Technical Ramblings

Set up mapserver for an interested web-hostee over the weekend. (If you’re interested in hosting a domain with mapserver available, please contact me. Barring extra needs, cost will probably be $10/month.) He set up a WMS+Shapefile layer to demonstrate the power of mapserver for me: this is now available at massradar. Radar imagery is provided via an Iowa State WMS Server, which also has data for the Entire country. Now I really want to set up Google Maps with a radar layer.

If you’re reading this, welcome to Bia, the new home of crschmidt.net and associated webhosting.

Athena services are slowly switching to bia. I’ll do a rundown of what I did post-friday, when I’m sure I’ve actually got everything working, but one cool trick I pulled is to use:

for i in 25 110 143 587 993 995; do
iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -p tcp –dport $i -j DNAT –to-destination 64.92.170.181:$i; iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -p tcp -d 64.92.170.181 –dport $i -j SNAT –to-source 65.110.51.60;
done

The biggest problem I had been having up until this point was how to migrate mail. Web stuff is easy by comparison: You just tell people not to update their MySQL content in the meantime, and have them switch their DNS. But mail is hard. During the time when DNS has been switched, hours or days can go by with cached MX records clogging up older systems. This system basically turned athena into a beefy NAT router for bia on all mail ports: Thus, when someone sends mail, it opens port 25 on athena, which actually opens port 25 on bia, and talks to it. Immediately after this, I did a final rsync of all the /home/vmail/ dirs, and turned off Postfix on Athena.

Pretty nifty solution to what seemed to be a hard problem.

Crucial Paradigm, by the way, has been an extremely helpful ally in the migration process. Many thanks to them for helping me get set up in my new home.

More details on the move and the reasons for it coming soon.

Recently, my hosted server – which runs this site, as well as a number of others – has been experiencing numerous mysterious restarts. I asked the hosting company why this was happening, and they did a diagnostic this morning, which is why you might have seen the site be down for about 3 hours.

The reply?

“Your server has been returned to service at this time. There was another heat issue with your server, frankly I’m not sure how it continued to operate (temps of 218 F or roughly 100 C. We have replaced both the cpu and heatsink and the server has been testing under load at a much more reasonable 42 C at this time. Please let us know if you continue to have any problems with this server.”

Yeah, I guess that might have an effect.

I’ve offered this to a number of small groups of people, but after working out most of the bugs that I’ve found, I’m ready to offer it to the larger audience that is the readers of this fine publication:

While I have seen many people preferring both Godaddy and Hostgator for their excellent prices and service for their web hosting process, it all depends on business to business which they would prefer.

I am currently the maintainer of a dedicated server, hosted by SagoNet, and the machine is set up to offer virtual hosted domains to any and all who need them. This hosting package includes the following:

• Web Hosting on Apache 2: All websites are hosted on Apache2 with PHP4 with most common modules installed. If you need a custom module installed, this can typically be worked out as well. Disk space is not limited.
• FTP access: FTP access directly to web directory, giving full access to access and error logs, as well the ability to create your own directories for storage
• MySQL access: Each account offers a MySQL database for you to use as you please.
• Subversion Repository (by request): Revision Control system hosted alongside your website
• Shell Access (optional, free of charge): If you want shell access, you’ve got it. (Please let me know before I set up the account).
• SMTP (using SASL authentication), IMAP, POP3, Webmail Access: Send/Receive mail from anywhere: on the road, at home, or anything else. Mail is provided using courier-imap/pop packages with Postfix, and you can have as many addresses as you want.
• Up to 100GB/month bandwidth: this offers basically limitless bandwidth for anything you need. (I doubt anyone would need this much bandwidth in a month: if you feel that bandwidth is a limiting factor for you, let me know and we will work something out.)
• Free installation of any packages in Debian Sarge: If there’s something you need, I’ll install it for you.

Stay away from the CPanel hassle. Get yourself on a real machine today, and don’t suffer the limitations of other web hosts! Get full shell access to your data. Gain the freedom of having access to the machine which hosts your files. Or, ya know. Just save me some cash 😉 View different shared web hosting plans and select the one that meets your demands.

Cost for serving depends on setup neccesary, but will not exceed $10 per domain. File a Request and I’ll get you a quote. If someone else is offering the same thing cheaper, I’ll match it.

If you are working on a Semantic Web related project, you may be eligible for reduced price or free hosting. Indicate this in your request.

All quotes will be answered in 24 hours or less.