Robert Bentley .NET

New Kayako based support system.

RobBentley — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 21:12:00 +0000

Last week I changed the SynergyWorks support system to better serve our customers. We’ve ditched the helpdesk integrated with our customer management / portal system (WHMCS) and started to use Kayako eSupport.

Kayako has been nicely integrated with the portal (including loginshare) and will allow us to matter manage customer sales and support requests.

The most notable features include:

Live Chat for both sales and support departments.

Realtime view of website visitors with ability to offer live assistance.

Out of Hours notifications to staff based on ticket priority.

Support for replying to tickets from Windows Mobile (useful on the datafloor).

Staff Reply notifications: Staff recieve other staff members ticket replies in their inbox.

Ability for customers to have collegues CC’d into ticket replies

All the above should really help speed up our already well respected support process

We’ve also launched a news blog at: http://www.synergyworks.co.uk/portal/announcements.php - Details of any problems, outages or scheduled maintenance will be publically posted here.

SynergyWorks launches Poweredge R300 Servers!

RobBentley — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 20:31:36 +0000

Today was interesting. Despite getting stuck stationary on the M20 for two hours thanks to an overturned camper van, I managed to get to my desk by 11am and get down to some serious work sourcing some new servers for our product lineup.

After lengthy discussions with the suppliers of our hardware I finally signed on the dotted line for a consignment of Poweredge R300 servers, yes thats not a typo, R300 - and even better, we’ve got them for the same price as our usual R200’s! Good news for us and customers!

So, whats so special about the R300? Well its not 100 times better than an R200 as the name would have you believe, but it does pack a few nice extras. The most appealing being the support for 24GB RAM which when compared to the R200’s 8GB is a huge jump. It clearly outlines how the R200 is very much an entry level machine build with limitations you’d expect on a modern desktop (8GB RAM, it’ll accept Core2Duo & Xeon 3000 processors and not Xeon 5000 series etc etc) where as the R300 supports 24GB RAM, Xeon 5000 series as well as the 3000 series chips the R200 supports, Redundant PSUs & hot-swap disks (chassis dependant) all in the same size 1U case. The R300 also features the same LCD display as on the Poweredge 1950 and 2950 units - which while mainly a gimmic to look cool, it does give out nice error codes if your ever unlucky enough to see one.

The servers should arrive with SynergyWorks on Friday to be sold as part of our range of dedicated servers. Our standard specification will include a Quad Core Xeon 2.66Ghz CPU at 1333FSB with 12MB of cache, enough to keep pretty much anything ticking along nicely and a 500GB disk as a replacement to the 250GB units we’ve been bundling with the R200’s until now.

As per always the Dell RAID controllers are not overly well supported by the Linux community & performance leaves a little to be desired. As a result we’ve opted out of the RAID cards and will fit our own 3ware 9650SE hardware RAID cards for customers who require that extra level of protection against data loss that Raid provides.

Pricing should be going out to resellers & partners tomorrow, and i’ll be interested to see what response is like.

Dell Latitude XT Tablet PC

RobBentley — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 19:13:52 +0000

Those who have known me for any length of time will know, I’ve always wanted a Tablet PC since piloting the original concepts for Microsoft and RM back in my college days.

With prices of IT equipment constantly falling, partly due to the impending credit doom we’re all scared of, I finally bit the bullet and purchase myself a Latitude XT, Dells first attempt at a Tablet PC.

It’s a very nice machine, decent build quality finished in matt black. Some of the features that initially stand out are the obvious; it’s a laptop as well as a tablet. The screen has a single centre hinge – open the laptop twist the screen 180 degrees, close the lid again and voila – Tablet PC.

The screen is nice and bright and easily usable outdoors. It also comes with an ambient light sensor to allow the system to adjust the display brightness dependant on the light falling on the screen. Resolution is lower than I’m used to at 1280×800, but to be fair it is only a 12.1” screen. Capacitive touch is Dells big selling point on the XT tablet allowing you to touch the screen without using the Pen/Stylus and I have to say it’s very precise – that said I’ve no experience of the supposedly inferior resistive touch screens to compare it to.

The processor is the Core2Duo 1.20 GHz from Intel. While not the fastest sounding processor in the world, it does stand up to my day to day tasks quite well – I don’t really expect nor need my Tablet PC to outperform my desktop – it’s a mobile unit after all to keep in touch with support tickets & emails and jump onto remote desktop every now and again to debug issues.

RAM is a strange one on the XT. 1GB fixed onto the system board (non-removable) and a single DDR2 slot which takes a single 1GB or 2GB chip making 3GB maximum RAM. Suffice to say I’ve installed all 3GB given my next point, the OS.

Windows Vista Business came pre-installed and the machine is very capable of running Aero. The XT out-performs my old laptop given the lower screen resolution while having the same ATI Radeon X1350 with 256MB RAM as my 1680×1050 HP.

The handwriting recognition is excellent, and I find myself using it extensively to write notes when walking around the data-centres (this is when a tablet really shows its hand). Gone are the days of kneeling down and balancing a laptop on my leg behind a rack.

I’m also due to meet up with Philip Stears at the end of this month for coffee, cake and to make tablet pc comparisons. Philip has purchased HP’s tablet offering, the tx2550ea, which is actually the reason I ended up buying the XT. I’d forgotten all about wanting a tablet until Mr Stears piped up about the HP after finding it on Dabs.com at a competative price. I can’t have the guy who got broadband when I was stuck on 64k ISDN getting a tablet before me too!

So in summary, i’ve very happy with my purchase - time will tell how much I use it, but so far its followed me everywhere. Its much lighter than any laptop i’ve had before with the bonus of touchscreen, which I do find myself using alot even in “laptop mode” to switch between windows. My only gripe is the PC ExpressCard slot as apposed to PCMCIA, so I need to buy a new 3G/HSDPA card

NEW Dell Dedicated Servers selling well!

RobBentley — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 23:08:16 +0000

We launched our new range of Dedicated servers during July based on the Poweredge R200 chassis as can be seen at http://www.synergyworks.co.uk/dedicated.shtml, and have since seen record sales. The machines are based on the new Xeon 3000 processors which boast a 1333FSB and support for upto 8GB ECC RAM.

The Dell servers also boast IPMI support. Moving to a product with IPMI support (Intelligent Platform Management Interface) allows customers to reboot their machine via the SynergyWorks customer portal (from our in-house developed web/IPMI control module) without the need to purchase expensive APC reboot ports. The IPMI controller talks to the portal completely independantly of the operating system while sharing the same physical ethernet socket. Win Win.

I suspect if we continue to grow at this rate SynergyWorks will fill all of our current rackspace by Christmas

R2D2 Projector…

RobBentley — Thu, 08 May 2008 23:52:49 +0000

Completely off topic… awsome or what: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RXRfZV25n6I

Driving Licence? Passport? No.. Utility bill!

RobBentley — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 20:32:39 +0000

Small rant - Went to TNT last night to collect a parcel. Foolishly I thought a Photo driving licence issued by the UK government bearing my name, address and picture would be sufficiant ID - clearly not according to the fool working for TNT who wanted a utility bill such as gas or phone :/ Go figure? - After blowing my top for about 5 minutes, he said he’d let me “take the parcel this time”. Makes you worry doesnt it…

CentOS 5 from DVD – Why is it so difficult?

RobBentley — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 02:37:39 +0000

I spent the best part of yesterday attempting to install CentOS 5 onto a server via a USB DVD drive (something you could expect to take the smaller part of 15 minutes). Every step of the installation process took an age – even checking package dependencies took nearly 10 minutes. Finally when I get to the installation – it hangs at approximately 25%.

I tried multiple DVDs and drives with no luck – and was nearly about to put it down to an incompatibility with the hardware. However, for some reason unbeknown to me I decided to try the installation from an IDE drive (after of course taking the lid of and balancing one on top). Low and behold it worked. Installed in about 10 minutes… very fast, no errors, no slowdowns.

What’s wrong? I have no idea - I am hoping somebody else knows. I’ve now experianced this behavior on approximatly ten servers. I will continue to quiz those around me. As yet, all have looked as me strangly and claim never to have seen this. I can’t be unlucky 10 times in a row can I? Anyway… moral of the story is, if CentOS 5 is being a bitch to install - check your not using USB.

Cacti, being very strange.

RobBentley — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 03:23:22 +0000

This is more a confused ramble than a blog entry.

I use a Cacti installation (www.cacti.net) to poll the SynergyWorks switches via SNMP and generate traffic graphs on a per-port basis. Until recently only 100Mbps ports were used, so 32bit SNMP counters were fine. As traffic grew however, I had to purchase various all-gigabit Dell PowerConnect 5324 switches. Graphing these showed the traffic bunny-hop between 0Mbit and 100Mbit when traffic flowed at a rate higher than ~ 100Mbps. This was clearly the 32bit counter rolling over - so I switched over to 64-bit counters - problem solved (i thought).

Forward fast 6 months, when I purchase a HP ProCurve 2824 Gigabit switch for our Telehouse East core. This was setup in the same way, SNMP enabled and polled using 64-bit counters via Cacti. Traffic starts to grow as the evenings draws closer and everybody starts to ‘log-on’, so I decide to have a look at cacti to find the graphs for the ProCurve 2824 stop plotting any traffic at all after a magic 80Mbps… No bunny-hopping, so clearly not a counter rolling over (and well - 64bit counters anyway, go figure?).

Various calls to HP yield nothing. “The ProCurve 2824 supports 64-bit counters sir. You should plot graphs above 100Mbps easily”. Despite me trying to explain its not a counter issue - as its just not presenting data after 80Mbit precisely.

So I decide we’re using an old version of Cacti, i’ll install a new version onto a new server on the off chance (you do apparently stupid things when your desperate for a solution). If you think about it, we happily poll 64-bit from the Dells… what on earth could a new cacti do to help?

… well, it fixed it. I’ve no idea how, what was wrong or why. If anybody out there in the land of the internet has a clue as to why an old version of Cacti wouldn’t plot above 80Mbit from a ProCurve 2824 but would a PowerConnect 5324, i’d be delighted to hear it.

For anybody intrested.. here are examples of a 32-bit counter rolling over and a 64-bit counter being v.wierd at 80Mbit.

/end waffle

Telehouse East - Ready to Go :)

RobBentley — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 01:05:12 +0000

SynergyWorks got the go-ahead yesterday on our first ever rack (a lockable 1/4) in Telehouse East. For anybody that doesn’t know… Telehouse East is a veteran in the world of data centres powering the internet and was put live in 1999 as an expansion site to Telehouse North (build 1990!). For this reason it is pretty much the most well connected building in the UK!

A presence in Telehouse will bring SynergyWorks direct connectivity to its two main collocation sites, Kent Science Park & Bluesquare, Maidenhead – and allow for future expansion into services such as ADSL broadband.

All we need to do now is move all the current routing & switching equipment over from TelecityRedbus Meridian Gate without causing any downtime! This is going to be a *fun* month

Myself join’s Facebook

RobBentley — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 23:58:38 +0000

I went to Reading over the weekend for a friends birthday, had much drinkies and a good time. While I was there I got convinced by numerous other friends to join facebook. I’ve never been a fan of ‘network sites’, I mean.. it took me a good few years to start a blog.. nevertheless I decided I would give Facebook a try.

The experience so far has been a real eye opener. There is a whole world out there that I never knew existed. These people are updating their profiles on an hour by hour basis. Part of me wonders how they had any time to become friends to an ‘out of touch’ non-facebooker such as myself. Pretty much every meeting, party or event is pre-organised using the groups and events features. The photos from said events are then distributed to all attendees, tagged with everybody’s name and commented on. With this and the vast amount of mini-games, video sharing and other such ‘Applications’ it seems there is more of a life to be had online than offline during a typical week.

The ‘social network’ concept in itself was enough for me. I’ve been given the ability to get back in touch with school friends I expected never to hear from again – some of these I distinctly recall finding the entire “computer thing” highly sad during our school years – I was the techie geek - yet I can now track their lives online by the minute.

As a web-host my brain is doing double time trying to comprehend the amount of disk-space and bandwidth such a community consumes. Naturally my instinct reaction was to query the Facebook IP prefix using the SynergyWorks looking glass – the response to which revealed Facebook run their own Antonymous System (AS32934). Any single website requiring their own global network, is pretty impressive in my eyes.

As to if my enthusiasm for this will last, is yet to be seen…