Ollie Phillips

Dec 30 / 6:44pm

Dancing. And better than their Dad.

My two youngest lads show me how the moves "should" be put down. Not convinced, but with no "dance-off" style retort to hand, I can do nothing but classify this as my favourite video of 2011 – and it is.

Nov 25 / 5:15am

Personalised Movember 'Thank you' Photos - Limited Edition #in

For some reason if I post it here, somehow it ends up on Facebook??! So here goes.

Today I'm having a bit of fun, fundraising for Movember.

Donate here: http://mobro.co/olliephillips, and I'll upload a personal piccy with a thank you note. Or donate, and ask me not to upload a personal pic - whichever way works for you. Anything from a pound upwards and I'll send you a thank you. Try and catch me doing interesting things like debugging a script, grabbing my lunch or using the lift, because I lead quite a varied and exciting life like that. For kicks at somepoint today I'll be on my bike, but I'm not saying when. Whatever I'm doing I'll stop and upload. Requests considered too.

Having struggled through the post pubescent look, then the sex offender look, it's now looking more respectable, but only yesterday a mate said I look like a 'camp Larry Grayson and slightly off-putting'. Plain old Larry Grayson would have done it Rich!

It's for a good cause though, help me finish on a high!

£47 in the pot so far, with a few bits of cash to add. Come on folks.

http://mobro.co/olliephillips

Nov 18 / 7:33am

My Movember. It's for charity you know #in

No doubt you've all spotted people wandering round with suspicious looking facial hair this month - the month of Movember. It's a fund raising effort in aid of mens health charities for testicular and prostrate cancer and, unfortunately, I'm doing it too.

I'd like your support on this, so if you can sponsor me please visit my mospace page at http://mobro.co/olliephillips. You can give as little as a pound, and it will make the itching, smirks, suspicious stares, mothers crossing the street with their children and me generally wishing I hadn't got involved, just a little bit more bearable.

You can also just drop by and leave a comment on my mospace page (URI as above), though comments containing the words "village" and "people" will be automatically deleted ;-)

Thanks very much.

Ollie

Oct 18 / 4:08pm

Tough lesson in Practice vs Theory

Bad day at the office today. Tomorrow will likely be the same. We've a server offline - has been for 18 hours and counting.

That server has RAID mirroring, daily backup to tape, and weekly backups to a remote NAS drive. None of which help much when you need your hosting company to act on your behalf.

After 5 hours trying to bring the server back up, it was written off. We'd get a new server. Bad but we've been here and can handle it. After 4 more hours of trying to provision a new server, still no server, couldn't be provisioned, "keeps falling over" - that's a first. Second line engineer will look at it in the morning. Good for him.

No matter. We'll restore the sites to another server or ours (if only temporarilly – load might be an issue). Please mount the recovered drive on server #####.

Drive mounted. Eh? no data on the drive. Well no files, all the directories we need but no files. Please mount the other raid drive on the server, it must be there? Nope – no files.

WTF? Suspects more than hardware failure at this point, but we're firewalled, we've no FTP service running and RDP is restricted on IP address.

Anyway, please restore the stuff we need from our tape please. Er that's also second line and they work sociable hours – be the morning. Good for "second line".

The hosting company involved is actually one of the good guys IMO, so I'm not going to lay into them. Stuff happens. But it's incredible how even tested DR procedures don't work quite as planned when you need to rely on them.

What would I do different next time? Well, I'd probably opt to be second-line myself for a start (since this is posted at 12.04am GMT)

Oct 17 / 3:52pm

Social Media - it's what your Peers make of it.

You simply can't deploy a "Social Media" strategy… In the end your customers, employees, peers, suppliers and "betters" will decide how they use social media for themselves, and most likely, your place in It. If you plan to take part and engage - you'll have to do it their way!

Oct 13 / 2:59am

Rackspace Cloud - A Firedrill

I mentioned this on Twitter last night, I thought I'd post up amore coherent summary of what happened and my thoughts.

Back in January 2011 I jumped on the UK Rackspace Cloud beta. It progressed through beta and now each month I send a few quid Rackspace's way for cloud server and cloud files services. It is a only a few quid too - their prices are pretty good.

Whilst I've been relying on cloud files for a few production sites, I've yet to do anything in production with a cloud server. Instead with the help of a good friend we've built, secured, optimised and documented a low end spec server specifically for Concrete5, a great CMS system. The spec may one day be the subject of another post, but suffice to say, I can spin up a virtual server (not really cloud) based on the 'special recipe' in minutes. And with the help of a few bash scripts can be installing Concrete5 and backing up to cloud files via Cron in no time.

We've had that done for nearly 2 months now – and still no production sites on a cloud server? Instead, I have just one test server live, which as well as load testing I've just left up – waiting.

Waiting for the inevitable - waiting for something to go wrong. Perhaps I'm overly cautious but before putting my clients' sites on a Rackspace cloud server, I needed a plan to recover things when it all goes wrong. I need to understand how I recover, what my options are, and that any previously planned actions are effective.

I needed a Firedrill.

Last night I got my Firedrill. A hardware failure on the machine hosting my virtual server. Here's what I learnt.

Rackspace's communication is great. They emailed me to let me know the server was down, when the a hardware swap had become necessary and when my server was back online. Automated emails of course but who cares.

I could have sat back and waited for the server to be moved to new hardware, but that's not a Firedrill. Instead I built a new server from a recent image (daily imaging highly recommended) and commissioned it in minutes. I tried to image the current server first so I could build from the latest state of my server, but that was never going to work.

CNames are worth the extra hop - end of story. The 10 test installations of Concrete5 were all back live with just one DNS A record amend.

At that point I had a new server up and all sites working. The only thing that had changed was the root password. In theory I could have left that server up and deleted the old one - accepting that in a production scenario we might have lost some customer updates. That image could have been up to 24 hours old.

But less that 3 1/2 hours later I got the last email, telling me the original server was back online. A single DNS amend again and all services were being hosted on the original (now moved) server. Maximum data loss 3 1/2 hours. In a production scenario communicating with customers, would probably mean no dataloss, only that Customers could not edit their sites for that time.

I know there are Rsync and load balancing options that could have reduced downtime further, but Concrete5 and my server config makes extensive use of caching, something which is inherently problematic in multiserver environments. I'm trying to keep it simple.

In conclusion, I'm impressed with Rackspace. That's the first downtime I've experience on Rackspace Cloud. I can't fault the communication – though It was have been nice if someone had picked up on my tweets which mentioned Rackspace (they have before). The server was recovered in an acceptable timeframe and I had a number of options for getting the sites back on line for the duration of the downtime.

Firedrill a success - will hopefully see the first production site on a cloud server in the near future.

Oct 3 / 4:38pm

Here's the real "I'm out"

"For no other reason than you don't appear to give a fuck (oops sorry f##k) - I'm out"

Oct 3 / 4:10pm

Short, sweet.

That hashtag you latched onto, that hashed thing that represents your conference or event on twitter.... that same hashtag you promoted by tweeting it; your followers are now watching it.

Was that really what you meant to put out there?

Answer can be a "yes", "no" or "err that was disgraceful".

Sep 30 / 3:01am

Social Media. Nobody should set the rules for you.

It's happening. The rules of engagement for Social Media are crystalising and the etiquette is getting set. Like the early internet, social media, a platform with endless possibility, is slowly taking on a political correctness as it matures. Let's stop it.

Self proclaimed thought leaders, seeking influence, are trying to assert how we should use social media; they're telling us what makes a good or bad social strategy, when really no precedent exists. We're being advised to buy what they tell us, when in many cases what they're selling is just a point of view, and often not even their own.

I suppose any "thought leader" worth their salt presumably need's thought followers but it's incredible how many people seem happy to oblige - are you one of them?

Think about it. Why are the "dos and don'ts" the "dos and don'ts"? Why is "generally accepted practice", the "generally accepted practice"? Don't get me wrong, commonsense often dictates the best process for doing something or the most effective way to address a problem, but there's also another more sinister factor at play – perception.

Perception is more about belief than knowledge. Often it's perception that underpins the "dos and don'ts"; a culture; "the way we do things round here". It's your perception that our self titled thought leaders are looking to engage. You should resist; perception especially when false, imposes artificial barriers. Who needs those?

For me, you can't title yourself "thought leader", that's a badge others must pin on you, so be responsible about who you give the accolade to - others will use the signal. True leaders don't seek followers and they don't need to impose their belief system on you. They're getting on with something important, and they're doing it regardless of what you think or what you're doing.

So, if or when you jump into social media on a personal or business basis, take any advice you get given with a pinch of salt. Apply the acid test of "is that commonsense or just perception". Do what works for you, stop doing what doesn't. Ignore bullshit etiquette. Don't subscribe to beliefs instead seek fact. Call time on emperors who appear to be naked.

And you can start by ignoring me…

Aug 31 / 6:21pm

Is it hard to be really horrid in 140 characters

There's SO much angst on the Net. It seems the chatroom "not accountable - not traceable" mentality of years back is now rife in Forum, Youtube & Blog comments. Why so? Why is it so easy to spin out the hate thing? I've no idea...

What does strike me as "odd" is how this mentality has not polluted Twitter in the same way.

I'm fairly sure I've rubbed people up the wrong way via tweet, knocked out a crappy late night tweet and indeed been on the receiving end of the same. But, no-one on Twitter is slating each other, certainly not to the same extent you see in the other channels mentioned previously. Why?

Do Twitter's unfollow and block mechanisms (some of which are present on the other platforms I mentioned above) work or, is it just hard to be horrid in 140 characters?