Category: Words

Until recently, my company had a Managed ADSL service with Telus, but when the contract expired in 2011 we had no hesitation in choosing not to renew it.

Perhaps it was just bad luck in being assigned poor account managers, or perhaps this poor experience is common throughout Telus’ business offerings.

Either way, I saw the fact that I was paying $485/month for a 4Mbps down/1Mbps up with an SLA that was heavily slanted towards advantage for Telus (as most SLA’s are) as unneeded.

Other factors in canceling the Telus contract:

• Auto-renewal of 3 year term contract, without notice or follow-up

• Telus “forgetting” to cancel our Managed ADSL contract after receiving signed letters and repeated call-backs, resulting in many months overages despite the fact that we cancelled the contract

 

It is unfortunate Internet service is so expensive in Canada, especially for such low speeds. The amount of data that we’re pushing in and out is growing every year, and single digit Mbps just doesn’t cut it anymore.

Over a year ago we added an Internet connection from a wireless ISP, WiBand. This is a 10Mb sustained (20Mb burstable) connection with unlimited GB/month. We have been very happy with this service, and it’s been rock solid for us. Almost all of our services to external clients run over this connection.

With the cancellation of our Telus line, we brought in a Shaw Business 50 connection that is 50Mbps down, 5 Mbps up. While this isn’t guaranteed throughput, it is very cheap (under $100/month) and provides great access for our head office’s general Internet needs. Because we have our WiBand link with an SLA, we don’t need a highly reliable Internet connection from Shaw for general use.

Funny enough, when I asked what Telus had to compete with this Shaw Business 50 service, I was told we would be much better off with a 5Mbps down/5Mbps up fiber service that cost $800/month. Great job there listening to your client, Mr Telus rep.

Despite these nice links, I still long for the day when Canada gets speeds like they do in Northern Europe, with fiber to the home being common and high-throughput links being used.

It has now been one year and one day since my first post on Faultbucket. When I was first reading about starting a blog and some common do’s and don’ts, one thing mentioned was, “Don’t post a 1 year summary”.

Screw those people, this is interesting stuff!
In my first year, I have:

• Made 50 posts
• Received 18,537 visits
• Had 35 comments (excluding mine)
• Blocked 2,753 spam comments

My most popular post so far is the Adobe Flash Installax.exe with 22% of pageviews, followed by Hyper-V Failover Cluster Setup with 15%.

 

I started Faultbucket for a variety of reasons, including sharing knowledge, having a place to document things I come across, and associating a body of work with my name. So far those things are being accomplished, so I feel pretty content with it.

Originally I was worried about running out of topics, but as of this writing I still have 3 in the queue and I come across more ideas every week. Perhaps this year I’ll even find time to make a logo and a unique identity for the site.

Looking forward to year number 2.

On Friday I was in the office working late, because our Dell TL2000 tape autoloader decided to die. During my support call with Dell, I was back and forth between my office and the server room, and had kept my key-card in my hoodie pocket.

At one point during the evening, as I was trying to manually eject the magazines from the TL2000 (no simple task for a single person), I took off my hoodie, left it in the server room, and then promptly closed the door behind me.

Luckily I was able to unlock the door through our security server; small IT with a wide range of responsibilities saves the day again.

This isn’t the first time this has happened to me, so the moral of the story is, keep your keys and access cards on your person, in a pocket in your pants. I guess the other moral of the story is, I don’t think very clearly at 10:30 PM.

A post by Ned Pyle was just released on the AskDS blog, which is excellent and should be read immediately:

http://blogs.technet.com/b/askds/archive/2011/09/02/accelerating-your-it-career.aspx

Reading through this got me thinking about my own career, my abilities and attributes. I consider myself good at my job, and invaluable to my company, but reading pretty much anything by Ned or other respected IT personalities (those at the top of the Serverfault reputation list come to mind) leave me wishing I had more.

More knowledge, more skills, more time to study, play in a lab, read more books. More motivation to excel and be more creative for my company.

 

I find that it is difficult to really retain knowledge and gain expertise on technology with which you don’t have any real interaction with, and I’m always afraid of spending time learning and mastering something, just to have that knowledge wither and die. When I graduated from SAIT in 2005, I had my CCNA, was trained for CCNP and would have passed the test easily but never took it because my first job was entry level system admin. Since then I haven’t touched a real routing protocol, or any Cisco device for that matter, and those skills have atrophied. I’m fearful that things I spend time on that have no relevance in my current position will be a waste of time.

Perhaps my perspective on all this is a little skewed, since at this medium sized company there are only two IT staff (myself included) and every area of IT falls under my responsibility. I’m directly responsible for (and have implemented myself) Exchange, Hyper-V, SQL, Windows Server and client OS, networking, backups, purchasing, policy making, documentation, monitoring, the list goes on. In addition, I’m beginning to learn C# and ASP.net for developing in-house tools at my company.

Just as Ned mentioned, it’s hard to be an expert in everything, but since I deal with everything, sometimes its hard to be an expert in anything. We’re hiring for a help-desk position in the near future so hopefully that will remove some lower end duties, giving me a bit of free time for some real learning and professional development.

 

All that being said, I start thinking about the things I am involved in at work, and can see many areas of improvement. Exchange and Hyper-V both come to mind, as those have both been my implementations, but I am in no way an expert for either. They’re also both critical to my company, and that in itself is a good motivator for improvement.

 

Either way, knowing there is room for improvement is powerful, and there’s a lot of helpful links from Mr. Pyle that I’ll be following up on.