Troubleshooting

Would you like us to troubleshoot your systems?

Instead of pontificating about all of our experience, we'd like to let you know that we consider troubleshooting to be the most rewarding engineering activity of all. Virtually every outfit for whom we have done work for hire has asked us to troubleshoot a problem at one time or another.

With our tremendous patience we have learned to methodically dig through a call stack in just about every conceivable environment, be it Visual C++, Visual Basic, .NET, Unix, AS400 or Mac O/S X.

We are familiar with reading dumps, gleaning information from executable images, and using toolsets which come with various software environments.

We can rewrite or repair defects in challenging multi-threaded programs and understand mutexes, semaphores, event objects, and most other synchronization and multi-threaded mechanisms. We also understand the Unix fork concept.

I just need you to fix one small thing

What appears as one small thing from the outside is in our experience reflective of a weak system design.

Therefore it may surprise you that once we get into your code to fix one small thing, we really will need to tear it apart to get to the root of the problem.

If documentation is not on-site, we may first need to spend some time documenting your system to see what is going on. Documentation is often done as an afterthought and there may be some initial expense associated with this.

Rest assured, whatever documentation we can do for you will be helpful in the long-term life of your project. We have yet to encounter a system where documentation was not helpful!

Operating System settings

Similar to the need to re-test systems when components are replaced, Operating System environments should be re-tested in ensure that a change in settings did not cause an instability in operation.

We are committed to building a test platform for your company so that changes to Operating System settings can be tested before being rolled out. This testing is invaluable to platforms such as Windows Server 2003 where a single change to a security setting can bring down a server.

Subsystems such as DNS and Active Directory should also be staged. We do not take for granted making DNS and AD changes in your environment without first testing them.

We believe that the Operating System, DNS and AD infrastructures, as well as Security Settings must be highly respected. Therefore we treat the above 'like code'. A programmer doesn't throw a change into production without proper testing and similarly an operations manager or systems administrator should not introduce a change in his environment which could cause an instability, system crash, or downed system.

In summary, OCC always encourages its commercial clients to invest in test beds. They are the only way to go.

Talent

In the final analysis, we believe that sheer talent is necessary to be a good I.T. performer. We believe we possess such talent, backed by our patience and insight and buttressed by our knowledge and experience.

Call us at 914-469-7545 or email us at our office for more information. We look forward to hearing from you!