When people leave comments on our blogs, we send them a confirmation email. If they click the link in the message, they have confirmed their identity and we publish the comments. One problem is that many people use spam blocking software or an ISP like Earthlink that offers spam protection.
We're not sending spam, but we get bounce-back email to our service address all the time that read "If you want this message to go through, fill out this form and type the word you see in the picture. Then we'll release your mail to the recipient." I get a lot of these. I fill the forms out and I do my best to make sure that comment confirmation email gets to the people who made the comments. The one that I hate doing is Earthlink's. They incorrectly parse our service account's name into first name "Inc." and last name "Weblogs" and if you submit the form without correcting it, they give an error message that your name cannot have a period in it.
Why give me a form that is already populated with values that are guaranteed to fail?
Brian Alvey
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Not usable
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A face for radio
So this afternoon Jason added his first podcast to his blog and it got me thinking about when I'd be podcasting. Checking our stats, he has more than ten times as many posts as I do, so it looks like I'm due for a podcast in 2015. Maybe I'll start sooner than that.
If I podcast as frequently as I blog, we can call it The Brian Alvey Annual Podcast.
If I did one this week I think I'd steer clear of things like c|net slamming Engadget or the ads in our RSS feeds. I'd probably cover the angles of popular news stories that mainstream media are missing. Like what if Jennifer Wilbanks, that bride-to-be who wasn't really kidnapped, and her fiance John Mason really do reschedule their 600-person wedding? Will anyone show up? What if he hires real Hispanic thugs to kidnap her in a blue van right before the wedding? Will anyone even look for her? That would be great revenge.
Yeah, I'm definitely going to podcast. Just not soon. There's lots of stuff left to build and we're not done moving servers around.
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Time Traveler Convention
They are holding a time traveler's convention at MIT in a few days. The cool thing about a time traveler's convention is that you only have to have one meeting ever. I'm busy this year, but I'm sure I'll end up going to it a couple of times with my family when I'm older. See you there.
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Hosting updates
We have quotes from a couple of popular hosting companies and more quotes and conference calls are on the way. One question that has come up was about marketing and trading advertising space in exchange for reduced hosting costs. Of course! We're a start-up. If someone wants to charge us less in exchange for promotion on blogs like Engadget, TUAW, Autoblog and TV Squad, we're into that.
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Weblogs, Inc. is looking for a new hosting company
Here's what we're looking for:- Database: We need a pair of database servers. 4 CPUs and 6GB of RAM each. Windows 2003 for running Microsoft SQL Server Enterprise edition. We also need fast drives with hardware RAID 1+0, not software mirroring. 4 fast 73GB drives is what we've been running, but we're open to having more drives and more space.
- Web: We need 3 Windows web servers. 2 CPUs each. 2-4GB of RAM each. At least 200GB of disk space, again mirrored and we prefer many smaller faster drives over giant slow ones and we need RAID 5.
- Bandwidth: We are serving about
400GB6TB per month and we're only getting bigger. [That 400GB figure we had was way off. Looking at our network reports, we're in the 4 to 8TB range.] - Firewalls: We need redundant, dedicated firewalls.
- Future: Soon we're adding some Linux web servers and we'll need load balancing, so this can't be a Windows-only host.
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Blogging in bursts
So after a six week lapse in blogging, here I am making my second post of the day. Don't get used to it...yet.
Logicworks stepped up and gave us Nick for the afternoon and it looks like we've resolved our biggest server issues. We're also planning on taking advantage of their managed database hosting services. They have a whole new division dedicated to scaling Microsoft SQL Server applications. That's what we do so it sounds like a great match.
I was flipping through our sites (because they actually respond for a change) and clicked on the links to my Meet The Makers site. Today is the two year anniversary of the beginning of my interview series. In 2002, I did three Meet The Makers events with Jason. When Jack was born in January of 2003, I gave up on the live events and did some phone and email interviews to keep the site fresh, but soon Jason and I had started kicking around some other ideas for projects we could collaborate on. Out of all our ideas, our favorite one was creating a blog publishing company.
At this point my Meet The Makers email address is 99.9% spam, so I shut it off a few days ago. Soon the whole MTM site will get archived and point to my new blog along with all of my other old sites, which will live in the new version of our blogging platform. No reason to have an out-of-date resume site offering to build web sites for people when I couldn't possibly take on consulting work.
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A lonely path, an uphill climb
I think it was Yogi Berra who said, "No one visits Weblogs, Inc. anymore. It's too crowded."
If I had to choose between having server problems that no one noticed or having server problems that people in other countries blog about, I'll take the one where people notice. Saturday morning we switched to a new database server with fast drives and yesterday at noon the whole platform went south. Dave and I spent eight straight hours yesterday looking for the source of our problems and came up with a few things:
- Our database server has anywhere from 220 to 400 open connections that are identified as "AWAITING COMMAND";
- Our web server is still having 5 to 30 second long connection outages on its public network card about once an hour; and
- We scheduled some new database jobs that we had only done some light testing on before moving to the new server and putting them into constant rotation.
We turned off those new jobs last night at Logicworks' recommendation - and a few other jobs for good measure - and it seemed to help, but as we were doing that it was evening and our traffic curve was dying down.
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Parking rage
I was picking up my dinner two nights ago and instead of taking the long way around the block and parking on the side street, I spied a meter space on the corner and pulled in. Dinner wasn't ready yet, so I had some hot tea and waited for them to finish up. Returning to my car, I saw a big man doing something strange to my car and my first guess was that he was putting a flyer on my windshield. As I got closer, I saw that he was probably ticketing me.
"Are you giving me a ticket?"
He looked up at me startled and backed onto the curb mumbling. I couldn't make out his answer, so I asked him again. He said he was giving me a ticket, but he was clearly surprised to see me there and must have thought that I was going to flip out and attack him.
I asked him how late the meters ran here. He said 8. It was 7:30, but it was darker than most midnights. I told him that it was so dark, I didn't even think about it. I was just going to stand there while he ticketed me, but he motioned for me to get in my car and started giving the car in front of mine a ticket.
I rolled down my passenger window and thanked him on my way by. I'm really pretty calm about tickets. You only get them when you deserve them. There's a rule. You broke it. You get a ticket.
It's other drivers that make me go nuts, not meter attendants.
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Looking for an IIS 6 genius
We've had little micro-outages on one of our new servers and I know there's someone out there who knows this stuff like the back of his or her hand. I'm not looking for someone to just come in and change a few settings and make the outages disappear. I'm looking for someone who knows performance tuning and can set up IIS 6 to handle heavy traffic loads - someone who can serve as a senior advisor/resource after the initial project.
If you know anyone who runs big-time Windows web sites, please send them my way.
Thanks.
Update: We've had some great people respond and we are already working with one of them. Can't you tell?
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Panix domain name hijacked
When I first came back to NYC after college I had a job working as a night secretary and tech support guy. Both of those roles were a bit of a stretch. I was a lousy secretary and horrible at using Word, but I would be a stellar one today. I knew a bunch about Macs and even had a repair certificate after working at an Apple dealer in Texas, but I really had a lot to learn about computers.
I learned Appletalk and Ethernet networking, network wiring, email administration and a ton about software, especially Word and Excel working with analysts who put together groups of investors to buy and sell airplanes.
The email administration was particularly cool since this was 1991 and we had a ring of Macintosh email servers relaying email between Hong Kong, London, Tokyo and New York over high-speed modems (9600 baud!). The whole system was set up by Alexis Rosen.
Alexis Rosen ran Panix, which is short for "public access Unix" and is the oldest commercial Internet provider in New York, providing access since 1989. He was this nutty, expensive (but not at all looking back) consultant and it would be safe to say that he hated me. If he didn't, he should have. They would use me for everything they could, since I was cheaper and always in the office and if I busted something or there was anything I couldn't figure out, they called Alexis.
Eventually, I was up to speed enough for everything the company needed and Alexis didn't come around anymore, but I kept track of his ISP's progress. Panix was never swallowed up in a dot com merger and they didn't go down in flames in the dot com crash. They were stable. They catered to a hardcore crowd who wanted shell access and they are run by an Internet guru.
So I was surprised to hear today that panix.com is no longer taking people to Panix. It is now owned by an Australian company, the DNS is run out of the UK and panix.com email ends up in Canada.Panix didn't approve this transfer. Their name was hijacked. Panix is diverting everything to their panix.net domain, but there are a lot of services that are hard coded to panix.com and it's a huge mess.
Hopefully they can get this resolved. I saw a copy of the note Alexis sent to Network Solutions to try and get the situation cleared up. He got a response that basically said he was out of luck. This is like Bill Gates being put on hold by Microsoft when he's looking for a little tech help with Windows XP.
If they get this name thing resolved and start any kind of domain name transfer reform movement, I'll sign up. It's the right thing to do and maybe Alexis will hate me less.
This is insane. How much software would stop working if this happened to aol.com or microsoft.com? How many businesses would lose money if it was a few days of redirected ebay.com or amazon.com? Maybe they're next.
GrimJack
EZ Street
Jon Sable, Freelance