AyaNova 7.2 Released!
AyaNova 7.2.0.0 has been released. The HaveAByte Hosted Demo is now running 7.2 and ready to show you all of its new features, including:
- Dashboard for at a glance overview - see more details in the online Help documentation http://www.ayanova.com/AyaNova7webHelp/dashboard.htm
- Localize on the fly from within entry screens - see more details at http://www.ayanova.com/AyaNova7webHelp/customize_an_existing_locale_o.htm
- Show all.. to easily bring up service workorders, quotes, PM's and units via the client entry screen; via the unit entry screen; and via the service workorder entry screen - see more details at http://www.ayanova.com/AyaNova7webHelp/listing_all_workorders_for_a_s.htm
The Dashboard:
Remember, if you're running a hosted AyaNova database with HaveAByte, upgrade work is performed free (note this has no relation to upgrade license costs).
Our hosted system upgrades occur by request only between 7-9 PM Pacific Time and must be scheduled with HaveAByte and require a minimum of 8 hours advance notice. If the entire 7-9 maintenance window is full of upgrades and if yours must be rescheduled, you will be contacted ASAP.
More information about AyaNova is available in our AyaNova menu at the top of this page, and at http://www.ayanova.com.
MyDomain DNS problems
Around 12:30 PM on 1/11/2012 a customer called me to inform that their website wasn't loading and emails were bouncing.
After a very brief investigation, the root cause was traced to MyDomain.com. At the bottom of this blog post is the email I sent to customers covering the issue.
Update: At 3:20 PM the @MyDomainDotCom twitter account announced that the problem was resolved, and after the approximately 30 minute expected turnaround for DNS propagation, everything is back up and running. That turnaround time may vary for different ISPs around the world as this corrected information must propagate around.
Update: At 4:01 PM they finally explained the problem, albeit very briefly, along with a statement that it was resolved at 2:30 PM, which doesn't really seem correct given the 30 minute TTL which would have meant things would have started working again around 3PM but that was definitely not the case.
Final thought: Overall I'm fairly unhappy about MyDomain's handling of the situation. No blog, no explanation of the problem on Twitter or otherwise, beyond a vague acknowledgement that there was in fact some problem they were working to resolve - the problem likely affected thousands of businesses and Twitter was blowing up at the incident. While overall MyDomain's track record for actual technology is great, going forward, I intend to use Mydomain less as an additional unnecessary point of potential failure, opting instead to prefer the built-in DNS management services at whatever domain registrar is being used for a domain. I will not be moving all of my MyDomain domains elsewhere, however, as I do not feel that's warranted, unless this problem happens again with equally poor customer communication on their part.
I hope this email to our customers serves as an example of how to handle customer communication properly. (This was sent in two blocks to two separate customer groups at 2:10 and 2:30 PM as the explanations varied slightly for each, sent just as quickly as it could be written and properly explained.)
Hello,
You are receiving this message because a site you have hosted with us may be affected by a problem and not working correctly.
Symptom/Summary
- One or more of your sites may be showing a junk sedoparking landing page, email may not be working, or AyaNova may not be launching.
- 2. This problem is even affecting haveabyte.com’s own website and email.
(This fact is affecting some AyaNova installations which do not use a dedicated domain).- The problem is at MyDomain.com, not HaveAByte, and their technicians are working to resolve it. ETA is 2-3 hours (give or take one hour), maybe sooner.
- MyDomain is a major ISP and this problem is likely affecting thousands of domains, thousands of businesses.
- I hope that by the time you actually read this, the problem will be fixed.
If you require more information, keep reading.
---
What is NOT happening
- Your domain hasn’t expired
- No data is lost
- The HaveAByte web/email servers are not down
- The problem is mostly affecting top-level domains (i.e., haveabyte.com will not load our website, but shop.haveabyte.com does indeed load our shop. However, this does not apply to the “www.” prefix which is indeed affected, as well as “mail.” which is required for email to work. Some subdomains, which several AyaNova accounts use, use a subdomain/prefix like this, and therefore may or may not be affected.)
What IS happening
- Domains point to our server by way of a DNS record which says “this domain = this ip address”
- Those records are managed through our MyDomain.com account (a service like Godaddy where we buy domains and manage DNS even for domains not purchased there.)
- Today, suddenly and without warning and not in response to any action we took, those records started returning incorrect data.
- This means that anything dependent on the domain name pointing to the correct hosting server is not going to work
We have been using MyDomain for nearly a decade and can count the number of problems on one hand. This is the first time ever seeing a problem of this scale.
Whatever caused this has nothing to do with any action on our part. This happened suddenly and without warning and not in response to any incorrect configuration change made by HaveAByte to our account there. It “just happened”.
What Is being done / How long will this last?
I am on hold with support as I write this email I just spoke with their customer support.
- They’re aware of the problem
- They’re working to fix it
- 3. ETA is 2 – 2.5 hours to repair the problem, after which the TTL of 30 minutes goes into effect for a total possible turnaround of 3 hours
- That is not a guaranteed turnaround, just an estimate, and they may need some wiggle room (how much I don’t know – maybe an hour, maybe two, so there is some chance it could drag on for around 5 hours, but I believe that is very unlikely)
- They are posting updates to their twitter feed but the information there is light at best, currently just acknowledging the problem.
It is important to understand that any DNS change, intentional or not, that affects a domain can sometimes take up to 24 hours to repair – DNS records are stored in a central location (mydomain.com) and the rest of the internet gets copies of this on their own schedule, more or less. They consider the records to be “good” because they came from an authoritative source. Once errors are corrected at the authoritative source, they cannot be “pushed” out to all the DNS servers on the internet – all that can be done is to simply wait for the rest of the internet’s DNS servers to come back and check for an update. How often they are instructed to come back and check is based on MyDomain’s TTL (“time to live” which is attached to every domain they provide data for.) MyDomain’s TTL is 30 minutes, meaning, it tells other DNS servers getting copies of its authoritative information to only trust that information for 30 minutes, and recommends they come back and check to see if anything has changed, though this may or may not be honored by all DNS systems on the Internet – but it generally is. When it’s not honored, it can take up to 24-48 hours, but my experience with the DNS server community has been only of ever-shrinking TTLs and more aggressive updating for more real-time information.
They told me that an unknown problem (or at least a problem that this support agent did not personally know) caused many domains to have “default” DNS settings added to them inadvertently and they’re working to resolve it.
What about email that is bouncing for senders trying to reach me while it’s down?
Generally one of two things happen in this situation:
- The email bounces immediately because the sender’s mailserver believes nothing is there or that there is some other kind of irrecoverable problem, it does not retry, but in this situation, it informs the sender so that they can take action
- Their mail server holds the message and retries every so often for up to a day or two, and only bounces it back to the sender if the full retry window elapses with no positive result.
In either situation the sender is informed of a problem, and if they’re not informed, it’s because the server is still trying to send it out and there’s a chance you’ll get it later once your server comes back up.
If your business is highly dependent on things like automated notifications from an external ecommerce system where bounces wouldn’t be handled by a human, please be aware that you could miss some notifications and nobody would ever know unless you logged into the ecom system and looked directly at activity that occurred during this period.
How Can This Be Prevented In The Future?
Short of moving all DNS to another service, which is theoretically susceptible to whatever caused this, there isn’t a way to really prevent this. DNS is the glue that holds the Internet together, and when something goes wrong, there isn’t much recourse. No matter who is running the DNS, problems can happen. All we can do is work to resolve it as quickly as possible and try to learn as much as we can from the situation.
Not all HaveAByte customers are managed with MyDomain, in fact, these days that number is quite small and shrinking. This is because lately we have been not using MyDomain for DNS on domains purchased through sites like Godaddy or Network Solutions in order to keep the domain registration and DNS management in the same place, since we found we need to manage those registration accounts anyway, meaning it’s quicker to make any changes the customer needs when we just leave DNS with the domain registration and not use an external management service.
If your domain was not purchased through MyDomain and you would like to de-couple your domain from them, let me know and I will reconfigure that for you at no cost.
I hope this information is considered thorough and complete and answers any questions you may have.
Feel free to call or email me at Knepfler@gmail.com if you have any other questions.
Erik Knepfler
714-369-5849
HaveAByte | Wegoz | Beautiful Engineering
@haveabyte | @eknepfler | @wegozcom
Facebook | LinkedIn | G+ | Skype | Carrier Pigeon
Monitor your website visitors in real time
Big Brother for your website!
How does it work?
Once installed, you browse to your site and press CTRL-SHIFT-1 to fire it up. Log in, and you're ready to start spying!It stores recordings automatically of visitors who come by while you're away - a bit like a security camera.
Other features include a geographical map of current visitors like Google Analytics. There's a satisfying "ding" when someone enters your website, like the chime on the door of a brick and mortar business.
There's also a live chat feature. Visitors see a well-designed popover in the bottom right hand corner indicating that an agent is available. You can hold multiple conversations at once, and even delegate the task to your staff.
All of this is provided for $7 per month and stores up to 100 recordings - delete them to make room for more. HaveAByte is not a reseller or otherwise affiliated with them - we just think it's cool.
It's easy to use, but you might need help installing it on your site. Get in touch to get a quote; for most websites, the work to install it takes but a few minutes.
Summary
Lucky Orange is the perfect way to really understand what your users are doing without having to run a focus group. It really makes you feel like your website is a brick and mortar, with people walking in and out whom you can observe. Seeing where they linger and what they ignore can be very insightful - the first day I used it, I spent 2 hours refining one of my pages that seemed to preoccupy one of my visitors, especially since they left the site after reading that particular section.Thanks for reading!
Top 6 Reasons That Top X Lists Are So Addictively Clickable
I don't write about social media much, but this has been spinning around my mind for a long time.
Why do we feel an overwhelming urge to click Top 10 lists that we see posted on social media, even if it's regarding something we care little about?
I have a few theories. So these really aren't the top 10 reasons since I'm no head shrinker, but merely my best guesses. I've done it David Letterman style:
6. (Get ready to gag) We are more used to bite-sized information in the SMS/Twitter era we live in daily. (Forgive me, I put it at the lowest possible position, but I regret you had to read that first. Stay with me.)
5. We know reading stuff on the Internet can often be a distraction, but the title virtually guarantees that it is providing probably useful information and not wasting time on a long winded and poorly researched opinion piece that is as thin as graphene.
4. People like it when authors get to the point and don't ramble on for pages about things we only really care a little about. People still read Reader's Digest after all.
3. Our brains process lists differently than paragraphs, and when we are collecting knowledge from the internet, that activity is powered more by that part of our brain.
2. We believe that lists are the result of someone else doing the work to research and whittle down a topic that we don't really want to dissect, or have time to dissect ourselves.
And the number one reason I think they are so addictive?
1. We know before clicking it exactly how long the article will probably be, providing a predictable experience, so we know exactly how time we will waste before we get the meat and move on.
Now get back to work.
New PC
It's been a while since I've looked at building a new PC, because the PCs I build tend to last a very, very long time. My current system is still extremely fast, but XP is starting to show its age, and upgrading to Win7 is impossible with the dated motherboard I have. It's pretty rare that hardware specs outlast software requirements, but here I am.
So after doing a bit of research, I built a cost-effective but very high performance PC on Newegg, and I thought I'd share. A few things are missing (like a keyboard, mouse, video card, and monitor) because these things will be re-used from the last system since they're still essentially perfect (Razer Mamba mouse, LG Flatron W2452T 24" LCD + secondary smaller old Dell monitor, Microsoft Ergo 4000 Keyboard, and a Geforce GTX 460).
My goal with any PC is simple: Find the FASTEST parts that aren't ridiculously priced due to being too close to the cutting edge, and keep the overall system cost within a reasonable amount. In the past this was typically under $1000, but the new SSDs cost a bit more.
I went with 16 GB of RAM - probably overkill, but I thought 2 GB was overkill when I built this PC, and I hit the cap all the time with all of the apps I run.
The Core I5-2500K is the overclockable version of that processor, and while an i7 would have been nice, the cost just isn't justifiable (another $100 or +50%) for the performance gain it provides (+5-10% at most.)
The new PC features a solid state drive for the main OS/Program Files drive, and two secondary 1 TB drives (1 for data, 1 for pure backup.)
It's hard to find good information on fast standard HDDs with all the attention on SSDs these days. But that Samsung Spinpoint is as fast as it gets. There are faster drives available, of course, but again, it's about a reasonable price/performance ratio, leaning toward the high end of the performance range. The trick is to find the items that are priced within the range of standard, slower competitors, just before the huge uptick in price kicks in for the premium, cutting edge parts.
Any quesitons, post to Facebook!
