March 2008

Its interesting. I work managing a data center/managed services provider that lives in Kansas City. They are enterprise vendors and support Visa’s application that I am focused on building out additional infrastructure, environments, and training for. They have a quality of service ethic bar none. When they say a thing will get done, its done. I think this quality extends to smaller companies as well that they support. Their NOC is topnotch and answers flow pretty quickly back to us.

I know that they are different than what we get when we deal with hosting services. A hosting service never really announces their SLA unless they do enterprise solutions or support. A Service Level Agreement stipulates what each party agrees to is reasonable and prudent given what is being provided. I write those on occasion so I have an idea what they contain. I’ve dealt with a few of the so-called best of breed like Siteground and Lunarpages. They are all missing something. I think its the philosophical tenet that the customer is always right. They seem to spin off on service guarantees, delivery times, etc.  But when push comes to shove they simply cannot deliver.

I’ve been waiting now for over a day to get a simple answer from Lunarpages. My mail server may have eaten some email.  My bad and I take the blame.  Spamassassin was a bad boy. I wrote back saying please resend. That was 5 hours ago.  My question:

What in the hell would happen if I had a critical service down? If I depended on my apache web server for something? I guess I would fit within some other service guarantee. Perhaps I am too demanding. I think I will ask our Senior System Administrator that manages our data center. What is reasonable when dealing with a hosting provider? Is it reasonable to expect an answer to email even if its automated? A real person to look at the question within an hour? If you pay a few hundred for a bargain basement IP, network, web, mail deal; what is the expectation of service?

I’m not sure; but I don’t like the ground I see. I don’t think there is a demonstrable quality of service guarantee when it comes to the thousands of hosting companies. They just offer, take, and every once in awhile get bought up by someone else. Kinda like what went on with the local neighborhood ISPs here in SF some years ago.

But that’s another rant. I’m lucky to have Rawbandwidth I think.

Has arrived for Linux. Thanks Amazon. Yet another nail in the coffin for iTunes and its incredibly inefficient and time-wasting interface. I just know that it cannot suck as much on Mac’s as it does on XP or Vista. Please tell me Mac dudes and dudettes that its pretty, works fine, and gives you that unfettered feeling. Meanwhile, the amazon MP3 downloader works nice on Linux and gives us something we have not had before.

And it gives me one less reason to even bother with VMware guest images of XP or Vista.

Meanwhile, I have already done a few downloads of albums and it works. Its not slow or fast. It just is. Its Amazon and they rule over iTunes.

Why is that I have not noticed this before? Now I have to retrain and refrain. I wish Scribefire would make a release that would be double space proof. Its hard to break a lifetime of spacing out (or double spacing out). Writing blog entries suddenly got a bit harder and I will need to go back and reread each post if I am concerned with the quality of my production. Come to think of; this blog has no real or implied quality. So its okay to have non-breaking spaces strewn throughout. Sometimes I feel like a non-breaking space myself.

Perhaps if I was writing for some big media conglomerate, I would actually give a damn. Now I sorta give a damn. Its annoying at the least because I was taught there should be two spaces at the end of each sentence. Writing that way and insisting on using parallel structure has been the dilemma I have faced since graduate school in anthropology. Why, oh why did I learn to write that way? Because the graduate dean had the power.

Meanwhile, my Sierra Broadband card rocks on. Its a solid networking performer on Linux and I love the flexibility it gives me.

Now I need to attend to a few other things. The kids want to go on vacation. The wife wants us to go to the snow. I have some questions about work. Its all about life. I told my wife this story of a work colleague and his wife when they went to see Into the Wild. They both walked out after feeling overwhelmed and affected. He turned to her and asked if she enjoyed it. She said “yes but never take me to see it again”. My wife thinks it has an affect on people that seems to go on. Perhaps Sean Penn knew this and often movies are made which take us to this other place away from awards and fancy clothing and walking the red carpet. Instead we walk another carpet and we see things that are hidden and they make us better. Or at least make us ask a whole series of other questions about what exactly it was we accomplished and how we did it.

I have to admit to also moving most of the world-wide base of operations of my vast multi-national holdings to Google Apps. Its just easier. There are the usual flock of plugins, the firefox hacks, Greasemonkey addins. Then there is the access. With the IMAP that Lifehacker and others have reported; its just too darned easy to build your very own universal email home using Gmail. Here is what I did to make it happen:

Buy the premiere Google Apps support. You get to add domain names, domain aliases, switch on multiple accounts to send from, have support for POP if you need it. Add in a few accounts that you have strewn all around the netaverse.  Now you have a single home and you can administer it from one place.  For some reason this creates a very empowering situation for users that always thought they would have to use Thunderbird, Firefox, a bunch of Unix shells.

Use the wondrous spam fighting to truly rid yourself. Here is what i do.  My primary domain for most things is this one. I have shell.  I can write procmail recipes. I can redirect and forward. So I just wrote a very simple procmail recipe to send all mail to gmail after creating a backup copy. Very easy to do.  Dig what it looks like in procmail-ese:

———–snippage of .procmailrc file———————–

:0 :
* !^(To|Cc|Bcc|From|Sender):.*mperry@lnxpowered.org
filtered

:0
{
:0 c
! xxxx@yyyy.com

:0 :
saved

}

:0 :
$DEFAULT

———————-end of the snippage——————

So what does it do exactly? Well. It tells my ISP’s mail server to never mind about email that is not directed to, CC, BCC, etc to me. This gets rid of a whole bunch of spam and you can do this in Thunderbird easily too. Then I tell my account to forward and copy all email so a copy goes to my google apps domain and gets backed up. The backup happens with the strange colon and 0 (not the letter O).  Procmail is wonderful but strange and it talks a special language of dots and letters and recipes. Worth learning.

Finally, you can verify additional email addresses in Gmail and take all the forwards and create new From: addresses for them.  Voila!  One mail box to rule them all.

Now on to the relevance of Yahoo! Mail. I don’t think there is any any more. Its spam filters suck.  Don’t even get me started on that pitiful excuse for a calendar. A calendar is meant to be shared Yahooligans. How about creating a calendaring system that’s actually useful.

I still like the home page; but on my work system and my systems not used at home too much; its changed to igoogle.

There are challenges that Google faces. One is how to integrate the various and sundry applications and truly provide software as a service where people can take each thing and fit them all together. I’d like to have taken my gmail account and just dedicated it to the google for domains thing.

But that will probably come later. I figure by the time that Yahoo! figures out that people actually want to do something unique with the calendar and email application, Google will have crossed the rubicon with free and paid gmail services and offer each of us the ability to blend the offerings.

Meanwhile; Gmail and Google Apps is the pie filling that fills up this crusty old soul.

I’ve been playing and futzing around with Drupal 6 and for my purposes its not ready for my primetime.  It seems to have a few issues with its blogapi support so using clients like Scribefire or Blogjet can be difficult.  I’m gonna stick with Wordpress for awhile now since it provides a reasonable template for the meaningless drivel that I write.  There are lots of themes also and this one seems pretty decent.

I just purchased a Sierra aircard 595 to take the place of the rapidly diminishing Tmobile Hotspot service.  The card requires a Windows laptop to activate but my card was activated already by Sprint.  It did have to reset the user and settings and I don’t think it could do that on Linux.  But once I got those things done, I rebooted my laptop into pure ubuntu and used a few scripts I found here and I was off and running.  Its a great card and it works with Linux flawlessly.  I also got my Sprint Evdo working on my Centro using a little shareware package called USB modem.

If you are wanting easy mobile broadband, Sprint offers two plans.  I took the “all you can eat” plan because it fits things easier for me and it replaces more totally what i had before.

Both of the great sites above offer scripts and howto’s to get either the aircard or your phone online.  Ubuntu makes it pretty easy these days to get the card or phone working.