Category Archives: Servers

Servers

Whither Spam?

By Dougal | Published: June 14, 2008

When I switched to my new Slicehost server, I spent a while trying to decide what I wanted to do about email for my domains. I contemplated using Google’s domain email service, or some other third-party email hosting. But I just hated giving up that much control of my email setup. [...]

Also posted in Hardware, Linux, Services, Software, Spam, Tech | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 4 Comments

Now on Slicehost: Me!

By Dougal | Published: April 21, 2008

If you are seeing this post, then you are getting pages served from my new server at Slicehost. I still have to migrate my other web sites, and figure out how I’m going to mange email, but this was a big hurdle, and I’m glad to say that it went pretty smoothly. There are still some old files that I haven’t put back in place yet, so if anything seems awry, don’t be too surprised. I know of a couple of things I need to take care of, but I’m sure there are others that haven’t crossed my mind yet. [...]

Also posted in Announcements, General, Services | Tagged , , , , | 11 Comments

Atlanta PHP

By Dougal | Published: April 2, 2008

Tomorrow night, I will be attending the April Atlanta PHP meeting. My friend Glen Gordon will be giving a presentation titled, “I’m a PHP dev! Why should I care about Microsoft?”

There are a host of technologies and tools from Microsoft that can add value to your PHP solutions, save you time, and are just plain cool. [...]

Also posted in Community, Development, Operating Systems, Tech, WordPress | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Roadwork Next 15 Miles

By Dougal | Published: March 13, 2008

I am preparing to move all of my web and email hosting to a new server. I’ve been fortunate to have an in-trade hosting arrangement for many years now (thanks to Jeff at Iguanasoft!). But my host’s owner is winding down some of his equipment, and I had outgrown the server I was on. I’ve secured a new server at Slicehost (a 1024slice running Ubuntu), and I’ll be transitioning my data over the next couple of weeks, as time allows.

I mainly mention this as warning that if my site appears to be down, email bounces, or any other strangeness occurs, it might be because I’m in the middle of moving things around. [...]

Also posted in Announcements, Blogs, Personal, Tech, WordPress | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | 22 Comments

VPS Recommendations?

By Dougal | Published: November 19, 2007

I’m looking for a Virtual Private Server host. The server I’m currently on is woefully underpowered for the handful of sites I running (on the plus side, it’s been free), and it’s high time that I moved my stuff to a box that’s up to the task.

Ideally, I’d like the following features:

  • Virtual Private Server with at least 1GB of RAM (preferably with root access within my instance).
  • SSH shell access.
  • Decent monthly bandwidth allotment (at least 250GB/month).
  • Plenty of disk space (25GB would be be plenty, but I can live with less).
  • Hosting of multiple web/email domains.
  • PHP5 and MySQL 5.
  • Ability to configure many email alias fowards within each domain.
  • Procmail for mail filtering.
  • DNS hosting, preferably with the ability to directly edit my own zone files, but I’ll live with a web interface if I have to.

Those are listed roughly in order of importance. [...]

Also posted in Services, Tech | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 23 Comments

glTail: Realtime Logfile Visualization

By Dougal | Published: October 11, 2007
glTail Screenshot

This screenshot shows how glTail visualizes a comment spam attack in my configuration.

A few days ago, in my usual daily link browsing, I ran across a link to something called “glTail“, which was described as “realtime logfile visualization”. I’m often keeping an eye on my server logs to catch unusual activity, so I thought I’d give it it a look. [...]

Also posted in Applications, Open Source, Ruby, WordPress | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 4 Comments

Site Problems

By Dougal | Published: January 23, 2007

Over the last few days, it’s possible that you might have tried to visit this site and gotten a blank page. It’s not you, it’s me. Or more precisely, it’s my server, and my attempts to eek a little more performance out of it.

The problem seems to come from APC (Alternative PHP Cache). I’m not absolutely sure why it decides to crap out on me like that, but I suspect that the real root of the problem might be some old supporting libraries on this server that need to be updated. [...]

Also posted in Blogs, Software, Tech | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Downtime

By Dougal | Published: February 7, 2006

Some of you might have noticed that my site had some downtime over the weekend, and into Monday night. I had upgraded MySQL from version 3.23.x to version 5.0 last week. Everything seemed fine at the time, but when the server ran some maintenance tasks on Saturday night, it turned up some mismatched library versions between PHP and MySQL. And of course, I didn’t know about it until Monday, because an emergency came up that took me out of town all day on Sunday.

So, I finally found time on Monday evening to try to resolve a cascading chain of library dependencies, recompiling just about everything on the server that is related to Apache, PHP, and MySQL. [...]

Also posted in MySQL | Tagged , , | 7 Comments

Server trouble

By Dougal | Published: August 17, 2005

My server has experienced some downtime over the last couple of days. Probably my own fault, due to some changes I made in some service monitor scripts. After trying to manually wrangle things for a while and still experiencing mysterious performance issues, I finally rebooted the box this morning. Hopefully this will return the site to a more acceptible level of performance. So far, so good.

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SpamValve Download

By Dougal | Published: May 26, 2005

I only had a couple of responses to my call for SpamValve testers. One of the testers has already begun using SpamValve on his FreeBSD server. The other is tied up at the moment, but is going to attempt to adapt it to work on a Linux server sometime next week.

In the meantime, I’ve started using it to filter spam hits to my mail service. This was accomplished with a one-liner: 

tail -0f /var/log/maillog | \
perl -e 'while(<>){ m/Mail from (.*) rejected/; \
system("/usr/local/sbin/svupdate", $1) if $1;}'

The command above watches the end of my sendmail log for entries indicating messages rejected by RBL checks. [...]

Also posted in Services, Spam | Tagged , , , , , | 10 Comments