End of an Era

After almost 2 years of hacking, configuring, fixing, uploading, manipulating, coding and moaning, my time working on the systems on Redsumo.com is drawing to a close.

It has sure been an adventure, overall a fun but challenging experience. I’ve had to reverse engineer someone else’s setup and code, work out new ways of managing a virtualised infrastructure, constantly adapt to the threats that face an online business and all within my usual day job.

In some ways I’m sad to see all my efforts literally disappear as the systems move to a dedicated hosting environment powered by cPanel. Sure I will keep my bits of code, and retain all the lessons I have learned, but it’s almost as if a part of me will be going forever over the next week or so!

Good luck to Redsumo.com in all their ventures in the future, and thank you for allowing me the experience of managing such a complex environment.

Busy Times

So, as 2012 draws towards its close, I sit here, typing on a funky iPad2 with a bluetooth keyboard,
wondering why it feels busier than ever.

This latter part of the year has seen me running (virtually on my own) the infrastructure of 2 very different companies. Firstly, my career job, the home from home that is my Infrastructure Manager position at BMS. A very successful year in infrastructure terms, despite the network outages a few months ago, and the conficker spread in March it has been reasonably quiet. That said the workforce has practically doubled and the server rooms have seen numerous additions. The company’s ambitions continue to match my own and 2013 looks set to be even busier.
Secondly, Redsumo.com, the friendly, local web design, it services and hosting company, founded in 2010 and run out of an office in Alcester with servers hosted on the interweb. Well, what a change we’ve seen there. With an office move into Studley and an even more ambitious server migration to locally hosted servers, a mere few feet from my own desk! Redsumo has continued to take a lot of my time, with building, configuring and maintaining the web and email systems as well as helping with the migrations and even a fair bit of web coding, something that has always been a passion of mine. Redsumo has become more of a Web Development & Hosting company over the last few months, with the IT services gradually phased out. The site has seen a revamp, with new products sitting alongside the old and trusted services that have been provided since day 1. A new WordPress based blog has also been developed to provide a news platform for existing customers to share their stories and prospective customers to see into what we do and how we do it. The Blog project has been something of a success for me, practically recoding an entire theme with many customisations to make it like no other out there. Whilst on the outside it looks plain and simple, I
assure you underneath the hood there’s a lot of clever things going on!

2013 looks set to be a busy, and hopefully compelling year for both companies, and therefore for myself as well. I’m really looking forward to the challenges ahead.

New Blog – Again!

Hi,

Welcome to my new blog, this one is intended to give an insight into the daily life of an IT Infrastructure Manager’s role within a small/medium software company. Having just been promoted to Infrastructure Manager at Beoley Mill Software Ltd. I thought it was my time to give back to the community of bloggers out there who’s content I rely on in my daily job to help troubleshoot issues and develop solutions customised to my company’s needs.

 

I hope that you find the content here useful and I urge you to link back to my site when you do.

 

Many thanks for visiting.

 

Jonathan