 |
News, tips and reviews from one of Ireland's leading hosting companies |
« February 2008 | Main | April 2008 »
Verisign, the company that manages the .com registry, will be increasing the price of .com domains by 7% again this year.
The price increase affects all registrars.
We'll be keeping an eye on how pricing develops and if this involves any change to our own pricing we will let you know.
If data centres and secure hosting environments make you yawn then this post might be best avoided.
We all know that you want your hosting to "just work", so you really don't need to know about the "inner works". I don't blame you.
Personally I find data centres to be incredibly boring places.
They're not "exciting" or "cool". Sure they can look pretty funky from the outside, depending on which data centre you're looking at, but that's just aesthetics.
Aesthetics don't provide security.
Fancy brochures don't guarantee uptime.
Slick sales pitchs don't provide a track record.
Investment in infrastructure and staff may not be "sexy", but it is a necessity.
I don't have to get excited about data centres and I'm not going to be distracted by glossy photos. The kind of stuff that does impress me is the physical infrastructure and the reputation which is why we use Interxion and Data Electronics.
Over the past year we've been hiring staff on a constant basis while also spending silly amounts of cash on building out the network. At times I wish we'd held onto the cash so that I could get myself a really nice car or a down payment on a nice big country pile, but instead we've invested it all back into the company.
The photos below show one of our private suites in Dublin. As you can see there's plenty of space available for expansion. We've put aside quite a bit of space for our "big" plans.
In the photo below Mark, one of our technical staff, is working on a server.
The monitor is rackmounted into the cabinet and connected up via a fancy KVM which allows technicians to work on any server within the cabinet easily. It probably saves on space too!
While here you can see Niall working on his laptop in one side of the suite.
A lot of the servers pictured above were first seen several months ago when we shared our Dell delivery photos.
The guys were moving stuff around last night in readiness for our new product launch (watch this space!)
The guys in Enum 353 are running a session this Friday on VOIP security which might be of interest to some people:
Venue: Morrison Hotel, Ormond Quay, Dublin 1
Date: Friday 28th March 2008
Time: 9.30 a.m. to 5.00 p.m. (lunch included)
There will be no charge to attend the session.
Overview:
This workshop will discuss several VoIP security considerations from a
service providers perspective, for example, SIP client security, SIP
proxy security and PSTN Gateway security. The workshop starts with a
short SIP introduction which highlights the SIP topics needed for SIP
hacking. Following this will be an in-depth look at specific attacks, a
live demonstration of the tools used in these attacks and a discussion
of attack countermeasures. Hacking methods displayed will include:
password hacking, account hijacking, relay attacks, identity spoofing,
billing bypass ...
This full day event will be presented by Klaus Darilion an expert in the
field of SIP communications. He studied electrical engineering at the
Vienna University of Technology, where he later wrote a Doctor thesis
about SIP based voice communication for public safety applications.
Klaus Darilion is now employed with enum.at, the Austrian ENUM registry,
where he is working on ENUM based call routing and all kinds of SIP
based communication.
NB: This event is not organised by Blacknight, so please address any queries to Enum353
Update: Sorry about this, but I've just been told that this session is not as open as I thought previously! This session is only open to members of the VoIP ENUM working group so for more information please email vewg@ienum.ie
If you want to know about any service affecting maintenance, technical updates or anything else of a technical nature, we recommend that you check out our new Technical Blog.
The site is hosted outside our core network (we don't even use our own nameservers just to be 100% safe!) and is part of our backup / contingency plans for emergency situations.
While our network uptime has been and hopefully will continue to be exemplary there's no reason to be lazy. We need to make sure that we have a system in place in case there is an issue NOT after the issue arises.
You can subscribe to the site's RSS feed OR to the email alerts.
Your choice :)
You can sign up for the email alerts by filling out the form below:
Well it's that Easter thing again.
Friday isn't a "real" holiday, so our offices are open pretty much all day today. Monday is a bank holiday in most EU countries, so we'll be operating on reduced staff numbers.
But Tuesday we're back in force.
So what's with the image?
Well I was looking for something to do with the entire Easter / Spring theme.
I did find plenty of "cute" pictures of chicks, ducklings and babies, but I didn't like them too much. What I was thinking of was something else. Something that also incorporated our new plans which we intend to launch next week!
So what's happening next week exactly?
We plan on unveiling a new range of hosting solutions that are going to change your life, cure world hunger and show you how super duper reliable and wonderful we are.
(Of course if you believe any of that you are truly gullible. Please email me directly and I'll help you buy loads of hosting that you don't really need. Thanks!)
Today and over the weekend several or our little elves will be beavering away on refining and tweaking everything so that it won't explode when we put it "live".
Of course you'd have to be insane not to expect there to be issues and problems. There always are. You can test stuff umpteen times, but someone will always find a new way to break it.
Speaking of stuff breaking ....
While we do offer excellent network uptime (see how we're curing the world's ails above) we do have issues from time to time. With that in mind we have been planning on moving our technical notifications to a separate offsite blog.
It's still a little rough around the edges, but I would encourage people to check out our new technical blog: Blacknight Status
The new site is running our favourite CMS - MovableType 4 and will be used primarily by our technical support and engineering teams to keep you up to date on any service affecting issues on our network.
What you are likely to find on there is:
What you are NOT likely to see:
I'd recommend you subscribe to the blog as soon as possible
So .. Have a good weekend and keep an eye on your inbox. You never know what might be winging its way to you
Journalists call from time to time asking me to talk about various internet related topics. Most of the time the publications or shows are "general interest", so you can only talk about very general things.
Last night, however, was quite different, as I was one of the guests on "Domain Masters" which is broadcast and streamed weekly at 7pm EST (11pm in Ireland, midnight CET)
The show's host last night was my good friend Jothan Frakes who is one of the domain name industry's gurus.
Although I was very nervous (which probably showed!) we had a nice chat about Blacknight, domains and the internet industry.
If anyone wants to hear the show there should be an mp3 version available on the WebmasterRadio site at some time over the next couple of days.
UPDATE: The Mp3 from last night is now available on the site http://www.webmasterradio.fm/Internet-Marketing/Domain-Masters/Geo-Domain-Expo-and-BlackKnight.htm
UPDATE 2: Of course if I provided proper hyperlinks people might be actually able to use them!
So here you go: Show details including podcast
When: Tonight Tue March 18th @ 21:00 hours
What: Disk replacement in shared server bors.blacknight.ie, the spare in the Raid 1 mirror failed last night so we're going to swap it out tonight. This machine does not have hot swap drives so we need to take it down for the change over.
This will take between 15 minutes and 1 hour to complete, please also note that performance will be degraded today and tonight post the swap out until the raid array returns to normal.
Summary: @ 21:00 tonight Tue March 18th the server hosting server bors will be taken offline for between 15 minutes and 1 hour while we replace a dead drive.
Update @ 21:48:
The disk has been replaced, the raid array is now rebuilding and the server is backup. It'll be a little slow for a couple of horus until the array is completely rebuilt.
Happy St. Patrick's Day!
Up until now I've been doing an obligatory "we're closed" post for the annual Patrick's day weekend.
This year things are a little different.
Although you may not be able to get through on our phone lines we managed to bribe and cajole a few members of our staff to give up their day off to work today.
So if you have any technical support, accounts or sales queries today you will probably get an answer. If you don't get an answer today you will tomorrow when all the "troops" are back on duty.
Of course there's no guarantee that they haven't got hangovers, but there isn't much that we can do about that!
If you're not an existing Blacknight client this post isn't going to be that interesting or relevant to you, so you might want to move along...
The short version of this post:
We'll be emailing you to get you to choose a new username for the new control panel and billing system. The email will be clearly identified as coming from us and we won't be asking you for any sensitive information (ie. it won't be a phish!)
And for those with more patience ...
As some of you know we are currently working on a new shiny hosting system which is going to make your lives better and cure the world's ills (marketing speak gone mad! I know!).
If you can get past the marketing blurb one important fact remains. We will be moving away from Modernbill before too long. While it has served us well over the last few years our relationship has had its ups and downs, so now it only seems fair that we part our ways.
Now we know that migrating people to new systems can be disruptive and we also know how annoying it is when you're forced to use an insanely complicated username and password pair.
So our little elves (forgive the terrible metaphors!) have devised simple solution.
If you are an existing client of ours you will be getting an email at some point in the next few weeks. Within that email will be the basic details you need to choose your new username for the new billing system. It will all be quite painless we hope (and pray!).
In any case if you have any questions do let us know.
When is this going to happen?
I can't give a fixed date just yet, as we're still ironing out some issues and I hate making promises that I can't deliver on.
Most days our post is boring.
There are invoices and other stuff for our accounts team. There might be the odd payment from clients who still pay us by cheque or maybe even a copy of a magazine.
It's nice to get a "thank you" letter from time to time and it really does make us feel good.
We have helped out several groups and individuals over the last few years, so it's nice to see them thanking us.
The System Administrators Guild of Ireland is one such group who we have been providing services to for several years. Their Chairman sent me this letter which I thought I would share:
So being a hosting provider can have its rewards as well sometimes!
Last Saturday Creative Camp was held in Kilkenny Castle. I've been to some nice venues over the last couple of years (I used to live in a really nice one in a previous life!) and Kilkenny Castle definitely gives them a run for their money.
Although the castle is in the middle of Kilkenny once you step through the gates you'd be forgiven for thinking that you were in the middle of the countryside, as all you can see is grass and trees.
The facilities in the building itself are excellent and the organisers did a wonderful job in arranging to hold the event there.
Since Kilkenny is only about a 20 minute drive from the Blacknight offices we simply had to turn out "en force", so six of us headed over for the day.
One of the things about our line of business is that although we maybe in contact with clients and business partners on a regular basis via email, phone and other methods, we rarely get to meet them "face to face". Events like Creative Camp are very refreshing in this regard, as it allows us to meet people in an informal setting. It's also a wonderful opportunity to get feedback on our services. While we may be doing a good job there's always room for improvement and the only way that you can really find out about it is when someone "grabs you" in a corridor and lets you know.
Being able to bring so many members of the team to an event was a great experience as well, since normally it's just me and one or two others. This time round there was a mixture of our development team, technical team and sales team, which was good fun.
There were some very interesting discussions being held throughout the day culminating in a very interesting panel session in the main hall about "Women in Technology". It also marked the official launch of a new site Sass.ie (think of it phonetically!) which we are delighted to sponsor. (We may be capitalist swine, but we like giving back to the community as well)
After the day's events we headed off for a nice Chinese with a couple of clients and friends before making our way back to Carlow.
George, our sales manager, took some nice photos at the event which you can find here. I was going to post a couple of them, but they're rather big.
When: INEX LAN#1 connection being upgraded @ 23:00 on Monday 10th of March.
What: We currently have 2 x 100M connections to INEX. Our LAN#1 connection carriers a lot of our INEX traffic and as such we're upgrading it to 1000M to prevent it being a bottle neck for traffic originated in Ireland. This is a simple software configuration change for the port speed on one of our routers and requires INEX operations staff to do the same on their end.
There'll be a brief hit as all our INEX peerings on LAN#1 go down and traffic re-routes over LAN#2 and transit. This should only be temporary and peerings should re-establish automatically after a few minutes.
Summary: @ 23:00 on March 10th we're upgrading our primary Connection to INEX to 1000M. Traffic reaching us via INEX peerings on LAN#1 should be re-routed via LAN#2 and transit with minimal downtime being incurred, just the time it takes for BGP to reconverge.
Update: 23:25 March 10th 2008
This upgrade went ahead without a hitch. We're now running at GE @ INEX on Lan#1. We'll upgrade Lan#2 later in the year as necessary.
When: Monday 10th of March @ 22:00 hours
What: Firstly we've recently lit our own protected wavelength between DEG and InterXion. It has been in place and in testing for a few weeks now. We need to test the failover on both the long and short legs of this new connectivity and also check the failover to the backup layer 2 paths in the event of both the short and long legs getting damaged at the same time.
We don't expect any downtime during this testing as our layer 2 network normally fails over within a few milliseconds.
Secondly we're moving the InterXion firewalls to the new Distribution routers in this location. This change should take 30 seconds or so to propagate within our network as it's a logical Layer 3 change.
This will mean the firewalled network in DEG and InterXion will be seperated from each other and traffic originating and destined for each data centre doesn't need to traverse our metro network.
For complete testing we'll allocate 2 hours to perform these tests. We don't envisage anything more than a few 10-30 seconds hits on metro traffic (so won't affect everyone) and it will only cause slow loading times for some websites and not others.
Summary: Works begin @ 22:00 hours on Monday 10th and end at midnight on Monday 10th. There should only be a few short hits on our metro links as they failover while we simulate fibre cuts, switch failures, port failures etc.
Update: 23:58 March 10th:
These tests have been completed. The inter DC links have been tested in several scenarios are we're happy it's quite resilient now. We also moved the InterXion firewalls to a new distribution router pair in InterXion from the DEG routers. This took a little longer than expected, around 3 minutes and 40 seconds or so, slight OSPF glitch in the config which took a minute or two to find. All went to plan except that firewall move in the initial stages.
So this weekend is Creative Camp and I'm currently trying to work out who exactly will be going from our offices... I know a few people were talking about it, but I'm still not 100% sure who is definitely going. It looks like there might be two carloads ...
So we're basically invading Kilkenny!
I'll probably be buying drinks / food for people later in the day / evening, so if you want some just look for the me ...
Don't know what I look like?
Well here's a recent enough photo of me with Playboy centrefold Sara Jean Underwood:
Relevance?
Practically none, but I've been trying to work out how to get a photo of me and a Playboy model onto the company blog for weeks ...
Of course I won't have these lovely ladies on my arm this weekend, but I should still be recognisable...
When you take your car into a mechanic you expect them to do the job correctly and to meet industry standards. It's not something you ask about, as it's taken as a given.
When it comes to web design, however, standards are all too often put in the back seat. You could get into a lengthy and irrelevant discussion of how browser software evolved, but it wouldn't help you get your site to work properly for a potential buyer.
Why do standards matter?
They matter because it makes life easier for everyone.
If your website complies with W3C (http://www.w3c.org) standards then you can more or less guarantee that all visitors will have an equal experience.
Badly designed websites can cost you money in lost sales and if your business is online then this isn't a good thing. Sites carrying "useful" badges like "best viewed in Internet Explorer" are going to cost you money.
I don't use Internet Explorer. I've no reason to and neither did over 50% of visitors to one of my websites last month. Do you want to stop me from doing business with you? Telling me that my choice of browser or operating system doesn't "fit" with your site's "requirements" is a sure fire way of dissuading me from spending money with you.
Another thing that people tend to forget is "accessibility". Accessible design doesn't have to be ugly. It can help reach an audience you might otherwise miss and anyone who could be turned into a buyer is welcome, aren't they?
This article first appeared in Computers in Business with the Sunday Business Post on March 2nd 2008.
For the last couple of years I've been writing a monthly column for PC Live, which is one of Ireland's consumer electronics magazines. Since January of this year I've also been writing a short column for the Sunday Business Post's monthly ICT supplement, Computers In Business.
Since neither publication makes all of my articles available online and the content is mine ie. I retain the copyright, I've decided to republish the articles here. I may not republish all of them, as there is overlap at times between what goes into print and what gets put on the company blog. In other cases the content may not lend itself to this medium as it wa time sensitive ..
If anyone has any feedback on this please post a comment below
Thanks!