Some of the problem-solving we do has a forensic component (not in the legal sense). When something breaks down, we perform what’s known as Root Cause Analysis. It’s well and good to fix the symptoms so things are running again, but it’s more important to fix the problem so it doesn’t happen again. Often enough, […]
We’ve discovered some interesting things about Windows, and they never fail to cause some head-scratching. We had cause to go rooting through a customer’s wordpress installation recently to hunt down the cause of PHP errors, and discovered two WTFs here. The first was the breakage of various scripts in the wp-admin directory. Through means unknown, […]
Recently we had a client on one of our webservers doing something which we consider to be bad form, inconsiderate and downright annoying – running scripts from cron every five minutes which take longer than five minutes to run. The end result? Processes that pile up, consuming resources and frequently inconveniencing other customers (if it […]
If you have hundreds of dedicated servers in a remote datacentre, and a need to operate on the console of some of those servers on a semi-regular basis (and I KNOW you do), then you’ll understand the frustration of having to physically put someone in front of those machines. You need to take into account […]
Customer support can be fantastically rewarding sometimes. When your combination of skill, tenacity and knowledge produce a solution that’s straightforward and effective, the feeling of satisfaction is hard to match. It doesn’t even have to be something big, we’ll take those small victories gladly. Our work sometimes looks a bit like magic, and we don’t […]
It’s no secret that we’d rather be working on Linux than Windows here at Anchor. It is, by and large, much more annoying to actually get anything done, but it also just breaks in opaque and unexplained ways. O Windowes, let me count the ways in which you are broken! This is one such problem […]