Category Archives: Tech - Page 8

The difficulty of finding solutions

Posted by on October 16, 2006 Comments Off on The difficulty of finding solutions

I have a need to host some websites. After a bit of research my first thought was that I would use a virtual private server configured with one of the many free control panels (Ravencore, DTC, VHCS, etc.) In my quest to find a reasonably priced VPS company I located a fantastic resource for comparing VPS plans: vpschoice.com. There you’ll find a searchable index of various VPS vendors and their plans so it’s easy to find one that fits both your requirements and your budget.

After playing around with a few different VPS vendors I discovered a few things. First, those free web hosting control panels are extremely difficult to install. Take it from someone who has been using *NIX for years, custom compiles Linux kernels with patches and has never had a problem installing web software. I spent hours trying to get a variety of these control panels working on two different VPS hosts with no luck. These things are a nightmare! If you’re asked to install one either run the other way as fast as you can or prepare to spend a lot of time playing with it to make it work.

Secondly, I discovered that most of the inexpensive VPS plans are incredibly difficult to work with and have questionable reliability. When they work, they work great but that seems to be a big problem. Most of the less expensive VPS vendors do not have a web control panel where you can do simple tasks such as re-install your server (useful after trying to install a web control panel which screws it all up, see above) or re-boot the VPS. Some of these vendors don’t even offer console access to your VPS meaning if you shut off the Ethernet port you’re simply out of luck until tech support gets around to restarting your VPS. In short, the problems compared to dedicated servers with physical access show the immaturity of this technology which has great potential.

That said my suggestion if you’re interested in VPS is twofold, first go with a provider using Xen as opposed to Virtuozzo or some of the others. It seems to be the most stable and prevents overselling of RAM which can be an issue with less scrupulous hosting companies. Secondly, be aware of the problems and pitfalls you can have with VPS and spend a month testing reliability before making a server active. There’s a lot of potential here for something between shared hosting and dedicated servers, the market just hasn’t shaken out yet.

Based on my difficulty with getting the hosting control panels to work on a VPS server and a shortage of time on my part to work through it I decided to move to a simple reseller plan from one of the shared hosting companies. This makes my life simpler, if less flexible, by moving the locus of control for most of the server functions to another company, e.g. they need to keep the OS up to date and make sure everything is functioning. The downside is I need to start from square one searching for a hosting company. I’ve had experiences with a few of these shared hosting companies in the past and you really have to watch out for sleezebags. There are a lot of fly-by-night operations promising lots of unlimited stuff (bandwidth, space, etc) for very little per month. Stay away! Usually they have lots of fine print, things aren’t what they seem and if nothing else the company will soon go out of business leaving you high and dry. Two of my favorite sites for finding shared web hosts are HostSearch and FindMyHost, again be aware that many of the host search companies are untrustworthy and skew results to favor advertisers or are actually owned by hosting companies pushing you to sign up with them.

Even with respectable sites such as these it’s much more difficult to find a good reseller account than a simple web host. I’m especially difficult because my specialty is mail servers and I’ve found many hosts (and even ISPs) that have a poor understanding of running mailservers (which manifests itself in poor mail performance and spam filtering) so I tend to want to know quite a bit about their server setup before making a committment. This information isn’t available on the typical webhost’s website so it usually involves contacting the host and waiting for a response which sometimes never comes.

By now you’re getting the picture that the webhosting business is quite a nasty place which is fairly accurate. Even big personalities can be caught off guard by a problematic host such as this weekend when Leo Laporte’s network of sites went mostly offline due to a hardware failure (somewhat understandable, if poor planing) but stayed offline for several days because of inaction on the part of the host (bad move, especially for such a visable network of sites). As for me I’m hosting the sites temporairly without the benefit a control panel on one of my dedicated servers while I continue to search for a respectable, but not overly expensive reseller host.

IAX Softphones

Posted by on October 2, 2006 Comments Off on IAX Softphones

In the past I’ve used the multi-platform iaxComm program to test IAX VoIP links with a PC but I’ve since discovered two more IAX sofphones. IDEFISK and Kiax are both multi-platform IAX softphones.

At first glance IDEFISK actually looks somewhat similar to iaxComm but with a more polished look and some more advanced features such as mail program plugins, the downside is that it is not open source and some features are only available in the paid version. On the other hand Kiax looks more like an instant messaging program than a softphone, but is entirely open source. Actually it is remeniscent of Skype or the Gizmo project.

Strike Three!

Posted by on October 2, 2006 Comments Off on Strike Three!

It seems we can now add Lenovo/IBM to the list of companies affected by bad laptop batteries. Details on the recall are available at http://lenovo.com/batteryprogram including a small program you can download and install or a place to enter in your battery’s serial number that will tell you if your battery is one of those affected.

When you really need to know whois

Posted by on October 2, 2006 Comments Off on When you really need to know whois

If you do much work with domain names you’re probably familiar with the whois system, at least the pretty web-frontend that is. It’s really useful for more than looking up who owns a domain and what the associated details are. If you access a real whois server such as the Verisign-GRS whois you can look up things like what IP is associated with a given nameserver or details about a specific registrar. Of course this all seems rather unimportant until you’re trying to track down why DNS records aren’t resolving correctly only to find out that the ns record isn’t pointing at the correct server.

Open Source Routing

Posted by on September 26, 2006 Comments Off on Open Source Routing

I’ve written about competition to Cisco products in the past, most recently about a college in Texas switching from Call Manager to the (fantastic) open source Asterisk PBX. It seems there’s more trouble in paradise. The networking market has been moving towards commoditization for some time but remains stratified, for example when Linksys got too close for comfort Cisco bought them out and made it clear such products were not suitable for the enterprise customer.

Another threat should be on the radar at Cisco. A company called Vyatta has released an open source product set to compete directly with Cisco routers called Open Flexible Router (OFR). The software runs on standard x86 PC hardware and is based on Linux but boots up and runs in much the same way a Cisco router does, right down to the command line interface that closely paralells Cisco’s. It seems the marketing is currently targeted and small and medium sized businesses but there’s no real reason that such a company couldn’t convice some educational and enterprise users to switch if they were convinced the support was good enough.

The two main things Cisco has going for it are the dedicated hardware which allows for (theoretically) more stability and optimized processing and the history of customer satisfaction and excellent support that Cisco has built into its brand. Of course with an open source program such as OFR another company could come up with a customized hardware solution that would erode at least one of the Cisco advantages, the other one will just take time if Vyatta can build a name for quality and stability.

Back up that data!

Posted by on September 26, 2006 Comments Off on Back up that data!

I’ve looked at online data backup solutions in the past and have found them slow and overly expensive. I recently uncovered rsync.net which looks to change all that, at least for those users confortable with the Linux command line.

The great thing about rsync.net (other than the $1.80/gb price and unlimited transfer) is that you can use the rsync protocol. For those not familiar, rsync is a protocol which transfers only the portions of a file which have chnaged instead of the entire file. Essentially it makes the tramsfer process much more efficient. As an added benefit you can use other open protocols such as sftp, Unison, rdiff-backup, WebDAV and duplicity. If that sounds like alphabet soup to you rsync.net is probably not the right solution, this is not a one touch backup solution. On the other hand if you are comfortable getting your feet wet rsync.net might be a great and inexpensive solution for automated offsite backup.

Collecting weather with one wire

Posted by on September 26, 2006 Comments Off on Collecting weather with one wire

I thought I’d written about this in the past, but it appears I have not so I’ll have to take a bit more time to explain this than I thought. To make a long story shorter my interest in weather and computers indicates that at some point I would like to have a computerized weather station at the house. In looking into this, and with my strong preference for inexpensive and open source solutions, I came across the Dallas Semiconductor 1-Wire protocol. As it turns out there are a lot of things you can do with the 1-wire protocol, including using their iButtons and readers as the basis for an access control system (another fun project). One of the early ways they popularized the 1-wire system was by developing an inexpensive weather station.

The station is now sold by Automatizacion Aplicada a Gasolineras (AAG) on their website. The sourceforge One Wire Weather (OWW) project is an open source solution to logging and displaying the data from just such a station. As an added benefit the OWW project has a page listing hardware suppliers, projects and scripting resources. If you’re interested in this sort of thing I encourage you to look at the 1-Wire products and the OWW project as a fun activity.

News for campus computing

Posted by on September 26, 2006 Comments Off on News for campus computing

I don’t know that I can add another publication or website to my list of reading material becasue I’m already so far behind but I found out that there’s an enterprise IT trade paper just for college and university settings. CampusTechnology is a monthly publication with roots going back to 1988 and published by 1105 Media, which is nice to see since the majority of the trade journals are controlled by CMP and IDG.

Shorten that URL

Posted by on September 26, 2006 1 comment

Several times in the past I’ve considered building an open source program similar to TinyURL (with some improvements) for my own use. I think it would be especially handy as a way for me to link to other sites from my blog while keeping strict anti-spam measures in place (which sometimes whine about my own off-site links).

I can’t believe this hasn’t been done before as the code shouldn’t be that difficult. I did spend some time recently looking for starter code but didn’t quite come up with what I was looking for. Instead I found lists of simialr sites which don’t appear to use open source code either the notlong service has links to some of their competitors and the Perl Shorten library gives another list of such services. The closest I have come is this short url php script but I haven’t looked at the code yet and I’m tempted not too because I’m not thrilled with the way the short urls appear to be handled and there is no information about how the code is licensed. The last thing I want is to get caught up in a licensing battle like the SCO/IBM case.

If you know of any open source PHP/mySQL URL shortening projects please add a coment and share the wealth.

Ajax comes to your server

Posted by on September 26, 2006 Comments Off on Ajax comes to your server

I recently heard about the nifty Ajaxterm project. The idea is to provide terminal access to Linux servers without the need for a Java client which has been the way this has been accomplished in the past. Obviously the connection is insecure unless you use SSH and relies on the local webserver staying up so their are some limitiations. Nonetheless, this is a cool project and one that could prove useful in a number of system management scenarios.