Posted on: June 20th, 2009 by Famous Phil
First I guess I should apologize for not posting anything in the past week here! I really hate it when I have to ignore my own blog for more important admin business elsewhere. The good thing is, I always manage to learn a lot of new stuff that I can easily share 
Over the past week, I got a new server to host Microsoft Exchange which is a powerful email server from Microsoft. Before you go all crazy on Microsoft (I know I typically do), Exchange is one of the few excellent products they make. I am actually very hard pressed to find anything that compares to it that is open source and can easily run on Linux which 99% of my hosting business up until now has ran off from. Man, I never thought that I would say that 
Tags: 1and1, 3dgwebhosting, active directory, Admin Reference, administration, Elite data hosting, email, exchange, exchange 2003, Exchange 2007, fsckvps, mailxchange, Microsoft, Microsoft Exchange, mobile, outlook, outlook web access, owa, server 2003, vaserv, vps, windows
Posted in Hosting / Server Administration, Mobile Technology, My Site
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Posted on: June 11th, 2009 by Famous Phil
First, I would like to offer my condolences to the family of K T Ligesh, the owner of HyperVM and LxLabs. It is a tragedy to see such a brilliant coder take his own life. You may read the entire story here
LxLabs develops the best control panel for OpenVZ/Xen which is a virtualization platform for hosting many servers on one physical server. HyperVM allows clients to control their server by enabling power control, operating system reinstallations, and charts for server status.
A major users of HyperVM is cheapvps.co.uk (a2b2, vaserv, fsckvps) which I would estimate hosts at least 5000 vps clients at the very least and I’m underestimating. They provide very cheap hosting and I did host with them for quite some time as a backup solution. I then found space on a friends server and didn’t need them any longer (I’d say about 2 months ago). To get back to vaserv, Their company took a big hit when a vulnerability was released (and as I understand it) was not fixed until 2 weeks after LxLabs was notified. Anyways, their entire service was hacked and most of their data was lost. I feel sorry for those who didn’t backup their vps regularly.
Back in the day when I was using LxLabs software: hypervm and lxadmin (which is like cpanel), the owner was very nice to help me with every problem I had. Eventually I made the move to cpanel because there was always some kind of problem popping up and I needed something much more stable and proven at the time. Cpanel did fix all of my woes.
Anyways, I bet there was a lot of pressure on the owner from everyone. VAserv still isn’t back up fully and it has been 4 days now. I really feel sorry for their staff. They must be losing a lot of money because of this 1 tiny hack. I can sort of see why the owner would kill himself over this, but because of his death, the programming community has lost a brilliant programmer. In addition, the VPS industry has lost a source of cheap, powerful software, so vps prices will likely rise in the near future if the legacy of hypervm isn’t carried on.
One final note on this, as a result of this, I hope the programming community realizes that updates are extremely important both for the developer and the client. I also cannot stress enough that proper backups should be made often and verified for redundancy! I will be verifying my backups later today
So you may be wondering, how did I find out? I have been looking at a vps server to host exchange 2003 or a similar email solution for mobile sync (to get away from the heavy ajax interface of mailxchange at 1and1 plus have control over my backups). I went to cheapvps and they were down, then I checked vaserv and found out that way. Because they have been down and I needed a server yesterday, I went with another provider who I might be reviewing in a couple of weeks or months
Tags: a2b2, cheapvps, CPanel, exchange 2003, fsckvps, hypervm, Ligesh, lxadmin, lxlabs, mailxchange, openvz, owner, suicide, vaserv, vps, Xen
Posted in Hosting / Server Administration, Programming
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