Anthony, E-Reads' Technical Director, conducted the greatest migration since the Ice Age

My phone console has a number of speed-dial buttons. There is RC Phone Home, of course. There’s one for our foreign sub-agent with whom I talk daily, and there are those for frequently called clients. There are intercom buttons for buzzing staff. And then there’s the Anthony Button. Anthony is E-Reads’ technical director. The button for his station is bright red. On a Friday morning in December I hit the Anthony Button. Hard.

As that day dawned I noticed that I had not received emails for eight hours. Refreshing and other tried-and-true techniques for goosing the get-mail function availed nothing. Then I clicked on the E-Reads home page. Some of it came in, but where the banner should have been was an error message.

I leaned all my weight on the hot button: ANTHONY! PICK UP!

Anthony had already seen the outage and analyzed it.  “Our cloud server is running on fumes.  We’ve loaded so many files recently that it’s maxed out.  We have to migrate our files to a larger server.”

“Why didn’t you tell me this was happening?” I asked, logically.

“I did,” he reminded me.

And he had.  But a move from the 60 gigabyte capacity of our current server to the 300 gig one we needed was a jump of four or five times the cost and I had dragged my heels.  To make room for more uploads Anthony had trimmed a bunch of junk files but it was hard to tell exactly how close the meter was hovering over Empty.

Once the system went down he didn’t wait around to determine if I was being penny wise and pound foolish (that was now a given). He immediately committed us to the larger server. But the changeover is not implemented with the snap of one’s fingers. Hundreds of thousands of files great and small, text files and jpegs, excel spreadsheets and metadata folders plus backups had to be migrated from computer A to computer B. But even with supercomputers running at peak speed, the transfer would take a minimum of 72 hours. In fact it took 96. Down so long it looked like up to me.

Meanwhile, though our resourceful technical director managed to rescue enough gigabytes to enable us to use our email, our website had to be taken offline.

If you’re looking for a definition of helplessness, try gazing at a “Sorry” message on one’s own website for 24, 48, 72, 96 hours. Though I was assured we had triple backup redundancy, excluding the portable hard drives I ferry once a week between home and office, the paranoid terror of a permanent failure haunted my dreams for four consecutive nights.

On the fifth day it came back, and it was good. Thank you, Anthony.

Wretched though this incident was, the bright side is that it was the result of a company that is growing – growing at a rate of of about 40 gigabytes a year.

Watch this space for the announcement that we’ve topped one terabyte.

Richard Curtis

Anthony Damasco, E-Reads’ technical director and intrepid explorer of the e-underworld, has looked under some more rocks today and produced this report on the child’s-play ease with which anyone can pirate a book.  Then look upon his video and despair.

Richard Curtis

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One of the easiest way to get pirated software, e-books, and music is to simply search for the key word you are looking for while adding the word “wordpress” or “blogspot”.  WordPress and Blogspot are places were people can create blogs hosted online. It’s easy to register for one and if it gets taken down, another can pop right back up in its place.

Anthony? Afraid of pirates? We don't think so.

The same basic formula that I described in my first post applies here. Pirates can create a post with details of the file they are sharing and a non-hyper-linked URL to rapidshare, megaupload or any other file upload service. The motivation for a blogging pirate can be notoriety or generate ad revenue, but it might also be to sneak malicious software on your computer.

So let’s see if we can find an e-book! I’ve been meaning to pick up my guitar again, but I’m a little rusty. Let’s find “Guitar for Dummies”. The video is silent, so there’s nothing wrong with your audio.

Well that was hard! 44 seconds and I’m reading my new e-book. If I were the author of that book, I’d be pretty ticked off. I’d be even more upset when I discovered how hard it to slay the beast once it’s out of its cage.  I could send a takedown notice but the file would be on a different blog in no time, linking to a different upload website. (Look for our postings on takedown notices in the next couple of weeks.)

Let’s try an experiment. If you’re an author, publisher, or agent, search for a book you own. Add the word “blogspot” at the end and see what comes up. WARNING: If you plan to go further than search results, be sure to have some serious protection.

That’s all for this installment, be on the lookout for part 3 coming soon. To see Part 1 click here.

Anthony Damasco