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

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

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

Here are the details:

Position: Unix Engineer

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

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

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

Skills / Knowledge

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

PERSONAL ATTRIBUTES:

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

QUALIFICATIONS/ EXPERIENCE

* 3 years experience working in a similar role

Salary

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

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

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

We're currently working behind the scenes on a nice new shiny set of hosting services. (I've wanted to say "shiny" all day - sorry!)

One of the things that the new system should be good at delivering is pre-installed scripts alla installatron, which is our current solution.

Of course it won't be installatron, so it won't offer the current range of applications. It could offer a similar range of applications, but it would be nice to know which applications people would like to see...

Which applications are you interested in using?

Which applications can you live without?

Why do you use some scripts and not others?

Any feedback you can give us would be fantastic!

And if you are a developer you can make your applications available to our customers!!! If you're interested in finding out more email management@blacknight.com

Posted by Michele Neylon at 3:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (20) | TrackBacks (0)

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

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

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

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

There are two possible solutions:

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

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

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

- WP Cache
- WP Super Cache

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

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

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

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

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

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 !!

Posted by Michele Neylon at 4:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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

Posted by Michele Neylon at 4:22 PM | Permalink

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

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

Posted by Michele Neylon at 11:16 AM | Permalink

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!!

Posted by Michele Neylon at 11:59 AM | Permalink

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

Posted by Michele Neylon at 7:29 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (1)

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.

Posted by Michele Neylon at 11:44 AM | Permalink

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?

Posted by Michele Neylon at 12:56 PM | Permalink

As we are active members of Nominet, the .uk registry, we often have to modify, renew etc., domains on our account.

While it might be possible for each and every member of our staff to become intimate with the specific commands necessary to interface with the registry's systems it would be a bit unrealistic. Our staff have enough on their plates!

So just over a year ago I asked one of our technical staff to do up a simple, easy to use, web interface for non-technical staff to use.

Over a year later it's been re-written several times and now supports most of the Nominet automaton commands.

So you don't need to spend 3/4 of an hour reading up on which template you need to use to perform a specific action.

Now I would never be so silly as to say that it's attractive to look at, but it's not meant to be!

So, in the interests of helping the wider Nominet community we've decided to make the interface software available to other Nominet members.

NB: If you are not a Nominet registrar this software will not be of any use to you. I repeat. You need to be a Nominet registrar (tag holder) to use this. You'll also need to read the include README file carefully.

Although we're generous people we would ask that you maintain the copyright notice that is included.
Full details are in the aforementioned README along with our nice big disclaimer - simple version being - if your server explodes or anything else happens please don't complain to us.

So, without further ado here is the link to the software:
Nominet Automaton Web Interface

You will need a recent version of PHP 4 or 5 to make use of it. Further details in the "famous" README.

Any issues please let us know.

Posted by Michele Neylon at 6:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (8)

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

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

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

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

Posted by Michele Neylon at 3:13 PM | Permalink

PHP4 will be discontinued at the end of 2007.

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

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

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

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

Posted by Michele Neylon at 3:04 PM | Permalink

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

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

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

So what's that mean for our hosting plans?

Put simply they've just got that bit better !

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

Posted by Michele Neylon at 12:51 PM | Permalink

We're pleased to announce that php5 is now available on our shared linux plans

The nitty gritty details:

PHP 5.2.0
MySQL 4.1.21

Any new servers will be installed with php5.

Due to compatibility / sanity issues we will NOT be upgrading existing servers to php5 at this time.

Combined with our domain name sale there's no better time to move your hosting and domains to Blacknight!!

If you need php5 for whatever reason you may contact our support team

Posted by Michele Neylon at 5:06 PM | Permalink

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

It's available in mp3, iTunes and Ogg.

Posted by Michele Neylon at 9:17 PM | Permalink

Here at Blacknight we like to keep our "finger on the pulse" of the web development world.

We are also proud to innovate, which is why we are often the first company to introduce new technologies to the Irish market:
- Spam filtering
- PHP 5
- UML hosting

to name but a few

This time round it's Ruby On Rails, which has to be simply the coolest technology to emerge in the last couple of years.

Before releasing it to the public we have been asking experienced web developers to test it for us... They seem to be happy, so we think it's time to let you be the judge.

So without further ado:
We're proud to announce the immediate availability of Ruby On Rails on all our linux hosting plans. (all new signups will have immediate access - other servers will be enabled over the coming days)

To make it as simple as possible for you our Ruby on Rails hosting is integrated into our web hosting control panel. You can simply control your applications and configure them straight from within the control panel.

Have fun!

Posted by Michele Neylon at 7:58 AM | Permalink

Have you already started selling cool tshirts via your website?

If you haven't, then get to it!

Our partners Spreadshirt have produced a number of tools to cater to the more advanced users. You can download tools and code over on the new SpreadShirt Developer zone.

We'll be announcing a special offer from our partner very soon - so keep an eye on your inbox and subscribe to this blog's feed!

Posted by Michele Neylon at 1:19 PM | Permalink

A few days ago we offered free Ruby On Rails hosting to a number of people to help us test it all out.

While we thought that we'd get some interest, we never expected for it to receive the level of interest that it did.

So we'd now like to know what you have managed to do with it.

Maybe you have created the next web 2.0 cool app (sic), or maybe you've simply setup a blog or a forum.

No matter what you've created we'd like to hear about it!

Posted by Michele Neylon at 7:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Here at Blacknight we are passionate about the internet and technology and we love being able to share that passion with you, our clients and partners.

Over the last year there has been a lot of "buzz" surrounding a new scripting language - Ruby On Rails.

RoR describes itself as being aimed at providing "programmer happiness" so we'd like to know what you think.

We are currently beta testing Ruby On Rails on our linux hosting platform, so if you would like to give it a go please contact our sales team. We'll be giving away (yes - for free!) a number of hosting accounts and domain names to let people get "down and dirty" with this new language.

EDIT:

Just to clarify what we are giving away:

• Hosting - SoHo linux


• Domains - Choice of .com or .eu or co.uk

EDIT

We've had a tremendous response to the offer and have given away a number of .eu and .com domains throughout the day.

Posted by Michele Neylon at 10:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

As part of our ongoing upgrades and improvements we are delighted to announce support for two new technologies:

Php 5 (version 5.1.4) on Windows Server 2003

and

ColdFusion 7 on Windows Server 2003 also.

Both of these new options are available via the Helm hosting control panel for our Windows 2003 server clients.

With php, for example, it works in a similar fashion to the asp.net settings - you simply choose which version you want to use and off you go

Posted by Michele Neylon at 9:55 AM | Permalink

One of the questions we get asked regularly by clients and potential clients is about which platform they should use.

So what's the difference between windows and linux?

I could get into a lengthy discussion of open source vs. closed source software, but that wouldn't help anyone make up their mind.

For a simple website with basic contact details and a few pages of content there is very little difference between the two.

It doesn't matter whether you are using windows on your desktop PC or not, as the web server will be "serving" your content will not care.

What makes all the difference is when you go to do something more advanced with your website.

If, for example, you want to setup a blog (like this one) on your domain you will need special software and possibly a database to hold all the content.
While it is possible to use Perl, PHP and MySQL on windows server 2003 it is not possible to run ASP or ASP.net on linux. So if you want to try out applications written in asp or asp.net you should get a windows 2003 hosting account, which will give you access to a range of technologies such as:

• asp
• asp.net
• Frontpage extensions
• IIS
• Access database support
• Microsoft SQL server

We support both windows and linux for our hosting clients, so it's simply a matter of letting us know which technologies you want to make use of.

Posted by Michele Neylon at 9:15 AM | Permalink