From where I left off. M1 down – Communication Resilience

In this new era where being able to be contacted is very important for most people. From the M1 Facebook page, a lot of disgruntled M1 mobile subscribers posted loads of comments on the mobile network downtime during the 60 hours period.

To avoid the problem faced by M1 users (btw my main line is Starhub mobile), I subscribed to 2 mobile services, one is a voice with data service and another one is pure data service. In addition, I also subscribed to Pfingo VoIP service.

So how does all these sum up to my own communication resilience plan?

First of all, I’m using an Android dual sim phone, Ino One. My Starhub Mobile voice and data sim card is occupied by the GSM sim slot, while my Singtel data sim card occupied the WCDMA (3G) slot. With this setup, if either one of the mobile service provider’s network down, I’m still contactable via Whatsapp, email and voice calls. In the event my main voice mobile service provider is down (have configured my voice line to divert to my VoIP number if such event happens), I can activate my VoIP application on my Android phone so my family members, friends and colleagues still can call me as my data plan allow me to have 30GB of data per month.

So if you are the kind of person who need to be contactable every hour, every minute and / or every seconds, you can use my communication resilience plan described above.

 

Cheers and have a great weekend.

Monkey Business

I bet it would be frustrating when you see your own website or your favorite website fail to load and just “hang” there with the browser trying to search for the website.

This unfortunate incident happens to one of my friend website. Can you believe it, Boon‘s website just went down without any warning from the web hosting provider. After more than 24 hours, did Boon received an e-mail from the hosting company notifying him that there were some outage. Wow! More than 24 hours, bet these monkeys were trying to salvage their customers data at the data center and forgot to sent out an outage e-mail/notices to their customers.

What could have happened?

The reason the hosting company given to Boon was an Apache burst occurred on their server thus bringing down the whole server. Could that be an excuse?

About 1 year ago, the data center which Boon’s web hosting provider used have an annual power maintenance at the tenants block which the data center is located. The power maintenance cause the whole data center to have a power outage.

WAIT!!! Did I mention power outage in a data center? I still remember my old pal have to work overtime during that day because the diesel generator and UPS somehow failed to elevate the power outage. Read more about the power outage incident that happened to this unfortunate dude that also hosted his server in the same data center here.

Of course not all data centers are immune to power failure, even the data center that hosted most of our government servers also encountered a power failure few years ago and cause a lot of government e-service to be unavailable. You can read about the power failure from this blog.

If you are wondering where do I host this blog, this blog is host on a server that is located in my bedroom with a 750kVA UPS 🙂

Windows Live Messenger – Error 80040200 Unable to Connect

I encountered the above error message and code when I try to connect to my Windows Live Messenger on my Windows 7 office’s workstation. When I clicked on the SIGN IN button in Windows Live Messenger, an error message just keep popping up that Windows Live Messenger service is not available.

Clicking on the round MORE DETAIL button show an error code, 80040200. Initially I thought the firewall was blocking Windows Live Messenger services. But running thru the log, I did not notice any unusual deny rule in the log file that indicate  Windows Live Messenger ports or service has been blocked by the firewall.

In frustration I exited Windows Live Messenger program and went to task manager to ensure that msnmsgr.exe is not running and end it process and open Windows Live Messenger again. And viola! Finally I can sign in to Windows Live Messenger.

Acer SUX!!!

Just encountered an error that one my user has on his workstation, any CD/DVD that he inserted into the DVD-ROM drive will pop-up an error message indicating that access to the CD/DVD media is denied. The same thing goes for his USB drives, insert it into any of the USB port, the same error message.

After reading through the Windows event log, I managed to figure out that the stupid Acer eManagement software is denying access to any removable drives. Removed those stupid Acer eManagement and eProtection programs, restart the workstation and finally the user is able to access the CDs/DVDs and read his data from his USB drive.

So if you have the same problem with your Acer workstation, remove those stupid Acer programs that has been installed by default at the factory.