Brian Kenny

I’ve spent a long weekend in Baden Baden this week. I have been treated by my girlfriend, Lee, to head off from Thursday to Sunday. The Ryanair flights and everything went perfectly. No delays, no hassle. Perfect.

We landed in Karlsrule and took the bus to the city center. We got off at the wrong bus stop but hey, we got to walk around the city and found the hotel. Sus’ things out a little.

Once we were settled in, we checked out the spa. My god it was amazing. Indoor and outdoor heated pools, sauna, jacuzzi …. what more could I want for a relaxing weekend. The price was cheap also, the spa only cost €16 for 4 hours!

The night life is relaxed. Dinner and wine, romantic ambiance. Followed by cocktails in the local bar.

Not to mention the local casino, a definite must see. A jacket and tie must be worn by the boys but completely worth it. We managed to get €50 in chips but leave with €102!!

An all round very relaxing time. I would definitely recommend it.

All major companies need to have their data in a high redundancy, availablity and backed-up envoirnment. In order to keep the data here in such a confirguration, we use off-site backups. If the building burns down, we can start again.

The primary decision is to move the data to a data center or another costly data house. I am currently deploying one that is a little bit more cost effective. All because of Fibre to the Home (FTTH).

I have a 8Mb/s pipe into my tiny one bedroom apartment which I share with my girlfriend. It’s uncontended and costs so little it’s quiet unimaginable. I will be deploying a noise reduced server at home (to ensure TV viewing is not effected) this evening. It’s maximum capicity is 1.5TB’s.

Off course in the essence of good security, a Cisco ASA5505 will be coming home with me

It’s nice to see the increase in technological advancements reducing our IT costs.

I am currently studying the CCNA exam with the hope of passing by June. It’s more of a challenge than a requirement which makes this a little fun. A few close friends have already obtained their CCNA levels. One has achieved the CCIE level.

After reading the statistics, it seems 15,658 people have acquired the CCIE level in the world. Call it stubborn determination, but I am going to spend the next couple of weeks acquiring all the info I can to see how hard it is to get to this level.

Once I can asses the situation, I will then evaluate how much it will cost to achieve the goal if fiesable.

Total of Worldwide CCIEs:		15658 (last updated 11.14.2007)
Total of Routing and Switching CCIEs:		14329
Total of Security CCIEs:		1207
Total of Service Provider CCIEs:		650
Total of Storage Networking CCIEs:		99
Total of Voice CCIEs:		601

If it is, I am going to try achieve the CCIE level in the cheapest methods possible…

Entropy are holding a Wireless Secuirty Conference at the end of Feburary. I’m actually looking forward to it. I don’t really get to attend many conferences these days.

The venue is the Westbury Hotel and the conference has the following schedule:

8.30-9.00: Registration & breakfast
9.00-9.10: “Battle of the Airwaves” – Introduction by John Ryan, Entropy
9.10-9.35: – “Wireless Security in an increasingly regulated environment” – Conor Flynn, Rits
9.35-10.00: “Safe without wires - how to safeguard your network against Wireless threats” – Paul Lawrence, Airtight
10.00-10.15:Tea/Coffee break
10.15-10.40: “The evolution of Wireless & VoIP and the new challenges for 2008” – Jane Cox, Aruba Networks
10.40-11.05: “The Practical Issues of implementing a secure Wireless network” – Jim Smith & Billy Crowley - ESB
11.10-12.00: Aruba & Airtight demos

It’s only half a day so nothing to intense Anyone wishing to attend, I believe you can email events@entropy.ie and you should be able to attend.

Brian: wel
Clare Healy is online.
Clare: bbbbaaaaaa
Brian: meeeoowww
Clare: mmmmoooooooo
Brian: wwwooooffff
Clare: nnnnnnnnnnneeeeeeeee
Brian: eeeeaww eeeeeawwww
Clare: qqqquuuack quackk
Brian: oink oink
Clare: twwweeet tweet
Brian: cockkkkka dooooodlleee dooooo
Clare: rrippit
Brian: cluck cluck
Clare: rrrreeeee rrrraaaa rrrraaammmmisshh wats a cluck cluck city slicker??
Brian: a f*#kin hen/chicken
Clare: ok il let you hav that one kkkkkkkaaaa kkkkaaaaaaa
Sent at 2:18 PM on Tuesday
Brian: what the hell goes kaaa kaa ?

I guess it was just the spontaneity of the event

I’ve never been to college. I never understood the point in going and drinking yourself to death and having beans on toast for 3 days a week. I know, that’s not exactly the picture of college, but my point is I would rather be earning myself a wage.

After completion of my leaving certificate, I ran out into the IT world and managed to secure myself within a few years to my current position. However, it’s becoming harder and harder to move forward and up the ladder without appropriate certifications in certain fields. This has led my latest challenge, completion of the CCNA by June and completion of the CCNP by the end of the year.

The main objective is to complete the course with spending as little money as possible. So far it has totaled up €60~ in so far as the ICND1 and ICND2 books/course material. Once read and completed, an addtional €200~ needs to be spent on the actual exam. This is only for the CCNA exam.

I’ll keep the blog updated and let you know what the hardest challenges were along the road to becoming a CCNA…

There’s been quiet a lot of chatter today about levels of service from different hosting providers. One instance outbreaks to a full denial of a customers account, another could not be self contained and ended up in a customer service feud. The question is, how is the most effective method of managing and containing these instances/outbreaks/occurrences?

Providing hosting services to customers is a hard task in itself. It starts at the SLA level, having to ensure your customers get the SLA the business and customer have signed. Creating high availability plans and deploying them to ensure the business stays on top and the SLA doesn’t have the option of failing. Ensuring redundancy is available throughout the network and equipment. That’s the network and equipment the company manages taken care of.

Next - What about all the equipment and network area’s the company doesn’t directly manage? All of these need to be in a high availability configuration also. Extra connections need to be inserted to ensure, if a route dies, another is instigated immediately. But most importantly, the company needs to ensure their SLA’s with their carriers is up held and doesn’t need to be applied in a none positive effect!

OK, so your afloat. Your providing a hosting service to many and it’s all working in safe operational limits. Things are feeling good, there’s money on the way in to the bank account. Lets pay the wages….BANG….some piece of equipement has failed, the failover high availability carbon copy of the equipment failed also. Call the on site engineer and get them working. 1 hour of downtime ensued. On-site engineer calls in a hardware fault, no replacement hardware on site 2hrs, 3hrs etc etc. SLA is starting to look like it’s going to be digged out by all of the companies clients.

This is one of a hundred things that could possibly go wrong. My point I guess is, there is very very very little talk, recognition or even positive feedback to hosting providers 99.999% of the SLA agreed time they have all of your services running like a dream.  But the 0.001% time something does go wrong, the blogs are written, the emails are sent, the slander is ensued……give the lads a break.

[All spelling mistakes are blamed on Lee Kutner, as she is lying beside me and nugging  me to close the laptop.]

After god knows how long trying to clear up some database size issues for the CBG website, I finally got a great query that will break down the database tables by name, rows, reserved data allocation, data allocation, index size and the amount unused by the data allocation vs size.

use whatever-database

declare @RowCount int, @tablename varchar(100)
declare @Tables table (PK int IDENTITY(1,1),tablename varchar(100),processed bit)

INSERT into @Tables (tablename)
SELECT TABLE_NAME from INFORMATION_SCHEMA.TABLES where TABLE_TYPE = ‘BASE TABLE’ and TABLE_NAME not like ‘dt%’ order by TABLE_NAME asc

declare @Space table (name varchar(100), rows nvarchar(100), reserved varchar(100), data varchar(100), index_size varchar(100), unused varchar(100))

select top 1 @tablename = tablename from @Tables where processed is null

SET @RowCount = 1
WHILE (@RowCount <> 0)
BEGIN

insert into @Space exec sp_spaceused @tablename
update @Tables set processed = 1 where tablename = @tablename
select top 1 @tablename = tablename from @Tables where processed is null
SET @RowCount = @@RowCount
END

update @Space set data = replace(data, ‘ KB’, ”)
update @Space set data = convert(int, data)/1000
update @Space set data = data + ‘ MB’
update @Space set reserved = replace(reserved, ‘ KB’, ”)
update @Space set reserved = convert(int, reserved)/1000
update @Space set reserved = reserved + ‘ MB’

select * from @Space order by convert(int, replace(data, ‘ MB’, ”)) asc

I’m finally alive on twitter -> http://www.twitter.com/bkenny

After working closely with our co-location and IT services provider, Blacknight, we have proudly aquired the title of “Irelands first commercial IPv6 website” for our title http://www.menupages.ie/

As you may know, the urge to migrate to IPv6 is becoming stronger. Why? In the current internet protocol version, IPv4, we have been estimated to run out of IP addresses between 2009 and 2011. Since the majority of devices now use an IP address, mobile phones, TVs, etc - The time until we run out of IPv4 address is coming soon.

The decision to re-organize the method in which internet addressing was done. IPv6 was the choice & was born. First thoughts when installing/deploying IPv6 are daunting. But after a couple of hours, you become very familiar with the it. The firewall configured was a Cisco ASA 5505 which had plenty of IPv6 support.

Since menupages.ie is a .NET application, it’s most stable environment is in IIS. IIS6 support is extremely lacking, so we decided to opt with IIS7 on the Windows Web Server 2008 platform. Primarily for it’s IPv6 support but also because of it’s .NET env support.

If you visit the Menupages website over IPv6 support you will notice on the top left hand side of the homepage - “You are viewing via IPv6″. I would like to thank Blacknight for their continued support in achieveing this goal. It would not have been possible without them. Let’s try get IPv6 moving forward..