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

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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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Posted on: February 27th, 2009 by Famous Phil

Today’s blog is about Google since Jordan will be writing about Google today as well.

I wouldn’t believe it if anyone told me they’ve never heard of Google.  I’d also find it extremely difficult to believe that anyone hasn’t used Google ever or benefited from a google query.  Lets face it, Google owns the search industry!  Google also is very efficient at indexing the internet for quick searches.

In recent years, Google has released several new features including, but not limited to, gmail, google earth, google calendar, google docs, and google web toolkit.

I have not tried google docs, however have heard that their terms of service say that google can access your documents whenever they want.  I’m not sure how true this is, so I will say no more. (http://www.jordandelozier.com/2009/02/does-google-0wnz-your-soul/ verifies this).  However with storing private information anywhere on another service, you have to trust other people who have access to your account (administrators).  I’m not sure if I’d like to trust a free service with my documents, regardless of how popular they are, but thats just me.

As for the google web toolkit and google search, I use both often. I don’t think I could live without google search!  I submit a good 100 queries each day to google.   As for the google web tool kit, I love how it simplifies javascript into java.  This has helped me on numerous websites that I’ve developed.

As for google earth, I’ve tried that and it is impressive, however I don’t like the fact that it installs a program to my computer that then interfaces to an internet connection, therefore I’ve uninstalled it and haven’t used it since.

Gmail is also impressive, I tried GMail twice.  I thought that I could make it interface with imap and sync my email to every device I have.  Unfortunately, I found out the hard way that their IMAP sucks.  You cannot upload email to their servers via IMAP to a sent mail folder.  I also found that when using a text based client called pine, I couldn’t access the server due to unfamiliar directory names.  I also hate how they don’t allow unsecure access via IMAP.  I do however like their web interface.

Google calendar is also impressive, and I used this on one website that I created.  Google calendar however has a small problem with it, its embedded and you can’t customize the calendar all that much. It also uses a format that is different from the normal ICS file format so a calendar parser can’t quite parse the google ics files correctly, however this may have been fixed by now.

With mobile applications and google, gmail syncs to a smartphone correctly, however won’t syncronise tasks, calendar appointments and contacts effectively.  I found many bugs with the one software program that does exist to sync the calendar to my mobile phone.

After finding all these problems, I now pay for mailxchange from www.1and1.com.  I got my own domain and it syncs to everything perfectly.  It also provides me with standard ics files to power http://calendar.famousphil.com!   I’m sure that Microsoft Exchange can do this also, however I wasn’t about ready to pay for hosting on Exchange with the very small space allotments most hosts provide.

Because of the sync issues I’ve had and pine issues, I use 1and1’s mailxchange service, and they even provide a storage area like google docs!   I have also read their TOS and they will not release my personal email or documents unless a legal case comes up requiring they do it.  I trust their staff, probably because I pay for it.  Google should allow its customers to pay for services like syncing if you ask me.

Thats enough blabbing about Google   I like thier search and will likely always use google for all of my search needs.  Their mail on the other hand needs some work before I’d consider using it.

Tags: 1and1.com, calendar, contacts, exchange, Google, ics, mailxchange, Microsoft, sync
Posted in Technology
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