99.99%.

It’s a compelling figure. The uptime guarantee trumpeted in SLAs the world over.

Of course, 100% is simply unattainable. Those SLAs must provide wiggle room for the .01% of unplanned, unavoidable, ‘well I didn’t expect THAT to happen, ‘what do you mean there’s been a power spike to the UPS’, ‘so THAT’S what that switch does’ events.

We started using Google Pub/Sub to synchronize between a legacy operations application and newer tech such as Salesforce. Along the way, we encountered quite a few challenges and not everything went according to plan.

In this post, I want to take a look back and share what we’ve learnt so far.

I recently installed and tested out PaperCut NG on the easy-to-use Univention Corporate Server (UCS).

Tl;dr? It was a breeze. But what about getting the server itself up and running?

Join me as I walk through creating a PaperCut-ready UCS test environment on a virtual machine.

Take it from a support manager who’s seen some grisly stuff: when it comes to protecting your print infrastructure, implementing health monitoring should be your top priority.

Sceptical? These chilling tales should scare some sense into you.

*wolves howl, printers jam in the distance*

I love making life easier. And let’s face it – some repetitive administrator tasks are prime targets for streamlining. Take the case of a boatload of inactive PaperCut users. Removing them’s too much trouble, but letting them take up valuable licenses is a big no-no. Here’s where scripting can really help.

Another successful PaperCut Constructival hackathon has come and gone. Around 120 PaperCutters huddled together in busy little groups for 30-odd hours and hacked to their collective heart’s’ content.

Why have a hackathon? What’s the value? How do I run a hackathon with my own team? These are the questions we’ll solve today.

When you’re responsible for software updates and upgrades, it’s best not to jump in without checking what the repercussions will be.

Systems architect Matt Lee shares his personal formula for ensuring a safe software update. As a bonus, Matt shares the horror story that led to his formula.

Flinders University CIO Kerrie Campbell shares three IT lessons she’s picked up over the years that keep her ahead of the pack.

I recently spoke at Linux Conf Australia about the differences between five programming languages developed over many decades. It was a five minute talk, which didn’t give me enough time to do the topic justice.

I found it an interesting enough exercise to warrant exploring more in a blog post, as it’s a handy way to see how different languages work.

The XML-RPC network protocol is popular, small, and lightweight. It’s designed for clients to make function calls to a server and receive the results in a simple and language-independent manner. Recently developed servers will probably offer remote procedure calls based on more modern technology, for example gRPC. However it’s very possible you will still need to […]

Our team has been using Google Cloud Datastore extensively as a part of our PaperCut Views product. We have found ourselves needing to migrate data from Datastore to BigQuery periodically so we can analyse them better. Unfortunately, the process of migrating this data is quite painful, as it requires manually exporting and importing the data. […]

After rolling out PaperCut Views on the Google Cloud Platform, we realised that the operation cost was more affected by the instance running time than by the number of IO operations, storage, cache, etc. In this article, I will show the problems we found in our original architecture and the changes we made to reduce […]