Interesting quotes from Steve Ballmer when asked what they would do with Yahoo’s PHP apps if Microsoft does buy Yahoo:

So I’m quite sure when all is said and done, we’ll be, you asked ‘what are you going to do with those PHP applications’, I’m sure a bunch of them will be running at high scale and in production for a long time to come. I think there’s going to be a lot of innovation in the core infrastructure, beyond what we have in Windows today, in asp.net, beyond what you see in linux & php today, and beyond time probably most of the applications on the Internet will wind up being rebuilt and redone…. but for the foreseeable future, we will be a PHP shop, if we own Yahoo as well as an ASP.NET shop

We have put a lot of attention in making sure that PHP applications run well on Windows Server … For those of you who do have PHP skills, we’re going to try to make Windows Server the best place to land PHP applications in the future as well.

You can watch Kawasaki’s interview of Steve Ballmer here.

For the third year running the cPanel will be holding its annual conference in Houston, Texas from June 11 to 13. This year’s conference promises to be more in depth, with more advanced topics then the previous years. There will be guest speakers, in addition to cPanel developers cPanel techs will be on hand to provide live, in person technical support. Also taking place will be a panel discussion with some cPanel’s developers and techs. With the upcoming release of cPanel Server Suite for Windows scheduled for April, the conference will have several sessions geared towards the new product and how it will significantly enhance Windows based hosting operations.

Conference registration is once again very reasonable at $60.00 USD per attendee. Attendees will be able to meet vendors and producers of software plugins that work with cPanel as well as service providers that deploy cPanel. As the host of the conference, cPanel will be providing a cocktail reception with a top shelf open bar on the evening of the 11th as well as a sumptuous dinner for all attendees and vendors on the 12th. Lunch and breakfast will also be provided both days.

For more information, please visit the conference site located at http://conference.cpanel.net/

The Cpanel team has published this presentation from their training similar that addresses how to use remote MySQL servers and the basics of MySQL clustering and replication:

http://trainingseminar.cpanel.net/slides/trackb/MySQL%20Remote%20Server.pdf

Cpanel’s support for remote MySQL servers is not very robust, but most web hosts should consider it if they are running highly dense shared hosting servers. The presentation outlines the modifications necessary to point Cpanel and its related applications to the remote MySQL server.

This Python script can be used for parsing exim mail logs to find messages that are over a certain filesize. In this case we were looking for senders of messages over 10MB (10000000 bytes). You can change that in the second to last line of the script.

example usage: cat /var/log/exim_mainlog | grep domain.com | msgsizefilter.py

Here it is:


#!/usr/bin/env python

import sys
for line in sys.stdin.readlines():
if line.find("S=") != -1:
s = int(line.split("S=")[1].split(" ")[0])
d = " ".join( line.split(" ")[0:2])
e = line.split(" <= ")[1].split(" ")[0]
if s > 10000000:
print “%s \t %d \t (%s)” % (d, s, e)


I came across a text ad served by Google today that I just had to share. Google didn’t invent but they have almost perfected the field of PPC (Pay Per Click) text ads. Ad groups, ad copy, split testing, quality score are what you will hear the experts talk about. But what’s also interesting about Google Adwords is that almost anyone can sign up and have their own ads being served in just a few minutes.

Whats remarkable is that you can even create a PPC ad saying that PPC ads don’t work!

I laughed out loud when I saw this PPC ad for Trusted Testimonials, a company that verifies and certifies customer testimonials.

click to see the full-size image

We have seen a problem with several Cpanel Linux VPS systems recently. It pops up in several places and is related to yum, the update tool that comes with CentOS and is relied upon by Cpanel.

For example, running a basic command like “yum list” results in a Python trackback error with some ugly error message like:

File “/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/yum/repos.py”, line 200, in populateSack
sack.populate(repo, with, callback, cacheonly)
File “/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/yum/yumRepo.py”, line 91, in populate
dobj = repo.cacheHandler.getPrimary(xml, csum)
File “/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/yum/sqlitecache.py”, line 100, in getPrimary
return self._getbase(location, checksum, ‘primary’)
File “/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/yum/sqlitecache.py”, line 93, in _getbase
self.updateSqliteCache(db, parser, checksum, metadatatype)
File “/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/yum/sqlitecache.py”, line 382, in updateSqliteCache
cur.execute(”DELETE FROM “+table+ ” where pkgKey in %s” % delpkgs)
File “/usr/lib64/python2.4/site-packages/sqlite/main.py”, line 244, in execute
self.rs = self.con.db.execute(SQL)
_sqlite.DatabaseError: unable to open database file

Some people say its a SQLite issue, the lightweight sql-like database used by yum for the local rpm database. The error message “unable to open database file” made me think this problem was related to the rpm database files in /var/lib/rpm. I tried rebuilding the rpm database but no luck.

It turns out the problem is much simpler:

[root@host1 ~]# df
Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
vzfs 83886080 3671424 80214656 5% /
df: `(deleted) /var/tmp’: No such file or directory

Notice anything wrong? Yikes! we don’t have a working /tmp or /var/tmp directory. Apparently the problem was inadvertendly caused by some Cpanel scripts which try to help us by securing those directories, making them noexec so that attackers can’t run rogue scripts directly from the tmp directories.

The fix

Wipe out the tmp dir stuff that cpanel had setup:

/bin/umount -l /tmp
/bin/umount -l /var/tmp
/bin/rm -fv /usr/tmpDSK

Now reset it:

/scripts/securetmp –auto

One of the cool features I really like about our Sun servers is the integrated LOM (Lights Out Management) features. With Sun’s LOM, you can pretty much do any maintenance function on a server without being in the datacenter. This is great for us and our customers. I would much rather be sitting in my comfy office chair doing server work than in the datacenter, having to deal with hooking up a crash cart and all of that.

Accessing the LOM through a web interface lets you see the hardware vitals of a server. Temperature, fan status, fan speed, voltage readings, and all of that goodness.

But the real power comes in when you fire up the Remote Console. You are now basically sitting at the console of the server, as if you had a monitor, keyboard and mouse directly plugged in. This is great for fixing crashed operating systems, firewall problems and any other accidental lockout.

Even cooler is the way you can mount a CD-ROM or other storage device from your desktop PC directly to the server. You can basically completely re-install the server this way, as long as you are on a fast internet connection.

Last week we officially launched our new Virtual Private Server plans. Virtual Private Servers have been gaining a lot of traction in the hosting industry recently, although the technology has been available in several different forms and fashions for years. We spent trying out different VPS technologies and finally settled on using Virtuozzo from SWsoft for powering our VPS.

If anyone can figure out the best way to indicate the plural form of “VPS” I would love to hear it! None of these exactly sound right:

• VPSes
• VPSs
• VPS’s
• NxVPS

We are also running a promotion through the end of June offering 30% off of any new signups - send me an email (mark@tqhosting.com) for more info.

We wrote a plugin for Nagios which will check the status of a Cpanel server license. The plugin uses the Cpanel license web server (http://verify.cpanel.net) to verify the license status of a server. If the plugin cannot verify the license, or if the license has expired, it generates a critical error.

The plugin was written in Python and has been tested extensively here.

Download version 1 of this plugin: check_cpanel.py

HP crafted a clever attention-getting for its current marketing campaign: they basically blew up a small datacenter. Why? Well actually it wasn’t just to start an arms race with Mythbusters. They suggest that if your company uses HP networking and server products, you will also magically be able to withstand having a bomb hit your datacenter. If you plan for it, of course.

Link to video from HP

What else can we take away from this?

• HP’s new spin on going Green: fight energy-users with explosives
• If you use HP products, you may want to blow them up too!
• HP has a lot of extra money that they would rather not invest in R&D and driving sales (this could be argued either way, but as a stockholder I don’t think I would be happy with a company that wastes its own products).

Regardless, HP did have some success because tech bloggers and writers around the world are talking about it. From a logical perspective, I don’t see this being a very effective marketing pitch. Any network, regardless of specific manufacturer, can be made redundant. Especially if you are carefully planning for an exact failure at an exact time. The challenge in the real world is to build redundancy on multiple layers, while weighing costs and benefits to create a network setup that is as redundant as possible from human error, geographical locations, complexity problems and hardware failures.