Tilting at windmills for a better tomorrow.
Birdhouse Hosting welcomes two new domains:
sms411.net: How to use SMS to stay in touch with your friends and family, have fun, save money, get information, and maybe even communicate during an emergency.
megcox.com: Veteran journalist Meg Cox offers fresh insights and resources on the topics of her most recent books: today’s high-tech quilt world and contemporary family traditions.
At the end of my rope with server loads caused by weblog and email spammers. SpamAssassin and Akismet etc. may keep spam away from users, but all that stuff still needs to be processed (and we’re talking about a huge percentage of all traffic).
Recently switched from the APF firewall to ConfigServer’s excellent CSF, which is integrated into WebHost Manager (the admin back-end for cPanel systems), and got thinking — the most heavily trafficked blogs here are already using spam rating systems that track IPs. The right script could harvest and rank those IPs and load them into the firewall in near real-time. Spent the past few evenings building a shell script to do just that.
reducer: Harvests bad IP addresses from multiple sources and adds them to the CSF firewall for cPanel systems. This version works with WordPress and Movable Type weblogs, and optionally the exim ACL deny system. Future versions will scan other sources for bad IPs as well.
Update, April 2008: Birdhouse Hosting has been running reducer system-wide for almost two years now, with great success. At this point, we wouldn’t even consider running a hosting business without it.
vim has a bad habit of chewing up a ton of CPU if user backgrounds it, closes their terminal window, or gets disconnected from the net with a vim session open. I see this every now and then on birdhouse – a vim process consuming 90% of CPU and owned by a user who’s not even logged in. Looked around for a solution for this apparently not uncommon problem on shared servers and didn’t come up with much, so wrote a quick shell script to dispatch justice when necessary: the vim reaper. Must be run as root, most likely via cron.
Just two months after doing a bunch of work to get the J-School’s web site unblocked in China, where censors had kindly blocked the entire server rather than just the China Digital Times domain, I’ve just learned that all of Birdhouse is now similarly blocked. We host a few China-related sites here, though to my knowledge none of them are hard-core political.
As if the censorship itself isn’t bad enough, the “block entire server IP” methodology is so grossly overreaching and unnecessary that it almost seems like an intentional attempt by the censors to punish not just the domain operator but also the host — inconveniencing dozens or hundreds of other innocent domain operators on the same shared server just to make a power point — and possibly to force the host to start saying “no” to people who want to operate China-related sites.
Time to start allocating more IPs…
One of my hosting clients — who is on a dedicated server — recently reported a strange problem: Some readers of their site were getting truncated downloads on MP3 files. Eventually we nailed the problem down to users of FireFox on Windows and Mac. FireFox for Linux was fine, and other browsers were fine as well.
After a testing splurge and much hunch following, we were able to eliminate upload methods, MP3 encoding tools, and MIME types as potential culprits. But neither I nor the data center are having any luck figuring out what actually is causing it. Google ain’t helping. Here are two links to bit-identical files on two different Linux servers:
One version on Birdhouse
Another version on Newwest
In both cases, the file is 5497828 bytes, permissions are the same, the MIME type is the same (and correct), and the file command reports:
StupidMistakes.mp3: MP3 file with ID3 version 2.2.0 tag
Both were put in place with wget from the same source. But if you’re using FF Win or Mac, the second link will appear to work, but give you only a few seconds of audio.
Theories welcome.
Birdhouse Hosting welcomes dhuff.org, the weblog of David Huff, who also maintains Via Media Dallas on Birdhouse.
The author is a regular, middle-aged guy from the N. Texas suburbs. Probably more liberal than most in this part of the world, but no fan of big gov’t either. This is where he writes about technology, culture, religion, and other things he pretends to know something about.
Birdhouse Hosting welcomes fromnicole.com, home of multimedia journalist Nicole Duarte, who also happens to be a shepherd.
Before journalism, I was a shepard, among other things. So any chance I get, I get out onto farms. Any farm. And in the absence of a farm, I make cakes with sheep on them and it seems to soothe my soul a bit.
Birdhouse Hosting welcomes awkward.org, home of Andrew Kimpton, former Be, Inc. engineer and Director of Development for BIAS, Inc. (makers of BIAS Peak and other cool tools). Kimpton’s blog is here.
Birdhouse Hosting welcomes Ch-infamous, the weblog of J-School student Joshua Chin. Some nice photos of his recent trip to India working with “Wildlife SOS, an Indian animal rights NGO that is trying to save sloth bears from rather painful and not terribly dignified lives as street performers.”
Josh Chin is a former apparatchik for the Chinese government. He also used to cook French food on a man-made floating island in San Francisco. He is from Utah and has spent a lot of time, probably too much, as a reporter in Asia. Now a student at the Graduate School of Journalism, he is aware of what a solipsistic thing it is to have a blog – and he’s fine with it.
Birdhouse Hosting welcomes arcus-associates.com:
Arcus is an independently owned technology company dedicated to building the best solutions for our clients’ technology needs. We specialize in information-rich application development, technology strategy and research.