It was a normal Thursday afternoon in the Free Range Cloud NOC. The time was around 3PM and I was looking forward to packing up and heading home for the day when all of a sudden things began to go south. The TV, tuned to an IP feed of CNN, locked up, Slack began throwing DNS errors, and alarms began to trickle in. Then my phone began to ring… We had experienced site outages before, but this time it was different – the problems weren’t isolated to one site, and our office (which had redundant VPN tunnels to different cities) Continue Reading
CHAN-DT! CHAN-DT! Wherefore Art Thou CHAN-DT?
It was a normal August evening and I had just sat down to watch the evening news when I noticed something weird – no signal from my favorite local broadcaster, Global BC. No matter, I thought, Sometimes the over-the-air feed into the datacenter where I have my tuning equipment can be a little flaky due to a mountain in the signal path, I could switch to the yagi antenna on the roof of my house which has more gain and a better line of sight and generally works great. A few clicks later and I had a signal… sort of. Continue Reading
Sticking it to Fido and getting full use of my phone
One of Canada’s claims to fame has been that we pay some of the highest prices for mobile service anywhere in the world. While that generally continues to be the case, in the last several years prices have begun to come down; and it’s even possible to score deals which are comparable to the rest of the world; shocking, I know. One such deal came along that was a little too good for me to pass up – $25 monthly for 80GB of data which even included roaming to the US. Sign me up! This particular offer was from Fido Continue Reading