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Ronan Kirby from RedHat did a nice write up on his trip to Skycon the other week.
Much to my amazement he not only mentioned my talk on email filtering but also includes a photo of me. It's taken from a rather odd angle and before anyone asks, no I wasn't drinking beer while giving the talk!
We're doing some more work on upgrading our network, or as I prefer to refer to it, spending more of our cash on hardware!
The important information is as follows:
Time / Date: Thursday March 8th-9th - 23:00 - 01:00 (IST)
What: Network upgrades.
Service affecting? - yes
Full details:
Overview: To facilitate the growth of our colocation facilities in DEG we need more ports in our core access layer. Currently there are 2 x 24 port switches currently connecting back to each equipment cabinet. There is a port from each switch into each cabinet and we use spanning tree to fail over in the event of a network failure at that layer.
We are putting in 2 x Cisco 2960G-48TS 48 port GigE switches to replace the current infrastructure and thus giving us more room to grow and increased bandwidth at this layer.
Expected Downtime: We expect the whole change over to take up-to an hour, we'll do all the preparatory work, racking and configuring the switches before hand. All we'll have to do is move the cabling to the new switches and do a lot of testing. So please expect connectivity to both the old and new networks to be intermittent during this window.
If you have any issues connecting to your site/server after the maintenance window has completed, please e-mail support@blacknight.ie with details and we'll deal with your issues immediately.
One of the things that attracts people to the internet is possibly a hangover of the dotcom boom. People still believe that they can make their fortunes online without having to work hard.
While it may still be possible to make money online the days of not working hard, alas, are no more.
However that should not dissuade you!
We've mentioned selling custom tshirts via your website a couple of times in the past, as we partnered with SpreadShirt (watch this space for more partnership news!)
But what if you can't design?
There are plenty of other options open to you.
A couple of the more popular ones are Adsense and Text Link Ads.
Adsense is quite simple to use. All you need to do is sign up for an account and add some code to your website pages. When people click on the ads you earn money! Not that complicated, is it?
If you start using Adsense you'll soon find that there are thousands of websites and blogs dedicated to providing advice on how to make more money from it. There are even a couple of books on the subject!
Text Link Ads is slightly more complicated, but the rewards can be generous.
The basic concept is that text links ie. not graphic links, are valuable both in terms of traffic and seo, so you, as a website publisher, can make money from them.
The only downsides to TLA is that your site needs to be established and the system will not work with static HTML ie. you need to be using PHP, ASP or some other form of server-side scripting language to use the system.
If you're looking for tips and tricks on making money online you may want to check out the Irish Webmaster Forum, which is popular with Irish web professionals.
There have been a number of issues with the IEDR backend systems over the last 24 hours which has resulted in some delays in processing of IE registration requests.
Both ourselves and the IEDR are aware of the issues and any delayed registration requests will be processed as soon as possible.
As some of you know we more than doubled our staff numbers last year. As a result of this we had to expand our office space. We were extremely lucky that our expansion coincided with that of the building where our offices are located.
So a few months ago the second "half" of our offices was made available and we moved in.
Why am I mentioning this now?
Well, as anyone trying to ring us this afternoon would have noticed, our phone lines seemed to be having issues.
What happened?
We've been having some really annoying issues with the electrics in the office. Some of the fuses were blowing for no apparent reason, so we got an electrician in to check things out. On investigation it transpired that whoever had done some of the wiring hadn't done a particularly good job so various sections of the wiring had to be fixed. It also transpires, as we discovered today, that not all the fuses in the fusebox were as powerful as they should have been.
This afternoon the fuse blew completely (the electrician had already tripped the sockets earlier in the day!) so our phones were down for about half an hour while he ran off to get a replacement.
He has assured me that the new fuse will be more than enough to handle our current requirements!
I am hoping and praying that the office electrics have finally been sorted out once and for all - I'm getting too many grey hairs from all this!
Several members of the Blacknight team were down in Limerick at Skycon from last Thursday until last night.
Skycon was organised in celebration of the 15 year anniversary of Skynet, the University of Limerick computer society.
Over the past couple of years I have been to quite a number of events throughout Ireland which were organised, for the most part, by companies and professional organisations. Many of them seemed amateurish compared to Skycon, which was organised, of course, by students.
As some of you may know, I am a graduate of UL and we also employ a number of other UL graduates, so it's always nice to go back down there.
This time was a bit different, as both myself and Paul were giving talks.
We also provided prizes for the table quiz on Saturday night!
My talk on email filtering was on Friday afternoon, while Paul gave a talk on open source software chez Blacknight on the Saturday.
Other speakers on the agenda included Alan Cox (RedHat), Simon Phipps (Sun) and TJ McIntyre . Full list of speakers is on the Skycon site
A big thanks to all the organisers for making the event such a big sucess and for looking after us all.
Earlier this week Rob Burke from Microsoft got in touch with us about Asp.net AJAX extensions.
It transpires that none of the Irish hosting companies were offering support for them (at least not officially).
Although we hadn't been supporting it officially it transpires that we had been running them on several of our Windows servers since late last year when they were still in beta.
We like to embrace new technologies wherever we can (bearing in mind any possible negative side-effects, naturally) so we were delighted to be able to work with Rob in getting it all working. You can see a demo of the Asp.net AJAX extensions here:
AJAX test site
So we can now happily say that we do offer Asp.net AJAX extensions!
Further coverage on Rob's blog as well as a mention on Paul's.
As I mentioned a few weeks ago, I went to Domain Fest in LA.
It was a truly amazing event and I would like to take this chance to give a word of thanks to all those involved. They did a truly amazing job!
Rather than try to outdo Ron Jackson I'd recommend you have a look at his overview of the conference.
We're pleased to announce that php5 is now available on our shared linux plans
The nitty gritty details:
PHP 5.2.0
MySQL 4.1.21
Any new servers will be installed with php5.
Due to compatibility / sanity issues we will NOT be upgrading existing servers to php5 at this time.
Combined with our domain name sale there's no better time to move your hosting and domains to Blacknight!!
If you need php5 for whatever reason you may contact our support team
It's that time of the year again!!
For the last couple of years we've either dropped our prices on domain names or run special offers.. This year is no different!
We're dropping prices across the board on all the popular domain extensions:
If your .ie domain is up for renewal with another registrar then you can save. Move your IE domains to Blacknight today for a mere €30!
The small print
All pricing is valid for the duration of the promotion and may not be combined with any other domain promotions.