Recently in Hosting Category

• global address book
  
• shared calendar
• public folders
• ActiveSync

• IMAP4 / POP3
• Spam Filtering
• Virus Filtering

NB: Plan features vary. See the comparison chart for details

1. Blacknight
2. Hosting365.ie (Register365 nameserver)
3. Digiweb (including Novara ie. register.ie)
4. Letshost
5. IrishDomains

• the control panel
• Plesk
• dns basics
• domain basics (and maybe more advanced topics?)

Dear Sirs,

We act as solicitors for Blacknight Internet Solutions Limited who have handed us a copy of yours of the 13th inst.  We have explained the contents in detail to our clients who acknowledges your clients situation. 

It is most important to note however that our clients are a hosting provider.  This is distinct to an access provider and our client therefore does not offer DSL or other internet access services. 

We understand that the agreement with Eircom relates to DSL services, which make illegal filesharing possible.  Again we reiterate that our clients do not offer this service.  Nor does our client have any subscribers as outlined in your letter.

We sympathise with your clients, we hope you will see that our clients are not involved in such activities and therefore we would be grateful if you would kindly revert and confirm our clients cooperation and also a release from any legal action as mentioned in your aforesaid letter.

• 1 year's hosting on our Medius plan (choice of Windows or Linux)
• 1 domain registration period for a choice of com/net/org/info/biz/mobi/ie/eu/co.uk (period as co.uk domains are registered for 2 years not 1 year)

1. An annual hosting plan (Minimus / Medius / Maximus)
2. A Google Adwords account that is less than 14 days old
   

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• Spam Assassin
• DNS Blacklists

• setting email size limits (if you want to block emails based on size)
• SPF settings
• DNS Blackhole (blacklist) settings

Image via Wikipedia

A lot of the questions we get asked on a regular basis are about moving your hosting without downtime and without too many headaches.

If you leave switching provider until the last minute it will be painful, so please don't!

We'd recommend people to look into changing their hosting provider BEFORE their current hosting subscription expires.

We've got a couple of simple articles on our site to help guide you through the process:

Guide to Moving Hosting Provider

and of course a

Transferring Domains

If you follow the steps outlined by us you shouldn't have too many headaches.

However, there are a few things that people need to take into account.

• Email - make sure you download it from your previous provider
• Email accounts - make sure you set them up on our servers. There is no way for us to know which email accounts you were using with another provider.
• Website content - make sure you have a recent backup from your previous provider.
• Databases - If your site uses databases (MySQL or others) the connection strings / parameters will need to be changed and updated to reflect the settings on our servers. You'll also need to ensure that you have a recent backup of any databases you were using.

We've added a couple of more Flash tutorials to the support section of our site.

The new tutorials cover using the control panel to manage DNS, change nameservers and use the autoinstaller (Application Vault) to setup applications like Wordpress or Movable Type.

You can now easily manage your domain's DNS settings including setting up both masked and unmasked forwarders via the control panel.

Any IE domain name registered via our new system is also fully manageable ie. you can update its nameservers without our intervention.

So if you suffer from insomnia you can update your nameservers in the middle of the night if you want to (bear in mind the IE Domain Registry does not reload every 5 minutes, so you won't gain much by doing that!).

We've been talking to a lot of our clients about the new control panel system over the past couple of weeks and the feedback you've been giving us has been really helpful.

Feel free to let us know what you think - we don't bite! Honest!

Is there some part of the control panel that you find confusing?

Why not let us know and we'll get a new tutorial done up for it.

A few weeks ago Krishna De and I spent an afternoon recording a series of short podcasts on hosting, domain registration, seo and related topics for the PodCamp Ireland series.

Krishna De has given me permission to use and abuse the hosting tip series, so I will probably make them available from here shortly (I'm still trying to find an embeddable mp3 player that I actually like!)

If people like this kind of thing it shouldn't be that hard to organise more of them....

We announced a while ago that multi year .ie registrations were going to be available soon. Wednesday last week this went live, you can now register an IE domain for upto 10 years. Currently we're allowing 1-5, and 10 years, we'll change this in a week or two once things settle down.

The second thing to announce is that you can now change the name servers of your newly purchased .ie domain names via our customer control panel (Playfully referred to as CCP by our support team) by clicking on "Billing" > "Domain Management" and then click on any .ie domain. One small niggly bug remains, for domains that are transferred into us from another reseller or the registry themselves can't yet be updated. This should be enabled in a week or so, it's a minor code fix on our end.

So to summarise, you can now register a .ie domain for upto 10 years and you can update the nameservers for your newly registered .ie domains via our CCP (without needing to ask us!).

More coming soon!

I mentioned the Tuesday push recently in relation to pix.ie.

This week's Tuesday push is Toddle, which we also happen to host!

So what exactly is Toddle?

Toddle is the brainchild of SpoiltChild design. If you've seen our new site or any of our print ads etc., then you've seen their work.

In simplest terms it's a service to help you design your email newsletters.

You don't need to have any special skills to create an attractive email newsletter that you can send to your clients or prospects, as their intuitive interface does all the hard work for you.

Setting up an account takes less than 30 seconds and there are both paid and free options. I'd encourage you to play around with the free version first to see if it suits your taste / requirements.

Are we biased towards them?

Probably.

Do we feel guilty about this?

No.

Hopefully this'll be the first of many feature updates.

I'm delighted to inform you all that we're now supporting .net 3.5 on all our new Windows hosting plans.

That is, Minimus, Medius and Maximus (Windows Only plans) which you can view over on our website .

We've also got Ajax extensions 1.0 installed (we had this previously aswell on the old plans), both of these were supported in the last hotfix for our provisioning software.

Keep an eye out in future for more updates.

Image via Wikipedia

While most people have been very positive about the new website and the new hosting plans there seems to be one area that is causing confusion.... logins.

Sorry about that!

If you placed an order for hosting or domain registration (apart from VPS) prior to Friday 8th August you can login here with your email address and password.

For all orders placed after Friday afternoon you should login here.

If you want to host a domain you already bought with us on the new shiny hosting system there is no issue. It's just a matter of updating DNS :)

And if you have any issues or queries please do let us know!

As I mentioned yesterday, we've just relaunched our website with a whole new set of hosting plans.

Over the coming weeks I'll be exploring some of the new options available to you and hopefully include a couple of screencasts as well (the stress is on "hopefully"!).

Our new entry level plan is called the "minimus", but there's nothing that small about it.

While it is "small" compared to our other hosting plans it comes with 20 times more space than its predecessor!

So what do you get?

To start with you get access to our new super-duper control panel. (You'll have to excuse all the superlatives - we're ever so slightly excited about this!)

The control panel is the "hub" for the entire system.

If you want to see what orders you have with us, be they domains, hosting accounts, vps or anything else, then you can login there and check their status.

To show you the kind of cool things you can do from within the control panel we asked our friends over in DemoDemo.com to put together some Flash tutorials for us.

If you have a look at some of the tutorials you'll probably get a "feel" for how things work.

What about other features?

The minimus, like all our hosting plans, allows you to host multiple websites on the one account.

You can now host up to 30 independent websites on a single hosting account.

If you want database support for a blog, forum, shop or anything else you will be blown away by the range of options available.

Not only are we offering you a choice of MySQL, PostGres and MS SQL 2005, we're also offering you the choice between MySQL 4 and MySQL 5, so if you need to move a site over from another provider you don't need to worry so much about database compatibility.

At the scripting level we're offering a choice of Php5 and Php4, though we would always recommend that you opt for php5.

If you want asp or asp.net there's no problem there, as we offer both Windows and Linux based web servers. You can simply choose which one you need during signup (we've got rid of the windows / linux plan pages since they just cause confusion).

What about pre-installed scripts?

We've a new application installer that offers a wide range of scripts and software for you to use with your site.

You can see it in action here

What about email?

We know how important email services are to our clients, so we've deployed a whole new range of email services and servers.

The "minimus" is not short on email features!

POP3 Mailboxes: Unlimited
Forwarders: Unlimited
Autoresponders: Unlimited
Mailing Lists: 5
IMAP
Email Filtering
Webmail: @Mail

If you want to access your email on the move then you'll love our new webmail service, which is powered by the very slick and powerful AtMail.

What about your site builder?

We've been offering clients a basic sitebuilder for quite some time and we were amazed at how popular it has proven.

We're now offering a much more powerful sitebuilder to our clients which comes with a nice range of templates to choose from.

What about ..... ?

There are a lot of new and cool features available for clients, so if you have any queries don't be shy! Let us know either by posting a comment here or simply emailing our sales team (sales@blacknight.com)

Image via Wikipedia

If DNS is not setup correctly your website(s) will not display, or if your ISP's DNS is having issues you won't be able to visit websites either.

Of course there are also nasty things that can happen if DNS is exploited.

If you want to be sure that your provider's dns is setup correctly then you can use a handy little tool provided by IANA.

You can read more about the tool and what it does on the ICANN site

If you've just gone to our website you may notice that it's changed. Not just a minor overhaul, but a full redesign (SpoiltChild) with CMS magic (2Bscene) and various other things integrated (Blacknight internal).

The new hosting plans offer:

• More space
• More bandwidth
• Single login
• More features
• More databases and database technologies

We will be migrating client billing accounts and domains into the new billing system as soon as we can (ie. over the next few weeks) but there is no magical way to move hosting from our old systems.

I'll be posting a bit over the next few days in more detail about the new plans and what we're doing that's different.

If you have any issues or simply want to give us feedback please do.

This weekend is a bank holiday weekend here in Ireland and in many other countries across the globe.

While I wish the weather was as nice as in my fantasy photo (see above) unfortunately it's raining heavily here.

Our sales and accounts teams will be back in the office again on Tuesday morning.

Technical support will be available over the long weekend, as usual, via the helpdesk.

If you have a dedicated server or colocation / transit services, please refer to the "out of hours" support details. If you don't have them for any reason let us know.

Enjoy the long weekend!

Image via Wikipedia

Leo Vegoda has posted an excellent followup of the session on the ICANN blog, summarising the speakers' various comments and thoughts.

While we may have some experience with ipv6 the session in Paris definitely opened my eyes to a whole set of issues that we will need to address moving forward.

We're currently putting what I hope (and even pray!) are the final touches to our new website.

One of the things we are very very interested in updating is the testimonials page ie. the place where people tell us how wonderful we are!

Seriously. If you like our services and are happy to let others know email me directly (michele@blacknight.com) and we'll put it up on the new site.

Please don't ask me to write your testimonials (it's happened before!) We're only interested in genuine ones.

Thanks!

Since we launched our VPS hosting a couple of months ago we've been working on adding extra documentation both internally to our wiki and externally to our knowledgebase and websites.

We've recently added a short FAQ for VPS clients which hopefully addresses some of the questions people have.

We'll be adding more content as we can, but if there are any areas that people would like us to focus on please let us know.

I've also added a new VPS section to our forum

Feedback, as usual, is welcome

We've been toying with the idea of providing "live chat" on our site for quite some time.

We finally found a software vendor whose product fit our criteria, so we're now offering live chat on our VPS hosting site.

All conversations are routed over 128 bit SSL, so your privacy is assured.

We would, of course, ask that people not handover credit card details etc., via the live chat system.

Staff from sales, technical support and accounts are available from 8 am to 6 pm Monday to Friday to answer your queries.

Of course if anyone has any feedback to give us either here or via email (management@blacknight.com) we'd love to hear it.

Ok the title sounds a bit funny, but it's the best I could come up with. Calling all developers, ROR users and people who need and want flexible ruby on rails hosting.

What is your ideal server setup? There are many choices, here are the ones we'd consider.

1) Apache + FastCGI?
2) Apache + Mod_Proxy with Mongrel or another application server?
3) Apache + mod_rails (passenger)

Shell access won't be a possibility here unfortunately in our new shared hosting system, it's just not going to be a feature. So what would people like instead? A ruby console of some kind that has limited command line options? What would you like these to be? access to ruby, rake etc?

What about Gems, have the ability to install your own gems? (I can't see this happening) How about if we had a Gem request system where by you can click a button and stick in a gem name and our support team would get notified?

Many people often ask how do I restart my application? Our current Apache/FastCGI setup results in this question a lot. This requires an apache restart which in cases of busy loads can take the server offline for anything from 2-30 seconds, admittedly this isn't ideal at all. In an ideal world we'd use passenger (mod_rails). All you have to do to restart your application is put a file called "restart.txt" into the tmp folder of your application and passenger restarts your app, cool huh?

What else would you like? What options would be ideal?

It's interesting to see that the media has been giving some more coverage to IPv6 over the last couple of days.

I was interviewed by ENN yesterday afternoon for a piece they put out in the evening:

EC urges speedy adoption of IPv6

Basically the EU is beginning to take an interest so there may, finally, be some movement.

Of course the only way it's going to happen is if people are able to use it, so broadband providers need to be encouraged to roll it out.

If you want to play around with IPv6 you could start by asking your current ISP what their plans are.

ICANN released a handy document that covers the salient points last year:
IPv6 document

Well it isn't quite Web 2.0. But it's now new and improved and shiny.

And before I get any complaints, we know Safari doesn't look perfect yet :-).

We've removed .net and Linux VPS plans, you now have a simplified version of the site that has VPS plans that are OS agnostic. When you click buy now you'll be able to use our fancy vps-shop web application to choose your OS and the package you want and whether or not you want to add Plesk!

So where is this fancy application I hear you cry. Any buy now link on Blacknightvps.com will now take you to it.

All pricing for each period and for plesk etc is all contained within the web app.

There's a few small issues outstanding that we'll be fixing in time.

1) Safari doesn't work well right now (if at all :/)
2) The initial page load is a little slow, we're aware of this, it's because of the volume of information being retrieved from our backend that causes this, we're working on it.
3) Changing OS doesn't appear to keep your selected options in all browsers. However if you change plan from basic to standard it keeps all your choices!
4) Non javascript users we'll have a more accessible version soon (within a week or two) that'll work particularly well for the visually impaired.

Please let us know what you think of the new simplified version of the site.

All feedback and comments are welcome.

Ok so the one question we've been asked over and over again was:

"How many IPs can I have with my VPS?"

When we launched initially we said 1 IP address.

Then we gave a second free and now we're going to give you up to 10 IPs but the downside is there'll be a small charge for additional IPs.

On our shared hosting you can only get 1 dedicated IP address, so our VPS plans give you more IPs for free for a start and also the ability to add more.

The magical upper limit that we've set is 10 IPs.

Each additional IP (after the 2 we give free!) costs 2 Euro per month.

This fee is an administrative fee and doesn't give you ownership of the IP but rather the ability to make use of it.

It is added to your account for your exclusive use. After you buy them you can click IP addresses in VPS management and click Add new.

The upper limit we'll look at later once the product matures more and people start giving out to me looking for more IPs. :-)

For the last few months we have been regular advertisers in a number of UK magazines including Linux Format.

Print advertising is an interesting "game". You can spend a fortune and reap no return or spend very little and see your sales jump over night.

For the first few months of our advertising "run" in Linux format we didn't do anything really "special" with our ads. The ads we ran were the same as any of the ads we'd run in other publications. While I thought this was a good thing on one level I also thought it would be nice to do something a little bit different for the specific demographic of Linux Format (click to enlarge):

I've no idea where Alan, who does our print ads, found the penguin, but it brought a smile to my face.

If you'd like to be in with a chance of getting a year's VPS hosting for free, check out the Web 2.0 Ireland blog.

They've recently redone their site's design, so they're running a logo competition.

We've been getting tonnes of feedback from customers over the past couple of weeks since our VPS product launch. As Michele has posted previously we've had lots of requests for other distros. Mostly our issues with these is cramming them all onto the website. We're building an app behind the scenes to make it easier to choose the type of VPS you wanted along with the distro, OS of your choosing.

Since that'll be a few days before it's complete I've a few URLs to allow people to go in and signup for their VPS.

OpenSuse 10.3 can be purchase here.
Ubuntu 7.04 can be purchased here.
Fedora Core 7 can be purchased here.

You can navigate to different periods from within the store. e.g. you can pay for 3 months and not incur a setup or pay for 12 months and only pay for 10 etc.

Feel free to give us feedback here or on the forum and as usual if you have any issues don't hesitate to drop us a line on our helpdesk.

At times I feel like I'm a broken record. I keep finding myself saying the same thing to people, possibly using different words or turns of phrase, but the message is essentially the same.

If you register a domain name and pay for it you have certain rights. Of course you also have certain obligations, but most of them aren't particularly cumbersome.

What I wrote last year still hold true.

Basics:

You are entitled to access to your EPP key for your .com without paying a fee. Registrars should provide that to you in a timely fashion.

If you want to transfer the billing of a .ie domain you DO NOT need to deal with the original IEDR reseller. If you only want to move the hosting you DO NOT need to move the actual billing.

If you want to move your hosting you should be able to do so.

Unfortunately there are no clear guidelines from ICANN mandating how resellers should handle things, so you may need to refer back to the actual registrar that the reseller is using if you run into issues.

We recently had yet another issue with a particular UK company that refuses to handover clients' domains without levying a wholly unreasonable fee. If that happens to you you should try reporting them to their upstream registrar who may be in a position to take action against them.

Another "old chestnut" is the unreasonable locking of domains by some registrars after a domain has changed hands. While the argument that it is to prevent "hijacking" holds some water it's also rather "convenient" for them, as they often get another year's registration fees from clients as a result of the restriction.

ICANN recently clarified a very important policy point - inter-registrar transfers. Hopefully this will be on the agenda at the next ICANN meeting, which is scheduled for June in Paris.

The key point raised is worth repeating here:

A registrant change to Whois information is not a valid basis for denying a transfer request.

One very large US based registrar has been denying transfers for a long time based on this. I won't name them, but it doesn't take a lot of work to find out who they are.

Paul, our overworked and under appreciated CTO (who also happens to be my business partner) has been beavering away on enabling more cool stuff for the VPS hosting solutions.

One of the most requested features over the past few days has been support for more linux distributions.

Since there are a LOT of linux distributions we had to focus on the more important and popular ones, so Debian was pretty much top of the list.

You can now order Debian VPS (without plesk) via the online shop.

Rest assured that we do plan on adding more linux distributions, but as the old adage goes - Rome wasn 't built in a day, so we'd have to humbly ask you to bear with us.

Of course you don't have to wait if you don't want to, but hopping up and down won't speed things up...

Speaking of linux distros ...

We probably won't be adding support for Gentoo for some time if ever - sorry!

And now to distract you with a pretty image:

Of course it's more than just pretty.

With the virtual server solution powered by Parallels you can easily manage your virtual server (with full root access) from within the control panel. Want to reboot it or even stop it? How about a simple mouse click?
And if you break your VPS beyond recognition you can easily reinstall it from scratch and start all over. (I think I've broken mine about 4 times in the last 48 hours !!)

I'll probably post some screenshots or a screencast of the system when I get a chance.

But if there's any topic you'd like to see covered do let us know via the comments

I've never really liked that old adage of "teaching a dog new tricks". I firmly believe that you have to learn to adapt and grow.

Launching a new product or service is a learning process. I could shove in another saying there about mice and men, but that might be overkill.

Earlier this week we launched the first phase of our new hosting services. In the first phase we introduced VPS hosting using Parallels.

The first thing we discovered was that our new VPS site was full of silly little bugs, with some links pointing to the wrong places completely, and some really odd display issues on some browsers - notably Safari. Even though I use a Mac I always use Firefox out of habit.

Thankfully people were really helpful and not only let us know what issues they'd experienced, but also pointed us in the right direction to fix them!

We also realised very quickly that we weren't really selling the products properly.

Sure, you could buy the product you wanted, but it wasn't as easy as it should have been, as we'd linked to the wrong pages from the site's main page. While this still isn't exactly the way we'd like it to be we're working on it behind the scenes

Based on feedback on my previous post about the VPS launch and the numerous emails both I and other members of our team received this week we've been working on a few things.

In the first instance we're adding more linux distributions into the mix.

The first one to be added is Debian, as so many people were asking for it. We've added that to the plans without Plesk (control panel)

We'll also be adding OpenSuse and Ubuntu, though I'm not 100% sure when yet!

There are two other things that we need to work on over the coming days and weeks, apart from the order process itself, and that is building up the documentation on the site, so that users can find the information they need easily, while the other is working on case scenarios.

People were very quick to point out that while my post included a couple of usage scenarios that they could relate to the site itself didn't.

In the words of Homer Simpson - doh!

So if you have any feedback please do share it. We take it all onboard and will do our best to implement changes based on what you, our clients, tell us that we're doing wrong - though it's also nice when you tell us we're doing something right too!

We have finally launched the first set of new products and services that we've been working on for months.

As of last night Blacknight VPS hosting is open for business.

The new VPS hosting is the perfect solution for people who want to run custom setups without incurring the costs of dedicated hardware.

For example if you want to experiment with JSP, Ruby on Rails, Light HTTPD or want to install custom DLLs on Windows.

With a VPS you have full control. The only limits are your imagination and your credit card limit!

What's a VPS?

VPS stands for virtual private server.

It's hard to put it into really simple terms, but it's a way to give you the control and flexibility of a dedicated server at a fraction of the price.

What are Blacknight offering?

We're offering a full range of Windows Server 2003 64 bit and Centos 5 (Linux) based virtual servers.

Can I get a control panel for this?

Yes. All VPS servers come with the Virtuozzo Power Panel which gives you control over the basic operations of your VPS.

If you're not comfortable managing your server over SSH / RDP then you can opt to get Plesk as well.

What about other linux distros?

We'll be adding other popular Linux distributions in the coming weeks. For the moment we're offering the most popular alternative to RedHat Enterprise

Will you be offering Windows Server 2008?

We intend to offer it as soon as it is viable ie. fully supported and tested

The entire system is securely hosted in one of Ireland's leading data centres, Interxion in Dublin, Ireland.

In the last few months we've mentioned a lot of upgrades and improvements to our network. Part of the reason for doing all this was to make way for the rollout of our Parallels network.

If anyone has any feedback we'd really love to hear it.

Let us know in the comments or if you'd prefer discretion email management@blacknight.com

We informed you some time ago of an upcoming upgrade to our billing / control panel system.

You will probably receive an email from us later today regarding our billing system.

The text of the email is below:

Dear XXX

As you may know we are currently deploying a new billing and control panel system.

In order to facilitate the migration we would appreciate your help.

Please follow the link below to create your new control panel login.

NB: We will not ask you for any personal information at any time.

To create your new control panel login, please visit

Should you encounter difficulties please contact support@blacknight.com

--
Regards
Team Blacknight
http://www.blacknight.com

Once you get this email you will be able to setup your new login for our new billing system which will be going live very soon.
If you have any queries or issues please let us know.

NB: This change affects ALL Blacknight clients

This article was originally published in April 2008's edition of Computers in Business. Since I wrote it and retain the copyright I am republishing it here:

People are always publishing articles on how to make the most out of your website or how to turn your website into “the solution” for your business.

I can’t see the point in even trying if you can’t get the basics right.

What are the basics?

The obvious things.

What does your company sell or provide?

Communicate this to me clearly in language I can understand. If I need a dictionary to read your website then you’re being too obtuse. Spell it out
for me so I can see.

How can I contact you?

Put your contact details where they can be seen without forcing me to search for them or squint.

Instil a sense of trust.

Mobile phone numbers, throwaway email addresses and PO Box numbers may suit you, but they do not give potential clients a sense of security.

Where are you based?

There is nothing more annoying than a website promoting a really cool and useful service WITHOUT telling me if it’s available in my area. (Sorry for yelling, but it’s really frustrating!!) If your service is only available in Co. Cork that’s fine, but don’t tell me it’s a “national service” on one page and restricted to Cork only on another.

Another basic thing to do is check if your website displays correctly in the most commonly used browsers. Of course if your site is “standards compliant” and can pass the W3C’s validator test then you won’t have to worry too much, so maybe investing a little bit more now will pay dividends later?

I hate acronyms.

Of course they're impossible to avoid if you work in IT, but that doesn't mean I have to like them.

RAID is one of those acronyms that really wrecks my head.

Not RAID itself which means simply Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks, but the different types of RAID array that can exist.

RAID, in case you didn't know, is a way of improving redundancy and performance in servers by using multiple disks. Of course you don't have to use multiple disks, but if you don't you will run the risk of losing data.

A few months ago someone posted a very nice simple graphic that explained the differences between the various types of RAID arrays.

Taken from: http://www.epidauros.be/raid.jpg

One of our technical staff sent me a link earlier today to a bash.org quote which sums up the potential issues with single disk servers very nicely:

sterano: Whats the difference between Raid_0 and Raid_1? Steve: In Raid_0 the zero stands for how many files you are going to get back if something goes wrong.

Moral of the story - use more than one physical disk :)

I am currently very very frustrated and annoyed.

I've always tried to be honest and upfront with clients, so it really annoys me when I have to backtrack on any kind of promise.

We are about to launch a range of new hosting plans.

We can't launch the new hosting plans just yet, since there are a couple of minor glitches with the system. They're small issues. They will be fixed, but we can't launch until they are.

This is really really annoying, as I actually told several people last week that we would be launching (there are two or three clients already using the system!)

So what can I say?

Sorry?

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!)

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:

• Service notifications
• Planned maintenance updates
• Technical Topics

What you are NOT likely to see:

• Marketing Stuff


• General Stuff

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.

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!

Summary: Kay.blacknight.ie (one of the windows shared hosting servers) is going to be moved to new hardware. The highlights are:

a) More memory
b) 64bit Windows 2003 server
c) Faster disks
d) Newer version of Smartermail

Time lines:

@22:00 on the 27th of Feb 2008 we'll be shutting down the smartermail service.

Once we're sure the service is stopped and all end users disconnected we'll be syncing the config, mailboxes and spools to the new server. Once we've moved everything we'll do some extensive testing to make sure all is well.

We estimate around 3 hours or so for the change over to take place, if it's looking like it'll take longer, we'll abort the move but keep syncing the data.

I'll post more info tomorrow when I know more. Mark one of our Windows engineers will be on-site for the duration of the change over.

Please address any queries regarding this to the support desk http://support.blacknight.ie, support@blacknight.ie

Update @ 7:30am Thursday 28th:

Mark aborted the transfer during the night as it was taking far too long. We're re-scheduling this for this weekend coming and we'll try an alternative means of syncing the data. Can I urge people to download all their e-mail and not leave it on the server for the next few days as this will help us migrate the data faster.

Update @ 14:30 Friday Feb 29th:

We've been investigating this further over the last few days and we've found a faster method to complete the transfer and replicate the data. The tests we've run indicate between 1 and 2 hours to sync the changes since the major file copy on Wednesday last. So starting at 22:00 tonight the mail server kay.blacknight.ie will be unavailable for 2-3 hours to complete this migration. I'll update the blog on Saturday morning with more information.

Update @ 23:49 Friday Feb 29th:

We have completed this move. There is a noticeable performance increase which can be attributed to new software, 64 bit OS and Mail services and better hardware.

Changes:

* New Webmail interface with a built in RSS reader
* New Antispam measures in the back end
* ClamAV now installed by default
* Better attack mitigation features
* Improved accessibility built into the webmail interface itself (Daragh please comment on how good/bad Smartermail got it this time)

When: Thursday 14:30 in the afternoon.

Summary: There is a software upgrade due for a while for the vendor we use. So we're going to do it during the day when the system is at its quietest.

We estimate between 30 minutes and 2 hours for the complete upgrade and testing phase. The backup system won't be available during this upgrade.

If you have any questions please address them to our support team. There may be client upgrades and new features available after this upgrade so we'll post about these once we've tested them all fully.

At the moment we're hiring staff for a variety of roles. One of the things we are planning on doing is extending our general operating hours for customer service and sales.

For the past few months we've gradually extended our work shifts so that our technical support and sales teams are fully operational and answering the phones between 8am and 6pm Monday to Friday (GMT).

Outside office hours all clients who have dedicated servers or use us for colocation have access to our oncall staff (If you fall into this category and have misplaced the contact details let us know!).

In terms of maintenance notifications we will be offering more options in the coming weeks, so watch this space.

In the meantime we recommend that people keep an eye on this site for updates. You can subscribe to the RSS feed or to email notifications.

But what about telephone support at the weekend?

Do people actually want that?

If we made it available would people use it?

What about "live chat"?

Are our ticket response times outside office hours fast enough?

Are they too slow?

Based on the responses we got from our recent survey I gather that people are happy with our customer service overall, but that we could improve it.

So what would you like to see?

We're hiring staff at the moment ... I've already mentioned some of the roles we need to fill and today I've got yet another one...

This time round its for an "experienced" *nix admin position.

Basically we've got loads of servers. They need lots of TLC ...

Here are the details:

Position: Unix Engineer

The Unix Engineer has a specific area of responsibility within the systems that comprise the Blacknight core service delivery infrastructure. He/she reports to the Support Supervisor. This role may require leadership of junior engineers. Close co-operation with the core systems engineers is essential.

Responsibilities associated with this role include, but are not limited to the following:

* Ensure that all Blacknight services run optimally; continuously monitor performance against published SLA targets; consistently strive for excellence and highest system uptimes
* Assume special responsibility for Unix/Linux-based service delivery systems:
* Shared unix web servers and mail servers
* Unix/Linux-based database servers
* Support to dedicated or co-located customers on Unix/Linux systems who have bought managed services
* Advanced dedicated server development
* Unix/Linux-specific backups
* Plan and implement future developments, such as systems upgrades, using detailed plans and scheduled upgrade or implementation cycles
* Maintain/upgrade current anti-virus, backup, and other management software on Unix/Linux systems;
* Support deployment of hardware, software, service, and maintenance of all information technology assets
* Maintain full security on all systems
* Some development of in house applications may be required
* Assist in resolving systems outages out-of-hours through participation in an engineer call-out roster

Skills / Knowledge

* Deep knowledge of networking protocols (DNS/IPsec/POP3/SMTP and TCP/IP in mixed operating system environments)
* Experience managing Linux and other open-source operating systems essential, scripting ability essential, experience with commercial Unix, such as Solaris, an advantage
* Familiarity with Quagga the open-source routing suite desirable
* Software development experience in PHP and/or PERL desirable
* Working knowledge of Windows-based server operating systems
* Ability to build, run, and scale most ISP services from source
* Experience with Java, Tomcat, JSP deployments, ability to deploy and support such deployments
* Extensive knowledge of project-based software upgrade plans, ability to plan, write, communicate, and execute project and/or test plans
* Excellent understanding of firewalls and network security essential; experience with management of and planning of deployments of Cisco PIX or Fortinet firewalls essential
* Disaster recovery planning/testing
* Hands-on experience of backup software essential
* hardware diagnostic skills would be desirable, be able to trouble shoot problems with servers to determine if a fault is software of hardware based and be able to use your own initiative to contact vendors for replacements where applicable

PERSONAL ATTRIBUTES:

* Excellent communication skills
* Must be forward thinking and have good planning skills
* Excellent troubleshooting, judgment, and decision-making skills
* High level of self-motivation and proven ability for self-study and learning on the job
* Flexible and dependable, On-call work and Out of hours duties may be required from time to time (this is paid extra)
* Team player

QUALIFICATIONS/ EXPERIENCE

* 3 years experience working in a similar role

Salary

* Negotiable, between € 28,000 and €35,000 plus benefits and depending on experience

EDIT: The job is based in our offices in Carlow ...

When I first setup Blacknight we were a very very very small operation without any staff, offices or anything else.

Nowadays we have a growing team and are constantly expanding.

Our offices are quite comfortable, though we're going to be extending them very soon.

We're currently looking for more staff to help us expand and grow and offer our clients quality service and support.

There are currently 4 positions open and it would be really nice if we could fill them.

On the technical side there are two roles.

One is technical support L1. In simple terms the L1 technical support role is the "frontline". You'd be dealing with our clients via email, phone and other methods (we're not using Livechat at present, but we may do...). It would be a junior position and in order to qualify you'd need to have a good balance of humour, patience and an interest in IT. You don't need to have a degree in IT. In fact you don't need a degree at all, though it would be helpful...

The other technical role is as "Data Centre Technician". I'll post the full job spec further down, but the basic outline is that you'd be working primarily in Dublin (Clondalkin and Park West) and liasing with clients and the rest of the team.

The other roles are on the sales team.

It's 2008. Ireland is part of the EU. It would be downright silly to not want to staff capable of communicating with our European neighbours. So we're looking for multilingual sales staff. The languages we'd be interested in would be (in no particular order): Spanish, French, German or Italian. However if you have other EU languages then do feel free to contact us.

The other sales role is "straight" sales.

Both sales roles are based in our offices in Carlow and the candidates would report directly to our sales manager.

So, without further ado, here are the details of the Data Centre Technician role:

Position: Data Centre Technician

The Data Centre Technician role would be suited to someone who has previously worked for a Data Centre/large corporate with 500+ server deployments. He/she reports to the Technical Director. This role will involve close co-operation with the deployment and sales teams regarding new/current and furture customer deployments.

Responsibilities associated with this role include, but are not limited to the following:

* Ensure that all Blacknight customer installs go smoothly and that there is ample space, power, hardware on site for each deployment; liase with hardware vendors regarding delivery of DC specific hardware; consistently strive for excellence.
* Provide hands and eyes support on-site when necessary during business hours
* Ensure that all customer subscribed services are setup within SLAs outlined in contracts.
* Plan and implement future developments, such as systems upgrades, using detailed plans and scheduled upgrade or implementation cycles
* Keep track of all deliveries to and from our two Dublin POPs.
* Support deployment of hardware, software, service, and maintenance of all information technology assets
* Assist in resolving systems outages out-of-hours through participation in an engineer call-out roster

Skills / Knowledge

* Basic knowledge of networking protocols (DNS/IPsec/POP3/SMTP and TCP/IP in mixed operating system environments)
* Experience managing Linux and other open-source operating systems ideal, scripting ability essential, experience with commercial Unix, such as Solaris, an advantage
* Cisco IOS experience, switch configuration and general Layer 2 topology awareness
* Hardware skills with Intel based servers from vendors such as Dell, HP and Intel.
* Meticulous care in deploying servers and all Blacknight, customer equipment and all network cabling.
* Attention to detail regarding keeping records up to date
* Disaster recovery planning/testing
* Hardware diagnostic skills would be desirable, be able to trouble shoot problems with servers to determine if a fault is software of hardware based and be able to use your own initiative to contact vendors for replacements where applicable

PERSONAL ATTRIBUTES:

* Excellent communication skills
* Must be forward thinking and have good planning skills
* Excellent troubleshooting, judgment, and decision-making skills
* High level of self-motivation and proven ability for self-study and learning on the job
* Flexible and dependable, On-call work and Out of hours duties may be required from time to time
* Team player

QUALIFICATIONS/ EXPERIENCE

* 1 year experience working in a similar role

Salary

* Negotiable, between € 23,000 and €27,500 plus benefits and depending on experience

If interested please send CV in RTF or PDF format with covering email to management@blacknight.com.

Recruitment agencies NOT welcome. Cold calls / emails from recruitment agencies in relation to these or any other vacancies will not be welcome and will be treated with contempt.

Summary:

We got some support queries over the weekend from various customers who were upgrading their wordpress installs saying that they were having permissions issues.

Resolution:

I've been dealing with the installatron guys for the last 4 or so hours and we've tested and re-tested and ... so on. We've got the bug nailed down now and I've successfully upgraded from 2.0.5 on a customers blog to latest stable available without breaking permissions.

I've a feeling this also sorts another issue for the upgrade that looses files that were changed during an upgrade.

Overview:

On 10:04am on 4/2/2008 an ethernet card failed in a device on one of our metro-e providers Layer 2 connectivity device in DEG. Immediately (within 50ms) our kit failed over to our backup route into DEG. There was no service disruption during this window due to our resilient network design. At 12:00 the card was replaced and this link came back up and we flipped our traffic back over to our primary link. Again service was unaffected.

We received the RFO from our metro-e provider yesterday afternoon that basically said what I've described above. A card failed and it was replaced within 2 hours.

We've been offering Wordpress via an automated installer for quite some time and it's proven to be very popular.

Unfortunately Wordpress' use of SQL is far from optimal and this can easily lead to a popular blog or site causing serious issues on our servers (or anyone elses for that matter!).

We don't like enforcing certain policies on our users, but we're not left with much choice.
Due to the recent issues regarding busy WordPress websites affecting the performance of shared hosting servers, we are contacting all of our customers that are using WordPress and asking them to please look into enabling caching.

I just wish the Wordpress developers would listen to reason and enable saner caching by default.

There are two possible solutions:

- use a blogging / CMS solution that is a bit "saner" in terms of SQL and / or caching content (You'll notice that this blog has always been running on MT for this very reason!)

- install one of the available Wordpress plugins that will provide caching

There are currently two caching plugins available that we know of:

- WP Cache
- WP Super Cache

What the caching does is take the load away from the MySQL / PHP processing so that the web server (Apache) only has to serve static content, which it does very well!

If you do not enable WP Cache (or similar) there is far greater chance that if your WordPress site experiences a period of high visitors or similiar, then it could cause issues on the server.
As per our Acceptable-Usage Policy, we might have to suspend any site that causes issues like this. Putting it simply - if you're not being a considerate neighbour we might have to shut you down until you behave.

Setting up caching should only take a couple of minutes and if you have any issues or need assistance our support forum is available, as is our helpdesk

EDIT: Gary, from our technical support team, has put together a short document to help people install and configure WP Cache. You can get it from here

Earlier today I emailed several thousand of our clients (some don't want to receive emails and have opted out) with a special offer and a link to the first customer survey we've ever conducted.

I was hoping that we'd get some responses, but I'd no way of knowing how many we would get and so far I've been pleasantly surprised by the response rate.

We weren't interested in people telling us how "wonderful" or "great" we were. There's no way that we can improve things if all we hear is positive feedback.

It's the negative comments that I'm really interested in and I'm delighted that so many people have given honest and blunt replies.

We decided to use Group Surveys to run the survey for us and I'm delighted that we did, as the reporting facility makes it quite easy for me to see what people have been saying.

I'll let the survey run for a few days, as I know from previous experience that not everyone is as obsessive about checking mail as I might be!

However it is my intention to do a number of things based on the feedback we've been receiving:

- I will publish a summary of the survey. (I just need to work out how easy that is to do!)
- I will collate the negative comments and the positive ones and publish a summary of what people have been saying as well as any responses we have at present.
- We, as a company, will be reviewing each and every response internally to see how best we can address any issues that people have raised.

While we did spend quite a bit of time coming up with the survey ie. choosing the questions we wanted to ask and how we wanted to ask them, several people have spotted glitches in it. I was hoping we'd ironed them out before making it public, but I was obviously mistaken. We can learn from our mistakes!

Issue: Iseult down

Due to an attack of some kind (report to follow after log analysis is complete) the shared hosting server iseult had to be rebooted. Post reboot the machine is now giving a grub error (grub is a boot loader).

We've dispatched a Linux engineer to the data centre to fix this issue. ETA is approx 2 hours. So @ approx 19:00 hours we expect the server to be back.

We'll update this post with more information as we have it.

Update: 18:15

The server is now booting and should return to normal service in the next couple of minutes. The raid array is degraded and is rebuilding, this will affect IO performance for the next hour or so. We'll dig through the logs tomorrow and see can we find a reason for this issue. It was however (from preliminary examinations) a customer website that was receiving a lot more traffic than normal (typically a wordpress blog without wp-cache installed/enabled) that caused the problem.

When: Starting Wednesday 9th @ 22:00 and ending Thursday 10th @ 01:00

What: Migration of Dedicated, Colocation and IP transit customers
to new Juniper network layer.

In December we bought a bunch new of Juniper routers to upgrade
our core network with. The ones that were there, were almost 2 years
old and were due an upgrade.

We'll have the new Juniper router pair pre-configured with all prefixes
and BGP sessions. We'll slot it into place and clear the arp cache
on all affected layer 2 devices and shut down the old device. There will
be approx 10-30 minutes where routes to certain parts of our network
are unavailable.

This will also remove the need for our old IPv6 configuration. We'll now
have end to end native IPv6 core running on the Juniper platform. We're
the first hosting company in Ireland to build a native IPv4, IPv6 network
core on the Juniper platform and we're very proud of this fact.

Who will be affected:

Customers on our unfirewalled network (who have their own routers or
firewalls) or IP Transit customers.

This affects both customer groups in InterXion and DEG locations. If you
are unsure if this affects you or not, give us a call or drop an e-mail
into support@blacknight.com

Summary:

On Wednesday 9th starting @ 22:00 hours we'll be performing maintenance
on the routers that run our un-firewalled and IP Transit networks.

Rather than leave it to the last minute I thought I'd take a moment today to give a quick outline of our Christmas 2007 opening hours.

Office Opening Hours:

Friday 21st December - open
Monday 24th December - closed
Tuesday 25th December - closed
Wednesday 26th December - closed
Thursday 27th December - open
Friday 28th December - open
Monday 31st December - closed
Tuesday 1st January 2008 - closed
Wednesday 2nd January 2008 - open. Normal operations resume

Accounts

As above

Technical Support

Our support desk is accessible 24/7/365 and we will have oncall staff throughout the holiday period to deal with any emergency issues.
If you have a dedicated server or colo you should have the "out of hours" number to call. If you don't have the number or have misplaced it please let us know as soon as possible.

IE Domain Updates

The IE Domain Registry will be closed from Friday 21st until January 2nd, so no dns updates will be processed during the Christmas period. If you need any changes made then you need to get them done by close of business on Thursday 20th.

Other Domains

Most other domain registries are automated, so changes and requests maybe processed.

If you have any queries please let us know

Finally, on behalf of all the staff at Blacknight, I would like to take this opportunity to wish you all a peaceful and pleasant Christmas break.

A couple of months ago (time flies!) I was asking people both here and on LinkedIn for product name suggestions.

I was expecting some feedback, but I was totally unprepared for the sheer volume of replies I got.

Wow!

Thanks for taking the time to exercise your grey matter and help us out!

Some of the suggestions were good, some were amusing and some were, well, em, a little, mad!

In the end we'll be opting for something that is hopefully simple enough for people to "get" without being too restrictive:

minimus, medius, maximus

Thanks for the input!

There have been some issues with the connection into our second location this lunchtime.

We will post a more detailed explanation as soon as we have one.

Update: (13:57)

After investigating the issue with our Data Centre and Connectivity partners we've narrowed down the issue to being a faulty patch panel and/or patch leads.

To minimise further downtime in the next 24-48 hours we're going to hold off debugging this issue further. We'll schedule a network maintenance window in the coming days so we can test both links to DEG from InterXion fully.

The lunch time fault today occurred because both metro connections dropped at the same time as InterXion were carrying out cabling work in their patch room. We're working with InterXion to get a resolution on this, but as I said above we want to minimise downtime for our customers by scheduling a window in 24-48 hours to solve this issue fully.

If you have any queries about this please contact us via phone/email/forum or leave a comment on this post.

As part of upgrading our network we are changing access to our primary
name servers (217.114.173.6 and 82.96.97.64) so that they are authoritative only. If you have servers on our network that are set to use these, then you will need to update the DNS settings.

We have attempted to notify all customers whose servers are currently using our authoritative name servers. However, if you have not been contacted and believe your server(s) may be using them, then you can contact us directly for more information. Any customers who put in a server within the last six months should be already using the new servers.

On Friday the 7th of December, the servers will be made authoritative only. If your name servers are not updated by then this may cause issues with connectivity.

Our support area has been upgraded to the latest version of Kayako, which is the software we use to run it.

We'll be tweaking the settings, and customising the look and feel over the coming days, so don't be put off if it looks a bit different!

A few things may not have been transferred over during the upgrade, but they will be restored to all their glory over the coming days.. It will also give you a chance to get a first look at the new style design that we will be unveiling shortly. We hope you like it!

Customer Migrations:

Due to restraints on colo space in the Dublin area at the moment we've had to make provisions to allow us to grow for the next 12 months at a minimum.

With this in mind, we've contracted with InterXion Ireland to get our own cage in their Dublin faciltiy in Parkwest Business Park.

On Sunday 2nd of December 2007 we wish to move our existing racks from the shared floor in InterXion to our caged area. Customers affected will be a small subset of our old and new shared hosting on the following two servers and their associated IP addresses:

balin
81.17.252.15
81.17.252.16
81.17.252.17
81.17.252.18
81.17.252.19
81.17.252.20
ragnell
81.17.252.110
81.17.252.111
81.17.252.112
81.17.252.113
81.17.252.114
81.17.252.115
81.17.252.116
81.17.252.117
81.17.252.118
81.17.252.119
81.17.252.120
81.17.252.121
81.17.252.122
81.17.252.123
81.17.252.124
81.17.252.125
81.17.252.126
81.17.252.127
81.17.252.128

Starting at 21:00 hours on Sunday 2nd of December, we'll be powering down the racks that contain these servers and transporting them down the corridor to our new Caged area. We estimate around 2-4 hours of downtime for the complete migration. This estimate is worst case scenario.

Colo and dedicated customers located in InterXion will be contacted separately with more information regarding their hardware.

As with any move of this magnitude we wish for anyone with any thoughts or questions regarding this please contact us ASAP so we can consider their ideas or issues prior to the move.

Contact details:

+353599183072
support [at] blacknight.ie

Blacknight Operations

In order to further facilitate communication between us and our clients I've setup a Jaiku channel.

If you have a Jaiku account simply join the channel to receive updates from us, including the latest posts from this blog.

If you're already "connected" to me, then you won't really need to this, but there's nothing to stop you !

Zend just sent me an email about a webinar that might be of interest to our clients:
Migrating from PHP4 to PHP5 - Presented by Ivo Jansch, CTO iBuildings

This webinar is aimed at both developers and IT managers who are still using PHP4 and considering migration to PHP5. This session will address the question, “What are the benefits of migrating to PHP5 and equally importantly, what are the risks?” Following this webinar you will be in a better position to make an informed decision between PHP4 and PHP5.

The scheduled maintenance for last night went ahead on time.

According to our engineering team most people would have been affected very briefly (less than one minute).

If anyone is experiencing issues please let us know ASAP. While everything has been tested thoroughly and we have not had any reports of issues to date there is always a possibility that someone was affected - let us know if you were.

Personally I'm overjoyed that the upgrade was finally completed, as it means that our network is a lot more resilient than previously, which means I get to sleep more soundly at night!

When: Wednesday 17th of October @ 22:30 hours

What:

Firewall Upgrade. We're moving our colocation and dedicated server
customers out from behind the current HA pair of firewalls. We've
indicated recently on our blog that we bought 4 new Cisco ASA firewalls
and the time has arrived to install them.

Who will be affected:

Both of our firewalled networks will be affected by this. Firstly
our shared hosting firewall will be moved to a new IP address on the
WAN side to facilitate VPN configurations for our colocation and dedicated customers.

Secondly the new ASAs will be put in place and they will replace the current
firewalls and access routers for these customers.

We estimate around 30 minutes to an hour to move the shared hosting firewall
and around another 30 minutes to an hour to facilitate the new firewall
install. This includes all the cabling work etc that will need to be done.

We will also allow a further hour for testing of both networks, so we're looking
at a maximum of 3 hours for this work to be completed.

Summary:

All colocation, dedicated and shared hosting customers will be affected by this outage.

We mentioned the pending "death" of php4 some time ago.

It now seems that some people have got together to help push the move to php5 forward and have set a deadline of sorts.

The "go php5" site lists software projects that support php 5.2 and greater natively ie. without "dirty hacks" or any other messing about.

As I mentioned previously, most scripts should work properly under php 5, but there will always be exceptions!

If you'd like to find out more about why switching to php5 makes sense have a look at their FAQ.

The idea behind this is to give people that extra "push":

PHP version 5 adds a number of new features and design changes that make developing robust, secure, feature-rich software faster and easier. Those features do not exist in older versions of PHP 4, however, and many are very hard to emulate. Such features include fast and easy XML support for improved web services, better timezone handling, vastly improved database tools and input tools to make PHP applications more secure, and many others.

Projects that support PHP 4 cannot make use of those newer features, however. That means projects have to choose between supporting PHP 4, which has been in maintenance-only mode for over three years, or enabling modern web applications and services. For a long time many projects have chosen to support PHP 4 because of the large number of web hosts running PHP 4. Unfortunately that has resulted in a "chicken and egg" problem where web hosts have no incentive to upgrade to PHP 5, which means PHP developers can't use PHP 5's new functionality even if they want to.

By announcing that many leading open source projects will drop legacy support for PHP 4 at a fixed later date, we believe we can break that cycle and encourage web hosts to upgrade and allow open source developers to build faster, more secure, more powerful web applications.

Now if only we could persuade people to stop using MS SQL 2000 and FrontPage!!

Sorry for the delay in providing this report regarding the last network issue

Date: October 7th 2007
Timeline: 02:15 - 03:35am (Irish time)

Affected Customers: Any customer on the shared firewall that has a dedicated server or has colocation with us was affected during this incident.
This also included our shared hosting clients.

What happened?

At around 2:15am on Sunday 7th of October 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.

Similar to the events of September 11 this year this was mostly because the firewalls we're using have 100meg ports and as such are easily flooded by this simple attacks. We've already put the wheels in motion to upgrade these and we hope to announce the upgrade at the end of this week.

A brief timeline of events is shown below.

02:15: Alerted that sites on the network are not reachable.
02:20: A check reveals that any site behind the shared firewall is
not accessible.
02:30: A reboot of the firewalls is not successful in getting a
response. so an engineer is dispatched to Dublin
03:30: A check by the Engineer on site indicate that one customer
box is sending out masses of UDP traffic. The firewall is attempting to stop all the traffic at the cost of bring down everything else includingthe local console.
03:35: The customer port is disabled and the firewall becomes responsive
again.

Last night around 2am (Irish time) we experienced a network issue that affected some parts of our network.

All services were returned to normal as soon as possible.

We will issue a full report on last night's incident as soon as I have had an opportunity to discuss it with our network engineers.

In the meantime I would just like to apologise for any inconvenience caused to any affected clients.

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

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!)

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.

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 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

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?

The scheduled network maintenance tonight proceeded as planned and has now been completed.

All systems should be fully operational, however if anyone has any issues please let us know ASAP.

One of our network engineers has been onsite for the last few hours conducting the upgrades, reboots and checks.

Our accounts department will be closed on Thursday and Friday this week, as one of our staff, Leona, is tying the proverbial knot. Since most of the office is invited to the wedding on Thursday we'll be closing accounts on Thursday and Friday. (Yes if you want to pay us we'll be able to manage it!).

On the subject of weddings this year has been very busy chez Blacknight with three members of the team getting married.

George, our sales manager, tied the knot earlier this summer. Carla, one of our programmers got married this weekend and now we have Leona following suit.

We wish them all the best!

If you are a mobile user then you might be interested in adding the Blacknight widset to your account.

It's a nice little alternative to using an RSS reader to get the latest news, tips and rants from team Blacknight!

More info on the Widsets site

Our team of networking engineers like to keep our network running smoothly and I am happy to say that they do a very good job of it overall.

Of course this means that from time to time they have to upgrade and patch things.

So between 27th and 28th of August we will be doing maintenance on our Cisco switches, which involves upgrading the IOS on some of the devices.

The affected switches will have to be rebooted, so there could be a loss of connectivity for up to a minute as the devices reboot.

Since we're doing this in the middle of the night it should not affect many clients as it is set to happen between 2200 and 0200 GMT. If you are located in the US for example that would be 1600 to 2000...

In any case there's more info on the forum

We have received a detailed report from our fibre provider regarding last Friday night's outage.

As the report is very long and highly technical I won't be publishing it here.

If anyone affected by last Friday night's issue would like more information about the steps that both ourselves and our fibre providers are taking to avoid future issues please let us know.

Due to work pressures I wasn't able to attend the event we sponsored down in Cork yesterday evening.

Damien tells me that there was a good turnout, so I'm delighted.

The IT@Cork blog has a review of the event as well.

In true blatant self-promo style I would ask you to please vote for us:

Please vote for us

in the
Web Hosting Directory

For about 20 minutes this morning users may have noticed that connection speeds / response times from some servers were slower than normal.

This was due to a denial of service attack the details of which are outlined below.

Timeline: 08:15am till 08:38am

Location: DEG, Blacknight Dub1 data centre

Problem and Resolution:

At approx 4am this morning a client machine started spewing data out of our network. At this time the traffic was not significant enough to trigger any alarms or cause any downtime.

At approx 8:15am this morning, a second attack started from the same machine with a significant increase in traffic. This traffic was tiny UDP datagrams aimed at an external host. The sheer volume of packets overloaded the CPU in the primary Firewall and as such it was dropping large numbers of packets.

We disabled the switch port that this machine was attached to and network flow resumed. We took preventative measures on the routers facing the customer machine to filter traffic from hitting the firewalls. We then re-enabled this customer port and logged into the machine to diagnose the issue.

The machine has since been removed from the network and is being examined by our security team.

There was an issue with connectivity into our second location in Dublin on Friday night.

Timeline: 11:17pm till 02:11am

Location: InterXion, Blacknight Dub2 data centre

Problem and Resolution:

The problem was identified at 11:17pm when we were unable to reach any equipment over our primary link into InterXion (IX).
This link is from Broighter Networks and is our primary link into IX.
We dispatched an engineer on-site to diagnose the problem and to eliminate our own hardware as the source of the problem.
We had completed this by 00:30 and we had switched both ends of the link to alternative hardware in DEG and IX.

We then notified Broighter that we had diagnosed the fault to be on their end. They in turn tried some fault diagnosis with no success, including a reboot of their fibre switch which impacted other customers of theirs. They then dispatched an engineer with a new switch + line cards to IX at around 01:00 ~ - he arrived on site and had to migrate customers to the new switch, this took a bit of time.
At approx 02:11 packets started routing again into IX and the issue was resolved.

We are awaiting a detailed explanation from Broighter regarding this outage, as we have a protected fibre ring which should be fault tolerant.
The main problem with this outage was that the physical layer, layer 2, never dropped and so it took significantly longer to fix than we would have liked.

Future protection against such outages:

We're provisioning another protected circuit between DEG and InterXion with an alternative carrier.
Unfortunately even if we had had this on Friday night, it would have been no use to us as the physical layer never went down and any automated switchover as a result of a failure would not have occurred.

In the future, if we have similar issues we can simply disable 1 of the rings in the event that the issue re-occurs.

We're hiring again!

This time we're on the lookout for a first-level technical support engineer.

I'll post more details once our CTO has come up with a detailed job spec, but ideally the person filling this role would be "into" Microsoft Windows server platform.

CVs as usual to management@blacknight.ie

It's a long weekend here in Ireland, so our offices will be closed from this afternoon until Tuesday morning.

Hope you all have a nice weekend!

As it's a long weekend a lot of us will be heading away for the weekend to visit family and friends or simply relaxing and enjoying life.

I'm not sure if I'll be breaking open any bottles of champagne over the next couple of days, but it's always a possibility!

We registered a couple of .mobi domains earlier this year for two reasons:

• Brand protection
• Branching out
• We're a bit geeky!

As the .mobi registration rules are quite different to those of other TLDs we were going to be obliged to actually use the domain for mobile content of some kind (which is a good thing!).

However, after meeting several people from .mobi in LA and also talking to other people about the entire mobile space I thought it would be a much better idea to actually use the domains productively instead of merely shelving them.

So there are now two .mobi domains pointing at our mobile site.

I think we're the first Irish hosting company to put a .mobi site live! So that's another little first for us!

The site is not a copy of the main Blacknight site, nor was it my intention to even try to make it a copy of the current site.

It's sole purpose is it to provide some basic info about us if anyone happens upon the site while using their mobile phone.

At some stage I'd like to see us using the site to actually offer services, but it's not very high up on our ever-growing "todo list".

It would be nice to see more Irish companies embracing the .mobi TLD and doing "funky" things with their dotmobi domains, so if anyone has done something cool I'd really love to hear about it.

The guys from .mobi have found some really nice examples of mobile sites that provide useful information and services.

I was browsing some of their "picks" on my Nokia this evening (at no cost thankfully, since it connects to my wireless network) and I was truly impressed.

I've always loved The Godfather so I was delighted to see that Paramount's mobile site has plenty of content up for grabs. Unfortunately it won't work with an Irish phone, but I love the idea (maybe I can bribe an American colleague to get some of the content for me?)

So if you'd like to find out more about .mobi, then let us know or simply register one today - they don't cost that much!

The phone system upgrade has been completed

It *should* be working properly - if you encounter any issues please let us know

Our phones are currently offline for an upgrade.

They should be working again in about 10 - 20 minutes

If you need anything in the meantime please email support@blacknight.ie or sales@blacknight.ie

I don't want to bore people with security, but unfortunately I have to keep coming back to it time and again...

Over the past few days there has been a spate of attacks on websites using the Joomla CMS (Content Management System)

If you are using Joomla we would urge you to check that you are using the most recent version available and if you aren't to upgrade.

Even if you cannot upgrade immediately we would urge clients to check that the configuration file is not writeable.

Since we still have a number of clients using MS SQL 2000 we have made available both myLittleAdmin and MyLittleBackup for the older platform

MyLittleAdmin is accessible here

I'll post details of MyLittleAdmin as soon as they are available

For MS SQL 2005 users please see our previous announcement

A lot of people signup for hosting using free email accounts or maybe their "current" work email address.

Unfortunately nobody on our end can possibly know if those email addresses are valid weeks, months or years later.

If you change your email address or telephone number you can easily update it via the control panel, or contact our accounts team and get them to do it for you.

If you don't keep the details up to date you may miss important emails from us about your hosting account, your domain renewal or even the chance to get something for nothing :)

Seriously, though, it is important that people keep their contact details up to date.

If you change jobs or stop using your free email account you do run a very serious risk of missing an important email from your hosting provider, registrar or ISP.

Take the time to check that the details on your .com domains are correct, especially if you have transferred them from another provider.

Under ICANN rules the WHOIS data has to be accurate at all times.

With other registries, such as Eurid, only a very small amount of personal data is viewable to the public via standard whois. It is very hard to spam the contacts on a .eu domain, for example, so please do not let a fear of spam lead to you losing out on a domain's renewal.

PHP4 will be discontinued at the end of 2007.

The PHP developers have announced that they will no more releases of php4 after the end of 2007.

We've been rolling out php5 on both our Windows and Linux servers for the last few months and will be discontinuing support for php4 at the end of 2007.

Most popular 3rd party scripts should work fine on php5, but some older ones may have issues. We'd recommend that people look into upgrading their scripts to support PHP5, as they're probably vulnerable in other ways also.

If you have any queries about this please let us know.

I'm almost afraid to say anything at this stage. Two days ago I thought we had had a problem and solved it, then I had to come back to people to let them know that it wasn't fixed .....

So far so good today, however.

Keith, our lead programmer, has been working hard for the last day or so on the problem and worked on until late last night. He's hoping to get this fixed once and for all before close of business today... We'll keep you posted......

We've re-enabled partial access to our billing system, so we can now take new orders.

If you want to pay an outstanding invoice please bear with us.

Our billing and ordering system is currently offline so that we may conduct maintenace. We don't like doing this during office hours, but we've no choice.

Yesterday we made a mistake. I was informed that the mistake had been fixed and that it was all "ok".

It wasn't.

I'm not going to apologise again - I already did - instead we're taking it offline until it is fixed properly.

I don't like "fire fighting", but we've no option again this morning.

Please bear with us!

One of the things you learn in business is that things will always go wrong when you least expect it.

You can invest as much time and energy as you like in trying to avoid mistakes, but they will still happen.

We had one of those issues this morning with our billing system!

While it might be easier to shove my head in the sand or try to blame someone else when these kind of things happen, I personally couldn't.

I've tried to email as many of our clients as possible who may have been affected by the problem, but it still does not detract from how much inconvenience this may have caused some people.

And now to explain it all .....

A number of our clients were affected by a programming mishap yesterday when our developers synced the IE domain renewal dates with the IEDR.

We are terribly sorry if you were affected by this and as managing director of the company I feel it is my responsibility to contact anyone who may have been affected to offer my apologies and an explanation.

Over the past few months our development team have been working on improving our billing system.

One area that was causing issues were the renewal dates of some IE domains, in particular those that had been transferred from another provider to ourselves.

While fixing this issue our developers managed to break part of the internal logic, which led to invoices being reissued for domains that had already been renewed.

As soon as we realised what had happened we took steps to reverse the issue and will be removing any invoices that were created in error.

I am terribly sorry if this caused you any inconvenience and if I can be of any assistance to you please let me know.

If you have any invoices on your account relating to IE domains with an issue date of July 4th 2007 then they are possibly affected.

Any invoices with dates prior to this should be correct.

We hope to have rectified the issue within the next 24 hours, but if you have any doubts please do let us know.

If you need to contact our accounts team please use accounts@blacknight.ie or contact me directly (michele@blacknight.ie) and I will personally look into the matter for you.

Sorry about this !

Just to let people know that we are doing yet another network upgrade next weekend.

When?
Friday 6th, Saturday 7th of July
Time: 22:00 - 02:00

For full gorey details see this post on our forum

As a company based in Carlow it's nice to see sites that serve the local community being hosted by us.

One such site is Carlow.pl, which completed its migration from a server in Poland this weekend.

Carlow.pl was setup to serve both the Irish and Polish communities in the greater Carlow area and is available in both Poish and English.

The site's administrator, Krystian Kozerawski, moved to Carlow about eighteen months ago and started work on the site before Christmas of last year.

As the non-English speaking population in Irish regional towns grows it's nice to see new sites and services launching to cater to their needs, so we were delighted to offer Krystian and his community some space on our servers.

I'll be looking forward to seeing what he does with some of the other regional portals he has planned!

Just to followup on the network maintenance from the other evening.

The work went ahead as scheduled and we have not had any reports of issues from clients.

We will be announcing the next phase in our network upgrades and maintenance plans in the coming days.

To keep abreast of these changes I'd recommend you subscribe to our RSS feeds :)

We're doing some more work on our core network this week, as we finally get to put our new Juniper routers live.

There shouldn't be any network downtime, as BGP should allow us simply to route the traffic elsewhere while making the changes, however when there are computers and humans involved you can never be sure :)

So to that end we are issuing the following maintenance notification:

When: Wednesday 13th, Thursday 14th of June (2007)
Time: 23:00 - 01:00

During this period we intend to switch off the BGP sessions on the router that is being replaced. We'll lose Level(3) and Smart telecom. If Tiscali (our third carrier) have any issues, we could potentially loose international connectivity for a time during the upgrade. All INEX connectivity will not be affected during this upgrade. We estimate 10 - 15 minutes where we will be "at risk" during the swap over.

What:

We are upgrading our edge routers to Juniper Service Routers from their current configuration. This will happen in two stages,
1 which will happen in the above time slot and the other during another time slot that has yet to be decided upon. There are several reasons for upgrading to Juniper service routers.

a) Additional port density, this means we can add more carriers, a second INEX connection and also take on services like Packet Exchanges eXpand and ProXimity services to give us further reach through global private peering.

b) As part of our ever expanding network we have to take into consideration our growth. Our traffic to the general internet has more than doubled in the past 12 months. These new service routers will allow us to continue this growth.

c) INEX are adding a second physical network, similar to LINX in London, and we'll have our second connection to that. This'll give us more capacity on INEX but also give us much greater redundancy and remove the single point of failure that we currently have.

We've just put a new shared Linux server live.

It's running Red Hat Enterprise Linux, as all of our newer Linux servers do.

What makes this server special is that it is the first one to come with MySQL 5 on Linux (on our network at least).

Hopefully the new server will live up to its namesake :)

Since we run a firewalled network giving clients direct access to the MS SQL servers has always been a security issue.

With MySQL there are open source web frontends, such as PhpMyAdmin, that do a fantastic job at providing a web frontend to the database server. You don't need to be a hardcore DBA to manipulate your data, optimise or repair tables, take backups etc., etc.

But what about Microsoft SQL server?

While there are a couple of open source solutions out there none of them come even close to offering the levels of functionality needed.

So what could we do?

The solution lay in France with a little company called myLittleTools S.A.R.L..

They offer two web based products for MS SQL management:

• MyLittleAdmin - which allows you to control your database


• MyLittleBackup - which is a tool for managing backups and restores

This latest addition to our offerings goes well with our recent announcement of an increased number of databases with most of our ASP.net hosting plans (Windows 2003).

Several of our team will be up a the Irish Internet Association event in Killiney Castle this Thursday.

The conference, which we've been attending for the last 3 or 4 years, is always a good event and is a wonderful opportunity to "put faces to names", so why not drop by our stand in the exhibition area on Thursday afternoon?

You might even get a little "goodie" to make the trip worthwhile!

It looks like I'll be tied up all afternoon, as I'm chairing one of the break out sessions:
Can you make money out of Blogs and Podcasts

The panelists include:

• David B. Johnson, Google – AdSense International Manager


• Richard Delevan, Sunday Tribune – Business Editor


• Richard Hearne, Red Cardinal

As it's a breakout session nobody will be pontificating. It's an ideal opportunity to ask questions and get answers from experts in their field

See you there!

Over the last few months we've seen a steady increase in requests for MS SQL 2005 databases.

Up until earlier today we were quite conservative in our allocation of MS SQL 2005 databases, but we've changed all that.

We're now offering a database per site on all MS SQL plans ie. if the hosting plan supports 16 sites then you get 16 databases, so every site can have its own database.

So what's that mean for our hosting plans?

Put simply they've just got that bit better !

(we also added more MySQL databases as well..)
If you want to compare our hosting plans, then have a look at our hosting comparison chart

Security should not be an afterthought and when you flaunt it too much you will end up regretting it.

While a hosting provider can do their utmost to make their network and servers as secure as possible there are limits.
Our clients want to be able to use technologies such as PHP, Ruby on Rails, Perl, ASP etc., and there are many fine open source (and commercial) software solutions out there to help them make the most of their online presence.
Unfortunately there are also plenty of nasty people out there that will try to take advantage of any possible security holes that may exist.
That, unfortunately, is life.

Here at Blacknight our technical team work very hard to ensure that the network is as secure and resilient as possible, which is why we offer a fully firewalled network to both our shared, dedicated and colo clients.

On our shared servers our team keeps a very close eye on all the relevant security bulletins and will act proactively wherever necessary.

Of course no matter how much we may do issues will still arise.

The most common issues stem from weak passwords.

If your password is a dictionary based word or a string of numbers then it is simply too weak and can be cracked.

If you cannot trust yourself to come up with a strong password then why not use the ones our systems generate for you? They're completely random and usually quite long.

If you are using software from our auto-installers you check from time to time that a newer version is not available. Most of the software available via the control panel is upgradeable, though this will depend a lot on how much customisation you have done.

If you need help with your security then why not contact us to let us know?

As one of the sponsors of the IIA conference we are able to offer our clients a reduced rate on the tickets.

Simply email events@iia.ie quoting "Blacknight rate" for details

One of the downsides to running your own network and managing all your own hardware is that you have to fix it when it breaks!

As we've mentioned several times in the past, we have been investing a lot in new hardware over the past year or so.

However, even with shiny new hardware, you can still run into problems.

So the other day we noticed some serious issues with one of our shared hosting servers - Gorlois (I really must explain the etymology of our servers at some point!).

What had happened?

Basically the hardware RAID card was not working properly. Instead of improving the disk performance it was actually bringing the server to a grinding halt.

Why?

While the hardware is supposedly supported it's just not that good.

Solution:

Move the entire server to another machine.

We normally have a couple of spare machines lying around, so we were able to migrate the entire server over to different hardware yesterday evening.

There may have been some downtime - about 10 minutes or so - for clients on the affected server, but as the IP address didn't change there won't have been any oddities caused by DNS caching etc.,

The new server is using a different RAID card, so hopefully we won't see that one developing "issues". Some geeks may find them "interesting" - as a hosting provider I could really do without them!

So there you go ... If your site is hosted on gorlois.blacknight.ie enjoy the new hardware - it's now a real monster of a machine.

Sometimes people misunderstand the emails we send them.

In some cases this is due to our (ab)use of the English language, whereas in others it's simply a case of the language / terminology / jargon being susceptible to confusion.

One such instance is that of "maintenance windows". They seem to cause a lot of worry and confusion to people.

So what exactly is a "maintenance window"?

Why do we refer to a "window" anyway?

The simplest way of explaining it would be to look at a tangible example.

If we are planning to swap the RAM on a server we might schedule an hour.

Does it actually take an hour to swap out the RAM on a server? No. Of course it doesn't. Anyone who has played around with computer hardware can tell you that it only takes a couple of minutes.

So why do we schedule an hour? The simple answer is "just in case".

Anything can go wrong. We would prefer to err on the side of caution.
If we told people that we were doing maintenance between 11pm and 11.15 pm and our engineers were held up in traffic, got a puncture or were struck by lightning you wouldn't be happy if your server(s) were unavailable at the "wrong" time, would you?

So even if a task should only take a couple of minutes we'll always schedule a window to cover eventualities... Hopefully we'll always manage to get the work done within the "window" we've scheduled.

Just to let you all know that MySQL 5 is now available on our Windows 2003 server plans.

We hope to make it available on Linux shortly

If you have any questions about it please let us know

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.

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

As we've mentioned a couple of times over the last few months, we've been working hard behind the scenes on improvements to everything

So far we've upgraded a LOT of the server hardware on our shared network and increased the bandwidth allowances.

In order to make all that happen we joined INEX and RIPE. We then moved all our equipment and that of our clients onto our new IP space gradually, in order to avoid downtime and disruption.

Our network staff, having carefully planned the new network rollout, are installing new Cisco switches across the entire network.

What this means in plain English is that we're removing any possible bottlenecks on our internal network ie. between your sites / servers and the internet.

To do that we have to switch the network cables over from one set of switches to another. If only there was a magical way to do that on several hundred servers at once!

Our CTO, Paul Kelly, explains it as follows:

Are there up sides and down sides to this work? The answer to that question is very simple. Both.

Downsides:
We have to re-patch 5 cabinets worth of servers into new
infrastructure.

What does this mean?
Ok well we basically have all the new equipment in
place and configured and linked into the core network.
We have all the cabling ready to go.
All we have to do is pull out your old network cable and plug in the new one.

There may be some convergence times for mac addresses to appear on the
new port in the core of the network. This should be brief but could be
5-10 minutes for our less busy customers.

Upsides:
Well you will now be connected into one of the most modern
networks in the industry in Ireland today. We'd go so far to say it is
one of the best designed networks that any of us have come across. We
say this with pride as we've spent a lot of time, energy, money and a
lot of thinking to get it to this point.

We've enabled a feature called "portfast" on all customer ports so as
the time taken to negotiate the connection speed and detect if there is
a loop takes less than 3 seconds. So for the most part none of you will
notice anything.

We've increased resilience from all our equipment cabinets. What we mean
by this is that we've now got 2 x links into the core network, into
separate core access switches and we're using rapid spanning tree to
fail over from one to the other in the event of a switch failure.

We're also giving more aggregate bandwidth per customer cabinet. We used
to allow 100mbit per pair of switches. We're now going to allow 1Gigabit
from each cabinet into the core network and from there to the Internet!

Ok after reading all that you now need to know when this is happening.
We want to do it next Thursday the 25th of Jan 2007. We hope to start
around 9pm and finish by midnight. We don't want to rush things, we want
to verify as we go that customers are coming back up. For this reason we
are scheduling a 3 hour maintenance window 21:00 - 00:00.

A point to note: Most customers who have gone live in the last 12 months
will already be on the new network infrastructure and this maintenance
window should not affect them. However we're applying this to all customers
just in case we need to make any global changes to the network to
accommodate extra capacity or link failures.

So basically, as they say, "it's all good".

If anyone has any questions or queries please let us know.

Over the last couple of weeks the Wordpress development team have released two updates to Wordpress.

The most recent release, version 2.0.7, was released last night (full details here)

If you are using Wordpress we urge you to upgrade to the latest version as soon as possible.

There are two ways to upgrade, however, in both cases, it is recommended that you make a backup of your blog first. You can do this easily via your control panel.

If you installed Wordpress via our auto-installer (Installatron) you will find an upgrade option within your control panel.

If you installed Wordpress manually please follow the upgrade instructions on the Wordpress site (here)

We endeavour to post important security notices on our forum, so subscribing to the Security Board can help to keep you informed (use this link if you have signed up for our forum already)

If you have any questions, queries or issues, please let us know

Thanks

Michele

I originally started drafting this post on our second day back in the office, but we've been so busy that it's only now that I've actually found the time to complete it. I guess that's good complaint to have

When I set up the first Blacknight website about 6 years ago I never thought we'd end up where we are now.

As I mentioned on my personal blog, we're now ranked as the second largest hosting company in Ireland according to both webhosting.info and IpWalk.

It's been a fascinating journey so far and we're nowhere near the end yet. (Yes I know that early version of the website is horrendous!!)

With the New Year comes new staff and plans for the following twelve months.....

Our latest appointment is George Pratt, who previously worked for one of our competitors.

George joins us with about ten years of sales experience in the IT industry and will be heading up our sales team (business development if you like that kind of jargon!).

With George's help we expect to roll out some new and exciting products and services over the next 12 months, so keep an eye out!

In the last quarter of 2006 we took on several new staff in accounts, technical support and programming.

By hiring our own programming staff we have been able to get quite a lot of backend work done including integration with the IEDR's new API system. The new API system allows us to send IE domain registration requests to the registry practically in realtime. While all registration requests still need to be manually checked and verified it reduces some of the workload for our staff. We intend to increase our integration with the IEDR and other registries over the coming months and will be working very closely with ModernGigabyte to this end.

In related news, we have recently acquired Noc Software and will be making a separate announcement about our plans for Noc Manager, which is an addon module for Modernbill.

We'll shortly be announcing details of some of our New Year specials.. We know you'll like them, but we have to make you wait a small bit longer

You may remember a while back that I mentioned some of our network and hardware upgrades.

As our core network peers at INEX with a growing number of Irish ISPs we felt the time was right to upgrade bandwidth on all our shared hosting plans, so that's exactly what we've done.

Our entry level hosting plan, which comes in both linux and Windowsflavours, used to come with 5 Gb of transfer a month, so we've upped that to 15 Gb thus tripling the bandwidth allocation!

With our other plans we've doubled, tripled or even quadrupled the monthly bandwidth allocations, so whether you want to run a business website or a podcast you can do so without worrying about your bandwidth usage

You can simply choose the hosting plan that suits your needs depending on whether you want to use linux or Windows based hosting. If you pay your order online using credit card, PayPal or Laser your account will be activated within a few minutes.

And if you have any questions or queries we're here to help you !

If your website takes more than a couple of seconds to load then you could be losing business.

A recent study conducted by Akamai and Jupiter research shows that 4 seconds is the maximum delay that a potential shopper will put up with before going elsewhere.

We've probably all had this problem where a website seems to take aeons to load. In some cases it can be down to bad coding or an external website not responding quickly enough. In other cases it can be simply due to the website being hosted on a bad connection on the other side of the planet.

Here at Blacknight we have invested heavily over the past 12 months to ensure that websites load quickly for both Irish and international shoppers.

All our servers are on a resilient multi-homed network which peers with most of the Irish ISPs. Put in more simple terms, we've taken steps to make sure that any delays are not down to the connection!

If you are tired of slow load times on your website then why not switch over to us today?

If you have been nominated for a Net Visionary Award this year you can now put a tasty logo on your website or blog.

(The sponsors haven't been left out either, as you can see from the main page of this blog.)

Adding the logo to your blog is quite easy. In my case I am using Wordpress for my personal blog, so I added it the theme's sidebar (sidebar.php).

Simply download the logo that corresponds with the category (or categories) that you have been nominated for from the IIA website. In most browsers you simply right click and choose "save as".

If you are using Wordpress for your blog you can either edit the template file via your browser (if the permissions are correct) or you can download the file to your computer and edit it there.

The HTML code you need to add could be as follows:

<a href="http://www.netvisionary.ie/votenom.html"><img alt="Net Visionary 2006 Nominee" src="http://blog.blacknight.ie/images/award06_nominee_blogger.jpg" width="133" height="214" /></a>

Just ensure that the "img src" part points to the correct location for the image you are using.

In the example code above the nominee logo is for "best blogger" which would display like this:

Don't forget - voting is open to everyone and you don't need to be a member of the IIA to vote.

At the end of last week our technical team sent out a notification to a group of clients to forewarn them of a pending IP renumbering.

As this kind of thing is quite technical I thought people might appreciate a more detailed explanation.

The explanation will include technical information, but hopefully it will be easier to understand from a non-technical point of view.

If anything is unclear please feel free to post a comment asking for clarification - that's why this blog is here !!

Earlier this year we joined both Inex and RIPE.

Inex is the Irish Internet Neutral Exchange. Basically what that means is that ISPs are able to "meet" there and swap traffic. In practical terms that means that the way your website or server is connected to users is affected.

For example, we now peer with Eircom. If you are using an Eircom DSL or dialup connection you are "closer" to your website and email

To see this in action do a traceroute from your computer to your website and you’ll see how many “hops” it has to take. If you need a reasonable comparison compare a traceroute from your desktop to irishisptest.com, which is on our Dublin network with one to nytimes.com, which is in the US.

The IP renumbering is a result of our joining RIPE and becoming a LIR (Local Internet Registry).
What this means for us is that we have become our own ISP. We now get our IP addresses directly from RIPE (a governing body for IP addresses in the EMEA) and we will never have to change them ever again.
Previously we got them from our ISP (bandwidth provider) and if we wanted to change ISP we had to give them back, which meant doing what we are doing now. Unfortunately this means that every time we changed ISP we'd have to do this change over, which is confusing and painful for both us and our clients.
Now we can pick and choose our ISP's and basically just advertise our Ips to them and to the internet and it all works automatically.

This means that we can also plan and allocate our network more efficiently.

Most of our dedicated and colocation clients have already been moved to the new network while the migration of all the shared linux and windows server 2003 hosting accounts is almost finished.

We also have the opportunity to offer new and exciting technologies to our clientele at various levels… Watch this space to see more

In terms of our hardware we have also started work on upgrading all of our shared hosting servers from unbranded servers to Dell Xeons and HPs.

The new servers we are putting in have bigger hard drives, faster CPUs and more RAM, which has allowed us to greatly expand our hosting plans. Our entry level hosting plans are no longer “entry level”, as they now come with a generous 500 MB of disk space (equivalent to 347 floppy disks!) and 5 gigabytes of transfer per month. Combine that will all the other powerful features and the ability to host up to 4 sites on a hosting account and you get a really excellent combination.

If you have any queries about any of this please let us know.

If you want to hear a bit more about our new Ruby On Rails offering then you may be interested in our first podcast interview with Mario from PR Web.

It's available in mp3, iTunes and Ogg.

Here at Blacknight we