TinFoilHats

I always respect the view that the customer is always right, even when they're wrong, but I'm finding it increasingly difficult of late to roll over and die.

I've seen too many customers transferring domains away to what they consider to be 'better' registrars or hosting companies in recent weeks only to find that they're moving their domains away to companies who are not even Nominet members.Read more

Over the last couple of days I've been investigating a couple of slow DSL connections for customers, many of which have provided 'evidence' of their slow connections from sites such as speedtest.net.

The view is very much one of if speedtest.net says the connection is only 1mbit on an 8mbit max line then that proves the customers point.

On digging deeper I've run some tests from my own 20Mbit symmetric vlan. I know that all of the upstream connections are clear and 1:1 contention. Downloads from selected sites happen at 20Mbit.Read more

It was sad to hear of the job losses at Deepstream Technologies yesterday. The company appeared until last week to have a promising future ahead of it.

The news will obviously have a far reaching impact on the investors, employees, suppliers and customers of Deepstream Technologies but there is one small group of people who should learn from these events.Read more

The girls had been on form so 7 fresh eggs greeted me as I lifted the lid on the nest box of the chicken house. My expectations hadn't been high so without an egg box to carry them I tried to juggle the lid of the nest box with a shoulder and 7 eggs in two hands while being cautious about any unseen poop that may have been stuck to the eggs. It wasn't long before the balancing egg on top made a futile break for freedom and smashed on the ground.Read more

The problem of allocating the resources of a single server between multiple applications, departments or users is easily resolved today using virtualisation technology which allows multiple guest operating systems to exist side by side within a single server.

It is becoming more common today to have network attached storage holding the guest servers thereby allowing each guest to migrate between host nodes as demand requires or to allow hardware maintenance with zero downtime.Read more

I couldn't remain silent for any longer, I had to ask my peers "Just what is cloud computing?"

This came about due to the latest release of Ubuntu claiming support for "Cloud Computing" so, with much enthusiasm, I poured over several introduction documents, flicked through FAQ's and even read a couple of installation manuals. At the end of the hour long exercise I found myself an hour older and none the wiser about what Cloud Computing meant in practice.Read more

How often do you see companies quote their mission statement or reason d'etre and how often do they live up to that statement?

We set out to be a 'budget' service provider 10 years ago but over the years the term 'budget' has been abused and tainted and probably no longer represents what we do.

Tesco suddenly started adding "The UK's largest discounter" to their advertising. Since when had Tesco considered itself a 'discounter'? (When it became fashionable and when the likes of Aldi and Lidl started gaining market share is probably the answer)Read more

Fibrespeed was said to allow North Wales to compete with the rest of the UK on a level playing field and with fixed pricing for service providers it was expected that the service providers would compete with each other on the same 'level playing field'

This item was going to be called 'making the numbers add up part 2'.

Consider our level playing field, lets say, Anfield, and our teams, The Mighty Reds (Liverpool), The Red Dragons (Wrexham) and Fairy Glen Ladies.

Care to take bets on the outcome?Read more

This arrived at our office via email, a short time ago.

"We noticed we have a attack on our server since 13:00 (GMT +1 24 Digital time).
The requests on our DNS Server seems belong to you.
We found your service because the DNS Request is pointing to xx.xxxxxxxx.com
We have banned your IP, but we want to let you know trying to make a DDoS attack is illegal.

Its your care to stop these attacks. If you do not, we will take measures. "

Now, please forgive me for sounding difficult, but my powers of telepathy are not what they were.Read more

All hell broke loose on Saturday when a large thrust borer entered a 32 meter deep underground tunnel owned by BT.

The full details of the incident are a little scarce but we do know that a third party tunnel borer cut through the BT tunnel severing a number of cables.Read more