-
Switching Online Services to a Secondary Datacenter
In the first post of this series I discussed the importance of establishing recovery time objectives (RTOs) for each component in your production system. In the second post I covered the comparative demands of performing triage during outages of different magnitudes; one that impacts a set of network devices versus an…
-
Writing Challenge: Day n+1
At the start of the 2020 December Writing Challenge, I wrote, “The act of writing is always a personal one. Even with supposedly dry, technical content, authors can’t help bringing a piece of themselves to the work.” Here on the day after the challenge has closed for another year, I hope this point is as clear to you as…
-
Windows Remote Desktop Connection vs. other RDP clients
When Windows offers a built-in RDP client, why would anyone want to use anything else for desktop sharing and remote support? Windows Remote Desktop Connection (RDC) is easy to use, reliable, free, and already there. But there are several features the built-in client lacks that third-party clients provide. The following…
-
IT Management is Key for Business Service Management
What is Business Service Management? As IT professionals we know the importance of technology to successfully driving business. IT acts as a business-enabler that brings connectivity, automation, and process efficiency to all business operations. All businesses depend on network connections—be it LAN or WAN. There are…
-
Everything I Needed to Know About IT I Learned From WandaVision
*SPOLER ALERT* If it wasn’t clear from the title, there will be spoilers for WandaVision throughout this article. If you’ve yet to watch it, go ahead and come back to this later. I’ll wait. Inspired by a recent conversation with Leon about WandaVision and how its lessons reverberate through IT, I want to take a few moments…
-
Un-Excuse-ing Upgrades
When we talk about upgrades here at SolarWinds, we spend a lot of time discussing the beneficial features, performance, and capabilities you can gain. That’s not by accident. The honest-to-goodness truth is, the most compelling reason to upgrade ANYTHING—from our phone to our game console to our monitoring software—is…
-
Is free remote control software good enough?
If you ever have to support desktops and laptops in your company, chances are that you’ve used some sort of remote control software to avoid walking – or driving, or flying! – to your end-user’s desk. Remote control software has been around for some time, and there are lots of different flavors. Some remote control…
-
Nothing is Ever Wasted, Part 1
A couple of weeks ago, Kevin Kline (@kekline) and I reminisced about activities from our youth (I’m talking about public speaking and sports, not “getting up from a chair without hearing several cracks and pops”), pursuits we thought at the time would have lifelong importance and relevance to us, but which didn’t pan out.…
-
Geekly World News - June 2021
It’s summer! Kids are out (or almost out) of school for the summer, and after more than a year of pandemic-induced stress, I’m excited to relax a bit thanks to vaccination. Here in Texas, summer also means 100+ degree heat, but we combat it with water activities and A/C. Recently, we celebrated Geek Pride Day—which has…
-
A DBA’s Habit for Success: CMMI (Part Two)
Originally appearing on OrangeMatter. Welcome back to our five-part series in which we discuss a top habit for DBAs to increase business functionality. In part one of this series, we discussed the importance of a capability maturity model (CMM) and more specifically Level 1 of the information management maturity model…