by Visakh S | Jan 29, 2015 | Technical Support
The data was conclusive. The servers orion-47, orion-50 and orion-52 needed RAM upgrades. In the past one month their RAM usage has mostly been above 85% and was showing an increasing trend. Swap usage has grown by more than 20% and it was resulting in higher I/O wait...
by Visakh S | Jan 28, 2015 | Server Administration
It is unwelcome, it is tedious, but it is inevitable. Every service provider dreads a hard disk crash, and the downtime it can lead to, but it is one eventuality that will happen sooner or later. Today was one such day. A high priority alert notified our Dedicated...
by Visakh S | Jan 27, 2015 | Server Administration
Reports are coming in from our Dedicated Linux Systems Administrators about an evolving threat, disclosed earlier today. A heap buffer overflow vulnerability in GNU C Library (glibc), allows remote or local actors to execute arbitrary code under the privilege of user...
by Visakh S | Jan 23, 2015 | Technical Support
“I did nothing. It just crashes all the time!” So began a professional administration request at the help desk of a data center we managed. The customer’s unmanaged Windows 2008 R2 VPS started crashing one fine day without any apparent reason. The...
by Visakh S | Jan 23, 2015 | Technical Support
“Logs from alpha-p3 is missing!” We were responding to an issue raised by an onsite technician for a data center we managed. System logs from one server was missing in the central log server. It looked like the Rsyslog service that was used for central...
by Visakh S | Jan 23, 2015 | Server Administration
It was a peaceful night shift at a data center we managed. Just a few routine server provisioning and customer queries were keeping us occupied. Suddenly all alarm bells started ringing. 25+ managed server instances had gone offline, and the alert priority was among...
by Visakh S | Jan 23, 2015 | DDoS, Server Administration
“This definitely is a problem with your monitoring system! I never used this bandwidth. I was on holiday!” The accounts department of the data center we managed referred this customer concern to us. His un-managed dedicated server showed a bandwidth spike...
by Visakh S | Jan 21, 2015 | Server Administration
The mood was upbeat. It was our weekly business review with a web host we support. Server improvements had resulted in zero service downtimes, and zero customer complaints on service reliability. It was time to figure out how to improve the infrastructure even...
by Visakh S | Jan 17, 2015 | cPanel, Technical Support
“It makes no sense!”, so started a tech support chat one Tuesday morning. An e-commerce site had seen a sudden drop in online orders, and the reason was traced to Google branding it as a malware source. The web site looked perfectly normal, and the...
by Visakh S | Jan 11, 2015 | Server Management
One of the popular questions we get asked is, “When you hire system administrators what qualities do you look for?” Instead of boring you with our recruitment format, let’s approach this question from another angle. Since 2001, Bobcares systems...
