Search bar support challenges

If you're even slightly geeky you will have seen any of several articles in the last 2 years that state "the URL is dead". With the inclusion of the search box in many browsers this is starting to become true, and is starting to present some interesting support challenges.

Every now and then you will need someone to visit a specific site, and you might not be able to connect to the user's device to assist. The solution in most cases is to politely educate the user (or get another user to assist) and move on, but I have had a few users who have been unable to understand the concept that the address/location input is actually what we're looking for. Perhaps the user has removed or shrunk the location bar so that its really insignificant, or perhaps they're just really too stressed to follow simple instructions.

For publically accessible websites the answer is to ensure that your site can be reliably found via all the major search engines, and have a link if necessary. This means that SEO becomes an important feature of your support framework. This is scary but something that very well will become a genuine systems and support concern.

Things get worse for internal-only addresses. In theory you shouldn't be in the position where you're not able to remotely assist a user inside of your own network, but lets face it, shit does happen - or it might be a guest/embedded device (such as a WiFi enabled phone). Whats the answer in this instance? Application level filtering and redirection in your proxy server(s)?

For the love of deity; Use BCC

The last 6 months I've seen 3 companies that I've used both professionally and personally for various services using CC to mass email their clients. This is not acceptable. As result one of my personal accounts is on various lists and receives a marked increase in junk mail.

The latest cock up came from MessageLabs. This is a company that provides email services. If they can't get this right, what hope is there for anyone else out there? If you're in the business of mass emailing any of your customers please, please either send individual mails or use BCC, and make sure that your staff understand why. It's not just a case of your customer's privacy, it's your company's also. Whos to say that on your list you don't have someone who want to steal your business?

This whole cock up doesn't fill me with confidence for MessageLabs, which is unfortunate as Symantec has bought Softscan, whom we use for mail filtering at work and they're now pushing new contracts onto the MessageLabs system instead. It begs the question as to whether or not they're actually technically a competent solution in comparison. In the past I've only had bad experiences. Anyone want to weigh in?

Collected droppings from other citizens of the web

Or some interesting links, if you'd rather be polite. I apologise in advance for those who might have already seen some of these links already appear on planet sysadmin.

  • Visualizing DTrace is an interesting and amusing talk from Bryan Cantrill at this year's LISA conference. Take the title with a pinch of salt as he also delves into the infamous Shouting in the DataCentre video and a whole load of other intersting things.
  • SysAdvent 2009 has just started. Last year's was great, this year should be just as good.
  • Robert 'RSnake' Hansen has posted an informational video on DNS Rebinding, and using it in conjunction with session pinning. Worth watching if you're a system or coding guy.
  • If you're into your metal then I can recommend checking out Maylene and the Sons of Disaster. I saw them last weekend at the O2 Academy in Bristol, along with Everytime I Die, In Flames (who pulled a lucky guy out of the crowd to film from the stage) and Killswitch Engage. All were amazingly awesome, but Maylene I'd not come across before. They had a great set, extremely crisp sound (in fact the best of the gig, despite the other bands being arguably more experienced). If you've got a chance to see the remaining bits of the Taste of Chaos tour, then do so.
  • If you run a business in the UK watch out for the VAT switch back on Jan 1st 2010.
  • Microsoft are running a R2 Haiku competition. You might be able to grab a home entertainment system complete with Xbox. They don't exactly stipulate that the Haiku has to be Windows Server orientated, but it's probably expected!

Windows Server 2008 R2 and CLOCK_WATCHDOG_TIMEOUT STOP errors

If you've got a Windows Server 2008 R2 box, running Nehalem based hardware you might find it handy to bookmark KB975530, which details a hotfix and workaround for CLOCK_WATCHDOG_TIMEOUT STOP errors you might receive with this configuration.

The Virtual PC Guy (Ben Armstrong) has a few more details on the problem.

Weave

I've become pretty used to loosing my bookmarks, addons and anything else stored in the browser over the last few years that I've pretty much trained myself to assume that whatever computer I'm next using will be blank. For this reason I've relied on pinned stuff in Bloglines for several years and my crazy accurate memory. However moving away from Bloglines was pretty problematic for this reason and I've started using bookmarked stuff again.

I spied Weave getting the 1.0b1 treatment and figured it would be interesting to try out. Turns out that it's actually pretty good, once you get everything setup, and even better theres a "server" component that you can run yourself. After all who really trusts the cloud not to go away?

The realy nice feature is that unlike the various other extensions for doing the same thing you can also sync history, tabs, preferences and saved form inputs, if you're into that sort of thing. The tabs feature seemed interesting, but for me it was just confusing as buggery as I tend to use my laptop and PC for totally different types of web surfing.

← Previous  1 2 3 4 5 … 42 Next →