Over the past few weeks, RS and I have noticed an increasing number of unexplained failures logging in over SSH with both manual and automated means. On most of the servers it was just an inconvenience, but as it started to become more frequent, it became a significant issue for …

Rob and I are working on updating our standard environmnent in our data centers. As may be clear already, we're big proponents of SmartOS, which has been working really well for our needs. We've also big proponents of automation (and, in particular, Ansible). Due to a hardware failure this weekend …

As part of completing our shut-down of 2007-vintage Xserves at the hosting center, we're moving a lot of servers to SmartOS (or at least SmartOS-hosted VMs). We've been really happy with the system so far. Here's a quick story of the power of this environment. As part of the transition …