Rackspace Conference Thoughts
I am presently sitting in the Delta Sky Lounge hacking this blog post because our flight from Atlanta to Little Rock is delayed. I am heading back from the Rackspace Reseller Conference to what looks like the Mt. Kilimanjaro of emails. If you have sent me something that I haven’t tended to in the past week and half, please know that I have it on my desktop and will get back to you as soon as I get home. To say it’s been a rough two weeks is an understatement.
The conference we attended was awesome. It gave us an awesome opportunity to network and meet in person some contacts that we have known and worked alongside for a few years now. Was pretty cool. I made about two pages of notes on this new MacBook Pro and didn’t get frustrated the first time and toss it across the room. That’s a sharp contrast to the less than 3 year old HP tablet PC I just had to trash. I will be going through these notes and throwing up some blog posts as soon as I get back to my office and climb out from underneath email hell, so stay tuned.
One really cool thing about the trip that happened today, I was sitting in the food court outside the conference having lunch and looked up to find one of my sports heroes as a child. Kevin Mchale of the Boston Celtics was just standing there getting a cup of coffee. Mchale was a sports star back when sports stars could be considered positive role models. Being the nerd that I am I had already twitpic’d the dude before he was finished putting sugar in his coffee.
Rackspace Reseller Conference
Just a heads up, my business partners and I are heading to Atlanta for the next three days to attend the Rackspace Reseller Conference. I will likely be in sessions for the biggest part of the next three days but will be checking email and voicemail whenever possible. If you are going to be in Atlanta for the conference be sure to send me a tweet, @cottonr and let me know. Maybe we can meetup between sessions.
Also, I will likely be blogging some things that I pickup during the conference, so stay tuned.
Checkout the O’Reilly Answers Social Network
I am typically not one to recommend a social network to my clients w/ the exception, of course, of the already established networks such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Tumblr, etc. My whole philosophy regarding social networking at this stage of the game is that if you want to build a community, build upon what’s already out there as much as possible (Facebook API, Twitter API) and don’t try to re-invent the wheel.
However, I have always felt that strong, reputable Niche networks could exist externally if they were packaged correctly. A good example of such a network that is currently in Beta right now is O’Reilly Answers. O’Reilly has a good vision with this network, and of course they have some really positive things in their favor already such as Awesome Reputation, an Established Following, and a Trusted Name, what more could you ask for?
You can also look at the Network and tell that there were some clear objectives put into place while developing this solution. They obviously wanted it to be user friendly, functional, and interactive. There are basically three ways you can interact inside O’Reilly Answers:
Share Your Knowledge
You can actually enter in blog posts and tag them according to your subject matter and other users can comment you on your posts. This is one area that I think they could have done a little differently. We all manage our own blogs externally, why would we want to post our content on their website as well and have 2 comment systems running at the same time to follow up w/ readers? My thoughts on this part are that they could have put into place some sort of RSS option where you could aggregate your content from your blog and have your friends inside the network click out to read your posts. Maybe I am not seeing the big picture on this, but as a workaround I posted about 3/4 of 2 blog posts into their network along w/ a link at the bottom to get to the remainder of my post on my blog.
Ask A Question
Since O’Reilly has been catering to the Technically Minded community for so long, you can rest assured that some pretty sharp folks are going to be hanging around in this community. Well, let’s say you have a question about a project you are working on, you can post that question to the community, tag it, and before you know it some of the sharpest minds in the world are answering your question. This is an area where I really see this network having value for a lot of us…
Answer a Question
Let’s say someone asks a question and you know the answer, you can provide them w/ your insight w/ ease. I think that this networking model is going to speed up the “obstacle to solution process” once the network get’s off the ground.
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Also, just a few notes regarding the Network as it is right now. There are obviously some bugs, I had a couple of errors pop up on me when I was setting up my profile, this is to be expected w/ a new release like this. Give them time, I am sure that O’Reilly will iron out all of the kinks very soon. Here’s some basic information that was forwarded to me today from our Account Rep at O’Reilly…
We’re launching the beta of O’Reilly Answers, and I’m inviting you to be part of it. In brief, O’Reilly Answers is a community site for sharing knowledge, asking questions, and providing answers that brings together our customers, authors, editors, conference speakers, and Foo (Friends of O’Reilly).
Why Answers, and why now?
O’Reilly is at the center of an amazing exchange of knowledge sharing and idea generation. We’ve created the usual means of facilitating communication between customers, O’Reilly folks, and the outside experts we call "alpha geeks" who contribute to O’Reilly books, conferences, and websites. We can connect through reader reviews, errata submissions, book forums, blog comments, Get Satisfaction, our customer service department, and more. But too much of this conversation is siloed, and not enough is public (e.g., discussions on our internal mailing list for editors, or personal responses to customer questions). O’Reilly Answers will be the place where much of that communication happens from this point forward.Why participate?
The lofty reason: Like O’Reilly, you want to "change the world by spreading the knowledge of innovators." That’s our mission, and we’ve been fortunate enough to build a community of passionate, committed people who love to learn and share their knowledge as they work towards a better world for us all.The "nice, but what’s in it for me" reasons: reputation, recognition, and rewards.
Get Recognized: "Find interesting people" is a core activity at O’Reilly, and an important component of our success. We see Answers as an important way to discover and connect with our next authors, online instructors, videographers, and speakers.
Build Your Reputation: You’ve learned a lot, why not get credit for all that knowledge? As your submissions to Answers are voted up, your personal reputation on the site increases. At launch, your reputation will be based solely on your participation in O’Reilly Answers. Soon, we’re expanding across oreilly.com, so the book errata and book reviews you’ve submitted, books you’ve registered, and conferences you’ve attended, will add reputation points. You’ll also earn badges to mark accomplishments and milestones.
Earn Rewards: Glory is great, but discounts and deals are nice, too. We want to reward your contributions to the O’Reilly community. Shortly we’ll have a point-based system in place that you can redeem for books, training, courses, and conferences. Details soon, but in the meantime, any actions you take now will count towards your total points.
This is just v.1: The best part of any project on the web is watching it take on a life of its own. With that in mind, we’re looking forward to *your* suggestions about where O’Reilly Answers should go, what features should be added, and what benefits and rewards we can offer all of you.
I’d like to acknowledge the projects that have proceeded Answers and inspired us, such as SitePoint Forums (we distribute their books), StackOverflow, Yahoo! Answers, Knol, and many others. They’re great resources, and we think the O’Reilly community can create a useful site that’s, well, a different kind of animal.
One last thing: O’Reilly Answers is in beta and you may encounter bugs. We’re still working on many improvements to the site, such as feeds for each tag, but would love to hear your suggestions for features and improvements. Please send any suggestions/questions/bug reports to answers@oreilly.com.
Until next time–
Marsee Henon
Also, if you should signup, be sure to add me as a friend, http://people.oreilly.com/cotton
Out of the Office: Pleth Corporate Retreat 2009
This weekend is our Pleth corporate retreat. Each year my business partners like to take some time away to focus on our business model. We have been successful at doing this too in some pretty cool venues, Las Vegas and Chicago just to name a few, but this year we are taking a little more laid back approach, we will be on Greers Ferry Lake this weekend on a pontoon boat, bouncing ideas off of one another that we have compiled throughout the year.
We have found that this process has helped us to refine our business tremendously. We will of course be examining our current products and service offerings, thinking of ways to improve them, and also doing the whole creative process for new directions.
All of this to say that I am signing off for the weekend and don’t expect to see me back in the office until next week! I do have a blog post on Usability that is scheduled to publish on Saturday but outside of that you probably won’t see much out of me except the occasional twitter or facebook post from me all weekend long, and trust me, I am ready for some R&R…
Oh, and by the way, once we are finished brainstorming this weekend I suspect we will have some new and exciting announcements so be sure to stay tuned to our corporate website (www.pleth.com) and our personal blogs, (www.gregorysmart.com) and (www.kegalsmart.com).
Also, if you are one of our existing clients and have ideas as to how we can improve on our existing products and services, please feel free to comment below, we would love to hear your feedback…
UNIX System Monitoring
Matt Critcher recently posted a review of Monit on his blog. We have been trying it out as a monitoring solution on our servers at Pleth. I get the impression from Matt’s post that he likes the software pretty well, I know he’s not a big fan of any kind of bloated software.
I checked Monit’s website this morning and was very impressed to see that they also have a free iPhone application that will allow you to track your systems from your phone. How cool is that? The software itself is also pretty cool. Monit can start a process, restart a process if it does not respond and stop a process if it uses too much resources.
Being a developer, one thing that I can see might be useful is that Monit also allows you to monitor files, directories and filesystems for changes, such as timestamp changes, checksum changes or size changes. There are several other solutions out there that will all you to track remote hosts also but they don’t have all of the functionality that monit has I don’t think. With Monit you can monitor remote hosts; and ping a remote host and can check TCP/IP port connections and server protocols.
I can remember a few years back I installed a similar solution to this on one our first servers for the purpose of tracking uptime and posting it on our website, it was a nice solution but it had so many security revisions with it that we eventually decided the risk wasn’t worth it in the long run. I can’t remember the name of the software we were using but I am sure it’s gone away by now… Here’s what Matt had to say about Monit on his blog:
When you maintain several servers each running several virtual machines and have anything else at all to do, it is impossible to keep your eyes on them 100% of the time. There are a handful of software packages out there that can do this for you, but most are either too bulky, too complicated, or lack the features that you want.
Scott Pinkston referred me to one the other day called Monit, which is the first one of these programs that I actually liked. Most of the others just have too much. This one is short, and to the point. Monit installs very quickly, and runs in the background as a daemon.
One very simple config file holds the configuration data for the services you want to monitor, and if you so choose, you can have a secure webpage display stats on your services. It can also be configured to email you (or call the beeper, etc…) if certain events occur, and best of all, is super lightweight. It won’t tell you if your version of apache needs updated and it won’t impress you with tons of buttons, whistles, and flash animations. But it will let you know if some process is running away, and it will kill it for you (and restart it if you have it configured)
So far, we have NO complaints. It’s licensed under the GPL, and they also sell a version (which we haven’t tried) that can monitor multiple servers from one central login for around $135.
Here’s a screenshot of Monit that I found on their website, looks pretty straightforward to me…
UNIX System Monitoring | www.mcritch.com
Focusing on MODx Hosting Solutions
I recently did a blog post for our corporate website about our MODx hosting solutions. As I have said in the past, we aren’t your typical hosting company, we very easily could be though given our advanced infrastructure, but for us that’s just not where our heart is. We tend to take more of a developmental approach to hosting, this is probably because we are developers first and foremost. The fact that we don’t spend as much time promoting our hosting solutions as we do our development services could probably be viewed as an injustice to those that are familiar with our infrastructure.
When it comes to our hosting solutions, the fact is that we probably have one of the most secure infrastructures on the market, with possibly the most value added services you will find anywhere else. We also rank very high when it comes to bandwidth and our storage rates are quite comparable to those offered on a national level. We can even provide developers and small agencies that are not interested in managing their own hosting infrastructure a viable and affordable alternative with our VPS (virtual private server) solutions.
Even though we don’t typically pursue hosting clients, we will occasionally notice a segment of the landscape that we would really like to reach, one of those segments is the MODx developer community. Here’s an excerpt from the post I did on MODx hosting solutions that we provide. (you can read the entire post here…) Given the fact that we know the software relatively well, possibly better than a lot of the larger, bargain basement providers out there, we feel as if we can do a better job hosting it for our clients.
One service that we have gotten very good at over time is hosting particular software, primarily Wordpress and MODx. My partner Greg and I almost work exclusively with these two products and we know the inner workings of these applications and can pretty much troubleshoot any problems that may arise with little cause for concern. Also, Matt Critcher has devoted a lot of time toward securing these applications and making sure that they run at optimal performance. In the case of wordpress, there are a lot of hosting providers out there that can provide one click wordpress installations through their control panels (us included), but with MODx, there aren’t a lot of hosting providers out there that have worked with MODx in comparison to some other CMS solutions that are out there such as Joomla or Drupal. This sort of is a good thing for us, it gives us an advantage over a vast majority of the hosting companies out there because we already have a good working knowledge of the software, and can provide straight to the point support on any issues our clients should have running the software. In fact, this site runs on MODx.
With this in mind, my partners and I are going to focus a lot of our attention toward the niche MODx managed hosting crowd that just wants to deploy their website from a developmental and management perspective and not have to be bothered with the actual hosting itself. We can provide one of the best hosting environments on the planet for MODx CMS as well as some of the most knowledgeable technical support for the software you will find. Again, we know this because we also deploy MODx solutions for our clients and manage them on a daily basis.
If you are interested in discussing your MODx hosting needs, please don’t hesitate to contact us and we will be glad to provide you with a free quote for managed or dedicated hosting.
If you have a need for MODx hosting, whether it’s 1 or 300 installations, please don’t hesitate to contact us if you think we can be of any assistance. We enjoy speaking with other developers who utilize this platform.
Pleth, LLC | MODx Hosting Solutions from Pleth
System Administrator Appreciation Day
At Pleth, we will be celebrating System Administrator Appreciation Day! What an awesome idea. I know that this holiday is probably not on those calendars you get for Christmas from your family each year, but it’s a pretty cool thing to add to it. Friday, July 31, is system administrator day across the country, it’s celebrated on the last Thursday in July each year. If you have a system administrator be sure to let them know how much you appreciate what they do behind the scenes. And if you have never had a conversation with your system administrator when you weren’t frantic about something, you should take it even a step further and take them to lunch or something because he / she probably thinks you are a turd…
I feel blessed because I have worked with a lot of system administrators over the years and can honestly say that Matt Critcher is quite possibly one of the best ones out there, and I have the pleasure of working alongside him putting out fires. Of course it’s usually him spraying the water and me pointing at the fire with a dazed look in my eye, and also sometimes denying any responsibility for the fire whatsoever!
So What is a System Administrator??
A sysadmin unpacked the server for this website from its box, installed an operating system, patched it for security, made sure the power and air conditioning was working in the server room, monitored it for stability, set up the software, and kept backups in case anything went wrong. All to serve this webpage.
A sysadmin installed the routers, laid the cables, configured the networks, set up the firewalls, and watched and guided the traffic for each hop of the network that runs over copper, fiber optic glass, and even the air itself to bring the Internet to your computer. All to make sure the webpage found its way from the server to your computer.
A sysadmin makes sure your network connection is safe, secure, open, and working. A sysadmin makes sure your computer is working in a healthy way on a healthy network. A sysadmin takes backups to guard against disaster both human and otherwise, holds the gates against security threats and crackers, and keeps the printers going no matter how many copies of the tax code someone from Accounting prints out.
A sysadmin worries about spam, viruses, spyware, but also power outages, fires and floods. When the email server goes down at 2 AM on a Sunday, your sysadmin is paged, wakes up, and goes to work. A sysadmin is a professional, who plans, worries, hacks, fixes, pushes, advocates, protects and creates good computer networks, to get you your data, to help you do work — to bring the potential of computing ever closer to reality.
So if you can read this, thank your sysadmin — and know he or she is only one of dozens or possibly hundreds whose work brings you the email from your aunt on the West Coast, the instant message from your son at college, the free phone call from the friend in Australia, and this webpage.
Critch on Drupal Security / PCI Compliance
Resident Server Administrator and all around Linux Guru, Matt Critcher, recently posted an entry on his blog about Drupal Security and PCI compliance. Matt has been running Drupal on his site for a while now and it seems to be working out well for him. I always look to Matt for security issues because he has an enormous knowledgebase between his ears when it comes to that sort of thing.
Making your website secure is one thing, but going the extra mile and making it PCI compliant is another thing. In the past I have recommended PCI Compliance only to our clients that do e-commerce, or gather sensitive client data, but it’s rapidly becoming a buzzword in the industry. I first learned about it in 2006 at a conference we attended in Las Vegas.
My business partners and I even partnered with HackerSafe, now owned by Mcafee, to sell PCI compliance solutions and certification to our clients back in 2006. If you are interested in learning more about PCI compliance or securing your website, be sure to give us a shout.
This site is running in a CMS called Drupal. It, like most CMS systems, allows users to easily create, edit, and delete content and manage many features of a website. But, like most, it is not without a few security flaws. Me, being a geek, and having more than a passing interest in security, decided to try to make this site a little more secure, and possibly even PCI Compliant.
It is possible to make Drupal PCI Compliant, but it takes a little work. Now, for the record I don’t have nor do I collect data that falls under this standard, but some people do, and some run Drupal. There’s not much information about the subject on the net, so I figure it’s worth writing about. But be warned that there is a trade-off. By default, Drupal is set up to be more convenient for its users. Putting these modifications in place will make you login EVERY time you close your browser window. To me, that’s not a problem. I actually prefer that to be the case. Others, well, you may not like it as much. YMMV.
First thing that you need to do is to force Drupal to use HTTPS for login. There are tutorials all over the net on how to install mod_ssl or Apache-SSL and configure it for HTTPS traffic, which is a pre-requisite for this. There is currently no drupal module that does just this, but you can get around it using .htaccess. In the root of your website, put the following somewhere in the .htaccess file
You can read the rest of Matt’s post here: Making Drupal More Secure | www.mcritch.com
Rackspace Handled the Outage Well (IMO)
I should probably state for the record that I might be a little bias on this one because I currently serve as a member of the Client Advisory Board at Rackspace and provide feedback on various aspects of their hosted email applications. But, as I am sure a lot of you realized today, there was a disturbance in the force. Rackspace experienced an outage today and as a result, a lot of websites and email accounts experienced downtime. While Pleth doesn’t host any websites at Rackspace, but we do however house some of our clients email solutions there.
Usually when there is a major NOC failure like this I like to find a nice tight hole and crawl into it, fortunately these situations rarely happen. When they do it’s a helpless feeling for those of us whose connectivity is affected by it. Normally we immediately call into our datacenter to see what news we can get, only to find that the call center is experiencing a severe meltdown thanks to the high call volume of resellers calling in to report the obvious. At the end of the day all we want to know is the same thing, what is the ETA for everything being back online? Well, thanks to Twitter, that’s all changed…
Today Rackspace did a great job getting updates out to their customers via Twitter, and I wanted to commend Cameron Nouri, the Rackspace Apps Evangelist who manages the @RackApps for doing an excellent job keeping us updated. I know it sounds weird to give a company Kudos on a day that they experienced an outage, but let’s face it, these things are going to happen. When these things do happen, keeping clients informed should be one of the top priorities for a provider in my opinion…
I know that there are going to be thousands of people out there that were affected that aren’t as calm about the outage as I am, and I promise I understand where you are coming from. I just wanted to point out how well they did on keeping us all in the loop.
Also, here’s a list of system status updates from the outage…
Critch on VMWare ESXi 4.0 Migration
We recently made the decision to upgrade our network and virtualization environment. Thanks to Matt’s careful engineering and configuration, Greg has been able to migrate some serious client data. One of the things that I think is cool about our setup now is that we have the ability to move IP addresses around that might be assigned to some of our clients websites.
As I have mentioned before, Matt Critcher is one of the most brilliant server administrators / engineers that I have ever had the opportunity to work with. He recently blogged about our migration to VMWare ESXi 4.0 on his blog, I have posted excerpts and links to both of his posts below…
VMWare ESXi 4.0 migration
As I posted last time, we decided to move over to ESXi and so far, its been pretty smooth. ThePlanet installed ESXi 3.5 on our servers, which I quickly upgraded into 4.0. When you install the vSphere Client there is an option to install the host update utility. Run it, point it to the zip file you’ve download from VMWare’s website, and wait a bit. It works like a charm (put the machine into maintenance mode first!!). Since the servers had no clients running on them, I did it during the day (which let me sleep last night! lol!!) I’ve been copying over the VM’s from our VMWare Server machine with good ol’ scp and using the vmkfstools command on the ESXi box to convert them into ESXi format. Takes about 30-40 min per server for the whole process, which isn’t exactly quick, but we’re moving low-traffic boxes in very off hours. I moved the server that this website runs on during lunch today….;o)
2 days later Matt added another post regarding the migration…
VMWare ESXi 4.0 Migration, Part Deux
As I wrote about last time, Pleth’s move from VMWare Server to VMWare ESXi has been very successful thus far, but in the process we’ve discovered a couple of "neat tricks" and have proven to ourselves that the technology choices we made a few years back were indeed the right ones.
When you copy a .vmdk (vmware disk image) over from a VMWare Server machine, you have to convert it over to ESXi format. This process makes the resulting disk image the whole size that you’ve allocated. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but if you had it set to thin provisioning in VMWare Server your disk usage just went up. WAY up.
We were working off of a template that we could clone into a new VPS rather quickly, so we settled on a default VPS size of 20gb. There are definite benefits to provisioning the entire disk at creation, but when you sell several to different customers using thin provisioning allows you to minimize the total size of the datastore because most of them are never going to use the whole 20gb we’ve allocated. In fact, most never use more than a few hundred megabytes that their website actually takes up. We’ve got plenty of space available even if all were fully allocated because we don’t believe in overselling disk space even if some other providers do. Having smaller disk images makes moving the machines from one ESXi server to another much easier and faster if the need ever arose, thereby limiting downtime. Now, you can avoid all of this by running your VMware environment on a SAN with tons of disk space and using vCenter and VMotion but given our small size, budget, and very small number (7) of VM’s we just can not justify the extreme yearly costs associated with it.
So how do you get around this? You leverage the technology you have to the fullest extent. We spent a lot of time evaluating different products and have tried to make the decisions that allow us to provide the absolute best service given our budgetary constraints. This led us to purchase a private rack at ThePlanet, an entire class C of IP addresses, and lease some extremely powerful machines for our hosting environment. We’ve chosen great software to help manage our hosting customers, and probably our best decision was to invest in a product called R1Soft CDP. It has the ability to make multiple block-level snapshots of servers per hour and can Bare-Metal Restore one in just a few minutes. I can not say enough how well R1’s CDP works. Over the past two years it has saved us HOURS of downtime and tons of headaches more times than I can mention. The ability to make so many snapshots so quickly lets you look like a rockstar when a customer calls and says "I accidentally deleted all changes I made this morning" and you can put them back in 30 seconds.
So how did I use R1Soft to pull this off? I created a new Virtual Machine with 20gb of thin partitioned space. I then assigned the CD-ROM to a ISO image of the R1Soft Restore Disk and booted the machine. We shut all services off on the old VMWare Server VM, made a quick backup with R1Soft CDP, and shut off the VM. On the newly created ESXi VM, I did a bare-metal restore of the old one. It took about 10 min to restore about 4gb of data. One quick reboot, and voila! It’s running again. We could have used VMware vCenter Converter to do this job. It will convert almost any disk image into almost any other disk image format. It also has some distinct advantages over our chosen method namely in creating virtual appliances, but the problem for us to use it was that we didn’t have a server in our rack we could dedicate to the task — only a VPS. We would have to import the data (ie copy it to the machine running Converter) and export it to the new server, which is basically copying it twice (ESX/i to ESX/i doesn’t require this step). Our chosen method meant no copying over the data, doing a conversion, and then recreating the image. Just 10 min and it’s done (which also means only 10 minutes of downtime). Not only that, we got thin-provisioned disks back on the machines we needed it on, while the other servers got to keep their fully provisioned disks. I love technology….
VMWare ESXi 4.0 migration | www.mcritch.com
