HostEntrepreneur

For a while now we’ve used other Brother P-Touch printers for labeling equipment… and they worked. But figuring out how they’re going to look with a simple lcd screen was never fun. Then I got my hands on this handy little printer, the Brother PT-1230 “PC Connectable” printer. By PC connectable they mean it has a USB port.  Of course some program needs to be run to design a label, but for PCs with Windows prior to Win7, you can leave the switch on the back in basic mode, and the software’s on the device itself. For Windows 7, you need to download the enhanced version (which you probably want to do anyway for the extra features like barcodes), and throw the switch in the back.

The list price on this little sucker is a bit unrealistic at $79. But it’s often at half that at buy.com  ( Buy.com link ) and sign up for thier daily emails, and every so often (3 or 4 times a year maybe) it will go on sale. It was on sale a few weeks ago for $16.99 with free shipping.  If you want one decide beforehand and wait for the sale. Once you see it, don’t hesitate or it will sell out on you. It happened to me twice, once I “thought about it” and when I went back it was sold out, and the other by the time I read the email it was gone already. But as they say 3rd time’s the charm.

For anyone sending equipment to colo centers this can be a life saver. Label your equipment with hostname, main ip, contact name and phone number. It can really help them find you server in racks of dozens of servers… Also if you have multiple drives label each drive, for example, use /dev/sda1, /dev/sda2, etc.  This way if a drive fails, it makes them determining which drive to swap pretty painless. After all you’re paying for their time usually, you want them to be fast about it.  I also suggest using the brother “Extra Strength Adhesive” series of tapes. Be aware that there are multiple sizes (widths) of tape. The largest this will use is 1/2″, so the TZS231 gives you the largest printing area for black on white labels. I don’t recommend the TZS131 (black on clear) as they can be hard to read unless your surface is a light color.

One of the harder things for me is coming up with ideas for articles… I’ve been doing this a long time and trying to put myself back into the mindset of a relatively new webhosting entrepreneur can be difficult for me.  I have to think about what might they want to know. I’m not saying I know it all. That’s just plain impossible. There’s always something new to learn… and I love learning. But what I might be looking to learn might not be interesting to you.

So I was wondering what would some of the readers here want to read about?  What topics interest you?  My experience ranges from programming to building server class systems, from DOS (yeah real DOS I’m that old) to HP-UX, from MySQL & Microsoft SQL to Rocket’s (formerly IBM’s) UniVerse database system.  And I don’t know something about it, all the better… I do love learning and can usually relate 25 years of IT experience to the new information.

If you have a dedicated server on which you have a mission critical website running then it is surely not good for you to face any downtime. For this reason some techniques for backups are used. One of the techniques for backup is the Mirroring of the server. In this technique, two servers with the same configuration are setup. Out of these two servers, one server is the Master server and the other is the Slave server. This is done for the purpose of backing up the Master server. If due to any reason, the master server fails or faces any kind of problem then the slave server immediately takes its place. As a result of this arrangement, there is no downtime faced by any of the websites. This kind of arragement i.e. the mirroring solution is generally done with the help of FAM and RSYNC modules. This process is know as the Failover dedicated servers process.

Failover process is the process in which the Master server is replaced by the Slave server in case the Master server faces downtime i.e. fails due to some problems. The user and the applications which are requested to the master server are automatically directed to slave server. One more process is involved which is known as the Restroration process.

If the master server fails and the slave server is replaced instead of it, then the slave server will have the data modified after the master server has failed. Restroration process is the process in which the data which has been modified is sent back to the master server which is said to be its original place. Since the data on the master server is already maintained in the slave server the data does not require each and every file to be selected and transferred.

The data on the slave server will be of great benefit if the master server has crashed due to a disk crash which results in the complete data loss on the master server. But as the data is present on the Slave server, it is very easy to get the data back to the master server. The slave server is always up to date due to the RSYNC software and when the master server is ready and can be relied upon, the two server will not have the same information as the slave server has the updated data right from the time master server was failed due to some reason. Restroration is the process of copying the updated data to the master server once the master server is set to come online.

This kind of adjustment is very beneficial for you and it has a lot of advantages. But as there are advantages involved, there are disadvantages involved also. Actually this cannot be called as the disadvantage as the only thing is the cost which is invoved in this process i.e. the mirroring of the servers. As mirroring requires two dedicated servers of the same configuration, you will have to spend double the cost of the dedicated server you select for your websites. If you can afford this cost of having two dedicated servers of the same configuration then you should go for Mirrored servers as they will always help you to keep your websites online. Some of the web hosting providers do not charge for this kind of service apart from the server charges, so you should look for these web hosting providers.

failover dedicated servers, mirroring solutions, what are mirrored servers, working of mirrored servers

If you’re a webhost and have less than 10 employees, you may be eligible for Microsoft’s WebsiteSpark Program, http://www.microsoft.com/web/websitespark/. If you’ve been in the hosting business a long time, you might remember Microsoft’s Certified Hosting Partner’s program, where MS provided some support and leads for customers. This one appears to be the new incarnation of that program. 

You get software:  Microsoft Windows Server 2008 (or R2 if available) Web Edition plus SQL Server 2008Web Edition… so you’ll actually be in license compliance, something I bet most small Windows hosts are not. You also get Visual Studio Pro, Expression Studio 2 (or 3) or Expression Web 2 (or 3) to design and develop websites. 

Plus you get Support and Training from Microsoft and the network partners, and best of all, sometime in the future you’ll get “Visibility & Opportunities” – meaning probably a directory or providers and sales leads.

You can be in the program for up to 3 years, but one thing to note,  a $100 fee is due at exit. So it’s not totally free, but pretty dang close.

One of the things you’ll find is that things tend to go wrong at the worst possible moment… like when you’re not near a computer. MidpSSH lets you establish an SSH session to your server via using your Blackberry or many other models of phones. While it’s not the easiest to use and there are some quirks (like needing to select “type” from the menu before typing commands), but in a pinch it can be a life saver!

Sorry it’s not a better picture… but you get the point. The type is small but even my aged eyes can see it well enough to be useful. I wouldn’t want to use it all day long though.

One of the cool undocumented features is the ability to use an alternate port for SSH to connect to… Like we discussed before, you want to run SSH on another port other than 22. While in most cases security through obscurity isn’t a great idea, changing your ssh port actually cuts the attempts to break in down drastically. It could be that I missed it in the docs, but I didn’t see the ability to use an alternate port. However, it’s easy to do. When you enter the details for a session, on the end of a hostname just add a colon and the port number, so it looks like  alpha.mydomain.com:12322  where alpha.mydomain.com is the hostname, and 12322 is the ssh port in this example. Of course, use your real hostname and port number.

And yes it can use key pairs for authentication. It took a little work to get them to the server. In my case I hooked up the blackberry to the pc to get the public key off of it and then put it into the auth file with cut and paste in PuTTY. Once that was done I was able to authenticate with them quite easily.

Remember about your data charges to your wireless provider and don’t go overboard. But this little gem of a program can get you out of a tight situation when nothing else is available. You can find it at: http://www.xk72.com/midpssh/

This handy little device is a Remotely Controlled Power Distribution Unit or PDU. Think of it as a smart power strip…  It has an ethernet connection and gets its own IP address. It has a total of 10 outlets, 8 of which are remotely controllable.  Once networking is established, you can remotely log in to an embedded web server and turn power outlets on and off without having to be there physically.

But it gets better!  The software built into the unit can also monitor ip addresses via ping and automatically cycle the power if the server stops responding. For safety sake, you can set how many times it needs to not respond before cycling. This means your downtime for a hung server goes from 10 to 15 minutes IF someone is at the datacenter, or possibly worse if someone isn’t or is busy with other issues… to a couple of minutes while the server reboots. This can definitely help your uptime SLA.

The only thing I wish this had that it doesn’t is the ability to have multiple logins and be able to limit those logins to controlling individual ports. That would come in handy for companies that colocate servers for others, or offer dedicated servers to their customers. It would let them offer the customer the ability to reboot their box (and only their box). When I asked about it, I was told it may be added in a future firmware upgrade. But I just checked the company’s website and the latest firmware doesn’t address this yet. This isn’t a major issue for us but I could see it being one for some, and it’s a nice selling point if they added it.

We’ve bought ours from http://www.datacenterhardware.com/ and wholeheartedly recommend them – tell Benjamin that Lagniappe Internet sent you if you do order from them (we get no commission or anything like that but a little good will never hurts).

No, not the “water displacement” spray lubricant we’re all used to!   But this product, the “Turbo Air Rechargable Air Duster”  from the same people.  Available from buy.com (and I’m sure many other places) for about the cost of 2 cans of compressed air, it’s great in that you never run out (it’s basically an nice little fan with good bit of torque) provided you keep it charged up.  I’ve been playing with one for a week or so now and don’t plan on going back to the old throw aways cans ever again.  Now that’s got to be “greener” than all those empty cans in the landfill.

 Link to buy.com item: http://www.buy.com/retail/product.asp?sku=211190111  but check around you might even find it cheaper.