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.

Posted by Michele Neylon at 5:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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.

Posted by Michele Neylon at 3:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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.

Posted by Paul Kelly at 12:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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.

Posted by Michele Neylon at 12:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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

Posted by Michele Neylon at 5:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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!

Posted by Michele Neylon at 2:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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

Posted by Michele Neylon at 11:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (16) | TrackBacks (0)

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

Posted by Michele Neylon at 10:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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?

Posted by Michele Neylon at 6:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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 :)

Posted by Michele Neylon at 3:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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?

Posted by Michele Neylon at 11:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

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!)

Posted by Michele Neylon at 2:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

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:

Posted by Michele Neylon at 12:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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

Posted by Michele Neylon at 11:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

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

Posted by Michele Neylon at 10:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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.

Posted by Paul Kelly at 11:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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.

Posted by Michele Neylon at 4:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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!

Posted by Michele Neylon at 12:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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)

Posted by Paul Kelly at 8:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

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.

Posted by Paul Kelly at 9:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

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?

Posted by Michele Neylon at 1:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (7) | TrackBacks (0)

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 ...

Posted by Michele Neylon at 3:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

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.

Posted by Michele Neylon at 12:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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.

Posted by Paul Kelly at 2:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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.

Posted by Paul Kelly at 3:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

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

Posted by Michele Neylon at 12:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (10) | TrackBacks (0)

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!

Posted by Michele Neylon at 8:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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.

Posted by Paul Kelly at 4:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

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.

Posted by Paul Kelly at 10:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

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.

Posted by Michele Neylon at 2:17 PM | Permalink

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!

Posted by Michele Neylon at 3:25 PM | Permalink

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.

Posted by Michele Neylon at 1:10 PM | Permalink

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.

Posted by Niall Donegan at 4:19 PM | Permalink

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!

Posted by Michele Neylon at 1:46 AM | Permalink

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

Posted by Paul Kelly at 11:09 AM | Permalink

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 !

Posted by Michele Neylon at 11:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

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.

Posted by Michele Neylon at 11:16 AM |