We love delighting our customers!

Congratulations to AJ!

We really do work hard to go above and beyond for our customers, and today we are delighted to show some proof of that. Our friends at Wild West Design sent over a lovely box of cup cakes to thank AJ for his hard work.

AJ in his typical humble manner insisted that he "did nothing out of the ordinary", and was "just doing his job". Proof indeed that customer attention is so second nature that we don't even realise when we are excelling.

Join us in congratulating AJ on his great work!

Reconnix Puppet Rollout

What is Puppet?

Puppet is a configuration management tool designed to provide server administrators a mechanism for managing large groups of servers via modules hosted on a Puppet Master. In simple terms this means that any servers running as a Puppet Client will always conform with the rules set to it by the Puppet Master.

What are Reconnix Doing With Puppet?

Over the past few months Reconnix technicians have been honing their Puppet skills and as part of this have come up with a base set of Puppet modules & manifests which can be applied to any servers configured with a Puppet Client. In conjunction with Puppet we are using SaltStack gather additional information on both the servers current software and hardware configuration.

As phase one of this project, Reconnix have rolled this out to approximately 30 servers which span a wide variety of setups to test for maximum compatibility. By the end of June, we plan to have this solution applied to all servers in the Reconnix estate.

This will allow Reconnix technicians to easily administer and adhere to our ISO processes and procedures in a consistent and auditable manner. A good example of this would be the well-documented vulnerability found in the OpenSSL package, Heartbleed. While Reconnix managed to patch all affected servers within the first 24 hours of the fix being released, had we been using Puppet we would reached the same goal in less than an hour! Not bad for a 400+ server estate.

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As well as allowing us to query the current status of software across all servers, by customising modules from the Puppet community, we are now able to manage sudo access and authorised SSH keys via our Puppet Master. This is a great time saver as any new starters simply need to have their username, required access level and SSH key added to our Puppet configuration and wait for the Puppet agent to call home and update the client servers.

What if there’s a problem?

When introducing any new technologies a full risk assessment always needs to be undertaken, as part of this we’ve come up with a number of “gotchas” that we’ve had to take into account when making the decision to use Puppet.

What happens if a human error is made within the Puppet configuration?

Firstly Reconnix have a test platform on which any changes to the Puppet configuration will be fully tested beforehand, this includes a spread of different servers and software set-ups.

As Reconnix as a whole follows ISO 20000, a procedure has been written to make sure that any changes to the Puppet configuration goes through a change management process which needs to be signed off by two Systems Administrators as well as the Operations Manager. This will include a full line-by-line code review.

What happens if there is a problem with the Reconnix Puppet Master?

Reconnix believe in true high-availability wherever possible, so for a job as important as our Puppet Master we have got a HA pair of servers running across 2 separate Data Centres. Should either of our Puppet Masters fail for any reason it would take us less than 10 minutes to failover to our secondary Puppet Master.

What about the overhead on my server?

Both Puppet & SaltStack are really memory-friendly processes, so unless you’re running right on the edge of your server resources you won’t even notice them running. To give you an example, one of the servers we’ve trialled Puppet on is using 44MB of RAM running Puppet & 26MB of RAM running SaltStack.

Sounds good! But what can I do with Puppet and/or SaltStack?

Anything you want, nearly! If you can do it on the command line of your server then there’s no reason that you’d not be able to configure Puppet to do that. What you need to remember is that it’s only worth doing with Puppet or SaltStack if it is a repeatable exercise and it needs to be done across multiple servers.

If you would like more information on what Puppet can do for you, or how you can introduce it into your server estate call one of our team on 0845 4210 444.


Contact Us

The Liverpool Pathway for Software?

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Tomorrow sees the world telecommunications and information society day and in the spirit of the day, we thought it would be a good time to reach out to our clients and let them know all the great changes that have been happening at Reconnix, as well as look at some of the new ideas in the pipeline for 2014.

alt textThe Liverpool Pathway for Software?

As time ticks by it’s important to keep an eye on the versions of software running in your infrastructure. Chris Davidson gives the lowdown on why keeping your software up-to-date and fully patched is critical.

End of life of a service such as the ones described below means that there will be no further development work done on the relevant branch on the project, not even to fix major security vulnerabilities which may later be found. For example the last Apache release that became EOL was done so with the following statement;

The Apache HTTP Server Project has ended legacy development of the 2.0 legacy branch, and announces the conclusive, historical release of version 2.0.65 of Apache HTTP Server (“httpd”). No further releases will occur for the 2.0 version family.

This version of httpd represents the last security and bugfix release of 2.0, although it is by no means all-inclusive of either security or bug fixes. The Apache HTTP Project developers strongly encourage all users to finish their migrations to stable version 2.4 or the legacy version 2.2 for additional, important updates.

App Latest Versions Latest version EOL Last version number Last version EOL Biggest risk
PHP 5.5.12 20 June 2016 5.4.X

5.3.X

1 March 2015

July 2014

Security / Speed
Apache 2.2.27 / 2.4.9 TBC 2.0.65 9 July 2013 Security
MySQL 5.6 Unknown (src) 5.5

5.1

Still updated

Still updated

Security



Contact us to talk about updating your software

alt textNew Client Portal On the Way

Our development team is expanding and we have been focussing on data visualisation tools and HTML5 applications to give you real insight into your service with Reconnix, Paul Adamson tells all about the new version of the Portal coming soon.

A spring clean, new javascript toys, and lots of html5; a new portal is being built with the objective of being a better customer experience. This means more than just ticket management, allowing insights into disk space, reviewing the state of off server backups, and more as the application develops.

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We’re implementing a lot of cool technology to achieve the goal of improving our client experience. For more information on what we’re using, and how, give us a call.



Contact us to join in with the new Portal trial

alt textExpanding Horizons

On Thursday 1st May, our team visited Newark Academy to reach out to the young people in the community and show the great benefits of a career in open source technologies.

Here at Reconnix we take apprenticeships very seriously and see it as the future of our company. We are looking to recruit a number of young enthusiastic people who are passionate about IT and new technologies. They will not only be trained through a proper apprenticeship scheme, they will be put through our initial formal training and then progress onto first class on the job, mentor-led training. Our highly skilled team members will help develop skills and give them the opportunity to have a fulfilling career with great progression prospects within the company.



View our current vacancies

alt textOpenStack, a BCS Talk

On Tuesday 15th of July, our CTO Steve Nice will be delivering a talk to the special interest group at the British Computing Society on the subject of OpenStack and the future of open source cloud computing. All clients are welcome to attend as our guest, please get in touch if you are interested in hearing what will be an enlightening talk.


Contact us to attend Steve’s Talk