The Diary of an Entrepreneur

It is often useful to have a server connected to your networking equipment for remote out-of-bands access or even to set up a router/switch without having to be onsite at 3am.

I tend to use OpenSolaris based machines for this (although this has now been dropped from development so you may want to use CentOS/Ubuntu) and the purpose of this post is to give you some quick commands which will allow you to pipe the serial output to the SSH console.

Connect the serial cable to port B on the Solaris machine and into the console port for your device. Once logged onto the Solaris machine remotely you need to run “tip hardwire” from the command line.

You should then be connected and shown a “Connected” message. Press enter a few times to see if you are getting a response and the prompt of your router/switch. If you are not, check your connections and make sure you have the right cable.

The hardwire parameter in the tip command refers to an entry in the file /etc/remote which describes the serial port connections. By default, hardwire specifies port B with 9600 baud, 8 data bits, no stop bits, and 1 parity bit.

From within tip, you can access a tip menu by pressing ~? after a carriage return. To quit the tip session, press ~. and to send a break character, type ~#

Update:

If you are running Ubuntu or CentOS the same can be achieved by running the command “screen /dev/ttyS0 9600″ for serial port A or “screen /dev/ttyS1 9600″ for port B.

Well its been 2 years since I last posted to this blog it would seem so my apologise for being away but I was caught up in running the company and forgot all about this little project!

Things have gone well since my last post with a number of new employees (we now have 14 full time up from 5 the last time I made a post) and very good growth over the last 12 months.

I’ll start to post more regularly with industry news and what is going on in the company not leaving it 2 years between posts!

So I’ve had about 2 hours sleep this night in between driving to and from work twice to deal with customer problems – Another day of caffine to keep me going it seems

Well a fair bit has gone on since my last update and we’re now getting closer to that magical critical mass. I expect we’ll reach the point in October sometime depending on how quickly I can get our pipeline business converted into sales.

We’re also facing some very large power cost increases on the back of the wholesale price increases over the last 12 months, mainly due to oil, which means some rapid re-thinking of our cost structure to take into account of this increase.

I’ve also learnt, once again, to listen to my insincts as I had a feeling things were going to go this way and I should have signed a 3-5 year contact last October instead of 12 months!

In other news my friend has started his own blog at http://t3-house.blogspot.com/ completely different to this blog but worth a read also http://www.miniclip.com/games/final-ninja/en/ is a game which has been destroying any free time I have!

I used to approach sales with a very softly, softly approach letting the customer be in the driving seat and reacting to the questions/communications they gave to me.

Since getting the investment last year and the explosive growth I’ve seen things have changed dramatically and I’ve had to “grow-up” in a lot of the ways I deal with the company and business in general.

One of the main things has been how I run sales. Previously it was very ad-hoc with no real marketing just letting things come to us and then not keeping a proper track of leads, opportunities and results, we had a full CRM just never used it properly, however now I see that I should have spent that extra day just learning how to use it then really buckle down with marketing our services. If I’d done that 3 years ago I could be in a very different position now.

What I’ve learnt from a sales point of view, for IT/Technology at least, is the following:

• You have to really shove all your offerings in people’s faces. That might be Google Adwords everywhere, emails to all the people you know and potential clients (If you send 500 you’ll get hopefully 8-10% response rate with good leads) or going to events with your target customers and just talk shop to them to find their requirements.
• A good CRM package is a must. Once you get more than 5 or 6 leads on the go with emails/calls back and forth it becomes almost impossible to keep track of everything for when they call you out of the blue wanting to know pricing. I used to use a book but its just not practical. Spend that £30 a month on something like Salesforce it’ll pay for itself within days!
• Set yourself weekly targets for sales. I used to get sell and if I happen to sell something then that’s good but now I set myself a target per week. These help to focus and concentrate your efforts where they matter that week.

Well that’ll do for now – I’m thinking about a post around electricity and “Green” issues!

Well I’ve had a blog elsewhere for a while now but thought I’d start one documenting my life an entrepreneur in the hosting/Internet space.

I’ve been running my company for around 8 years now, 5 and a half years full time, I left school when I was 17 so that I could put all my time into the company.

Since then we’ve had a few ups and downs but the brief story is that I took on some investment about 16 months ago which resulted in finance to be able to aquire our own datacentre in South West London, refurbish it and then “go-live” in October. All our existing equipment was moved down and allowed to “bed in”. In December we started move customers in and since then we’ve been getting busier each day.

This blog is to basically provide a regular insight into the life of someone running a fast-growing company as well as day to day musings on the world.