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

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.

One of the things that people really really hated about our old order system was the lack of a bulk order option for domains.

Our nice new shiny order system solves this issue once and for all!

You can now order up to 100 domains at once via our new bulk order system.

We're also adding support for more TLDs to the website order system. We don't want to play email ping pong with you anymore than you do!

Earlier today our developers were doing some housekeeping on IE domains.

What we were doing was updating some of the technical contact details to maintain some level of uniformity.

While this change had zero impact on the domains themselves and only affected the WHOIS data, the registry's system still sent multiple emails to registrants confirming the changes.

Unfortunately the wording of the emails may have been a bit confusing!

In any case, now you hopefully know what that was all about!

If anyone has any queries please feel free to contact us

Like a lot of people I have a todo list. It never seems to get any shorter, but today I managed to remove one item from my todo list - updating our "on hold" recording.

Liam Quigley is the voice you can hear while waiting to talk to any of our team:

Click here to download the mp3 file

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....

At times I get out of bed in the morning and I wonder why on earth I'm involved in this "game". Maybe I should have got into something else.

But what?

The last couple of weeks' rain has inspired me, as well as soaking me to the skin.

Add to that the flooding of some parts of Carlow town (only a few hundred metres from our offices on the banks of The Barrow) over the weekend and I may have hit on the solution!

We're going to branch out into selling watersports equipment.

We'll start with Scuba gear, as we're probably all going to have to swim to the office soon anyway.

I'm not sure if we should really go full out on this or not:

What do you think?

Maybe we'll just stick with hosting for the moment ....

Since first setting up this official company blog less than two and half years ago we've published 363 articles / posts.

However, there is no easy way for us to gauge if we are talking about the things that YOU want to hear about.

So what would you like us to post about?

Since we launched the new site, new control panel and new hosting plans recently I was thinking about doing some screencasts and tutorial type posts, but I'm not sure if people want that.

So please do let us know (post a comment below!)

Damien Mulley has finally announced the launch of the 1st Irish Web Awards. Damien is also the driving force behind the Irish Blog Awards by the way.

Unlike so many of the other industry events that seem to gauge participation by the amount of money you are willing to spend, The Irish Web Awards are open to anyone and the sponsors are covering the costs (which makes sense!).

It will be interesting to see how much traction this new awards event is able to gain in both industry and elsewhere. At present there are several other award ceremonies being run every year, but each of them operates in a very different manner.

Disclosure: Blacknight host the sites for both the Irish Web Awards and The Irish Blog Awards

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.

The IEDR, the people who look after the IE domain space, have announced the introduction of multiyear registrations of IE domains.

The change comes into effect at close of business Wednesday and will allow us to offer IE domains for periods up to 10 years, namely:

1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 10 year registration periods.

This change will not affect domain renewals or transfers, so if you already have a registered IE domain you cannot append years to its registration period at present.

The IEDR have said that they are looking into rectifying this at some point in the not too distant future.

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!

If you're using Twitter you can now follow our updates from both this blog and our technical status one by simply following the blacknight user on Twitter.

Of course we're still offering email updates and RSS feeds, so if you aren't using Twitter you don't need to worry about it.

EDIT: updated twitter a/c to our new one

Image via Wikipedia

It's been completely overworked and abused since we first got it and we now have to schedule some downtime.

Naturally we'll be conducting the much needed maintenance outside office hours, as we wouldn't want a lack of caffeine to have a negative impact on our staff's performance.

We have warned our staff members who work the early morning shift that they may have to wait for their first dose of the day (I think some of them have taken to referring to it as a "fix") while our office manager does the necessary.

We expect service to return to normal around 9am, however there are no guarantees, so please excuse our sleepy staff.

Image via Wikipedia

The idea behind the new policy (PDF) is to help stem online fraud and cybercrime of various kinds, however the policy document itself is very ambiguous in its wording.

While ambiguity might be a good idea in certain contexts it's not a good idea when it can affect people's businesses and income.

Both myself and several other people have gone on the record about this, but ICANN seem to have approved the policy change regardless.

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!

Image via Wikipedia

I personally own a very eclectic mix of domains including a .kz (Kazakhstan), but I know that that kind of madness isn't for everyone!

While catching up on RSS feeds this morning I came across a short piece about Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt. While most of the press are focussing on their newborns the writer in question had spotted that Ms Jolie, or someone acting for her, had registered a bunch of domains related to the twins.

That's good going!

It's never too early to register a domain name. Registering your child's name, for example, means that they'll have their own little slice of cyberspace when they're ready for it.

In the case of the Jolie - Pitt babies it's a little different, as they were bound to attract plenty of online interest for the next few years, so registering the domains now will save them a lot of headaches (and money) further down the line.

So when should you register a domain?

When you want to. When you can. When you feel that you should.

Worst case scenario, your idea doesn't blossom and grow and you let the domain expire.

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

I spoke to a Sunday Business Post journalist a couple of weeks ago about blogging and business blogging specifically.

This month's Computers In Business supplement features an in depth article where they spoke to a wide variety of people including TJ McIntyre, who was able to provide a legal angle:
Brave new blogging world

Blacknight Solutions, Ireland's leading internet services company, is now accredited to sell .co.nl domain names. By registering a .co.nl domain name, for example myname.co.nl, registrants have the opportunity to reach a wider audience, particularly in The Netherlands.

Domain names with the .co.nl extension can be registered by anyone anywhere, unlike the .nl country code that requires a contact point in The Netherlands.

"Becoming an accredited registrar for .co.nl domain names allows us to give our clients an even wider range of options for registering domain names", said Blacknight CEO Michele Neylon.

"It extends the level of service we can offer our clients, making Blacknight Solutions a one-stop shop for all a businesses' internet hosting and domain name requirements."

With over three million .nl domain names already registered, obtaining your preferred .nl domain name can be difficult, however with this new extension, it will be much easier.

To ensure our clients get the .co.nl domain of your choice, Blacknight Solutions suggests contacting us as soon as possible to discuss requirements.

The .co.nl domain name extension was launched at the ICANN meeting in Paris held from 23-26 June, 2008. To ensure every person and every company has a fair chance to register their own .co.nl domain name, there will be a Sunrise process, as outlined below.

During this Sunrise period, every owner of a .nl and/or a valid trademark registration has the exclusive opportunity to register the international variant of their domain name within the defined Sunrise periods:
Sunrise 1: Grandfather period - commencing date Q3 2008
During the Grandfather period, owners of a .nl have an exclusive right to register their .co.nl as well. This implies that a registrant owning mydomain.nl, will be the only entity that has the opportunity to register mydomain.co.nl during the Grandfather period.

Sunrise 2: Registered Trademarks - commencing date Q4 2008
Domains that were not registered during Sunrise 1 (Grandfather) can still be claimed by trademark owners during the second phase. These applications will also be reviewed by a Verification Agent.

Multiple eligible applications of the same .co.nl name received during the 2nd Sunrise period will be assigned on a first come first served basis.

Landrush/ Go live - commencing date Q1 2009
In the Landrush phase, application requests can be made by the general public without restriction. They will be accepted on a first comes first served basis.

(Mentioned dates are merely indicative. Specific dates will be communicated two months before the actual launch)

Image via Wikipedia

Blacknight, Microsoft and PollDaddy provided prizes, with us offering a year's VPS hosting to the winner!

We'll be liasing with Alan to ensure he gets to make full use of his prize :)

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.

Image via Wikipedia

Thursday evening sees the Firefox party in Dublin, which is sponsored by ourselves, PutPlace, Wubud and BT.

If you're in Paris this week there's a domainer meeting being held prior to the ICANN meeting. It looks like quite a few people will be attending both events, as they are in the same venue.

Saturday is BarCamp Belfast.

And of course there's ICANN in Paris which officially starts the following Monday.

We're delighted to be involved in some little way with the next BarCamp event which is being held on Saturday, June 21st 2008 in Queen's University.

Unfortunately I won't be able to attend, as I will be in Paris for the ICANN meeting.

If you're interested in finding out more or would like to simply drop by you can find all the details over on the BarCamp site.

The list of attendees is growing nicely, so it should be an enjoyable and informative day for anyone interested in technology.

Image via Wikipedia

I will be heading over to the ICANN meeting in Paris next week. At present ICANN holds international meetings three times a year and it's a very good opportunity to get involved with the discussions of policy and future development of the internet.

While I am looking forward to the trip, I'm also quite nervous, as I have been asked to give a presentation on IPv6 to a group of industry peers.

Here at Blacknight, as we keep telling people, we've been investing heavily in network equipment. In simple terms we've been doing our utmost to ensure that not only do you never have to suffer the pain of an outage, but also to make sure that any sites or servers hosted by us have excellent connectivity to the outside world.

One of the areas that is of concern to a lot of people in our industry is the depletion of ipv4 space.

(I can practically hear people yawning at this point!)

Basically any device, be that a pc, phone, tablet or whatever that wants to connect to the internet needs an IP address. Back when Vint Cerf et al were coming up with the internet they had no way of knowing how big it would grow or how their addressing system would be expected to cater for so many users for such a long time. The end result - the current system of allocating IP addresses means there is a finite number of them available and that number is getting smaller every single day.

Our CTO Paul posted about our plans to bring IPv6 to everyone last year.

Of course it hasn't happened yet, but we weren't expecting it to happen overnight.

As I mentioned in a recent interview with ENN, it's a bit of a "chicken and egg" situation.

With that in mind we've been working on rolling out ipv6 to as many areas as possible.

Some of our company sites are accessible over IPv6, such as www.blacknight.ie - but not www.blacknight.com, as we're waiting to upgrade some backend software to support the necessary DNS records. I'm a strong believer in "eating my own dog food", so I've enabled IPv6 on my personal servers so that you can now access several blogs and other sites over ipv6 or ipv4.

We're also in the process of enabling IPv6 on our nameservers, so that not only would we be able to server AAAA (ipv6) records, but the nameservers themselves will be accessible over IPv6.

Unfortunately not all hosting providers and ISPs are offering native IPv6 on their networks, so we have to do some jiggery pokery to get it all working on our partner networks (we run dns in three countries for extra redundancy)

We're doing some maintenance on our billing system this evening from around 8pm (Irish time) to around 9pm.

During this period the following services will NOT be available via the main Blacknight website:

• New orders - hosting & domains - this does not have any impact on VPS hosting
• Payments
• Viewing / editing account details

The maintenance will have zero impact on hosting accounts and has not impact on our new VPS hosting solutions, as they use a completely different billing backend

More details on the technical status blog

Image via Wikipedia

Later this month Firefox v 3 will be launched (it's currently in advanced beta testing) and it will be time to celebrate.

The good people at Mozilla are organising parties at a number of locations worldwide and the Dublin event is being organised by Paul from Segala and being sponsored by us and Putplace.

The event happens to coincide with the Irish Open Source Technology Conference, so there should be a number of OSS people in the Dublin area anyway...

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

At 12 today the IE Domain Registry will do it's latest domain deletion run. If you're on the lookout for a "tasty" IE domain then check the deleted list anytime after 12.

You never know what you might find!

What's the catch?

There is no catch.

Do dropped IE domains cost more?

No. They cost exactly the same as any other new registration. We're currently charging a mere € 21 (ex-vat)

Do you know if a particular domain will become available today?

No. We can only see which domains we are billing contact for will become available and when. If you are interested in a particular domain we'd recommend checking its registration status. If the domain is showing "suspended" instead of "active" then it's probably going to drop off very soon.

How often do the IE Domain Registry delete domains?

Every two weeks.

Where can I get a list of dropped IE domains?

There's a list of them on our site here.

Why would I register a dropped domain?

There are a lot of reasons why dropped domains can be attractive.
In some cases it can simply be a case of a relevant domain. In others you might be able to pick up some traffic quickly, as an established site might have links pointing to it.

Every time I write one of these "heads up" posts I silently hope and pray that it will be the last. Of course it never is.

At present there are two scams doing the rounds.

Our "friends" in Domain Registry of America are still sending out letters to thousands of domain holders. As I've said before - dump the letters if you get them. You can read them if you want, but you're better off simply ignoring them completely.

Another, more disturbing, scam is being sent around by EU Business Services Ltd promoting the "EU Company Directory".

The devil is in the details, so if you look at the fine print you will find that signing off on a "simple" listing will set you back close to 1000 euro! I think I've personally received about 6 emails from these people about their "wonderful service" in the past few days. Do yourself a favour - bin it!

Basically they're doing the same thing as Euro Business Guide. They're probably the same people.

As of a few minutes ago we have dropped the price of IE domains across the board.

No special links or coupons required.

ALL IE domains are now 21 euro ex-vat for both new registrations and renewals.

We've also got a list of the latest dropped IE domains, so you can grab a previously owned domain - nothing wrong with secondhand domains!

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. :-)

I'm delighted to announce that the IE zone rebuilds are now more frequent.

The new zone rebuild times are:
10:00, 12:00, 17:00 and 22:00

AND it is set to rebuild 7 days a week, 365 days a year!

This is a major improvement for IE domain holders, as now updates, changes and new registrations will be processed much more efficiently.

As we mentioned previously, we are one of the sponsors of the Irish Internet Association's Congress, which takes place this year in Dublin's Croke Park.

Full details of the event may be found here

If you would like to avail of a 20% discount on booking simply use the coupon code: Congress2008

As we're sponsors of the event some of our staff should be around during the day, so keep an eye out for them!

Here at Blacknight we take our coffee very seriously.

I recently decided that we needed to get a slightly beefier coffee machine. The one we had been using for the last few months was fine, but it was time to upgrade.

Since I'm half Italian and have always had a certain fixation with good quality coffee it was only natural that I'd look at Gaggia and similar marques.

The machine I opted for in the end is a Gaggia Syncrony which takes beans or ground coffee.

Since we recently imported about 20 kg of fairtrade coffee beans our small little coffee grinder was under a lot of pressure, so a machine that did its own grinding solved two problems:
- ease of use
- dosage

One of the things that's really nice about the new machine is that you can re-program it so that the dosage of coffee and water is exactly the way you want it.

So expect to have very hyper Blacknight people answering phones over the next few days!

It's amazing what designers come up with at times!

Mouse over it to see what it's all about ....

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.

Today is a historical day for the IE namespace, as it has finally breached the one hundred thousand domain barrier.

The graph below shows growth over time

It will be interesting to see how long it takes for the namespace to double again in size.

Compared to some of our EU neighbours 100 thousand domains is a very small number. The UK registry, Nominet, handles in excess of 100 thousand new registrations every month!

Of course it's a bit unfair to draw parallels between the UK and Ireland.

While there have been considerable improvements in the registration process many registrants still feel that the process is quite arduous compared to that of .com.

In many ways the biggest improvement was the introduction of an API, which allows companies such as ourselves to send registration requests, updates and deletions directly to the registry.

In real terms that means that as soon as you place an order for an IE domain on our site (and pay us) it gets sent into the registry's queue.

So, if you do a WHOIS lookup you'd see:

% Application Pending - There is currently an application being processed for % the domain name you have requested. If unsuccessful, the application would % expire on the date above.

While the technology has improved some of the policies haven't, which leads to many of us having a certain love/hate relationship with the namespace.

Personally I have mixed feelings about it.

On the one hand I've been more than happy to support the growth of the IE namespace over the last few years.

The relaxation of some of the rules has made it significantly easier to register domains, but there is always room for improvement.

On the other hand I can appreciate the frustration felt by many registrants.

Being forced to provide the infamous "supporting documentation" for each and every new domain name could be seen as having a very negative impact on the growth of ecommerce in Ireland.

Whether that perception is valid or not is debatable.

If you have a valid reason to register a domain name providing the documentation shouldn't be that arduous a task.

Unlike .com there are still literally thousands of excellent names available. If you have a look at some of the recently deleted domains you might find inspiration.

Want to setup a photography business? Album.ie is currently available to register

Or maybe you are an ET fan? Alien.ie is up for grabs, or at least it was when I looked a minute ago!

One of the strong points of the IE namespace is also its perceived weakness.

Being a "managed" registry end users should have some comfort and security when they interact with a website using the .ie extension. Security, however, is not without its price.

In the .com world it is arguably "too easy" to register a domain, provide false details and setup a scam. If you want to do the same thing in IE namespace you'd have to be willing to put in a lot more work!

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

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?

Verisign, the company that manages the .com registry, will be increasing the price of .com domains by 7% again this year.

The price increase affects all registrars.

We'll be keeping an eye on how pricing develops and if this involves any change to our own pricing we will let you know.

If data centres and secure hosting environments make you yawn then this post might be best avoided.

We all know that you want your hosting to "just work", so you really don't need to know about the "inner works". I don't blame you.

Personally I find data centres to be incredibly boring places.

They're not "exciting" or "cool". Sure they can look pretty funky from the outside, depending on which data centre you're looking at, but that's just aesthetics.
Aesthetics don't provide security.
Fancy brochures don't guarantee uptime.
Slick sales pitchs don't provide a track record.

Investment in infrastructure and staff may not be "sexy", but it is a necessity.

I don't have to get excited about data centres and I'm not going to be distracted by glossy photos. The kind of stuff that does impress me is the physical infrastructure and the reputation which is why we use Interxion and Data Electronics.

Over the past year we've been hiring staff on a constant basis while also spending silly amounts of cash on building out the network. At times I wish we'd held onto the cash so that I could get myself a really nice car or a down payment on a nice big country pile, but instead we've invested it all back into the company.

The photos below show one of our private suites in Dublin. As you can see there's plenty of space available for expansion. We've put aside quite a bit of space for our "big" plans.

In the photo below Mark, one of our technical staff, is working on a server.

The monitor is rackmounted into the cabinet and connected up via a fancy KVM which allows technicians to work on any server within the cabinet easily. It probably saves on space too!

While here you can see Niall working on his laptop in one side of the suite.

A lot of the servers pictured above were first seen several months ago when we shared our Dell delivery photos.

The guys were moving stuff around last night in readiness for our new product launch (watch this space!)

The guys in Enum 353 are running a session this Friday on VOIP security which might be of interest to some people:

Venue: Morrison Hotel, Ormond Quay, Dublin 1
Date: Friday 28th March 2008
Time: 9.30 a.m. to 5.00 p.m. (lunch included)

There will be no charge to attend the session.

Overview:

This workshop will discuss several VoIP security considerations from a
service providers perspective, for example, SIP client security, SIP
proxy security and PSTN Gateway security. The workshop starts with a
short SIP introduction which highlights the SIP topics needed for SIP
hacking. Following this will be an in-depth look at specific attacks, a
live demonstration of the tools used in these attacks and a discussion
of attack countermeasures. Hacking methods displayed will include:
password hacking, account hijacking, relay attacks, identity spoofing,
billing bypass ...

This full day event will be presented by Klaus Darilion an expert in the
field of SIP communications. He studied electrical engineering at the
Vienna University of Technology, where he later wrote a Doctor thesis
about SIP based voice communication for public safety applications.
Klaus Darilion is now employed with enum.at, the Austrian ENUM registry,
where he is working on ENUM based call routing and all kinds of SIP
based communication.

NB: This event is not organised by Blacknight, so please address any queries to Enum353

Update: Sorry about this, but I've just been told that this session is not as open as I thought previously! This session is only open to members of the VoIP ENUM working group so for more information please email vewg@ienum.ie

If you want to know about any service affecting maintenance, technical updates or anything else of a technical nature, we recommend that you check out our new Technical Blog.

The site is hosted outside our core network (we don't even use our own nameservers just to be 100% safe!) and is part of our backup / contingency plans for emergency situations.

While our network uptime has been and hopefully will continue to be exemplary there's no reason to be lazy. We need to make sure that we have a system in place in case there is an issue NOT after the issue arises.

You can subscribe to the site's RSS feed OR to the email alerts.

Your choice :)

You can sign up for the email alerts by filling out the form below:

Well it's that Easter thing again.

Friday isn't a "real" holiday, so our offices are open pretty much all day today. Monday is a bank holiday in most EU countries, so we'll be operating on reduced staff numbers.

But Tuesday we're back in force.

So what's with the image?

Well I was looking for something to do with the entire Easter / Spring theme.

I did find plenty of "cute" pictures of chicks, ducklings and babies, but I didn't like them too much. What I was thinking of was something else. Something that also incorporated our new plans which we intend to launch next week!

So what's happening next week exactly?

We plan on unveiling a new range of hosting solutions that are going to change your life, cure world hunger and show you how super duper reliable and wonderful we are.

(Of course if you believe any of that you are truly gullible. Please email me directly and I'll help you buy loads of hosting that you don't really need. Thanks!)

Today and over the weekend several or our little elves will be beavering away on refining and tweaking everything so that it won't explode when we put it "live".

Of course you'd have to be insane not to expect there to be issues and problems. There always are. You can test stuff umpteen times, but someone will always find a new way to break it.

Speaking of stuff breaking ....

While we do offer excellent network uptime (see how we're curing the world's ails above) we do have issues from time to time. With that in mind we have been planning on moving our technical notifications to a separate offsite blog.

It's still a little rough around the edges, but I would encourage people to check out our new technical blog: Blacknight Status

The new site is running our favourite CMS - MovableType 4 and will be used primarily by our technical support and engineering teams to keep you up to date on any service affecting issues on our network.

What you are likely to find on there is:

• 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

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

Up until now I've been doing an obligatory "we're closed" post for the annual Patrick's day weekend.

This year things are a little different.

Although you may not be able to get through on our phone lines we managed to bribe and cajole a few members of our staff to give up their day off to work today.

So if you have any technical support, accounts or sales queries today you will probably get an answer. If you don't get an answer today you will tomorrow when all the "troops" are back on duty.

Of course there's no guarantee that they haven't got hangovers, but there isn't much that we can do about that!

If you're not an existing Blacknight client this post isn't going to be that interesting or relevant to you, so you might want to move along...

The short version of this post:

We'll be emailing you to get you to choose a new username for the new control panel and billing system. The email will be clearly identified as coming from us and we won't be asking you for any sensitive information (ie. it won't be a phish!)

And for those with more patience ...

As some of you know we are currently working on a new shiny hosting system which is going to make your lives better and cure the world's ills (marketing speak gone mad! I know!).

If you can get past the marketing blurb one important fact remains. We will be moving away from Modernbill before too long. While it has served us well over the last few years our relationship has had its ups and downs, so now it only seems fair that we part our ways.

Now we know that migrating people to new systems can be disruptive and we also know how annoying it is when you're forced to use an insanely complicated username and password pair.

So our little elves (forgive the terrible metaphors!) have devised simple solution.

If you are an existing client of ours you will be getting an email at some point in the next few weeks. Within that email will be the basic details you need to choose your new username for the new billing system. It will all be quite painless we hope (and pray!).

In any case if you have any questions do let us know.

When is this going to happen?

I can't give a fixed date just yet, as we're still ironing out some issues and I hate making promises that I can't deliver on.

Most days our post is boring.

There are invoices and other stuff for our accounts team. There might be the odd payment from clients who still pay us by cheque or maybe even a copy of a magazine.

It's nice to get a "thank you" letter from time to time and it really does make us feel good.

We have helped out several groups and individuals over the last few years, so it's nice to see them thanking us.

The System Administrators Guild of Ireland is one such group who we have been providing services to for several years. Their Chairman sent me this letter which I thought I would share:

So being a hosting provider can have its rewards as well sometimes!

Last Saturday Creative Camp was held in Kilkenny Castle. I've been to some nice venues over the last couple of years (I used to live in a really nice one in a previous life!) and Kilkenny Castle definitely gives them a run for their money.

Although the castle is in the middle of Kilkenny once you step through the gates you'd be forgiven for thinking that you were in the middle of the countryside, as all you can see is grass and trees.

The facilities in the building itself are excellent and the organisers did a wonderful job in arranging to hold the event there.

Since Kilkenny is only about a 20 minute drive from the Blacknight offices we simply had to turn out "en force", so six of us headed over for the day.

One of the things about our line of business is that although we maybe in contact with clients and business partners on a regular basis via email, phone and other methods, we rarely get to meet them "face to face". Events like Creative Camp are very refreshing in this regard, as it allows us to meet people in an informal setting. It's also a wonderful opportunity to get feedback on our services. While we may be doing a good job there's always room for improvement and the only way that you can really find out about it is when someone "grabs you" in a corridor and lets you know.

Being able to bring so many members of the team to an event was a great experience as well, since normally it's just me and one or two others. This time round there was a mixture of our development team, technical team and sales team, which was good fun.

There were some very interesting discussions being held throughout the day culminating in a very interesting panel session in the main hall about "Women in Technology". It also marked the official launch of a new site Sass.ie (think of it phonetically!) which we are delighted to sponsor. (We may be capitalist swine, but we like giving back to the community as well)

After the day's events we headed off for a nice Chinese with a couple of clients and friends before making our way back to Carlow.

George, our sales manager, took some nice photos at the event which you can find here. I was going to post a couple of them, but they're rather big.

So this weekend is Creative Camp and I'm currently trying to work out who exactly will be going from our offices... I know a few people were talking about it, but I'm still not 100% sure who is definitely going. It looks like there might be two carloads ...

So we're basically invading Kilkenny!

I'll probably be buying drinks / food for people later in the day / evening, so if you want some just look for the me ...

Don't know what I look like?

Well here's a recent enough photo of me with Playboy centrefold Sara Jean Underwood:

Relevance?

Practically none, but I've been trying to work out how to get a photo of me and a Playboy model onto the company blog for weeks ...

Of course I won't have these lovely ladies on my arm this weekend, but I should still be recognisable...

When you take your car into a mechanic you expect them to do the job correctly and to meet industry standards. It's not something you ask about, as it's taken as a given.

When it comes to web design, however, standards are all too often put in the back seat. You could get into a lengthy and irrelevant discussion of how browser software evolved, but it wouldn't help you get your site to work properly for a potential buyer.

Why do standards matter?

They matter because it makes life easier for everyone.

If your website complies with W3C (http://www.w3c.org) standards then you can more or less guarantee that all visitors will have an equal experience.

Badly designed websites can cost you money in lost sales and if your business is online then this isn't a good thing. Sites carrying "useful" badges like "best viewed in Internet Explorer" are going to cost you money.
I don't use Internet Explorer. I've no reason to and neither did over 50% of visitors to one of my websites last month. Do you want to stop me from doing business with you? Telling me that my choice of browser or operating system doesn't "fit" with your site's "requirements" is a sure fire way of dissuading me from spending money with you.

Another thing that people tend to forget is "accessibility". Accessible design doesn't have to be ugly. It can help reach an audience you might otherwise miss and anyone who could be turned into a buyer is welcome, aren't they?

This article first appeared in Computers in Business with the Sunday Business Post on March 2nd 2008.

Easter will soon be upon us, so today we decided to splash out on some "goodies" for the staff in our offices - organic Easter eggs from Green and Black's.

Green and Black's eggs come in recycled cardboard boxes and while the ingredients in the eggs may not be FairTrade the company has a good track record in that area.

If you're wondering why we've "suddenly" gone "green" the answer is very simple - we haven't!

We just haven't been telling people about any of the stuff we've been doing quietly behind closed doors.

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)

This is most of the equipment that was damaged or destroyed the other day.

It might not look like much, but the plantronics headsets are far from cheap and 8 of them were burnt out!

We're currently waiting for some guy from an insurance company to come out and tell us what we already know - the smell of burning was a give away!

(click to get a bigger version)

(Photo courtesy of Mark Brislane)

I'd like to think that we don't take ourselves too seriously. Sure - hosting is a serious business, but there's nothing wrong with having a bit of a laugh from time to time - even if its from a competitor!

One of our competitors posted a link to a YouTube video today that was quite amusing. Remember Monty Python?

NB: Contains some language that people *may* find offensive

There's a "lovely" aroma of burning in our offices in Carlow this lunchtime.

I say "lovely" as I'm trying really hard to find a silver lining to this morning's electrical "mishap".

I am not an electrician and I would never pretend to be one. Neither it seems was the person or persons responsible for this morning's problems!

They may advertise themselves as electricians, but I'd love to know how someone competent could have unbalanced a 3 phase so easily.

It seems that while doing some work on the other half of the building ie. outside Blacknight territory, they managed to disconnect one of the phases which caused an imbalance and a rather nasty power spike.

The surge took out several of the lights in our offices, three desktop PCs (the power supplies are literally burntout - you can actually see black smoke marks), the phone system blew and more than half of the headset base stations melted.

On a positive note the UPS worked fine and kept the office servers up and running and protected them from the nasty spike.

The guys down in PC Pro in Cork will be happy, as we've had to replace a load of office equipment..
I'm still compiling a list of stuff that got damaged, but the bill will run to several thousand euro.

There isn't a whole lot you can do in a normal office building when crazy people with screwdrivers get involved, so I'm thankful that we don't have any customer equipment onsite at present. The data centres we use in Dublin are incredibly redundant!

Our Carlow offices are without electricity or phones this morning.

Servers and all services are normal as they are based in Dublin.

Our sales team, support team and accounts team are currently "offline".

We will update you as soon as we have more information.

From what I have been able to gather several devices may have blown during a power surge a few minutes ago. Hopefully the phone system was not damaged!

Update 1 - We have sent most of our technical support staff to work offsite. They will be able to respond to support queries submitted to our helpdesk.

Update 2 - Power has been restored in our offices. Unfortunately it looks like our phone system's power supply may have been blown, so our phones are still down

Update 3 - The following mobile numbers maybe used to contact our offices.

Update 4 - Telephone system is back online with a new power supply!

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.

Much to my amazement we've made it through to the shortlist for this year's Irish blog awards!

The competition in the business blog category is particularly tough, but it was nice to have made it this far.

Best of luck to everyone!!

We've been active members of the Irish Internet Association for the last number of years and have been happy to sponsor several of their events in the past.

This year's event takes place in the Croke Park Conference Centre on Friday May 15th

This year the IIA's conference will be focussing on social networking and new media.

We'll be providing more details on the speakers and the rest of the day's details as soon as they are forthcoming.

At least two or three of our team should be at the event, so please do make yourselves known. There might even be a prize draw for something really cool and useful... If nothing else we'll definitely have a few hoodies and polo shirts to give away (they're really comfy!)

If you haven't done so already I'd recommend that you subscribe to our blog's feed to be kept up to date!

(click on the image above for a really BIG version)

Today is Pancake Tuesday (Shrove Tuesday).

If we were in New Orleans we'd call it Mardi Gras.

So today Paul, our CTO and my business partner, made pancakes for all the staff in our offices.

Since we normally don't have any form of cooker in the office we acquired a simple hot plate and Paul worked his magic...

Pity there's no photo of the chef in action....

Next Saturday is a date that should be marked in every Irish web professional's calendar, as it marks the first "event" organised by the members of Irish Webmaster Forum. (You don't have to be a member to participate!)

Where?

Harbour Master, Mayor Street, IFSC, Dublin 1

When?

Saturday February the 9th. 7.30 PM til ...... I guess that's up to you!

The original thread that started it all off is here, but it's been mentioned on quite a few people's blogs and sites over the last few days.

Although I won't be able to attend due to prior engagements (translation - I have to go and see my mother before she disowns me and had arranged it beforehand) I'm hoping that some of our other staff may be able to make it, but even if they don't we'll be there in "spirit", as we're sponsoring the event.

I'll expect a full report with photos from the attendees!

The survey mentioned in our last newsletter is now closed.

I'll try to put together the results over the next few days and will followup once I've done so

We learnt quite a bit from the first survey. Not only about ourselves but also about writing surveys.

The next one will be quite a bit shorter as a result!!

It seems we've been nominated for the Best Business Blog category at this year's Irish Blog Awards.

Thanks to whoever nominated us!

I honestly don't expect us to win, as the competition is very strong in that category, so best of luck to all the nominees!

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

DomainFest draws to a close this morning with the farewell breakfast which I won't be attending.

The first SnapNames Live auction produced some interesting results, though not all domains found buyers. (I reported some of the results on my domain blog - for full results check DomainNameNews )

I'll be heading back to Ireland this afternoon via London, so I should be "back in circulation" on Monday (if not sooner!).

Registration for this year's DomainFest will be opening in little over an hour's time at 10am PST.

The organisers of this year's event are expecting over 600 delegates to attend over the event's three days.

Personally I'm looking forward to the live auctions being held tomorrow and Wednesday.

The expression "there's no such thing as a free lunch" may seem a little overused at times, but scam artists of all shapes and sizes are still "in the wild".

In some cases being a small bit more cautious or actually reading the fine print could avert disaster (or at least go a long way to avoid headaches).

It doesn't really matter which "offer" I am referring to.

It could be Domain Registry Of America (DROA) whose modus operandi consists of sending thousands and thousands of nicely laid out and very official looking letters to domain registrants. If you get one - dump it. If you don't want to dump it immediately, by all means open it and read it. But please read ALL of it.

One of the offers doing the rounds at the moment is from Euro Business Guide.

There are a couple of things about it that raise red flags:

- they're doing it via email en masse (basically spamming)
- the wording is more than a bit misleading

If you sign up with them WITHOUT reading the fine print you could be liable for a EUR 965 charge.

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!

If you're an existing client or subscribe to our newsletter make sure you check your mail. We've sent you a very tasty special offer.

No. This offer is not open to the public

The following article was published earlier today in Washington Internet Daily. It is reproduced here with the publisher's permission. I posted a related article on my domain blog earlier this week.

Registrar Network Solutions could face legal action over its practice of locking in domain names that are searched but not bought, Michigan attorney Enrico Schaefer said Thursday. The action violates consumer protection laws banning deceptive business practices, he said. There's no indication on Network Solutions's website that use of its free availability search prevents other registrars from offering the name, he said. "We are considering a class action," Schaefer told us. Network Solutions defended the process as a shield for customers against other front-runners.

The practice, "domain name front-running"(DNFR) may differ from the term in its best known sense. In November, .uk registry Nominet published a paper on its experience with DNFR, calling it a "technique believed to exist, but so far unproved, whereby one person monitors the activity of a second person who is planning to register a domain name and the first person then registers the domain name before the second person." Nominet concluded that DNFR "in the most common sense of someone tracking your actions to register a domain just before you can, does not exist."

DNFR is under investigation by ICANN's Security and Stability Advisory Committee, which in October issued an advisory on the practice and is assessing the resulting comments, an ICANN spokesman said. The panel defined DNFR as "the opportunity for a party with some form of insider information to track an Internet user's preference for registering a domain name and preemptively register that name." It preliminarily found insufficient evidence that any party involved in the registration process engages in DNFR. Nor did it set standards for judging whether monitoring name availability is acceptable or not.

Network Solutions' ploy is "more nefarious," said Michele Neylon, managing director of Irish hosting and domain registration company Blacknight Internet Solutions. He agrees with Nominet that DNFR, in classic form, doesn't take place. But Network Solutions automatically registers names that prospective buyers query on its site and warehouses them preventing them from being offered by any other registrar and ensuring that consumers are stuck paying Network Solutions's often higher prices, Neylon said.

Network Solutions Vice President of Policy Jonathon Nevett responded Tuesday to the allegations, calling the practice a security measure meant to allay customer concerns about DNFR. The measure kicks in when someone searches for an available domain but decides not to buy it immediately after the search, he said. The registrar puts the name on reserve, during which time it's not active and Network Solutions doesn't monetize traffic to it, he said. If the name isn't bought in four days it's released to the registry and made generally available for registration, Nevett said.

The effort also tries to "take an arrow out of the quiver of the [domain] tasters," Nevett said. They’re the largest front-runners, buying search data from ISPs or registries, then tasting names for profitability, he said. "Some folks might not agree with our approach, but we are trying to prevent this malicious activity from impacting our customers," Nevett said.

"This is definitely front-running," said Ross Rader, director of research and innovation at registrar Tucows. Network Solutions has "put some lipstick on it and put another name on it by claiming that this is a consumer protection measure," he said. Either way, it's using availability and Whois search data for purposes other than the actual buying process, he said.

Existing DNFR data are believed to stem from ISPs selling log files of DNS data to buyers who parse the materials for Whois queries. They then use the information, and the five-day grace period registrars have to cancel a registration for a full refund from the registry, to front-run in various ways, said Tucows President Elliot Noss. Network Solutions is using others' bad behavior to excuse its own, he said, when the focus should be on ISPs’ selling
DNS data for inappropriate purposes, he said.

Network Solutions alleges that registries are selling availability or Whois data to third parties, Rader said. In a recent blog on the Tucows site, company Marketing Vice President Ken Schafer quoted a Network Solutions spokeswoman as saying that the registrar believes some registries or ISPs or both may be selling search data to front-runners. If Network Solutions has specific knowledge that registries are doing that, "they should do the right
thing" and come forward with it, Rader said.

However the practice is labelled, it raises strong consumer protection issues, Schaefer said. The registrar is essentially "tricking" consumers into using its free search tools without telling them they won't be able to buy the name queried from anyone but Network Solutions, he said. No one has contested front-running in court. The practice is new and loss of a single domain typically doesn't generate enough damages to justify legal action, he said. But suits against registrars engaged in front-running are "viable and likely inevitable," he said.

Network Solutions informed ICANN when it launched the process, an ICANN spokesman said. ICANN is looking into the matter to see whether it complies with the registrar accreditation agreement, he said. -- Dugie Standeford

Reproduced by permission of Warren Communications News, Inc., 800-771-9202, www.warren-news.com

Every year I usually organise some kind of sale in the new year. We usually offer a discount on domain registrations or something similar.

This year I decided to take a slightly different angle.

Instead of offering a discount to everyone I thought we'd offer a BIG discount to our existing clients (and subscribers to our newsletter).

Of course we like getting new business, but it's about time we gave something extra to our existing clients.

So keep an eye on your inbox.

The email with the details will be "winging" its way to you at some point over the next 3 days.. It's worth the wait!

And if you aren't getting our special newsletters already it's not too late to sign up!!!

DomainFest is being held in Hollywood in a couple of weeks and we're proud to be one of the sponsors.

The event is one of the most important in the calendar for people involved in the domain industry and, if last year's event was anything to go by, it should draw a very interesting crowd from the four corners of the globe.

Last year I got to meet people from every aspect of the industry, so I'm hoping that this year will be similar. I've spoken to several people over the last couple of months who plan on attending THIS event since they had such a good time last year.

Unlike a lot of other industry events I've been to DomainFest manages to mix the business and pleasure to provide an almost perfect cocktail. You can easily find yourself having a drink in the bar with an unassuming multi-millionaire if you're not careful!

Of course a conference wouldn't be a conference if it didn't have speakers and at least one keynote. Last year they had TechCrunch's Michael Arrington, while this year's line up includes John Battelle, whose name may be familiar to anyone involved in SEO.

The agenda for this year's event looks very interesting and I will try to post more details as soon as they become available.

Similar to last year's event there are two "tracks" available.

If you're a DomainSponsor client, then you can learn about some of their new products and services.

However if you're more interested in hearing and discussing the latest trends in the domain name industry then the main track will be the place to be.

The topics on the agenda include new TLDs, legal issues, portfolio management and the famous networking sessions.

Last year was the first time I'd ever been to a networking session that was so intense and so incredibly productive! It's like speed dating, except it's for business contacts!

My biggest concern, of course, is not to get too involved in the live auction! It would be oh so easy to spend large amounts of money when you see the preliminary list of domains that are going to be on offer.

I'll be flying out to LA towards the middle of next week, as I want to take a couple of days prior to the event proper. At least that way I won't be able to use the excuse of jetlag if I spend the company's profits on dodgy domain names!

Sometimes it's our clients who come up with the cool little ideas.

The latest one I came across is a domain search extension for Firefox which will do a search for available domains on the Blacknight site.

You can get it here. Developed by Weeno Media and mentioned here

Very cool!

Happy New Year!

2008 should be an interesting year.

We'll be announcing a number of new products and services this year, expanding our team again (yes - we're hiring again!) and launching a new and improved website.

Watch this space for more news ....

The expression "it never rains but it pours" springs to mind today ....

Earlier today we had a serious network issue and as soon as that was resolved we discovered a glitch in our online credit card processing.

I'm not a programmer, so I won't even pretend to understand exactly what happened, but I do know what the consequences were - no online CC processing for a few hours!

Fortunately our technical team were able to find the problem and fix it, so credit card processing is back in operation.

Sorry about the hiccups today !!

As some of you know there were connectivity issues earlier this morning.

At this juncture all service should be restored, however if anyone is experiencing issues still please let us know

We'll provide more details on what happened as soon as one of the technical team provides a report

We're going to maintain the price of .eu registrations and transfers @ 5 euro for the foreseeable future ie. we've no intention of upping the price.

We are hoping that Eurid (the entity that is in charge of .eu namespace) will change some of its procedures and policies with regard to renewals, as the present regime does not benefit either registrars or registrants.

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!

It seems like every ecommerce site I've ever bought from is doing something special in the runup to Christmas.

Here at Blacknight we've spruced up the offices a bit - no singing Santas, but a few decorations here and there. I think there might even be a miniature tree floating around somewhere!

And of course tonight's the annual party!

Over the past few years the numbers have gone up and up as we've expanded. Hopefully the number of embarrassing photos that end up on Flickr won't!

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.

As I've mentioned a few times in the past few weeks and months, we're in the process of switching over from blacknight.ie to blacknight.com.

I switched this blog over to the .com a couple of weeks ago and didn't think anymore about it until just now.

Normally I check the comment spam filter every couple of days to see if any legitimate comments have been blocked and end up dumping several thousand junk comments.

For the last few days it's been completely empty!

I don't know if it's a coincidence or not, but I suspect that the spammers are confused by the redirects or something... I guess they'll find the new location for the comment form fairly soon, but if they don't I won't complain!

Of course I might have just broken the blog comments ... If you can't post a comment please let me know (michele@blacknight.com)!

The Irish PHP Users Group meets every month in 3 different locations.

This month is no different with 3 meetings scheduled for tomorrow evening:

Dublin: Longstone pub on Townsend Street
Cork: Metropole Hotel on MacCurtain Street
Monaghan: Contact Kae Verens for details.

More information on the UserGroup may be found on their site

On a sidenote, if anyone has an event that might be of interest to our clients please let me know. I'm only too happy to plug relevant events on the company blog

If you're reading this in a web browser instead of an RSS reader you should notice that it's look and feel has changed quite a bit.

We're currently rolling out our new design and look.. Over the next few days we'll be upgrading all the public facing sections of our sites etc., to give you a new uniform look and feel...

Hopefully you all like green and black - it's purely coincidence that Green & Black are my favourite chocolates as well!

Anyhow we've updated the blog (that's here!) and the forum so far and the support area is next on the list

Thanks to the guys in Spoiltchild for the design and 2BScene for the implementation work

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!

The maintenance window for Cold Fusion has been cancelled

Our technical team found a resolution that did not require any upgrades

We have been informed by INEX, the Irish Neutral Exchange, that they will be conducting maintenance on 28th November between midnight and two am Irish time.

If you're going to focus all your energies and money on developing your online presence then there are some really simple things that you need to get right.

If you were to rent a small shop in the centre of any town or city you would have to pay "top dollar", but if your main activity is centred around your website you don't need to worry about that particular expense.

However you do need to make some small investment in your actual online brand, as it's far too easy for someone else to grab it if you're not careful.

I'm always amazed at how little attention companies pay to basic online brand protection and, speaking from personal experience, it's an expensive lesson to learn after the fact!

When I first setup Blacknight I made a number of rather silly mistakes with our online branding. I didn't check that all the domains were available to register - hindsight's a wonderful thing, isn't it?

Acquiring domains when they've already been registered by someone else can be awkward if not impossible. And even if it's not awkward it can be expensive.

If you're going to start from scratch then you need to check if the name you've chosen fits some basic criteria:

• Is it short?


• Is it memorable?


• Can people spell it easily?

How many times have you heard an advert on the radio for some "cool" product or service and then not been able to find the company's website?

It's happened to me far too often. In some cases it's because the company name is odd and forgettable.
In other cases it's not clear how the domain name is spelt.

When it comes to registering the domain names a bit of common sense goes a long way. It's a hell of a lot cheaper to register a couple of extra domain names NOW than get into litigation about them later.

How much does a legal letter cost?
How much does a WIPO dispute cost?

If you compare those costs against the costs of registering a couple of extra domain names it's obvious which option to go for.

If you're an EU company I'd strongly urge you to get the following extensions:
com,net,org,info,biz,eu and co.uk
If your company is based in Ireland, then getting the .ie domain won't hurt!

Of course if you need to expand your brand into other markets in the EU then you probably need to get a few more extensions, but if you get the ones I mentioned now you'll save yourself a lot of headaches and MONEY !!

I mentioned the upcoming eNum event a couple of weeks ago.

I've just received details from them about the day's event and it sounds like it could be very interesting:
Venue: Gresham Hotel, O'Connell St, Dublin 1
Date: Wednesday 28th November 2007
Time: 4.00 p.m. to 7.00 p.m. (followed by drinks and snacks)

here will be no charge to attend the information session.
(parking available; close to DART and LUAS)

Agenda:

* Welcome and Introduction (IENUM)
* ENUM in Ireland (IENUM)
* ENUM in Austria (IPA)
* ENUM in the UK (BT)
* How to become an ENUM registrar (IENUM)
* ENUM - an Irish implementation (Soft Telecom)
* ENUM – an industry-led policy perspective (ENUM Policy Advisory Board)
* Open forum - Q&A
Objectives of the session:

• Share the experiences of ENUM in Europe, and understand the various business models used by registrars
• Inform about the benefits to service providers of being an ENUM tier 2 registrar
• Show how to become an ENUM registrar
• Discuss technical implementation details of ENUM and VoIP
• Share experience of a practical business implementation in Ireland -
ENUM as a tool to connect remote sites

If your feed reader went a little nuts last night and grabbed a load of old posts from here there is a simple explanation!

I changed this site over to the .com domain last night as part of our rebranding. This would force a lot of RSS readers to pull down fresh copies of a lot of content - sorry about that - I've no intention of changing the domain again for quite some time!

If you're in the Galway region then you might be interested in the Linux InstallFest on Saturday 17th November:

Galway LUG is organising a multi-distro installfest from 1000-1200 on Saturday 17th of November, in the DERI building (opposite the Westwood Hotel), Newcastle Road, Galway[1]. We will have people available to help with Ubuntu, Debian, Mandriva and RedHat (minimum). There will be demo systems with various software preinstalled, and with luck plenty of install CD/DVDs.

The recent introduction of "personal IE domains" has been welcomed by all parties, but I get the impression that a lot of people are still unhappy with the restrictive policies being used by the IEDR.

What would people like to see?

Should we have a more open policy?

Should it be a "free for all"?

Are there advantages to a "managed name space"?

Are there disadvantages?

At the moment there aren't that many issues with cybersquatting, spam or phishing in the IE namespace. There are issues - yes. But the barriers that exist at present render dotIE to be too awkward to be of interest to the average online criminal.

One possible solution would be to introduce a couple of subdomains such as co.ie or me.ie etc., that might help with the rules and policies.

Of course the main issue at present is that there is no formal policy development process.

We've decided to extend the special offer on EU domains for the month of November.

You can register a .eu domain for a mere 5 euro!

Check out which dotEU domains are available by using our online search

I'm currently attending the 30th International ICANN meeting in Los Angeles, California.

This morning we have been sitting through the final meeting of the outgoing board and the handover to the new one

Peter Dengate Thrush has been chosen to fill the position vacated by Vint Cerf.

Today also marks the addition of Dr Dennis Jennings to the board.

Tomorrow morning personal IE domains will be made available for the first time.

We've been accepting registration requests for the last few weeks, so tomorrow morning at zero hour we will be submitting the queued requests to the IE Domain Registry.

If you haven't ordered a personal IE domain then you still have time, though obviously your choices will be more restricted if your surname is common.

For those of you who have already submitted your registration requests and sent us in the documentation you can sit back and relax. If we need anything more from you our sales team will be in touch.

Of course if there is a large volume of requests there will be delays. We've been warned by the IEDR to expect delays, so we must ask you to please be patient.

If you have any queries do not hesitate to contact our sales staff, but please bear in mind that the volume of queries may result in there being a longer delay in replies than is normal.

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 !

We've dropped the price on .eu domains for the rest of this month to a mere 5 euro!

You can place your order online via our website and your .eu will be up and running in minutes.

We've been an accredited registrar for .eu domains for the last couple of months, although we hadn't put our accreditation fully live until this morning.

The next ICANN meeting is being held in Los Angeles, California.

Although the meeting doesn't officially start until the Monday there will be meetings and events over the weekend as well.

I'll be attending again, as there are quite a few topics of interest on the table.

If you're interested in the meeting schedule, then it's available on the site.

The meeting will also include a special event in honour of Vint Cerf who has served ICANN since the beginning.

As a domain registrant you have certain rights. Unfortunately those rights can be abused by companies that don't believe in ethical business practices.

It would be nice and simple if the whois display were the same across all TLDs (ie. domain extensions), but they're not.

A basic right is for the domain to be registered to you and under your control.

That means that the domain details should show yours. For example a .ie domain registered to me shows:

status: Active
nserver: NS.BLACKNIGHTSOLUTIONS.COM
nserver: NS2.BLACKNIGHTSOLUTIONS.COM
source: IEDR

person: Michele Neylon
nic-hdl: ABG182-IEDR
source: IEDR

person: Blacknight.ie Hostmaster
nic-hdl: AAM456-IEDR
source: IEDR

For some TLDs, such as .eu the command line whois will give out varying amounts of information and you may need to go to the web based whois server to get the full details.

In either case the registrant is listed somewhere, even if the public cannot see it easily.

If the registrant wants to move their domain between registrars that is their right.

Under ICANN rules registrars are obliged to provide the EPP codes to registrants in a timely fashion (bearing in mind that you cannot transfer newly registered .com's etc., between registrars immediately)

If they want to update their domain's nameservers then they should be able to do so.

Unfortunately this does not happen.

The reality is that a disproportionate number of companies are denying registrants basic rights.

In some cases they may be doing this by accident, but in other cases it is 100% deliberate.

There is no valid reason for your web designer or developer to put their details all over your domain. None.

If you have asked your designer / developer to register a domain for you and paid them for it then it should be registered to you (which is one of the reasons why .ie domains are attractive!).

Over the past couple of years I've seen some crazy things, including a particular "registrar" that registers ALL .co.uk domains to themselves regardless of who has requested the domain.

Another company warehoused hundreds of .eu domains "on behalf" of their clients ie. in the hope that the clients would want to register the domains at some point in the future. Of course it wasn't clear if they would be charged a premium for this "service".

If a provider won't update the DNS for a domain then there is something wrong somewhere.

(If they can't update it due to the DNS not being loaded that is the registrant or their provider's issue!)

There's no good reason to delay handing over an EPP key.

If a registrant wants their co.uk domain retagged simply do it.

Why make people suffer?

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.

I've always liked being able to support Irish companies. I don't like supporting them for the sake of it, as that's just plain silly. But if an Irish company offers a product or service that is excellent, then I have no qualms about recommending it to my friends and to our clients and partners.

Why wouldn't I?

That's the case with Infacta.

They're based in Sligo, in the west of Ireland, which is well away from Dublin and the other urban centres of Ireland. Yet they've built up a really cool suite of software and services that help companies communicate with their clients. Although I use Ubuntu Linux and Mac OS X for a lot

Group Surveys is a really cool online survey tool. It might not be free, but there's nothing wrong with paying for a quality service, is there? However if you're a Blacknight client you can get some free credits to get you started. How's that?

What can it do?

It's a versatile and easy-to-use application for conducting online surveys. You can create online surveys in minutes using custom designs and multiple question and answer types. A link to your survey can be placed in your website, blog or e-mail, making distribution simple and flexible.

If you want to get started follow this link to the "special" Blacknight page. Happy surveying!

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.

As some of you know I have been writing a column for PC Live for the last couple of years.

This month's edition just arrived, so I thought I might as well republish it here.

Download file (pdf)

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.

PodCamp Ireland was fantastic.

The organisers did a fantastic job and I hope everyone had as much fun as I did.

They even managed to bamboozle me into joining a panel!

A couple of us have headed over to Kilkenny for the day to attend PodCampIreland.

If you're in the area drop into the Ormonde Hotel

As it's a Friday evening I thought I'd have a quick look at the spam filtering stats to see what's been going on.

I haven't looked at ALL the figures yet, but just to give you a flavour of what's going on...

One of our filtering nodes was sent 372,460 emails yesterday. It rejected 88% of those mails!!
Of the 30 thousand plus emails that it filtered nearly 30% was marked as spam.

Can you imagine that amount of junk hitting your office mail server on a dsl line?

I'd rather not!

Eurid, which is the registry in charge of the .eu domain, contacted all their registrars, including us, earlier today to announce a major change to the way they handle DNS updates.

At present .eu DNS servers update 5 times a day.

From 12 on October 9th the DNS will move to dynamic updates ie. changes will be instant.

This also means that the time lapse between a registration or change will be a lot faster (bearing in mind the distributed nature of DNS etc.,)

The announcement text is below for reference purposes:

The switch to dynamic updates, announced earlier this year, will be taking place on Tuesday 9 October at 12:00PM Belgian time. At that moment, .eu DNS servers will cease to update 5 times a day and begin updating instantaneously in response to changes as they occur. Please be sure to inform your customers of the change as this will affect certain services (e.g. website and email) since domain names will become active as soon as they are registered. We also remind everyone that while it is currently possible to correct any mistakes you have unintentionally made before the next scheduled update takes place, any mistakes made after dynamic updates have been implemented will be effective immediately. Conversely, any unintentional mistakes can be corrected immediately as well.

Most of the main domain registries use a similar system, so there won't be any tangible impact on the way things work, apart from them working faster!

If anyone has any queries let us know

Ireland's first major podcasting event takes place this Saturday in the Ormonde Hotel, Kilkenny.

The event kicks off at 10am and promises to be an interesting day if the list of expected attendees is anything to go by.

As it's only "over the road" from us I plan on attending, as I'm still feeling guilty about not attending the last couple of events that we sponsored!

For a list of possible attendees see here

If you want to get your personal IE domain then remember we'll be taking pre-orders up until the "go live" date.

Unfortunately there seems to be some confusion about which domains are allowed and which ones aren't.

To start with, as is indicated on the order form, to pre-order personal IE domains you need to submit them as follows:
select the applicant class ‘Natural Person’ and the domain category ‘Personal Name’.

DO NOT try any other combinations. If you do your application will be rejected.

You cannot register your surname / family name.

You cannot register your first name.

While your friends may call you all sorts of interesting names you can only register names that you can provide documentation for.

What documentation is accepted?
If you are based in the republic:

Irish passport
Irish driver's licence
Irish revenue / social welfare document showing PPS number
Irish birth certificate
Irish marriage certificate
Irish utility bill (e.g.: NTL, Chorus, SKY / ESB, Airtricity / Bord Gais / Eircom / Vodafone, O2, Meteor, Three - bill pay phones only).

If you are based in Northern Ireland:

UK driver's licence with Northern Ireland address.
HM Revenue & Customs / Northern Ireland Social Security Agency document showing National Insurance number
Northern Ireland birth certificate
Northern Ireland marriage certificate
Northern Ireland utility bill (e.g.: NTL, Chorus, SKY, UTV Internet / NIE, Airtricity / British Gas / BT / Vodafone, O2, 3, T-Mobile, Orange, BT - bill pay phones only).

Where should I send the documentation?

All documentation should be sent to us either via fax or email.

Our fax numbers are:
+353 (0) 1 4811 763
UK Fax: 0845 280 088
US Fax: 213 232 3366

Please ensure that any documentation is clearly marked with the domain name in question.

DO NOT send us original documents via mail.

What format name(s) can I register?

Johnsmith.ie [first name / surname]
Johnpaulsmith.ie [first name / middlename / surname]
John-smith.ie [first name / hyphen / surname]
John-paul-smith.ie [first name / hyphen / middlename / hyphen / surname]
Johnpsmith.ie [first name / middle initial / surname]
John-p-smith.ie [first name / hyphen / middle initial / hyphen / surname]
Jsmith.ie [first initial / surname]
Jpsmith.ie [first initial / middle initial / surname]
Jp-smith.ie [first initial / middle initial / hyphen / surname]
J-smith.ie [first initial / hyphen / surname]
J-p-smith.ie [first initial / hyphen / middle initial / hyphen / surname]
Paulsmith.ie [middlename / surname]
Paul-smith.ie [middlename / hyphen / surname]
Psmith.ie [middle initial / surname]
P-smith.ie [middle initial / hyphen / surname]

NB: You will need to be able to provide documentation of the name chosen with the spelling chosen, so if you want to register johnnysmith.ie you will need a document in that name

Voting has now opened in the 2007 Irish Internet Association Net Visionary Awards.

I've been nominated under both Internet Entrepreneur and the Online Trader categories, so any and all votes would be appreciated!

There's also quite a few other names on the list that are familiar to us here at Blacknight. They belong to friends, business partners, clients and acquaintances. I wish them all the best of luck!

Unfortunately I didn't make it to BarCamp Galway, as we're doing a major deployment this weekend (remember those photos? Multiply the pile of servers by a factor of 3!)

I'm hoping that some of us will make it to Kilkenny for PodCamp instead!

We're a hosting company.

Like most hosting companies we have several hosting plans (products)

These plans have names.

Like everyone else the names we've been using are boring:

basic; standard; professional

I want to change them. I want something new. I want something that's a bit more imaginative, but I've no idea what!!!

Options on the table at present:
metals - silver, gold, platinum
grades - essential, premier, ultimate
arthurian - round table, holy grail (you get the general idea)
chess - pawn, rook, king

I'm open to suggestions. I'm open to anything at this stage!

While I may have a love-hate relationship with servers I simply dislike faxes and fax machines.

I can't get excited by them and simply consider them to be a waste of space and money.

Yes - we still have one in the office, but I've stopped using it for inbound faxes.

We had an issue several months ago where one of the telcos managed to cut off our fax lines with a digger for a few hours so we took our faxing online. I haven't looked back.

Not only can I get all my faxes in a handy electronic format (who needs expensive scanners?) for storage I can also send on the faxes to 3rd parties easily if needed.

So what?

Well you too can dump your cumbersome fax machine!
Signup for a free 30 day trial and choose from a multitude of localised numbers (we've got ones in the US and UK!)

No more worrying about expensive fax ribbons, splodgy printouts or simply mangled faxes... Not to mention the amount of paper you can get rid of..

Kiss your fax machine goodbye !! (Or turn it into a bookend!)

Personal IE domains will be available from October 31st 2007.

Basically if you want to register yourname.ie you will be able to do so after October 31st.

Since we expect that there will be a high demand for these domains we have put in place a queuing mechanism.

How will this work?

Our development team have put together a queuing system to hold the orders until October 31st.
Any orders for personal IE domains placed between now and October 31st at 8am will be submitted to the registry on the "go live" day.

What happens if two people want the same domain?

Domain registrations are on a first come first served basis. We will be submitting the requests to the IEDR in the order in which they were received. We cannot offer ANY guarantees (neither can anyone else)

What if someone else orders the domain from another company?

As already mentioned it's "first come, first served".

What if my chosen name is taken on the "go live" day?

We will offer people the opportunity of registering an alternative personal domain

Is Blacknight's system better than other?
Other companies have also setup queues, but only one or two of them have their servers physically in the same data centre as the IEDR.
Some of the other companies don't even have servers in Ireland, so their connections to the IEDR's API servers will be significantly slower.

There's been quite a bit of media coverage in the last few days about the upcoming relaxation of IEDR rules to allow people to register yourname.ie.

While some of the reporting hasn't been particularly inspired some of it has been quite misleading.

As of October 31st any Irish citizen or resident in Ireland will be able to register their name.

You will NOT be able to register ANY name you want post October 31st. You will only be able to register your given name or a variation thereof that you can prove (I'll post about that in more detail later).

However, if you are a published writer, artist (in the broadest sense of the word), politician or business person who actively trades using your own name at present you can register your name NOW. You do not have to wait until the end of October.

One of the examples that people have mentioned is politicians' names, such as bertieahern.ie - he's already got his domain name, so there's no point trying to get it. Even if he hadn't got it already he could get it before the end of October.

If you are a doctor, solicitor or other tradesman that trades using your name you can register your domain name today. You do not need to wait!

If you'd like to find out what people are getting upto in the wonderful world of mobile devices and the mobile web, then Mobile Monday is the place for you.

On Monday next, September 24th Mobile Monday Demo Night will take place in The Hairy Lemon, which is in central Dublin (map)

Several companies will be showing off their latest creations so it should be good fun.

As we're promoting .mobi domains at present it's only natural that we also take the time to promote mobile web related stuff, so we'll be sponsoring the event.

More info here

Just got this email from the IEDR:

It has once again come to the attention of the IEDR that a company operating under the name “Internet Register Ireland” is in the process of contacting businesses with registered .ie domain names by post and by fax, soliciting them to register their domain name with the “Internet Register Ireland”. The “Internet Register Ireland”, a German based company will request you to fill out their form and return it to them signed. It should be noted that they charge an excessive fee of approximately €958 for the registration of the .ie domain name in their database.

We would like to reassure all of our customers that no such organisation has been authorised to act on behalf of the IEDR. If you are contacted in this manner we would recommend that you disregard this letter and advise your customers to be aware of this activity.

The IEDR are responding to enquiries from concerned domain holders, by recommending them to contact an official IE Reseller if they require any further Internet services for their website.

We mentioned their activities last year.

Following on from last Tuesday's incident we are following through on our promises.

Our technical team had been discussing the finer points of various firewalls for some time. When it comes to choosing equipment they always spend quite a bit of time evaluating the options. They have to take into account a lot of different factors.
How well will it work with existing equipment?
Will it scale?
How long before we have to replace it?
How much does it cost?
Do we have staff who know how to use it?
Does it support ipv6?
How much traffic can it handle?
How many concurrent connections can it handle?
How much RAM does it need?

The list goes on and on...

In the end we decided to go with Cisco ASA 5500 series.

And since we love our camera phones here are a couple of snaps of the new firewalls. Before anyone asks - I'm not 100% sure when they'll be installed.

And from behind:

And a slightly further away shot:

Summary:

An internal routing issue developed in our network between our edge routers and our core distribution routers.

Diagnosis and Resolution:

During regular network maintenance Blacknight staff were moving a customer from the shared vlan to their own VLAN. During this move we were forwarding IP packets from their old IPs to their
new IPs. Normally this should not be a problem. However in this case, the rules caused OSPF on the primary distribution router to flap.
As a result of the session flapping the secondary router was not able to take over correctly. We manually failed over to the secondary router and at this point the network stabilised.

We are still investigating this issue, but we believe a router upgrade that is planned for later in the year will fix this issue permanently.

In case you haven't heard the cost of .com/.net/.info/.biz domains will be going up later this year.

I got an email from the registrar we currently use about the price increases last night, so I thought I'd share the news.

The price increase isn't welcome, but it comes from the domain registries NOT from ICANN or the registrars. Unfortunately the registrars have to pass on some of their costs to companies like ourselves (although we are an accredited registrar for several TLDs we still aren't accredited by ICANN).

We've always priced com/net/org/info/biz in a "sane" way. We've never been the cheapest in the world, but we've always been able to maintain our prices. This isn't going to change, though it does mean that our margins will be slightly tighter than before.

If you're used to registering domains directly with us, then you have nothing to worry about, as we don't intend to increase our prices in the foreseeable future.

If you're using other companies to register .com etc., then you may need to keep a watchful eye on their pricing. Some of the registrars have been pricing themselves so low that an increase will be inevitable. If you're using one of those registrars I'd recommend you look at renewing domains for multiple years now before the price increases kick in on October 14/15.

We took delivery of a second load of Dell kit later this afternoon.

Since we had so many Dell servers it only seemed logical to use Dell cabinets, so we got a couple of them.

They're not terribly exciting to look at, but using Dell cabinets with Dell servers will mean less messing about. If anyone has tried racking Dells into non-Dell cabinets when they've been given the wrong rail kits you'll know what I'm talking about :)

One of things that I have a love / hate relationship are servers. For the MD of a hosting company that's probably an odd thing to say.

I love the fact that we have so many.

I don't love the fact that they cost so much - the numbers involved get a bit silly when you buy as many as we do!

We get a lot of our hardware from Dell.

At the moment we are working on a project which needs quite a bit of hardware, so we're currently taking delivery from Dell by the van load.

We got a van load of servers today, so at lunchtime Paul Kelly, our CTO, took this photo of some of the boxes stacked up in our warehouse (that's another day's story!)

For the geekier types - you can probably work out that a lot of the smaller boxes are rail kits, while the bigger boxes are for rack mountable servers.

The photo was taken with a Nokia N95 if you are interested :)

Yesterday at lunchtime there were some issues on our network.

I'll try to explain what happened in simple terms and also explain what we are going to do to avoid this type of issue arising in the future.

If anyone has any queries about the explanation please feel free to ask via comments or email us directly.

Timeline: 13:55 - 14:18
Affected Customers: Any customer on the shared firewall that has a dedicated server or has colo with us was affected during this incident. This also included our shared hosting clients.
What happened?

At around 2pm yesterday afternoon a segment of our main network was sluggish and people would have experienced latency and packet loss.

Why?

As you may know our main network is firewalled. We have a pair of firewalls setup in HA (high availability) to protect the bulk of our clients, which includes all our shared hosting clients on both windows and linux, as well as a large number of clients on dedicated servers or with colocated machines.

Firewalls are basically computers. Depending on how much money you want to spend on them you get different capabilities. While our firewalls are perfectly adequate under most conditions they have limits.

When a server behind the firewall was compromised and started pumping out large amounts of traffic the firewalls were pushed to capacity. While the network was up at all times it would have been slow and unresponsive until our engineering team were able to take action.

What action was taken?

The server that had been compromised was disconnected from the network until the issue had been resolved / removed.

How can we avoid this in the future?

We had been planning to upgrade the firewalls in any case, this is now being moved forward. The new firewalls will be able to carry larger amounts of traffic so this kind of issue will have a lower impact should it arise again.

For the last few months we have also been actively encouraging clients to opt for their own firewall(s).

And now for the more detailed breakdown:

Outage Information with Timeline of Events

13:53 C program downloaded onto a customer's machine via a hole in their
programming code.
13:55 Code compiled and executed. A result of this was 80mbit/s of
additional traffic heading towards the shared firewall service during peak lunch time traffic.
14:05 Our engineering team noticed latency of SSH and terminal services connections to machines on the network behind the firewall were laggy or intermittent.
14:06 Senior onsite engineers begin to investigate the issue.
14:08 One of our external traffic links was carrying approx 50mbit/s more
traffic than normal (some traffic from the affected host never made it past the firewalls) and they begin to check access switches for which equipment cabinet has the infected host.
14:15 The host responsible for this increase in traffic was identified and
their switch port was shutdown by a network engineer.
14:16 Services begin to return to normal and the load on the firewalls CPU
drops back to acceptable limits.
14:18 All services are back to normal

The IE Domain Registry have finally released details of the policy change on personal domains which I've mentioned in the past. (For a long rant please see my personal blog)

We will be offering personal IE domains from October 31st 2007 onwards.

For clarity I am republishing the full text of the IEDR's press release:

The IE Domain Registry (IEDR), the managed registry for Ireland’s dot-ie domain names, today announced the relaxation of the rules for registering personal dot-ie domain names for individuals. This policy relaxation comes into effect following full consultation with the dot-ie reseller community and industry organisations.

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?

Starting Monday 10th September 2007 we'll be running a special promotion on new dotmobi domain registrations.

I've mentioned dotmobi in the past.

It's the domain for the mobile web.

Forget about WAP - think of browsing and using the internet and online services on your mobile device - be that a Nokia tablet, an n95 or even on an iphone.

It doesn't have to be a painful experience!

In any case we'll provide more details of the offer on Sunday night / Monday morning.

I mentioned not so long ago that we were going to be doing some rebranding.

You'll see this happening slowly until the new site launches, then it will be a little bit faster.

The kind of things that are going to change on the outside are:

• Email signatures


• Web addresses


• The logo's colour scheme


• Email addresses (not sure about that yet!)


• Print ads


• Online ads


• Links back from other sites

We're not dumb. In fact we always try to hire the best and the brightest, so we're not going to be doing away with anything. If you are used to going to a particular URL to access a service of some kind it will still work. It might redirect to a new one, but the old links will still work.

If we do change email addresses over to the .eu domain, which we will probably have to do at some point, all the old ones will still work (I still get mail on about 5 variations of our main domains as it is!).

The thing that is going to be the most painful is how the search engines handle matters.

When we launched our current website about 3 years ago (can it really be that old?) we changed all the URLs and pages around completely. We didn't have any choice, as we were changing the site's backend completely.

The earlier iterations of the Blacknight company site didn't have a "backend" per se, unless you call notepad / dreamweaver / editplus / vim backends. (If you want to see them they're on archive.org - though you'll need to do some detective work to guess the domain!)

When we moved to using Typo3 as our CMS all the inbound links were lost except to directories eg pages that were accessible via a "/".

We had to work hard with the developers (2Bscene) who were also assisting us with SEO to get things sorted out. Thankfully Tom Doyle knows his stuff and we were able to maintain our pagerank and get reindexed quite quickly.

This time round we will have to be very careful, but we have learnt from our past experiences and our past mistakes.

Taking a hit in terms of SEO is something we won't be able to avoid entirely, though we will be trying our best to minimise the impact!

Yes - that is a very big image!

But it hopefully caught your attention

Ken McGuire has made a series of PodCamp logos and buttons available for people to put on their blog / site.

Podcamp is a free event and takes place in Kilkenny city (about 30 minutes from our offices) on September 29th 2007.

If you haven't registered, why not do so now?

It won't cost you anything!

EDIT: Fixed the links.