Happy Sunday!

I’ve noticed – and it’s really no surprise – that I get fewer people visiting this bastion of technical omnibabble on the weekends. I get it, you’re busy and have real lives; and to that end I rarely publish posts on the weekends either. In a fit of alcohol-induced something or other, however, it struck me that this is a missed opportunity to make some special posts just for you lovely weekend visitors – a “Secret Sunday” club. Heck, maybe people want posts on the weekend, right?

Ok, so let’s give this a shot. I’ll do my best to post something on Sundays, and if you read if on the day it’s posted, please know that it was just for you, my special Sunday readers, who I value just as much as the poor suckers who only check out this site during the work week.

The trick with the Sunday posts though is that they’ll be short and sweet. Weekday readers may at this point be wishing for a week of Sundays, but they’ll be disappointed. I am well known for my inability to express an idea in less than 1000 words, and nothing will change there. Secret Sunday posts will be shorter. Promise!

Secret Sunday

Today’s weekend link is to a post by Ethan Banks, The Principle of Same-Same in Physical Network Design. If you haven’t seen his post already, do take a few minutes to read it (and subscribe to his blog!). As Ethan says:

Simply put, “same-same” means that what you do in one place, you match exactly in the other.

Ever had a Disaster Recovery site where the hardware was downsized because “it’s just a backup site”? Ever seen non-identical switches serving two supposedly failover upstream paths then dying under load when a failover happens? Ever failed over to the backup WAN which was half the capacity of the primary, and watched it crash and burn? My quick summary:

• Maintain equivalent redundant paths (including WAN!)
• Test your failover to make sure it works
• Watch capacity carefully; active/active versus active/passive may require very different thresholds.

Enjoy your weekend 🙂