Category: Office Tech

The headlines and press relations and social media are filled with corporate responses to the recent health and economic challenge.  Many of the corporate responses are a bit discouraging — Apple closing its iPhone stores, airlines canceling flights.  Many other corporate responses are predictable but a bit ham-fisted — hotel chains with emails to me in which the supposed communications goal is to let me know that they are cleaning each guest room extra well, but poorly concealed is a rather desperate plea that I will please book a room at one of their hotels so that they can make a little money.  Other corporate responses, for example from banks and other service industries, try to put the best face they can on the cutting back of their opening hours.  A remaining category of corporate response is to covertly raise prices, typically by keeping the nominal price the same while cutting back on the variety or quantity or timeliness of services or hours of operation.  Which brings us to a frankly encouraging corporate response from one of our favorite service providers.  Continue reading “A refreshing corporate response to the recent health and economic challenge”

Recently I happened upon a weather station with a couple of interesting-looking air sensors.  What do they sense?  It’s easy of course to work out what the white one (upper right) is sensing.  But the one in the lower center, metallic colored — what is it sensing? Continue reading “What is it sensing?”

Recently at Oppedahl Patent Law Firm LLC we chose to explore possible work-from-home approaches.   This blog article and a previous article talk though some of the things that we are working on, in case it may be of interest to some readers.  The previous article talks about being able to unplug a phone from a desk in the office, and put the phone into car, and take it to an employee’s home, and plugging it in, and having it work just as it would in the office.  This article talks about being able to unplug a desktop computer from a desk in the office, and put the computer into car, and take it to an employee’s home, and plugging it in, and having it work just as it would in the office.  Continue reading “Setting up remote access — computers”

Recently at Oppedahl Patent Law Firm LLC we chose to explore possible work-from-home approaches.   This blog article and some subsequent articles talk though some of the things that we are working on, in case it may be of interest to some readers. In this article we talk about setting up what we call “bat phones”, meaning phones that can be plugged in at the homes of employees and the phones work exactly as they would work in the office.  In a subsequent article we talk about setting up VPN access so that an employee might be able to take his or her desktop computer home, and plug it in, and have it work just as if it were in the office.  Continue reading “Setting up remote access – telephones”

Quite often when I find that some consumer electronic device that I purchased has a really nice or clever feature, I realize that this is not at all due to my somehow having been a savvy purchaser, but instead that it is due to dumb luck.  This really nice feature of my new Lenovo Yoga notebook computer falls into the “dumb luck” category. Continue reading “Charging port redundancy”

Yesterday I offered a quiz to my loyal readers.  Which readers could figure out what these four things had in common?  Today I announce the winners and I offer some discussion and explanation as to how these four things are really very nearly exactly the same. Continue reading “What the four things have in common”

Okay, loyal readers, here is a quiz for you.  These four things turn out to be exactly the same in a very important way. Continue reading “What do these four things have in common?”

A week ago I blogged that we migrated our OPLF speed test from our office in Colorado to a server farm in Arizona.  At that moment our speed test was on a box that was connected to the rest of the world through 100base-T ethernet.  That meant that the fastest speed you would ever see in the speed test is 100 Mbps.  If your own Internet connection happened to be faster than 100 Mbps, then our speedtest would give you an unnecessarily pessimistic sense of the speed of your Internet connection.  Just now we took a step that removes this unnecessary pessimism.  Continue reading “Our speed test improved still more”

We have moved our speed test server from our Westminster office to our dedicated server in Arizona.  The connection between our speed test server and the Internet is much faster now. Continue reading “Our improved speed test”

A year or so ago we migrated quite a few of our firm’s server functions, including this blog, and our firm’s main web site and our firm’s shopping cart, to a shared server in this large building (company web site) in Phoenix, Arizona (aerial photo at right).  I’ve never been in that building and my best guess is I won’t ever be in that building. The shared server was on an equipment rack in a cage controlled by our hosting service provider.  The building provides multiple connections to the Internet and diesel-powered backup power supplies.  In the photograph you can see the diesel fuel storage tanks.

Shared servers are really good to know about.  A shared server can provide a very inexpensive way to host many functions in a secure and reliable environment. 

On a shared server, you are sharing processor and hard-drive and network-connection bandwidth resources with others on the same server.  This means that if you were to use too much of the resources, your hosting service provider would suggest you move to a dedicated server.  This also means that if some other user or users on the same server were to use a lot of resources at a particular time, your functions would get slowed down.  If for example you were hosting a web site on the server, the web site might run slower for visitors to the web site, because of the activities of other users on the shared server.  Another thing to keep in mind is that not all hosting service providers are created equal.  Some providers will load too many users on a shared server, and the result will be that it runs slowly for everyone.

Back when we used a shared server at Godaddy, it often ran slowly.  I imagine this is because Godaddy put lots of users onto each server.  It is part of why we migrated to our present hosting service provider.  During the time that we used a shared server with our present hosting service provider, it happened only very rarely that the shared server would run slowly for us. 

A couple of months ago we migrated most of the functions that were on that shared server to a dedicated server.  The dedicated server costs more per month, but of course there are benefits to its being a dedicated server.  The server is very fast.  It never slows down because of other users, because there are no other users.  And you have “root access” meaning that you can do really neat things.  One of the neat things that I was able to do is to set up Let’s Encrypt (blog article) in the AutoSSL of the cPanel (Wikipedia article) in this machine.  The consequence of this is that we won’t ever again have to pay money for an SSL certificate for any web site on this server.

I haven’t ever actually seen our dedicated server, and I probably never will, but from its specs I can guess that it might look like the one pictured at right. It takes up one “rack unit” on an equipment rack in the same cage where the shared server was located.

The natural question that one might ask is, if we ever were to find the need to reboot our dedicated server, how would we do it?  Would I need to get on an airplane, fly to Phoenix, present myself at this building, get myself admitted to the cage, figure out which server is mine, and push the “reset” button?   Or would I need to contact our hosting service provider and beg and plead for them to send someone to the cage to do this?

Surely not. 

So should the need arise, how would we reboot it?  Continue reading “Rebooting a server that is a thousand miles away”