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Since I spent all day yesterday with podcasters and surrounded by podcasts, audio equipment etc., etc., I've been thinking about what we as a company should be doing.
Should we do a podcast?
Is there any point?
Would we gain anything?
Would we lose anything?
Is it a waste of time?
Should we do it ourselves?
Should we outsource it?
What would the content be?
PodCamp Ireland was fantastic.
The organisers did a fantastic job and I hope everyone had as much fun as I did.
They even managed to bamboozle me into joining a panel!
A couple of us have headed over to Kilkenny for the day to attend PodCampIreland.
If you're in the area drop into the Ormonde Hotel
As it's a Friday evening I thought I'd have a quick look at the spam filtering stats to see what's been going on.
I haven't looked at ALL the figures yet, but just to give you a flavour of what's going on...
One of our filtering nodes was sent 372,460 emails yesterday. It rejected 88% of those mails!!
Of the 30 thousand plus emails that it filtered nearly 30% was marked as spam.
Can you imagine that amount of junk hitting your office mail server on a dsl line?
I'd rather not!
Eurid, which is the registry in charge of the .eu domain, contacted all their registrars, including us, earlier today to announce a major change to the way they handle DNS updates.
At present .eu DNS servers update 5 times a day.
From 12 on October 9th the DNS will move to dynamic updates ie. changes will be instant.
This also means that the time lapse between a registration or change will be a lot faster (bearing in mind the distributed nature of DNS etc.,)
The announcement text is below for reference purposes:
The switch to dynamic updates, announced earlier this year, will be taking place on Tuesday 9 October at 12:00PM Belgian time. At that moment, .eu DNS servers will cease to update 5 times a day and begin updating instantaneously in response to changes as they occur. Please be sure to inform your customers of the change as this will affect certain services (e.g. website and email) since domain names will become active as soon as they are registered. We also remind everyone that while it is currently possible to correct any mistakes you have unintentionally made before the next scheduled update takes place, any mistakes made after dynamic updates have been implemented will be effective immediately. Conversely, any unintentional mistakes can be corrected immediately as well.
Most of the main domain registries use a similar system, so there won't be any tangible impact on the way things work, apart from them working faster!
If anyone has any queries let us know
Ireland's first major podcasting event takes place this Saturday in the Ormonde Hotel, Kilkenny.
The event kicks off at 10am and promises to be an interesting day if the list of expected attendees is anything to go by.
As it's only "over the road" from us I plan on attending, as I'm still feeling guilty about not attending the last couple of events that we sponsored!
For a list of possible attendees see here
If you want to get your personal IE domain then remember we'll be taking pre-orders up until the "go live" date.
Unfortunately there seems to be some confusion about which domains are allowed and which ones aren't.
To start with, as is indicated on the order form, to pre-order personal IE domains you need to submit them as follows:
select the applicant class ‘Natural Person’ and the domain category ‘Personal Name’.
DO NOT try any other combinations. If you do your application will be rejected.
You cannot register your surname / family name.
You cannot register your first name.
While your friends may call you all sorts of interesting names you can only register names that you can provide documentation for.
What documentation is accepted?
If you are based in the republic:
Irish passport
Irish driver's licence
Irish revenue / social welfare document showing PPS number
Irish birth certificate
Irish marriage certificate
Irish utility bill (e.g.: NTL, Chorus, SKY / ESB, Airtricity / Bord Gais / Eircom / Vodafone, O2, Meteor, Three - bill pay phones only).
If you are based in Northern Ireland:
UK driver's licence with Northern Ireland address.
HM Revenue & Customs / Northern Ireland Social Security Agency document showing National Insurance number
Northern Ireland birth certificate
Northern Ireland marriage certificate
Northern Ireland utility bill (e.g.: NTL, Chorus, SKY, UTV Internet / NIE, Airtricity / British Gas / BT / Vodafone, O2, 3, T-Mobile, Orange, BT - bill pay phones only).
Where should I send the documentation?
All documentation should be sent to us either via fax or email.
Our fax numbers are:
+353 (0) 1 4811 763
UK Fax: 0845 280 088
US Fax: 213 232 3366
Please ensure that any documentation is clearly marked with the domain name in question.
DO NOT send us original documents via mail.
What format name(s) can I register?
Johnsmith.ie [first name / surname]
Johnpaulsmith.ie [first name / middlename / surname]
John-smith.ie [first name / hyphen / surname]
John-paul-smith.ie [first name / hyphen / middlename / hyphen / surname]
Johnpsmith.ie [first name / middle initial / surname]
John-p-smith.ie [first name / hyphen / middle initial / hyphen / surname]
Jsmith.ie [first initial / surname]
Jpsmith.ie [first initial / middle initial / surname]
Jp-smith.ie [first initial / middle initial / hyphen / surname]
J-smith.ie [first initial / hyphen / surname]
J-p-smith.ie [first initial / hyphen / middle initial / hyphen / surname]
Paulsmith.ie [middlename / surname]
Paul-smith.ie [middlename / hyphen / surname]
Psmith.ie [middle initial / surname]
P-smith.ie [middle initial / hyphen / surname]
NB: You will need to be able to provide documentation of the name chosen with the spelling chosen, so if you want to register johnnysmith.ie you will need a document in that name
Voting has now opened in the 2007 Irish Internet Association Net Visionary Awards.
I've been nominated under both Internet Entrepreneur and the Online Trader categories, so any and all votes would be appreciated!
There's also quite a few other names on the list that are familiar to us here at Blacknight. They belong to friends, business partners, clients and acquaintances. I wish them all the best of luck!
Unfortunately I didn't make it to BarCamp Galway, as we're doing a major deployment this weekend (remember those photos? Multiply the pile of servers by a factor of 3!)
I'm hoping that some of us will make it to Kilkenny for PodCamp instead!
We're a hosting company.
Like most hosting companies we have several hosting plans (products)
These plans have names.
Like everyone else the names we've been using are boring:
basic; standard; professional
I want to change them. I want something new. I want something that's a bit more imaginative, but I've no idea what!!!
Options on the table at present:
metals - silver, gold, platinum
grades - essential, premier, ultimate
arthurian - round table, holy grail (you get the general idea)
chess - pawn, rook, king
I'm open to suggestions. I'm open to anything at this stage!
While I may have a love-hate relationship with servers I simply dislike faxes and fax machines.
I can't get excited by them and simply consider them to be a waste of space and money.
Yes - we still have one in the office, but I've stopped using it for inbound faxes.
We had an issue several months ago where one of the telcos managed to cut off our fax lines with a digger for a few hours so we took our faxing online. I haven't looked back.
Not only can I get all my faxes in a handy electronic format (who needs expensive scanners?) for storage I can also send on the faxes to 3rd parties easily if needed.
So what?
Well you too can dump your cumbersome fax machine!
Signup for a free 30 day trial and choose from a multitude of localised numbers (we've got ones in the US and UK!)
No more worrying about expensive fax ribbons, splodgy printouts or simply mangled faxes... Not to mention the amount of paper you can get rid of..
Kiss your fax machine goodbye !! (Or turn it into a bookend!)
Personal IE domains will be available from October 31st 2007.
Basically if you want to register yourname.ie you will be able to do so after October 31st.
Since we expect that there will be a high demand for these domains we have put in place a queuing mechanism.
How will this work?
Our development team have put together a queuing system to hold the orders until October 31st.
Any orders for personal IE domains placed between now and October 31st at 8am will be submitted to the registry on the "go live" day.
What happens if two people want the same domain?
Domain registrations are on a first come first served basis. We will be submitting the requests to the IEDR in the order in which they were received. We cannot offer ANY guarantees (neither can anyone else)
What if someone else orders the domain from another company?
As already mentioned it's "first come, first served".
What if my chosen name is taken on the "go live" day?
We will offer people the opportunity of registering an alternative personal domain
Is Blacknight's system better than other?
Other companies have also setup queues, but only one or two of them have their servers physically in the same data centre as the IEDR.
Some of the other companies don't even have servers in Ireland, so their connections to the IEDR's API servers will be significantly slower.
There's been quite a bit of media coverage in the last few days about the upcoming relaxation of IEDR rules to allow people to register yourname.ie.
While some of the reporting hasn't been particularly inspired some of it has been quite misleading.
As of October 31st any Irish citizen or resident in Ireland will be able to register their name.
You will NOT be able to register ANY name you want post October 31st. You will only be able to register your given name or a variation thereof that you can prove (I'll post about that in more detail later).
However, if you are a published writer, artist (in the broadest sense of the word), politician or business person who actively trades using your own name at present you can register your name NOW. You do not have to wait until the end of October.
One of the examples that people have mentioned is politicians' names, such as bertieahern.ie - he's already got his domain name, so there's no point trying to get it. Even if he hadn't got it already he could get it before the end of October.
If you are a doctor, solicitor or other tradesman that trades using your name you can register your domain name today. You do not need to wait!
Just a quick note to people posting comments.
Since we moderate all comments (it's a business blog, so I really don't want spam on it!) there can be a delay in comments appearing. I'm sorry about that, but there's not much I can do.
If your comment doesn't appear and you think it should have done please let me know.
I won't allow spam comments or anything that could be considered libel, but I don't have an issue with most other comments ie. if we get something wrong telling us isn't a bad thing.
If you submit a comment it will be published on the internet and it will be spidered and listed by search engine robots. If you do not want your comments made known to the public then please email us privately as we have to work on the assumption that you are aware that comments will be made public.
At present we do not accept trackbacks, since they've been rendered almost useless by the spammers who have learnt to abuse them.
If you'd like to find out what people are getting upto in the wonderful world of mobile devices and the mobile web, then Mobile Monday is the place for you.
On Monday next, September 24th Mobile Monday Demo Night will take place in The Hairy Lemon, which is in central Dublin (map)
Several companies will be showing off their latest creations so it should be good fun.
As we're promoting .mobi domains at present it's only natural that we also take the time to promote mobile web related stuff, so we'll be sponsoring the event.
More info here
Just got this email from the IEDR:
It has once again come to the attention of the IEDR that a company operating under the name “Internet Register Ireland” is in the process of contacting businesses with registered .ie domain names by post and by fax, soliciting them to register their domain name with the “Internet Register Ireland”. The “Internet Register Ireland”, a German based company will request you to fill out their form and return it to them signed. It should be noted that they charge an excessive fee of approximately €958 for the registration of the .ie domain name in their database.
We would like to reassure all of our customers that no such organisation has been authorised to act on behalf of the IEDR. If you are contacted in this manner we would recommend that you disregard this letter and advise your customers to be aware of this activity.
The IEDR are responding to enquiries from concerned domain holders, by recommending them to contact an official IE Reseller if they require any further Internet services for their website.
Following on from last Tuesday's incident we are following through on our promises.
Our technical team had been discussing the finer points of various firewalls for some time. When it comes to choosing equipment they always spend quite a bit of time evaluating the options. They have to take into account a lot of different factors.
How well will it work with existing equipment?
Will it scale?
How long before we have to replace it?
How much does it cost?
Do we have staff who know how to use it?
Does it support ipv6?
How much traffic can it handle?
How many concurrent connections can it handle?
How much RAM does it need?
The list goes on and on...
In the end we decided to go with Cisco ASA 5500 series.
And since we love our camera phones here are a couple of snaps of the new firewalls. Before anyone asks - I'm not 100% sure when they'll be installed.
And from behind:
And a slightly further away shot:
Summary:
An internal routing issue developed in our network between our edge routers and our core distribution routers.
Diagnosis and Resolution:
During regular network maintenance Blacknight staff were moving a customer from the shared vlan to their own VLAN. During this move we were forwarding IP packets from their old IPs to their
new IPs. Normally this should not be a problem. However in this case, the rules caused OSPF on the primary distribution router to flap.
As a result of the session flapping the secondary router was not able to take over correctly. We manually failed over to the secondary router and at this point the network stabilised.
We are still investigating this issue, but we believe a router upgrade that is planned for later in the year will fix this issue permanently.
In case you haven't heard the cost of .com/.net/.info/.biz domains will be going up later this year.
I got an email from the registrar we currently use about the price increases last night, so I thought I'd share the news.
The price increase isn't welcome, but it comes from the domain registries NOT from ICANN or the registrars. Unfortunately the registrars have to pass on some of their costs to companies like ourselves (although we are an accredited registrar for several TLDs we still aren't accredited by ICANN).
We've always priced com/net/org/info/biz in a "sane" way. We've never been the cheapest in the world, but we've always been able to maintain our prices. This isn't going to change, though it does mean that our margins will be slightly tighter than before.
If you're used to registering domains directly with us, then you have nothing to worry about, as we don't intend to increase our prices in the foreseeable future.
If you're using other companies to register .com etc., then you may need to keep a watchful eye on their pricing. Some of the registrars have been pricing themselves so low that an increase will be inevitable. If you're using one of those registrars I'd recommend you look at renewing domains for multiple years now before the price increases kick in on October 14/15.
We took delivery of a second load of Dell kit later this afternoon.
Since we had so many Dell servers it only seemed logical to use Dell cabinets, so we got a couple of them.
They're not terribly exciting to look at, but using Dell cabinets with Dell servers will mean less messing about. If anyone has tried racking Dells into non-Dell cabinets when they've been given the wrong rail kits you'll know what I'm talking about :)
One of things that I have a love / hate relationship are servers. For the MD of a hosting company that's probably an odd thing to say.
I love the fact that we have so many.
I don't love the fact that they cost so much - the numbers involved get a bit silly when you buy as many as we do!
We get a lot of our hardware from Dell.
At the moment we are working on a project which needs quite a bit of hardware, so we're currently taking delivery from Dell by the van load.
We got a van load of servers today, so at lunchtime Paul Kelly, our CTO, took this photo of some of the boxes stacked up in our warehouse (that's another day's story!)
For the geekier types - you can probably work out that a lot of the smaller boxes are rail kits, while the bigger boxes are for rack mountable servers.
The photo was taken with a Nokia N95 if you are interested :)
Yesterday at lunchtime there were some issues on our network.
I'll try to explain what happened in simple terms and also explain what we are going to do to avoid this type of issue arising in the future.
If anyone has any queries about the explanation please feel free to ask via comments or email us directly.
Timeline: 13:55 - 14:18
Affected Customers: Any customer on the shared firewall that has a dedicated server or has colo with us was affected during this incident. This also included our shared hosting clients.
What happened?
At around 2pm yesterday afternoon a segment of our main network was sluggish and people would have experienced latency and packet loss.
Why?
As you may know our main network is firewalled. We have a pair of firewalls setup in HA (high availability) to protect the bulk of our clients, which includes all our shared hosting clients on both windows and linux, as well as a large number of clients on dedicated servers or with colocated machines.
Firewalls are basically computers. Depending on how much money you want to spend on them you get different capabilities. While our firewalls are perfectly adequate under most conditions they have limits.
When a server behind the firewall was compromised and started pumping out large amounts of traffic the firewalls were pushed to capacity. While the network was up at all times it would have been slow and unresponsive until our engineering team were able to take action.
What action was taken?
The server that had been compromised was disconnected from the network until the issue had been resolved / removed.
How can we avoid this in the future?
We had been planning to upgrade the firewalls in any case, this is now being moved forward. The new firewalls will be able to carry larger amounts of traffic so this kind of issue will have a lower impact should it arise again.
For the last few months we have also been actively encouraging clients to opt for their own firewall(s).
And now for the more detailed breakdown:
Outage Information with Timeline of Events
13:53 C program downloaded onto a customer's machine via a hole in their
programming code.
13:55 Code compiled and executed. A result of this was 80mbit/s of
additional traffic heading towards the shared firewall service during peak lunch time traffic.
14:05 Our engineering team noticed latency of SSH and terminal services connections to machines on the network behind the firewall were laggy or intermittent.
14:06 Senior onsite engineers begin to investigate the issue.
14:08 One of our external traffic links was carrying approx 50mbit/s more
traffic than normal (some traffic from the affected host never made it past the firewalls) and they begin to check access switches for which equipment cabinet has the infected host.
14:15 The host responsible for this increase in traffic was identified and
their switch port was shutdown by a network engineer.
14:16 Services begin to return to normal and the load on the firewalls CPU
drops back to acceptable limits.
14:18 All services are back to normal
The IE Domain Registry have finally released details of the policy change on personal domains which I've mentioned in the past. (For a long rant please see my personal blog)
We will be offering personal IE domains from October 31st 2007 onwards.
For clarity I am republishing the full text of the IEDR's press release:
The IE Domain Registry (IEDR), the managed registry for Ireland’s dot-ie domain names, today announced the relaxation of the rules for registering personal dot-ie domain names for individuals. This policy relaxation comes into effect following full consultation with the dot-ie reseller community and industry organisations.
Registration of personal domains will be available to individuals from Wednesday, 31st October, 2007. This follows a seven week notice period, to allow time for sole traders, professionals, politicians, trademark holders who have not already registered their .ie Internet address, to do so under existing non-personal domain categories.
The introduction of personal dot-ie domain names is a result of the increased popularity of social networking and blogging sites and the increasing number of individuals who are coming online.
The registration of personal domain names will be open to all individuals who can authenticate a claim to the domain name and who have a real and substantive connection to the island of Ireland. To authenticate a claim, a copy of an identification document is required, for example an Irish utility bill or driving licence. The name on the document supplied must match exactly the domain name applied for. This requirement ensures that the status of Ireland’s dot-ie namespace, as the world’s second safest country code top level domain, is maintained and protected in the future. Applications will be time-stamped to ensure fairness and transparency of the process.
Commenting on the introduction of dot-ie personal domain names, Mr. David Curtin, Chief Executive of the IE Domain Registry said, “The IEDR is pleased to announce the relaxation of rules for personal dot-ie domain names. To maintain the integrity of the dot-ie domain namespace, which has negligible levels of cyber squatting and cyber crime, applicants will need to authenticate their claim by providing matching supporting documentation such as an Irish passport or utility bill.
This limited registration policy relaxation comes into effect following consultation with dot-ie resellers. The introduction of personal domain names was first proposed to internet service providers three years ago, but there was little interest due to expected low levels of demand. Since then the broadband take-up and popularity of social networking has created a desire for a personal presence on the Internet, which in turn will have a positive effect on the level of demand for personal dot-ie domain names. The IEDR has also significantly reduced its prices, which have fallen by 50% since 2003 and introduced key system changes that facilitate fast, automated and real time registration, which has reduced resellers’ process costs.”
The shared server "morgana" has been having intermittent issues for most of today. Our engineering team are working on a resolution. More information on the issue has been provided here
Over the course of the next few weeks I'll be doing an occasional series of posts on making the most of your dotmobi domain.
If anyone has any suggestions or ideas that they'd like to share please let me know!
The topics I intend to cover will include things like building a site, checking it, making money from it and any other topics that people suggest to me.
What's the deal?
We are running a sale on dotmobi (.mobi) domains starting today.
How much will they cost?
Registrations of .mobi domains will cost a mere 10 euro per annum, so you can make big savings by registering your domain for up to 10 years.
What is .mobi (dotmobi)?
Dotmobi is the domain for the mobile web.
If a company publicises a .mobi site it should work on your mobile device and you should be able to make full use of it.
How can I test my dotmobi site?
You can test your .mobi site to see if it will work properly on a mobile phone using the ready.mobi suite of tests.
Who is behind dotmobi?
Dotmobi is supported by some of the biggest names in mobile and general technology including Ericsson, Google, GSM Association, Hutchison (3), Microsoft, Nokia, Orascom Telecom, Samsung Electronics, Syniverse, T-Mobile, Telefonica Moviles, TIM, Visa and Vodafone.
How can I register a .mobi?
You can check if your chosen domain is available by doing a search here
We've just released an upgrade to the Irish ISP Test.
You can now choose which speed you think you are on and your ISP.
Let us know what you think!
There are several reasons why this blog exists and one of them is to get feedback from clients.
It may come as a surprise to people, but we actually do pay attention to what they say to us and about us.
I'd love to think that we do a good job all of the time, but there may be aspects of our service that fails to meet your expectations and if that's the case I'd like to know about it. (If you don't want to comment in public you can always email me directly: michele@blacknight.eu ). It might be something as simple as the way we worded our product or service offering ... If people don't let us know we have no way of knowing!
We are currently working on rolling out a new suite of websites and we will be unveiling a whole range of new products and services over the coming months. I'll be teasing you all with little details as we finalise the details, but now is also the ideal time for us to take your feedback. If you want us to offer something that is feasible then we might just do that. Of course we might think your idea is crazy ... but if you don't talk to us we will never know.
What kind of services would you like to see hosting providers like us providing in the future?
What elements of our current hosting plans would you like us to change? (I'm not saying we will change them, but I am more than willing to listen)
Which technologies would you like to see us offering in the future?
Starting Monday 10th September 2007 we'll be running a special promotion on new dotmobi domain registrations.
I've mentioned dotmobi in the past.
It's the domain for the mobile web.
Forget about WAP - think of browsing and using the internet and online services on your mobile device - be that a Nokia tablet, an n95 or even on an iphone.
It doesn't have to be a painful experience!
In any case we'll provide more details of the offer on Sunday night / Monday morning.
I mentioned not so long ago that we were going to be doing some rebranding.
You'll see this happening slowly until the new site launches, then it will be a little bit faster.
The kind of things that are going to change on the outside are:
We're not dumb. In fact we always try to hire the best and the brightest, so we're not going to be doing away with anything. If you are used to going to a particular URL to access a service of some kind it will still work. It might redirect to a new one, but the old links will still work.
If we do change email addresses over to the .eu domain, which we will probably have to do at some point, all the old ones will still work (I still get mail on about 5 variations of our main domains as it is!).
The thing that is going to be the most painful is how the search engines handle matters.
When we launched our current website about 3 years ago (can it really be that old?) we changed all the URLs and pages around completely. We didn't have any choice, as we were changing the site's backend completely.
The earlier iterations of the Blacknight company site didn't have a "backend" per se, unless you call notepad / dreamweaver / editplus / vim backends. (If you want to see them they're on archive.org - though you'll need to do some detective work to guess the domain!)
When we moved to using Typo3 as our CMS all the inbound links were lost except to directories eg pages that were accessible via a "/".
We had to work hard with the developers (2Bscene) who were also assisting us with SEO to get things sorted out. Thankfully Tom Doyle knows his stuff and we were able to maintain our pagerank and get reindexed quite quickly.
This time round we will have to be very careful, but we have learnt from our past experiences and our past mistakes.
Taking a hit in terms of SEO is something we won't be able to avoid entirely, though we will be trying our best to minimise the impact!
Yes - that is a very big image!
But it hopefully caught your attention
Ken McGuire has made a series of PodCamp logos and buttons available for people to put on their blog / site.
Podcamp is a free event and takes place in Kilkenny city (about 30 minutes from our offices) on September 29th 2007.
If you haven't registered, why not do so now?
It won't cost you anything!
EDIT: Fixed the links.