Josh Currier

Blogging about stuff.

Archive for October, 2009

Outsourced SMTP – Good or Bad? – PostIni Outage?

October 13th, 2009

I’ve had some pressure from time to time, to outsource our SMTP gateway function. There are some legitimate reasons for doing this but there are also some fairly serious drawbacks as well. Right now it appears tha PostIni is suffering a significant outage and I can’t email Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart, I said. Just think about how many other enormous companies are being affected by this outage right now!

As I have resisted the pressure to outsource everything from backup storage to SMTP servers, we are not one of those companies stuck in the mud today. This does highlight one of the more serious drawbacks to having your SMTP outsourced. Yes they have redundant servers. Yes they have redundant networks. Yet somehow they are experiencing an outage. » Read more: Outsourced SMTP – Good or Bad? – PostIni Outage?

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Posted in Email

Disaster Recovery Simulation

October 13th, 2009

I’ve had this problem over the years, with managing to execute even a basic DR simulation. Once I bought some huge external drives to test restores from tape. By the time I got around to doing the test, the external drives weren’t big enough to do any but the smallest of our restores. I’ve been fortunate though, and the few real disasters we’ve had were easily recovered from, but I’ve been burned a few times by smaller instances of data loss because of issues that would have been discovered during a DR Simulation. » Read more: Disaster Recovery Simulation

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Posted in Data Protection, General IT

Tags: DR

Data Backup – Growing Pains

October 5th, 2009

When I started at my current employer during the summer of 2000, we had 4 servers, three of which had with thier own 20G DDS4 tape drive managed by independent installations of ArcServe. Combined, we had less than 50G of data being backed up by the daily full backup. The backups were usually flawless and completed in a few hours at most, and sending a monthy set offsite was no big deal and that set typically contained the data set from the last day of the month. I miss those days. » Read more: Data Backup – Growing Pains

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Posted in Data Protection, Storage

Tags: backup

OpenDNS is DOWN!!!

October 2nd, 2009

At 3:15pm EST today I got an email from our BES that it had lost its SRP connection. This happens from time to time and I ignore it as long as it reconnects within a few minutes. Today it did not. A quick test revealed that internet connectivity was alive and well, but that external DNS resolution was not. The OpenDNS servers were unreachable, as was their website. Oh dear.

I switched the forwarders on our internal DNS servers back to our ISP-provided servers and we were back in business, but what does this mean for OpenDNS? I’ve been using them at the corporate level at several of our US sites for over a year with success, but today’s mishap has me wondering if I will continue to do so in the future. I await more information from OpenDNS and hope they have a good explanation as well as a plan to keep this from happening again in the future.

Update: A rather snide comment (below) from David Ulevitch of OpenDNS suggests that this was a Verizon issue rather than an OpenDNS issue. Given the general lack of buzz on the internet, I’m inclined to believe it, but shouldn’t this type of issue warrant some sort of communication to the public? A blog post on the OpenDNS website, or a sticky thread in the forum would go a long way toward getting the word out when problems prevent access to their services, even if said problems are not directly an OpenDNS problem.