Archive for the 'Hosting' Category

I’m Not Spamming You, I Swear!

Published
by
Chris Meller
on March 31, 2008
in Announcements, Hosting, Internet and Security
. 1 Comment

In the last couple of hours, I’ve gotten over 4,000 bounced emails where someone is apparently spamming the shit out of the internet with an @doesnthaveone.com email address that doesn’t exist.

Since doesnthaveone.com redirects here, I thought I would post a message for anyone who may angrily type in the URL… It’s not me, I swear. I get lots of emails sent to random @doesnthaveone.com addresses, it’s a random address people make up. I’m not the one sending you this apparently random spam, I swear.

It appears all this spam has originated from a single IP belonging to a Puerto Rican ISP / Hosting provider. I have notified them through their registered abuse address and hope to see the flood stop soon.

Mail Migrations, the Final Piece

Published
by
Chris Meller
on March 24, 2008
in Gripes, Hosting and Internet
. 0 Comments

I’ve spent the past two days or so managing my email migration from DreamHost to Google Apps for Domains.

Over the weekend, DreamHost had some scheduled maintenance. Not only were their main page, panel, and all webmail down for an extended period, but they were moving the cluster I’m hosted on… for the second time. This is soon after a typo killed their entire network by firewalling out the entirety of the internet.

Of course this downtime would have to come as soon as I’m ready to send one of the half dozen emails I’ll actually send this year. All in all, it was the straw that broke the camel’s back. I think DreamHost offers good service, for the price they charge, but sometimes ‘good’ just isn’t ‘good’ enough.

I moved my blog to SliceHost previously, and email was the last link in the chain. While I’ll still use them for massive bandwidth and storage, there’s no chance I’ll be putting anything mission critical on their network again - it’s just not worth it.

How the hell did I compile that again?

Published
by
Chris Meller
on March 10, 2008
in Hosting, Internet, Techno-Babble and Work
. 0 Comments

I was stuck re-compiling Apache today to enable support for mod_proxy so I could pass requests through our existing webserver seamlessly to our new PHP5-sporting webserver. Of course I decided to make some other “optimizations” along the way with our Apache configuration, so I ended up breaking everything.

Recompiling Apache threaded of course required that I recompile PHP so it had thread support, and recompiling PHP meant I had to re-tackle the problem of Oracle support in PHP which has always been quite shady anyway.

To make a long story short, one of the things I needed to know was which parameters to pass into each ./configure command. PHP’s handy-dandy phpinfo(); page shows you the configure command used, but I didn’t know off hand how to find out which parameters Apache had been built with.

After poking around in the Apache root directory, I found my answer. Apparently the Apache configure command saves a pretty format of itself every time it’s compiled. On our box at work, I found it in <server_root>/build/config.nice - I presume it’s in a similar location for everyone.

For anyone wondering, yes, I did get mod_proxy up and running, and everything works like a charm. I’ll probably toss together another quick entry tomorrow about our specific use case, since I had to piece together all the information I found from dozens of different sites, none of which seemed to have the whole picture.

In the mean time, happy compiling!

Can You Spot the Downtime?

Published
by
Chris Meller
on March 5, 2008
in Commentary, Daily Grind, Hosting, Humor, Internet, Networking and Techno-Babble
. 0 Comments
Can You Spot the Downtime?

Testing the Slice

Published
by
Chris Meller
on March 4, 2008
in Hosting, Internet, Public Opinion, Questions, Techno-Babble and Wordpress
. 1 Comment

I’ve had a slice at SliceHost for longer than I care to admit by now1, I just hadn’t quite gotten around to ever testing and configuring it the way I wanted to.

Well, I finally got around to wiping out whatever I’d been playing with there before and dumping on their stock Debian 4.0 image. After running through their tutorials on setting up Apache2 and PHP, I was good to go.

The base system with my webserver and database running read at about 25 MB of used RAM. Not bad for a fully functional, if barebones, webserver. I’d been worried that, coming from a fully dedicated box with 1 GB of RAM, I would run into a memory bottleneck, but fortunately that didn’t seem it would be a problem.

The next important step was to do some testing. I played around with MySQL, running some basic queries, just to see if it was noticeably laggy after a casual poking. Again, everything looked fine.

The next, and really final, step was to dump a copy of my blog on the slice and see how it ran. After some complaining about the default max_upload_size value in PHP, I got a copy of my database imported using phpMyAdmin and a quick scp -r later and I had an exact copy of my blog setup and ready to go.

All-in-all, it looks like performance is at the very least on-par with the other hosting I’ve used in the past. The performance over DreamHost, where my blog has lived for several months while I really decided where to host it, represents about a 10% improvement3.

I’m still not ready to make the DNS switch, but at least I’ve realized I’m being too paranoid about the memory limits. In the end, the only other reason to stay with my expensive dedicated server is the convenience of Plesk, which scratches my lazy itch perfectly.

If I can get a few scripts hobbled together (in one language or another) to help automate things like vhost and database creation, I may be able to do away with Plesk entirely.

One final problem, and one I’m looking for opinions on, is what to do about email. I’m not planning on dumping DreamHost any time soon4, but I would like to move my email along with my blog if possible.

So who do you use for email? Any problems? Only condition is that they have to offer IMAP…

  1. About 6 months, but don’t tell anyone. [back]
  2. I never expected it to be that different than other distros. [back]
  3. Going purely by the stats in the footer of my theme. [back]
  4. I use their massive storage for backups as well. [back]