EMERGENCY MAINTENANCE WINDOW 9-30-2015 T1 Customers only
Wednesday September 30th at 5PM EST, the DataYard Technical Operations Team will be performing a emergency software update on Core Networking Equipment. This emergency update will be updating core infrastructure for our T1 customers only. We do not anticipate any downtime, the estimated time is < 20 minutes for completion. Affected clients will receive a notification via email. […]
Emergency Maintenance Window 7-20-2015
This evening, Monday July 20th at 10PM EST, the DataYard Technical Operations Team will be performing emergency software updates on Windows VIPs, Fusion and Connect Exchange systems. These emergency updates are in response to a remote security vulnerability that Microsoft has announced (https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/security/ms15-078.aspx). Patching the vulnerability quickly will help ensure the stability and security of your environment. […]
Industry “Best Practices”?? I Don’t Care!
A staple of the information technology industry is the notion of a “best practice”. I’m not very fond of it. Best practices are supposed to be the the golden standards by which technological solutions are implemented and problems resolved in the surest way possible. They’re often researched and developed by the vendor who produced the […]
DataYard’s Speed Test Going Offline
DataYard’s Speed Test Going Offline Beginning January 21st, 2015, we are retiring the Internet speed test that we have offered at http://speedtest.donet.com/. There are numerous other speed test sites available, the most well-known being http://speedtest.net/. Although we know a lot of our customers have used this service over the years, we believe the functionality it […]
Ready Backup Scheduled Maintenance – October 06, 2014
The DataYard Technical Operations team will be performing an upgrade to our Ready Backup infrastructure beginning at 10:30 AM EDT on Monday October 06, 2014 with an anticipated completion time of 4:30 PM EDT. During this maintenance, access to backup and restore capabilities will be limited or unavailable. No interruption or delay to regularly scheduled […]
Layer 2 Networking Pseudo Redundancies
Layer 2 Networking Pseudo Redundancies Premise I’ve seen many production networks that rely on layer 2 pseudo-redundancies through the core, and I’m here to explain why such designs are unnecessary, often dangerous, and how they can be improved. This article assumes an understanding of the OSI model, the most common protocols at layers 2 and […]
Routing Around Internet Congestion
Around 9:30AM EST, we started experiencing some choppy and dropped phone calls through our own internal SIP based phone system, and shortly after began receiving customer reports of slow and limited access to internet resources. After some investigation (20-30 minutes of troubleshooting) we determined that the access problems were isolated to one of our three […]
Mail Routing Fundamentals
Mail Routing Fundamentals E-mail can be accessed multiple ways from the e-mail program installed on your desktop to the web application you use when you are traveling. Even though these methods of accessing e-mail have a different interface their method for sending e-mail is very similar. The process of directing a message to the recipient’s […]
Remote Server Administration with PowerShell
Remote Server Administration with PowerShell Your RDP Client is going to get straight up jealous Intro In the past remote Window’s administration has been limited to RDP, Citrix, DRAC/KVM, VNC, or the command line using PsExec. Developing scripts to remotely connect to hosts and gather data utilizing these legacy technologies became very cumbersome. One of […]
BGP, ASICs, and IPv4 at scale – Why the Internet is (or was) Broken
BGP, ASICs, and IPv4 at scale – Why the Internet is (or was) Broken On Tuesday August 12, 2014, the global IPv4 Internet routing table exceeded 512,000 routes. This is an important number for several very common routing platforms across multiple networking vendors, and as a result many networks across the globe experienced interruptions and […]