptime, but it’s possible to get pretty darned close. If you design things solidly and are willing to throw money at the problem, you can […]
It’s hiring time again here at Anchor1 and that means we’ve been sifting resumes. Lots of them. We’d like to offer some advice. There’s no shortage of advice on what to put in a resume, how to format it, and how to highlight the most salient terms. All that still applies, but our advice is […]
We put Kyoto Cabinet under the gun recently as a means to improve Redis. The Anchor Propulsion/Internet Laboratory validated Kyoto Cabinet as “fresh”, but extended live testing has revealed sub-optimal behaviour in some situations. To recap, we used Kyoto Cabinet to give Redis near-realtime disk persistence with a greatly reduced memory footprint; we called this […]
Regular readers of this blog will know that we’re hiring – we’re always hiring, in fact, and we’re going to be talking about it more in the near future. Hiring good people is really hard, so a smart company is always ready to scoop up a great candidate when they crop up. Hiring is hard […]