Walking Dolphins Consultancy Inc.

If you have some computer-savvy staff or are a hands-on person interested in putting in a bit of time to do it yourself, it is not as difficult as it once was. With Lunarpages.com you will find you gain access to much more than your basic needs at a genuinely amazing price.

If you are a small business or a farmer, you will not need more than the Lunar Pages Basic which comes at about five bucks a month over five years. If you expect to have more than 100 users connecting at any one time, you should consider a business package. continue reading…

Lacie provides a well-branded line of external enclosures and NAS and backup storage solutions. We recommend against any Lacie purchases because their solutions can fail without any warning and Lacie support will enthusiastically provide no support at all.

It is important to be clear that Lacie is not the supplier of the actual hard drives. Typically the drives are from Seagate or Western Digital. Lacie packages these third-party drives into an enclosure with Lacie electronics that generally run an open source server on top of a variant of Linux. The Lacie electronics allow for network attachment via ethernet, USB and in some models eSATA.

We have purchased Lacie products and for the most part have found them good performers as NAS solutions.

However, Lacie has a very weak commitment to supporting their products.

Most recently we again experienced a failure with a 1TB LaCie ETHERNET BIG DISK.

We say “again” because the identical failure occurred in January of 2009, so when the identical symptoms recurred in 2010 we had direct experience to guide us.

In 2009 the solution was to purchase a new power supply from Lacie and the solution worked.

But at the time it was not Lacie who provided the solution.

Instead, a search of the internet reveals that there are dozens of Lacie customers experiencing the identical problem:

The symptoms are that merely connecting the power supply results in the drive enclosure giving a steady blue power on light with no ability to turn it off, reset it with prolonged button pressing and no recognition of the drive. It happens without warning and without any obvious cause.

Depressing the power for ten seconds or longer is Lacie’s method of resetting the enclosures.

The health of the drives is rarely at issue and this is verifiable by removing one of the drives and connecting it as an internal drive. The drive will be discovered by the system and could be formatted and used.

Of course the entire point of purchasing the unit is to provide backup storage so formatting could be catastrophic if no other backups exist.

Indeed, in the course of one trouble ticket, Lacie opined on how important it is to keep backups of all data in case recovering the Lacie product resulted in total data loss. Which is ironic and completely unhelpful when the product with the trouble is in fact the backup.

When the exact set of symptoms recurred in 2010 we submitted a ticket with Lacie support purely in the hope that they had addressed the problem they had known about since it first occurred with us and revealed in further research, they had known about since 2007 or 2008. Instead of having done anything at all the Lacie support response was to direct us to a data recovery business.

Now, if you have a Lacie product that contains a single drive you may be okay. There is a good chance that you can extract the drive from the Lacie enclosure, connect it to a computer and using one of several techniques recover the data. If the Lacie product is a server-based solution that runs on a Linux kernel then you will need to connect the drive to a system that runs Linux to access the data, but this can be done easily from a variety of boot CDs or windows-hosted Linux installations.

However, the real problems come if your Lacie product contains more than one drive — which is very typical. Ours contained two Seagate 500 gigabyte drives.

When the Lacie device contains more than one drive, the drives are RAIDed to act as a single drive. In this case, neither drive can be used without reformatting.

Lacie’s technical support solution to this problem is advise their customers to pay a third party data recovery company to recover the data.

We have identified at least 28 instances of users reporting and seeking help for this problem yet Lacie either is unable or unwilling to diagnose it.

It is clear that the problem is a Lacie technology problem, not a user-generated one. Yet Lacie has entirely ignored the problem for at least two years of which we are aware.

Their support responses border on defensive and are without question completely unhelpful.

When the problem is initially reported in a ticket from a customer, there is no recognition from Lacie that this problem has occurred in their experience and instead they set the customer off on a support experience as if it were the first time this had ever happened.

Even if Lacie has never bothered to try to diagnose what causes their products to suddenly turn into bricks, ethically they should inform a customer of the track record of the problem to give the customer some context why they are simply being told to go to a data recovery business. By omitting the known issue from the support response, the customer is misled into thinking they are dealing with a unique issue which generally leads to wasted resources trying to troubleshoot.

It is also at the bare minimum misleading for Lacie to imply or flatly state that the drives in the enclosure have failed, when they know from experience that this is almost never the case with the described symptoms. The only rationale for such customer abuse would seem to be an attempt to shift responsibility from the Lacie technology to the drive manufacturers.

Given this track record, you purchase Lacie products at your own risk — or worse, the risk of your clients.

For god’s sake do not rely on Lacie products for critical data backup.

Experiencing very slow page loads?

The problem may not be your host or your ISP.

A common issue that is easy to overlook is the loading time of external resources. If you have images that are src’d from external web sites, the load time of even a single such image can hold your entire page up. If you are using a host that is stingy about drive space, the first thing to do is look for an alternative that provides a better cost-benefit. Lunarpages.com, our preferred supplier provides Basic individual and Basic Business packages that allow for unlimited disk space and unlimited bandwidth. This allows you to host your images on your own site.

If you have deployed several complicated scripts or a large number of images, they can slow page loads to the point of timing out regardless.

Scripts that create the most problems are typically associated with building content features. Good practice has the output cached so that the scripts do not have to run with every single page load.

Thus one solution that we have found effective is to set up some crontabs to call the slow-loading pages every half hour or so. When the cron loads the page, the continue reading…

Walking Dolphins Consultancy Inc. works with many hosting companies, but we do try to steer clients to Lunarpages.com.

The question arises if a move is determined appropriate, what will happen to company email between the time you take down the existing host and set up the new one.

For this article we’ll use the real example of a move from 1and1 to LunarPages.

We do not claim that this process will work with other hosts, as LunarPages runs a particularly forgiving environment which we abuse to our client’s benefit in this case. But it should also work with many mainstream providers.

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Clients exist because they do not know all the ins-and-outs of having a web presence and do not have the personal resources to learn it all.

But too many developers take that advantage and deliver only the minimum required to meet the client’s explicit requests.

Here are three basic services every web or network developer should deliver at little or no extra cost — because they are free and take modest amounts of time to deploy. In-house tech support should have these things done already as a matter of common sense.

1. Configure OpenDNS as the DNS servers for the client’s computer network. This can be done simply by adjusting the DNS server addresses in the primary router to the outside world. It provides an extraordinary degree of free protection against known malicious and criminal web sites. The client should also be given the opportunity to continue reading…

It is important to pay attention to licenses and terms even when the words “GPL,” “Open Source” and/or “Free” are used to describe a work. The GPL License is the standard for free and open source software.

There is GPL and then there is GPL-with-a-catch.

If you are building your own web site, this can matter. For example it is quite common for web site themes to be released under GPL.

It is also quite common to restrict the application of the GPL license to the php or java script coding and to attach different licensing to the css and images that compose the full theme.

In many cases the conditions are very reasonable.  Releasing ccs and images under the Creative Commons License (CCL)  is frequently a matter of an author wanting to receive acknowledgment for his or her work.  The CCL allows authors to specify how they want that acknowledgment to be made. continue reading…

It is not effective to have the same people advising and selling to you.

Walking Dolphins Consultancy Inc.’s technology consulting will ensure you fully appreciate your real needs, without expensive frills, gotchya on delivery or an never-ending cycle of customization, fix, upgrade, customize.

We will also then find price-performance supplier options that address those needs with the right amount of technology, no more and no less.

A significant part of our practice is working with people to formulate the right questions. Too often, people in the technology business start with a specific-sounding mandate and proceed to incur expenses for the client/employer as if the answers have all been realized when the correct questions have not even been asked.

The most important step in obtaining or deploying technology is to strip down the imaginative to stark words on a page. What is it that you actually hope to accomplish. Receiving or dealing in jargon and buzz phrases inevitably leads to major excess expenses and sometimes creates a career for someone taking care of the technology that was supposed to do all the magic.

So instead of accepting, even from yourself, an ambigous statement such as “we want CRM,” get down to work and write out what exactly “CRM” means to you. What do expect to be physically happening after it is all installed and operating?

Helping people navigate this essential planning stage by bringing to bear our experience and knowledge from desktop software to million dollar custom process software installations, Walking Dolphins reveals unexpected opportunities as well as unforeseenchallenges.

Real needs can always be discovered through dispassionate questioning.

The barrier is that so often the people who are providing the advice are the same ones who will be selling the product or service so that there is little incentive to deliver less than the maximum possible. It is their job to persuade to buy as much as possible and they will use ambiguous language and implied wisdom to ensure you do buy as much as possible.

And most people, including CEOs, are not well equipped to realize what are the right questions when it comes to technology procurement and deployment. Walking Dolphins provides that strength before the first vendor is invited to coffee.

Have a look at our free guide, Technology Management for Business and particularly the section Know Why You Are Buying.

The name is intended to symbolize some of the characteristics of our business. We have remarkable intelligence and can navigate cleanly through stormy waters. We can apply sophisticated thinking, but when the occasion requires we can strike hard with blunt force.

We can attract attention and inspire, gleaming in the sun — or as needs arise, remain unseen, disguised in deepest waters.

We can learn in schools – or hunt alone.

We can communicate with sight, with sound, with smell, and with touch.

All of this and we do tricks too.

*”walking dolphins” refers to the trick dolphins do when they raise themselves vertically and “walk” on the water on their tail fins. It’s a remarkable feat.

“Walking Dolphins” is a Registered Trademark of Walking Dolphins Consultancy Inc.