Author Archive: Lyndell Rottmann

You (should) know the importance of having regular backups of your important data, but to what extent does data need to be backed up to be safe? With a crowbar and shove, thieves broke into my apartment and stole the backups I’ve used for hundreds of gigabytes of home videos, photo files and archives of past computers. A Dobro RAID enclosure and an external drive used by Apple Time Machine were both stolen, and if I didn’t have the originals on my laptop or a redundant offsite backup, I would have lost all of my data. My experience is not uncommon, and it’s a perfect example of an often understated principle that everyone should understand: You need redundant backups.

It’s pretty simple: You need to back up your data regularly. When you’ve set up that back up schedule, you should figure out a way to back up your data again. After you’ve got a couple current backups of your files, you should consider backing up your backups off-site. It seems silly to think of backing up backups, but if anything happens — failed drives, theft, fire, flood, etc. — those backups could be lost forever, and if you’ve ever lost a significant amount of data due to a hard drive failure or experience like mine, you know that backups are worth their weight in gold.

Admittedly, there is a point of diminishing return when it comes to how much redundancy is needed — it’s not worth the time/effort/cost to back up your backups ad infinitum — so here are the best practices I’ve come up with over the course of my career in the information technology industry:

• Plan and schedule regular backups to keep your archives current. If your laptop’s hard drive dies, having backups from last June probably won’t help you as much as backups from last night.
• Make sure your data exists on three different mediums. It might seem unnecessary, but if you’re already being intentional about backing up your information, take it one step further to replicate those backups at least one more time.
• Something might happen to your easy onsite backups, so it’s important to consider off-site backups as well. There are plenty of companies offering secure online backups for home users, and those are generally easy to use (even if they can be a little slow).
• Check your backups regularly. Having a backup is useless if it’s not configured to back up the correct data and running on the correct schedule.
• RAID is not a backup solution. Yes, RAID can duplicate data across hard drives, but that doesn’t mean the data is “backed up” … If the RAID array fails, all of the hard drives (and all of the data) in the array fail with it.

It’s important to note here that “off-site” is a pretty relative term when it comes to backups. Many SoftLayer customers back up a primary drive on their server to a secondary drive on the same server (duplicating the data away from the original drive), and while that’s better than nothing, it’s also a little risky because it’s possible that the server could fail and corrupt both drives. Every backup product SoftLayer offers for customers is off-site relative to the server itself (though it might be in the same facility), so we also make it easy to have your backup in another city or on a different continent.

As I’ve mentioned already, once you set up your backups, you’re not done. You need to check your backups regularly for failures and test them to confirm that you can recover your data quickly in the event of a disaster. Don’t just view a file listing. Try extracting files or restore the whole backup archive. If you’re able to run a full restore without the pressure of an actual emergency, it’ll prove that you’re ready for the unexpected … Like a fire drill for your backups.

Setting up a backup plan doesn’t have to be scary or costly. If you don’t feel like you could recover quickly after losing your data, spend a little time evaluating ways to make a recovery like that easy. It’s crazy, but a big part of “risk management,” “disaster recovery” and “business continuity” is simply making sure your data is securely backed up regularly and available to you when you need it.

Plan, prepare, back up.

-Lyndell

Too often, new customers can get overwhelmed by a small administrative task on a Linux server. One of the more common questions I see in technical support is when a drive partition runs out of space. The website appears offline, and on of my coworkers advises you to just free-up some space. “Just?! Where can I find files that are deletable without affecting my website?”

Don’t worry … it’s really quit simple. If you can use FTP (File Transfer Protocol), you can handle this bit of server management. Depending on the exact problem, we might instruct you to free up space by removing files in one of the following directories:

• /var/log
• /usr/local/cpanel
• /usr/local/apache/logs
• /usr/local/apache/domlogs

The reason these directories are usually overlooked is because they are not accessible by normal FTP users — users who only upload website content. When you upload website content to the server via FTP, the FTP user is limited to the directory structure for that website. Directories starting with “/var” and “/usr” cannot be accessed by these non-root users (The “root” user can access anything). And while root is a powerful user, for the sake of security, it is not normally allowed to log in over FTP because FTP is not secure … That’s where SFTP (Secure File Transfer Protocol) comes in.

Most FTP clients support SFTP, so you don’t have to learn a new environment to securely access any file on the server. Every FTP client is different, but I’ll illustrate with FileZilla because it’s free and available on Mac, Windows and Linux. If you don’t already have an FTP client, I highly recommend FileZilla. Because there are a few ways to use FileZilla to get an SFTP connection, I can share different options for you to try:

Quick Connect

The Quick Connect bar is the quickest way to connect to your server. Start FileZilla and look immediately under the toolbar for the Quick Connect bar:

Enter the hostname (IP address or domain name), “root” in the Username field, the root password in the Password field, and “22″ in the port field. Remember, port 22 is for SFTP, the same as SSH. Click the Quickconnect button to connect.

Using the Site Manager

The Site Manager lets you save your login details. Start FileZilla and you’ll see the following:

To open the Site Manager, click the left-most icon in tool bar or go to File >> Site Manager in the menu.

Enter an IP address or domain name for your server in the Host field, and select “SFTP” as your protocol. You’ll enter the root user’s login information, and you’re ready to connect by clicking the “Connect” button or you can click the “OK” button to save and close the dialog box.

If you just saved your settings and the Site Manager is not open, click the Site Manager icon again. From there, you can select the site under the “Select Entry” box, and you just have to click “Connect” to initiate the SFTP connection with your saved settings.

If you see a pop-up that warns of an “Unknown host key,” clicking the “Always trust this host, add this key to the cache” option will prevent this interruption from showing in the future. Once you click “OK” to complete the connection, your FileZilla screen should look like this:

Notice the “Remote site” section on the middle right of the FileZilla screen:

This area in FileZilla is the directory and file listing of the server. Navigate the server’s file structure here, and click “/” to access the top of the folder structure. You should see the “/usr” and “/var” directories, and you can explore the filesystem to delete the files technical support recommended to create space!

Message Log

If you have a problem connecting to your server by FTP or SFTP, the open area below the Quickconnect bar is the Message Log. If you can copy and paste this text into a ticket, you’ll help technical support troubleshoot your connection problems. Below is an example log of a successful FTP session:

Status: Connecting to server.example.com...
Response:   fzSftp started
Command:    open "root@server.example.com" 22
Command:    Trust new Hostkey: Once
Command:    Pass: **********
Status: Connected to server.example.com
Status: Retrieving directory listing...
Command:    pwd
Response:   Current directory is: "/root"
Command:    ls
Status: Listing directory /root
Status: Calculating timezone offset of server...
Command:    mtime ".lesshst"
Response:   1326387703
Status: Timezone offsets: Server: -21600 seconds. Local: -21600 seconds. Difference: 0 seconds.
Status: Directory listing successful

And here’s an example of a failed connection:

Status: Resolving address of example.com
Status: Connecting to 192.0.43.10:21...
Error:  Connection timed out
Error:  Could not connect to server
Status: Waiting to retry...
Status: Resolving address of example.com
Status: Connecting to 192.0.43.10:21...
Error:  Connection attempt interrupted by user

If you have any questions, leave them in a comment below. Enjoy your new-found SFTP powers!

-Lyndell

Having worked in SoftLayer’s technical support department for a few years now, I can tell you that the more information you provide us, the faster we can get you to a resolution. If you can show us exactly the problem you’re seeing with details from when you see it, it’s much easier for us to troubleshoot, so I wanted to post a quick blog on the heels of Todd’s “Global Network: The Proof is in the Traceroute” post to help you get information to us much more easily.

Document Format
Many people consider a Microsoft Word document the lowest common denominator when it comes to formatting an attachment or file while others prefer plain text for everything. I always advocate the use of plain text. Plain text is universally accessible, it doesn’t require a third-party application to view, it doesn’t add funky encoding, and it uses monospaced fonts that format the text like you’d see in a command prompt if you were sharing troubleshooting results from ping and traceroute commands. It’s quite unnecessary to take a screen capture of a ping or traceroute when you run it, and it’s doubly unnecessary to paste that screen capture into a Microsoft Word document.

Copying Your Ping/Traceroute
The problem many Windows users run into is that it’s not very clear how to copy text from the command prompt … The familiar keyboard shortcuts for copying (CTRL+C) and pasting (CTRL+V) don’t work from the DOS Prompt, so the screen capture route is usually the easiest to execute. There is an easy way to copy, though.

Microsoft documented the instructions you need, and I wanted to share them with SoftLayer customers here:

1. Open the command prompt. If you’re unsure how to do this, open the Start Menu, click Run, enter “cmd” (without the quotes) and click OK.
2. Execute your command. Use “tracert softlayer.com” to follow along with this test.
3. Right-click the title bar of the command prompt window, point to Edit, and then click Mark.
4. Click the beginning of the text you want to copy.
5. Press and hold down the SHIFT key, and then click the end of the text you want to copy (or you can click and drag the cursor to select the text).
6. Right-click the title bar, point to Edit, and then click Copy.

Now the text is in the clipboard. You can paste it anywhere, including the body of a ticket. To preserve layout, I usually paste the text in Notepad and attach that file to the ticket. If you don’t want to go through the hassle of opening Notepad, just paste the results into the comment field below.

If you enjoy reading quick tips like this one that can make life easier, be sure to check out KnowledgeLayer.

-Lyndell

Bonus tip: If you want to submit your traceroute in a comment on this blog without losing the mono-spaced formatting, surround the pasted content with the <code> and </code> tags.