Our IDS has proven itself to be extremely valuable several times so far, we thought we’d share something interesting that it picked up. What’s an IDS? In case you’ve not come across the term “IDS” before, and seeing as we haven’t mentioned it previously, we’ll go over that first. An Intrusion Detection System, or IDS […]
Today’s piece is for developers out there building for the .NET framework, specifically webapps run under IIS. Katie, our senior Windows sysadmin, has kindly written an intro to changing the session state backend for your app. The session state store is similar to PHP’s session feature, storing per-user data such as logins and shopping carts. […]
We recently made the decision to pay off some of our technical debt by eliminating the VMware servers we built when we first started our Virtual Private Server (VPS) offering. VMware is a commercial vendor platform so it’s not exactly trivial to jump ship, but it is possible with some time and effort. Forcing a […]
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. […]
In an ideal world every service would support High Availability and Load Balancing, would scale up easily and cleanly and all of us systems administrators would be paid bucketloads to play golf all day while the computers did all the hard work. To quote Dylan Moran of Black Books fame, “Don’t make me laugh…bitterly”. I’ll […]
I kid you not, we just received this in a piece of marketing guff from our favourite enterprise vendor. “Industry analysts predict that Linux and Windows will soon dominate the operating system space. How you respond to this is critical.” Meanwhile, industry analysts predict that more than 98% of the population will be consuming oxygen […]
A question I get asked reasonably often is “Do you know any good free FTP programs?” Yes, I do. It is WinSCP. Some of the cool features are: It does what it is designed to do and does it excellently. SFTP, SCP & FTP support (ditch FTP and use SFTP!) I’ve never seen it crash. […]
Every now and then we see an example of application failure so astounding it literally brings tears to our eyes. We have a client whose legacy application is unfortunately still running on an ancient version of Oracle Weblogic and which must be maintained until the new, flashy .NET version of their site is complete. We […]
If you’re one of our dedicated server customers, you’ve got the option of a paid support package, the choices being Anchor Secure and Anchor Complete. Whatever you choose (or if you decide you don’t need one), we just hope it’s the right one for you. One of the services we provide with a support package […]
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, […]