Excellent Evaluations

Leeware - Unmanaged VPS Provider

So unless you’ve been held up in the Unabomber’s shack for the last year or two you’ve heard of Virtual Private Servers or, in the vernacular of the day; VPS. A VPS is basically an instance of an OS running on a machine which shares resources with several other virtualized OS installs. These OS can be Windows, Linux, you name it.

Well, I recently started using InterWorx’s control panel for to host my Linux loving sites and I decided to bail on using UltraDNS’ expensive and less than exciting service for DNS redundancy. InterWorx uses djbDNS as its name server so I decided I’d pick up a couple of el cheapo VPS to act as offsite djbDNS slaves.

When searching for sloppy-secondary machines phrases like “enterprise-grade” and “click here for quote” don’t really set my world on fire. I want to read things like “so cheap you’ll be amazed if it works” or “poverty friendly pricing.” Seriously, if the server tanks for a while at a time it’s no big deal. I’ve got two other servers ready and waiting.

That’s where Leeware came in. I picked up a Fedora VPS for all of $15 per month and guess what; it’s worked fine. I only run djbDNS on it so there’re no load or disk I/O issues. If I tried to run a dynamic website on it I might feel differently but for what its doing its adequate.

The datacenter it’s in isn’t the greatest (FDC Servers) and the system has been unavailable for short periods of time. There have also been occasions where, in SSH, if hit a key, got a beer, drank it and still found myself waiting for the character to appear on the screen. But, as I setup an automated replication system, I never have to log into the box and I’ve only gotten notices about a blown cron job fifteen or twenty times in the year or so I’ve had it.

Lee (yes you guessed it, the owner) is also very helpful. The service is unmanaged but if you’re having an issue with your VPS he’s all too happy to re-image it for you. Seriously, at least he answers his support tickets. That’s half the battle at bargain basement hosts.

Anyway, if you’re looking for a VPS to run some redundant service like backup DNS or email I’d recommend Leeware as an affordable option. If you’re looking do anything more serious pull your wallet out and get a real dedicated server somewhere that’ll let you sleep at night.

Rating: 4/5 (in the bang-for-the-buck department)
URL: www.leeware.com

January 10th, 2007

m0n0wall FreeBSD Firewall

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Continue Reading Add comment March 7th, 2006

The Planet

Sometimes a shared hosting account simply won’t cut it. If you’re doing anything which involves a custom configuration, be it running Windows or Linux/Unix, you might need a dedicated server to properly pull it off.

I’ve been using dedicated servers from a bevy of different companies for quite some time now. Yes, yes I co-locate machines in the city where I live but, for a variety of reasons, renting dedicated boxes on an outside network can complement your co-lo setup.

One of the companies I’ve been leasing servers at is called The Planet. They’re located in Texas and have been around for quite a while. I’ve actually had a few servers there for a couple of years now and have been pretty happy with them. Firstly, they have a nice, diverse network. They purchase bandwidth from several bandwidth providers including Verizon, Sprint, Level3, Globex, Savvis, AT&T and Hurricane Electric. A diverse provider portfolio helps guarantee that their network will be up in the event that a single (or several) providers have technical problems. It can also help get your inbound and outbound data packets the best possible route to their end location. During the time I’ve been there the network has been pretty solid with only a few outages which have affected me. There’s capacity to spare as my servers routinely hit 20 or 30Mbps for brief periods of time without trouble.

The hardware they use is fairly decent. My servers are (I believe) Dell systems and have performed admirably for quite a while. I’m tempting the fates here but as of right now I haven’t had a single hardware issue. Of course after writing this my servers will doubtless burst into flames. Anyway, I think a lot of dedicated server providers tend to skimp on quality hardware in their machines but isn’t the case at The Planet.

Their support seems okay. I’ve got to admit; I’ve never used it. I’ve never called about a reboot or some technical problem with a server. I have called during a rare moment of downtime and was helped by someone who at least seemed like they knew what they were talking about. I’m easily fooled however so take that with a grain of salt. The Planet is (at least with my package) an unmanaged server provider which means that they’ll do very limited hand-holding with regards to software issues. If you purchase a more advanced support package from them they will help you with software issues but I have no experience with their management services. Their control panel web application is very nice however. It’s called Orbit and lets you do everything from reboot your server to check your bandwidth utilization to purchase additional servers and upgrades at a reduced price.

All in all I have to say that they’ve been a good provider for the money. I can’t give them a perfect score as I’ve never tested their support but I’ll update this evaluation when the opportunity avails itself.

Rating: 4/5
URL:??? www.theplanet.com

Add comment February 23rd, 2006

Postini Spam Filtering

Like many of you who host your own email server I’ve noticed a drastic increase in the amount of spam I’ve been receiving as of late. Yes, of course I run a spam/virus checker (Spamassassin/MailScanner). Yes, I also block certain ⿿problematic” netblocks and use RBL lists. Did all of this work? Well, sort of. For it to really work acceptably it required a fair amount of server administration time on my part and as someone I know is fond of saying; “Life’s just too short for that sort of thing.”

A good friend of mine is a reseller for a mail filtering company called Postini. You may or may not have heard of them however they are regarded by some as the king of the hill of the spam filtering world. I cried on his shoulder for a while about the glut of e-turds bouncing off my server every day and the few crashes that have resulted because of it. He took pity on me and told me he’d give me a couple of months to give his service a try and I, on an impulse, decided to give it a shot.

Here’s a little background on me; I’m a hands on guy. I don’t like outsourcing something as important as email to anyone. The thought of another company being a link in my email chain would usually be enough to keep my up at night. Recent events had however completely eroded my can-do attitude. I was at the breaking point and I couldn’t deal with more missing email or a downed server.

So I bit the bullet and set my primary domain up with Postini MX records and waited. I used their control panel to add a couple of domains to my white list but that was pretty much all the intervention on my part. Slowly the spam dropped off as DNS caches started running dry. By the next day the problem had pretty much vanished. Every time I hit send and receive I was rewarded by either no mail or mail that I wanted. It was beautiful.

I then decided to explore the Postini control panel. They have a MRTG-style graph that shows how many emails have hit the server and whether they were delivered, quarantined, chucked etc. It was fairly interesting. I could run reports and see exactly what percentage of email was being delivered. My percentage was a meager 2% by the way. I could browse the quarantine section and see what the software had tagged as spam. It all was. I could also change settings for how aggressively the system treated certain categories of junk mail. Among the options are “Sexually Explicit,” “Get Rich Quick,” “Special Offers” and “Racially Insensitive.”

If Postini does have a weak link it is the system administrator control panel. Mind you, the user control panel is fine. It’s very simple and easy for the average user to add domains to the approved or blocked senders list. When you, as a reseller or web host, want to add new email accounts or domain to the system things become a little more complicated. I really wish that companies with quality software products would spend a little more time on their web interfaces. If the system administration interface had help files and a more intuitive structure I wouldn’t hesitate to give this product 5 out of 5. Fortunately once you get the hang of it it’s not too bad.

All in all this is a fantastic product that I can’t recommend enough to those drowning in spam. I’ve since put all the email accounts on my mail server on Postini and my server loads have dropped substantially. By configuring the firewall on my mail server to only accept connections on port 25 from Postini’s mail servers I’ve also closed the door on the crafty spammer who ignores MX records and connects directly with your mail server to do their dirty business.

Rating: 4/5
URL: www.postini.com
Reseller URL: www.opendoors.com

Add comment February 23rd, 2006

UltraDNS SiteBacker

If you have a domain that absolutely must be up 24×7 you know how important your DNS setup is. If your DNS is down you’re not getting hits, not getting email and in a lot of cases, not getting paid. I myself have experienced the pain of a non-responsive DNS setup and it spurred me to kick my name server setup up a notch.

My DNS problem was a classic example of Murphy’s Law. For the longest time I was running a secondary server on a VPS (virtual private server) which was located across the country from my main DNS server. It was running BIND and configured to act as a slave to my primary server which was pulling double duty as a web and mail server. Anyway, besides being a bit on the pokey side, it worked fine.

Fast forward to about six months ago. My phone starts ringing and I’ve got people telling me that a web application I host isn’t working anymore. Hm, the server must be down. I try to log on and get the obligatory 404 finger. I try to log into a Linux box via SSH using the system IP address and guess what, I get right in. This gets me thinking. I pull up a DOS prompt and, using the very handy nslookup utility, try to query my DNS server. Nothing. I try my backup server. Also nothing. Queue panic.

Well, my primary DNS server came back up with a simple reboot. The mail server had become choked with spam and Spamassassin and/or Mailscanner had taken the box down. But where was my trusty backup DNS server when all this was going down? Well, my VPS company had quietly gone out of business a few days before and taken my secondary name server with them. Perfect.

This left me with a choice; I could either get another VPS (which I hadn’t really been too jazzed on) or lease a low-end dedicated server and just run DNS and maybe a backup mail server on it. I then remembered the fancy DNS service providers I’d looked at in the past and thought I’d give them a second look.

After a bit of looking I decided on UltraDNS’s product, SiteBacker. It basically acts as a secondary (and tertiary) name server by accepting zone transfers from your DNS server. The price was right (around $15 per month) and after making a couple of changes to my DNS server I was in business.

Pros
The pros of this service are its simple setup, the fact that it automatically updates itself, the affordable pricing and the tech support. I’ve submitted a couple of tickets and they’ve been quickly answered by people not using “hax0r” speak. The DNS servers themselves are fast which is nice. It seems solid too. I haven’t noticed any outages. There’s a report section in the control panel which shows how many queries they’re fielding for you which is moderately interesting.

Cons
The downside is the lame control panel and the lack of documentation. If I didn’t already know how to set BIND up to do what it needed to do I would have been at a loss. They really need to add a few tutorials to the web interface to help those with setup questions. It was challenging for me to find a few bits of info that I really needed and it was a bit frustrating that I had to dig so hard to get them. The web interface also looks pretty dated which is kind of a turn-off. Who doesn’t like pretty things and the monochromatic blue interface doesn’t help me know where to spastically click at two in the morning to add a domain.

The other major con is that they make you sign a one-year agreement. In the managed service industry one-year contracts are becoming a thing of the past and UltraDNS really should consider dropping this requirement on their lower-end product line.

All in all I recommend this service for those who run a name server and are looking to add some quality redundancy without adding another server to their management headache. I just wish they didn’t make you sign your life away for a full year.

Update: 7/10/2007

I guss UltraDNS was purchased by NeuStar. Not much has changed. Same pricing, same crappy backend. I’d recomend moving to another provider like DNS Made Easy at this point. The pricing and functionality is better however DNS Made Easy’s backend, like NeuStar’s is no treat for the eyes, or brain at 2am.

Rating: 3/5
URL: www.sitebacker.com

Add comment February 23rd, 2006

Verizon XV6700

So you’re in the market for a new cell phone and you want a PDA running Windows Mobile 5.0 with a QWERTY keyboard. Well, you’re in luck. The XV6700 from Verizon (PPC-6700 on Sprint) will rock your socks off. I purchased it from Verizon for $299 and happily pitched my Treo 600 in the trash never to look back. Here’re the ups and the downs of this fantastic device.

Pros
The biggest pro for me is Windows Mobile 5.0 (or wm5.0). It’s awesome and is a breath of fresh air compared to the Palm inspired nightmare I was living in with my Treo 600. It comes with mobile versions of the major Microsoft Office applications which enable you to open and create Word and Excel documents. You can also view PowerPoint files. The first day I got this thing someone emailed me a PowerPoint file that I had to review and comment on quickly. It was so convenient to open it, view the file and then email my comments back all while out on the road.

For those of you using Microsoft’s Exchange email server you’ll be living in the world of push email that was previously the sole domain of Blackberry users. I haven’t used push email on this phone but here’s what it does; when you get an email on your mail server, it forwards a copy of it to your phone and you are alerted to it. The mobile version of Outlook is installed on the phone to handle email duties and like its desktop cousin it works fine. POP3 email is a breeze as well. I’ve had no problem downloading and sending messages. The way ActiveSync downloads your email from your desktop/server and stores the messages on your phone is a lifesaver for those on the run all the time. It’s very nice to be able to review a message that was previously downloaded to your desktop. Windows Explorer works great and the data transfer seems to be just as fast via EVDO as it is with the built in WiFi.

Windows Media Player 10 Mobile is very nice. I’ve been listening to more radio on my phone while driving then the actual radio in the car. For those who subscribe to XM radio and want to listen without a satellite receiver WMP10 delivers. I’ve been watching live streaming video events with this phone and I’ve got to say it works great. The player has a landscape mode which uses the full-screen and looks dynamite.

All the other “phone” type applications work great. The speakerphone is loud enough, the text messaging application works well, the dialing application and contacts software function without bugs. If you’re listening to streaming radio and someone calls the phone will mute the media player in favor of the phone call.

Cons
The battery life on these types of devices can be poor and this is the case with the XV6700. If you’re a power-user you may want to keep a charger in your car. I have to charge the phone every night or I’ll run into problems. The lack of physical buttons for dialing might be an issue for some. Being a Treo refugee, I do kind of miss the real number buttons that the Treo has. Most people who purchase are going to want to get a voice dialer. The camera is not all that great which probably won’t be a big deal to most people. It works okay and the video function is fine. Some have balked at the MiniSD card however I had no trouble finding a one and two GB memory cards at Frys.

All in all I really like this phone. It’s by far the best PDA phone I’ve ever owned. The data speed is smoking, the WiFi and Bluetooth 2 integration is great and the keyboard is unbelievable. I would heartily recommend that anyone interested in a PDA phone give the XV6700 a look.

Rating: 5/5
Url: http://www.verizonwireless.com/b2c/store/controller?item=phoneFirst&action=viewPhoneDetail&selectedPhoneId=2200

1 comment February 21st, 2006

Excellent Evaluations

Leeware - Unmanaged VPS Provider

m0n0wall FreeBSD Firewall

The Planet

Postini Spam Filtering

UltraDNS SiteBacker

Verizon XV6700

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