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Oh Brother!

Robert — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 14:22:54 +0000

I’m going to do a short review of another Brother label printer but I just got this link to a Brother QL-570 from buy.com for $35 shipped (not a bad price)… This is an address labeler so I was interested but then I read:

The Brother QL-570 Label Printer can print up to 50 labels per minute (faster then one per second!).

Did I miss a memo or something?? When did we change the number of seconds per minute to 50? Maybe it’s one of those European things like the electricity being at 50Hz instead of 60… Since last I checked, and until someone sends me a copy of the memo, we still have 60 seconds in a minute. So to be “faster than one per second”, it would need to print MORE THAN (not “up to”) 60 per minute. So does the copy writer for Brother’s specs need to go back to grammar school science class, or are they playing fast and lose with the features list?

I hate things like this… I’m sure they know that it’s not faster than 1 per second. They shove this garbage in there expecting up to just read and accept it without thinking. It’s as if they think we’re stupid… maybe we are, we keep letting them get away with it.

Hosting Companies Unite to Provide Relief for Haiti.

Robert — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 20:33:01 +0000

On January 12th, a series of earthquakes measuring 6.5 to 7.3 on the Richter scale devastated Haiti. There is now a critical shortage of essential supplies and support personnel to assist the people of Haiti through this crisis.

Although normally fiercely competitive, as members of the hosting community we know that the power we wield as a group is much more than we can wield individually. And so we’ve come together to help assist those affected by this disaster. With the generosity of all our combined customers, we hope to make a difference. And you can too. One dollar helps. One hundred dollars helps one hundred times more.

Please visit and consider supporting the Hosting for Haiti project today – Read more at http://www.hostingforhaiti.com/

Webinar: Joomla – Web Based Content Management and Data Security – EMEA

Robert — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 14:00:17 +0000

http://www.mysql.com/news-and-events/web-seminars/display-485.html

Wednesday, January 27, 2010

Join us for this informative technical webinar with Connectage.com and a member from the Joomla core team, which will explore the benefits of an open source Content Management stack based on Joomla and MySQL.

This webinar describes how Joomla offers excellent content management and distributed authoring capabilities as well as reliable data security through MySQL. It will detail use case examples of organisations who have adopted Joomla as a highly visible content management platform in publishing and public sector healthcare where data security was a paramount consideration.

Joomla provides a flexible, extendable content management platform and runs on an open source stack and comes embedded MySQL as the default database.

Connectage.com is a specialist Joomla development and integration company with many sites delivered on the Joomla/MySQL platform and a range of essential Joomla extensions for e-commerce, e-learning, taxonomy and search management.

WHO:

Phil Doyle, Connectage.com
Wilco Jansen, Joomla

WHAT:

Joomla – Web Based Content Management and Data Security – EMEA web presentation.

WHEN:

Wednesday, January 27, 2010: 10:00 Central European time

Wed, Jan 27:	09:00 Western European time
Wed, Jan 27:	11:00 Eastern European time

The presentation will be approximately 45 minutes long followed by Q&A.

How to Set up a Microsoft SQL Web Server cluster

Leif — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 14:00:25 +0000

Types of clusters:

A cluster is basically referred to as grouping of similar things to reduce the load or work of a single one. When it comes to servers there are 2 types of clusters :

1) Load Balancing Web Server ;

Load balancing Web Server is setup so that the traffic load is distributed among a number of servers instead of one single server. It involves a number of servers which are setup in such a way that the traffic is equally distributed among all of them. Due to this kind of a setup, the network load is not concentrated on one single server and this helps in improving the reliability with the tremendous improvement in performance. This kind of setup is also available for 2 or more nodes in the cluster.

2) Failover cluster Server :

Failover cluster also involves a number of servers but this is not the same as Load Balancing servers. Failover, as the term suggests, is setup to provide high availability even after there is an hardware or software failure. Once there is a software or an hardware failure, an action is taken by the cluster immediately so that the resources of the server are moved to another server. Cluster is informed once the hardware of software failure has taken place as the cluster keeps on monitoring the resources.

Real time failover for hardware and software failures including the current status of the applications can be acheived by fault-tolerant failover cluster. But this requires a better software application and more hardware and this is due to the fact that the condition of the current applications must be known. The applications which are currently in use are lost while the failover process is going on by the hardware and the software components and these should be recovered.

Microsoft’s Cluster Service (also known as MSCS) is exactly opposite to the true fault-tolerant cluster and is built in as a high-availability cluster. This is better as the cluster will not require specialized fault-tolerant solution and can work with more applications with less hardware also. This will definitely reduce the price. The cluster will not be in a good position after the failover but will be able to recover from a hardware or software failure. Two servers (nodes) are supported by the MSCS high-availability solution.

Basic hardware and software components

A common set of hardware is involved which are actually two servers nodes in a cluster. Both the servers in the cluster are connected to the network and both of them have there own operating system. The harddisks are external but they are connected to the servers through a network. A drive controller connects the shared disks to the servers. A Storage Area Network (SAN) is commonly used for this purpose.

Only one of the nodes in the cluster is active at a time. They are not active together and hence this solution is also called as an active/passive solution. The resources of the cluster is used up by the active server (node) and the active server writes all the data on the Shared disks. If one node fails the other one comes into play. To make sure that all the nodes are working properly, a signal known as a heartbeat is sent accross the private network to which all the servers are connected. If the active server fails, the passive server gets a signal about it through the heartbeats and once it receives the signal, it starts working as an active server and starts using all the resources of the cluster.

How to Install SQL Server in a cluster ?

Operational cluster is required to install SQL server in the cluster. Follow the steps given below to install Operational cluster.

1) First, install a Windows Server edition which supports MSCS on each server.

2) Now, make sure that each server in the cluster is connected to a Public network which is required to receive requests.

3) Make a different network and all the servers shouldn’t be connected to this network as this network should only be established between two servers within the cluster. This network will only be used for the heartbeats to send signals.

4) You will have to create a user account for the service account so that the cluster operates under this account in the domain. Make sure that you add this account to each Administrator’s group of each server.

5) Now you will have to connect the Shared harddisks to the server and you will have to power off the servers for this purpose. Once you connect the Shared harddisks to the servers make sure that the resources are being used by the server. Turn on node number one of the cluster.

6) Install Microsoft Cluster service and then configure it through control panel. Follow the steps given below to do this.

a. Go to Control Panel.

b. Then, Add/Remove Programs

c. Finally, Windows Components

7) You will have to give a name to your cluster and also assign an IP address with the Shared disk resources.

Now turn on the second node in the cluster and move to the First one (Original one) once the second one is online. Once you get back to the original one, to add another node use the Cluster Administrator.

Note : You will be able to install the second node quite easily in comparison to the first one as it will be based on the configuration of the second one.

Once you have installed the cluster sucessfully and everything works fine, follow the steps given below to install SQL server into the cluster :

1. To begin the installation process, you will have to insert the SQL Server Enterprise edition CD. If the installation does not start auto-matically, launch the setup through setup.exe.

2. Select Virtual Server on the computer name screen and enter a name by which you would like the Cluster be referred.

Note : This name is a Virtual name and is just like the hostname of a server.

3. Now make a service account to run the SQL web server and make sure that you provide Administration rights on each node on the cluster.

4. You will have to assign an IP address, Shared Resources and a service account to the SQL server while the installation.

Once you have done all the above steps correctly, a copy of SQL Server server will be installed on each node by the setup program within the cluster and the setting of the cluster will be installed automatically. Now you will be able to control the SQL server services by the cluster administrator.

New Lagniappe Internet ad in Ping! magazine

Robert — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 21:58:36 +0000

Lagniappe Internet LLC has a new half-page ad appearing in the Ping! magazine. See the Oct-Nov 2009 issue page 32. The pup in the photo is one of our own… Doug. We’re pleased to be partnering with Ping! and are looking forward to a long relationship with them. As part of the partnership, all existing and new U.S. based customers are getter a free subscription to Ping! after they’ve been with us for a month.

Finally some good news on Linux+DVD

Robert — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 20:22:54 +0000

After having to file a paypal dispute and numerous emails back and forth with failed promises…

My 1st 3 issues finally showed up today… 2 and 1/2 months after I ordered them. Tux showed up a couple of weeks ago. Hopefully from here on out things will be straightforward.

Find ripped off content

Robert — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 12:00:59 +0000

The other day I blogged about tynt.com’s tracer program and how to stop it from annoying you while browsing. The idea behind it makes sense to a lot of web publishers. You don’t want people ripping off your content. But the post the other day pointed out how easy it is to get around these measures.

Google has a feature called Google Alerts, http://www.google.com/alerts, which lets you find content and emails it to you. I strongly recommend that you set up alerts for your domain name, and company name at a minimum, and get them emailed to you as they happen. This lets you keep on top of what people are saying about your company.

It would be trivial to include a fairly unique phrase into pages you are wanting to try to protect. Then setup an alert for that phrase and have Google email you. Sure you may get some false positives, but provided the phrase is unique enough, it should be few and far between. Remember to use double quotes, like “this is my phrase” so that google doesn’t match “this website is not the same as my website, even though it has the same words as my phrase“. See how all the words are there, but it’s not the phrase. And it could miss a copied page if they did enough editing on the copied content. But since these people are basically lazy, they won’t edit the page much if at all. So it should catch the majority of them. Catching the others probably won’t happen with the other “solutions” either if they’re modifying the content that much.

Secondary cPanel DNS with cPanel’s Clustering

Robert — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 05:01:21 +0000

cPanel has an option to cluster cPanel servers for DNS services. This allows you to have a true secondary, or tertiary, or… , dns server for your cPanel based hosts. This option is called Clustering and is installed but turned off on the default installation. But fortunately, the it is easily enabled. And if you don’t have a second cPanel server, cPanel offers a freely licensed “DNS Only” version. This is basically just the dns portion of the software… but for clustering acts the same as a standard cPanel server does. If you want the DNS Only version it can be obtained here: http://www.cpanel.net/products/cpanelwhm/related-server-software.html

Step 1 – Get your 2nd cPanel server (or cPanel DNS-Only server) up and running… we’ll call it “ns2″, assuming “ns1″ is on the main server.
Step 2 – Log into ns2′s WHM at http://your.ip.address:2087/ with your root password
Step 3 – Under ”Cluster/Remote Access” on the left side, select “Configure Cluster”
Step 4 – Under “Modify Cluster Status”, enable dns clustering if it is disabled.
Step 5 – Back under “Cluster/Remote Access” select “Setup Remote Access Key”.
Step 6 – Go ahead and “Generate New Key” for some reason I’ve had trouble with the existing key the 1st time.
Step 7 – Copy the Current Access Key, make sure you select the WHOLE KEY … scroll down to get it all.
Step 8 – Log in to ns1′s WHM with your root password
Step 9 – Under ”Cluster/Remote Access” on the left side, select “Configure Cluster”
Step 10 – Under “Modify Cluster Status”, enable dns clustering if it is disabled.
Step 11 – Under the Servers in your cluster section, add the ip address of ns2 and click configure.
Step 12 – When prompted for the access key, paste the whole key into the box.
Step 13 – Back under “Configure Cluster” your new ns2 should now be listed, change the Role to “Synchronize Changes” to start sending dns to that server.
Step 14 – Under “DNS Functions” on the left pane, select “Synchronize DNS Records” to push existing records to the new server.
Step 15 – You should now be able to query the new nameserver with nslookup for existing domains that you serve.
Step 16 – If all went well, update your registrar with the new name and ip address of your new secondary nameserver.

This is the perfect application for a small vps… We even offer a secondary cPanel dns only vps service that we install it for you, and only handles dns for a rather reduced rate of $5.95/month at Lagniappe Internet, http://www.LagniappeInternet.com/ . Perfect for vps resellers who don’t want the expense of maintaining their own secondary cPanel server but want the redundancy of a real secondary dns server.

WebHostBootCamp – Winter 2009

Robert — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 20:00:12 +0000

WebHostBootCamp is coming back… The Winter 2009 virtual conference is set for December 7 through 9th. The premier session this past June was a great success. Even seasoned hosters like myself with more than 10 years of experience, learned many new things. We’re looking forward to the Winter conference… WHBC has annouced that there will be 18+ breakout sessions, 3 keynotes, and networking events as well. Learn more at http://webhostbootcampvirtual.com/

HostGator – AGAIN on Inc 500 Fastest Growing List

Robert — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 05:01:17 +0000

Included in the new list of the 500 fastest growing private companies are many technology and internet business. But we wanted to point out that at # 239 is HostGator.com with 896.4% increase! Hostgator is not new to the list either… This just goes to show that it is possible to build the webhosting business by defining your services well, and taking care of your customers. Congratulations to HostGator – Keep up the good work!