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