Category Archives: Technical

Technical

EU Cookie Law

The new EU Cookie law is now in effect and applies to websites hosted in the UK. The law requiring websites to gain explicit consent before storing cookies on users computers was passed in May 2011 but the ICO granted firms a year to comply before prosecuting any cases.

What the law means for webmasters

There are a few steps to go through in order to achieve compliance with the law:

  • You must audit your cookies and present clear information about them on your privacy policy
  • Depending on the kind of cookies you’re using on your site, you must decide on a model for managing user awareness and consent.
  • You must make any technical changes to cookie-storing scripts in order to test for consent before a cookie is stored.

In practical terms it means you need to avoid using cookies or deploying third party software that uses them except where it is essential for the purpose making your website work. This is because as soon as explicit consent is required, users may refuse that consent. If you see a particular feature as important, you’ll want to know that it will work all the time, whether or not users have consented to cookies.

Bear in mind that in the UK, the ICO is taking a relaxed approach to analytics. Their guidance is that analytics cookies are fairly unintrusive and that therefore, as long as you inform users about their use, explicit consent is not required.

Use a Plugin to Update your Website

http://civicuk.com/cookie-law/index Cookie Control enables you to comply with UK and EU law on cookies, in a couple of quick and easy steps. Proudly developed in Scotland by CIVIC

Technical

Tech Events 2012

a nerdy guy
Release your inner geek at a tech conference this year

Here are some of the tech events taking place in 2012

  • NEXT Elevator, Germany (May 8-9). The NEXT Elevator is renowned for creating platforms for new ideas and giving startup founders an opportunity to pitch before investors and opinion leaders. elevator.nextconf.eu
  • Thinking Digital, UK (May 29-31). 3 day event built for people who believe in the power of innovation and creativity to create positive change in their work, organisations and communities. thinkingdigital.co.uk
  • Digital Shoreditch, UK (May 21-June 2). A festival celebrating the outstanding creative,  technical and entrepreneurial talent of East London and Tech City. digitalshoreditch.com
  • Over the Air, UK (June 1-2).  Over the Air is a unique tech-agnostic event for and by the developer community, featuring technical workshops where attendees can roll up their sleeves and tinker with new platforms, operating systems, APIs & SDKs; and tutorial sessions that feature real business cases & new insights. overtheair.org
  • Picnic, Amsterdam (September 17-18). A leading creativity and innovation platform. It functions as an incubator and accelerator for game-changing ideas, concepts, products and services. picnicnetwork.org
  • MADE: The Entrepreneur Festival, UK (September 19-21). Whether you’re a startup, a high growth business or a well established business looking for inspiration and idea, MADE is for you. madefestival.com
  • Wired 2012, UK (October 25-26). WIRED’s first conference in October last year was a compelling event that was sold out and attended by more than 440 delegates. This years event will be jam-packed with stimulating content, networking and inspiring talks from people reshaping our world. wiredevent.co.uk

WIRED Magazine (UK) is currently offering discounts and the chance to win tickes to some of these events – email tilly.bull@condenast.co.uk if you are interested.

Technical

Notes on Hyper-V backups

Windows Hyper-V allows backups to be taken of entire virtual machines extremely quickly. To do this, volume shadow copies are used.

Sometime however the volume shadow copy service fails to run properly. You might get an error like this in your logs: vss_ws_failed_at_prepare_snapshot or ERROR: Selected writer ‘Microsoft Hyper-V VSS Writer’ is in failed state. – Status: 8 (or Status: 11)

When this happens, the next step is to open a command prompt and type

vssadmin list writers

You may see something like this:

Writer name: 'Microsoft Hyper-V VSS Writer'
   Writer Id: {66rfg1cd4-6e5ed-4f4b-8417-fd23456dc3de}
   Writer Instance Id: {f0dreda9-1459-4632a-9861-51e45g6414a7}
   State: [8] Failed
   Last error: Retryable error

To try and fix this, go to the Services control panel and try restarting:

  1. Hyper-V Virtual Machine Management (note this does not cause running machines any problems).
  2. Volume Shadow Copy (optional – try 1 first).

In practice we find that just restarting the Hyper-V Virtual Machine Management service is enough.  Run the command again and check if VSS is now showing ‘no error’ state.

vssadmin list writers

Then wait for your next backup job and check it completes properly.

There are a number of hotfixes available from Microsoft but we’ve not found a reliable fix for Windows Server 2008 (release 1). So far we’ve not seen the problem recur on Windows Server 2008 R2.

About Us

2020Media is an established UK hosting provider. We offer dedicated virtual servers with full root access on a variety of platforms, including Hyper-V. We also offer prebuilt and configured instances of popular open-source free software such as SugarCRM and Java Tomcat,  on virtual machine instances.

Technical

IPv6 Day – the aftermath

Graph of website traffic to 2020Media on IPv6 day
We got some extra traffic to our site

As we reported in an earlier post, 2020Media took part in World IPv6 Day, which took place on 8th June 2011. For 24 hours (or more) major websites around the world turned on IPv6 access to test how well this technology actually worked in practice.

Organised by the Internet Society, the project was intended to raise awareness about the need to start the global transition to IPv6 and to enable participants to gather data about potential glitches

2020Media’s website and blog were reachable over IPv6 (in addition to IPv4 of course), and we saw an increase in our normal website visitors on the day. We had no reported problems and our servers coped without any errors, so we consider the day a success.

Not so the boffins at Nominet, who were hosting one of the probes monitoring UK connectivity. For the early part of the day, routing problems there made UK sites, including the BBC look patchy.

ISOC measurements
ISOC measurements

One good thing about IPv6 day was that where there were any kind of routing problem, because everybody was watching, those problems were resolved fast.

Continue reading IPv6 Day – the aftermath →

Technical

Cricket Liu at the IOD

Institute of Directors2020Media staff  attended a talk by DNS guru Cricket Liu at the prestigious Institute of Directors today.

Cricket Liu is known as the co-author of the BIND DNS books and today gave a talk on a variety of IPv6 topics. You can view the webcast here for a limited time.

2011 is the year that IPv6 really matters. The Asia-Pacific region has now run out of IPv4 addresses and it’s very likely the European/Russian/MiddleEast area will run out before the end of 2011. Even if you do not need to deploy it immediately, you should begin planning for IPv6, including making sure your infrastructure and your ISP can support it.

Read more about IPv6 at our IPv6 day page and our IPv6 deployment plan