Repeatability is a intuitive aspect of daily life. If you throw a ball up, it must come down. If you throw it twenty times, the same thing will happen, up and then down. When repeatability doesn't occur we get anxious. Repeatability is equally an essential quality in...
Software companies often choose to rollout new products by having their developers work directly with beta test customers. But is this really a good idea? Not really, but let's understand why not, and then consider a couple of best practices if you just have to do it...
Recently, we performed a successful migration of around 68,000 CAD documents for one of our clients. We went from our old PTC PRO/Intralink 3.4 server to a shiny new PRO/Intralink 10 server with very few disruptions and issues. This may seem like a daunting task and...
Linux continued to perform well as an alternative server platform in 2012 and RedHat has maintained its position as a reliable and trusted Linux distribution. This reliance on Linux based servers is likely to increase during 2013 as more services migrate to the cloud...
Ensuring servers provide consistent performance is a primary goal for all infrastructure management services . A large portion of our servers are in a virtualized environment, and the additional complexity involved there can present some challenging performance...
As technology has advanced, it's become more complex -- and with complexity comes the issue of tracking and monitoring the different processes and their corresponding data. In non-critical applications, the extent of this reporting is often minimal. However, in...
Almost every programming book starts with an example of a small program which can be compiled from the command line using a simple call to the compiler with maybe a few flags. Known as “Hello World”, the few lines of code needed to output the text is almost universal....
I'm a huge fan of automation, especially when it comes to installing software. With a simple one-click solution, you can setup software on a user's workstation with little or no impact on your work load. In fact, you don't even need to do the installation -- users can...
At this year's Electric Cloud Summit there was big focus on Agile software development practices. Even a casual look at Electric Cloud's product line, which includes ElectricAccelerator, ElectricCommander, and most recently ElectricDeploy, will make it obvious that...
As the push towards the cloud continues, 2013 will see a growing emphasis on cloud-related outsourcing projects. Cloud-related IT expenditure covers a wide range of areas including; Software as a Service (SaaS), cloud compute centers, infrastructure as a service...
(Originally published in 2012, updated January 2022.) One of the common tasks for any system administrator is managing disk space on a server. A common question is how to increase disk space on a linux system. I won't go into a boring lecture on why managing disk...
Occasionally I’ll get a comment from a potential client who is particularly price sensitive about the rates for our consultants, and the comment usually goes something like: “I can hire a full-time employee who would cost me a lot less than what you are going to...
