Asgrim

I’ve finally managed to get the last remaining websites I used to run on my home servers up and running. Hannah and Tom’s blog are now online and raring to go…

• Hannah’s Blog
• Tom’s Blog

Check them out!

I’ve managed to sell the server cabinet now, but I’ve still got a few things to sell. If you might know who would like a server for their birthday… please send them this way:

• 4U Rack Mountable Server 1.7GHz (bidding starts 4th August)
  
• 4U Rack Mountable Server 2GHz (open to offers!!)
• Air Conditioner Unit Silver 9,000 BTU (bidding starts 4th August)

Please buy them, we have a wedding to fund, and they don’t come cheap!

Now, even though I still don’t have Internet due to BT crossing my lines, I am already singing Newnet’s praises. Their customer service is simply supreme. The difference is quite simple… call centre in England, with English speakers, but the important part is this, so I will emphasise this a lot:

The technical support know what they are talking about.

I have never had such a pleasurable experience being told I can’t get internet just yet. It was simply bliss. The good thing is, they explained the problem clearly, in simple-to-understand language, and without just repeating what BT Wholesale just told them, or just reading from a script!

So, here’s to Newnet, possibly the best ISP in the UK.

Yep - we’re live and kicking again! Asgrim.com now works, well ahead of schedule, so top marks to 1and1.co.uk so far!

Now all I need is internet at home… gah!

Well, I missed the boat for updating the nameservers for asgrim.com, so until 1and1.co.uk sort out my nameservers, asgrim.com will point to a random UK2.net holding page.

So for now, my nice “memorable” home page will be:

http://s250208861.websitehome.co.uk/asgrim/

Woo… anyway, in about 5-8 days, asgrim.com should be alive again! Woop!

Well, I have finally decided to stop all this home serving malarkey. I just don’t have time to do it any more, and trying to maintain a comparable up time to other hosts is simply a nightmare. Not only that, it’s expensive on electric, and at the moment I still have no Internet (gah!), so it sort of rules out any hope for now.

Last night I spent some of the evening taking apart the server cabinet ready to sell on eBay. One thing I am particularly cautious about is data on the hard drives. Most people think that they need a whopping great magnet (like the ones that pick up cars in scrap yards), or that they need to drill holes in the drive and damage it irreparably. Well, thankfully, this is not the case.

All you need is DD. And, no I don’t mean my friend from Portsmouth, I mean the ancient UNIX command “dd” (sometimes nicknamed “disk destroy”). dd is a low-level data copier or converter. It works by writing blocks of data from one place to another. The very useful thing about UNIX/Linux is that it has these things called “devices”. One of these devices is called “/dev/zero”. It is a constant stream of 0. Lots of them.

Technically minded people might see where I’m going with this (well, they should already know what I’m talking about really…). Basically, an irrecoverable way of properly formatting a disk is top copy zeros all over the disk.

[root@oblivion /]# dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda

The above command is all it takes to completely destroy a disk. If you are really paranoid, you could do it a few times, or intersperse it using /dev/random, like this:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda
dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sda
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda

According a data recovery company, there is less than zero percent chance of recovering data after using a single dd command. Some guys have even decided to make it a challenge.

If you’ve not heard of them, read about UK2 here. The original article was written by a guy called Andy Crawford, but I’m having exactly the same fustrating troubles as him.

Basically, UK2 are trying to charge me for each domain I want to transfer away, even though I have already thrown tonnes of money at them. This is what Andy Crawford said:

[1] They are not cheap
Ok so they might look cheap at first, but after you register your domain everything else is an add-on. Your website(s) will posssibly cost more in the end.

[2] Pop-ups and the UK2 advertising banner
You will have to pay for removal of pop-ups and the UK2 advertising banner.

[3] Webspace is extra
Webspace costs extra and it will be assigned to only one domain name. If you have more than one domain that you want to run separately, you need to buy webspace for each and every domain. This now becomes very expensive.

[4] Upgrades and add ons are assigned to each domain
You must also pay for upgrades for each domain separately (CGI-PHP, Statistics etc)

[5] Email is a forwarding service only
If you want a POP3 Mailbox or use IMAP, you will need to create a separate UK2.net mailbox address. Even if you pay extra for unlimited email address forwarding you will not be able to forward to multiple recipients.

[6] It’s pot luck whether your CGI scripts will run
Even something as simple as FormMail will not run on the UK2 servers. If you use their own version of FormMail, any mail generated can only be sent to a UK2.net mail box and cannot be forwarded.

[7] Support
My own experience of the support team is that:They will reply with a block of standard text which does not answer the query, or, they reply with various conflicting and incorrect answers.

[8] Transferring your domain
When you have had enough of UK2 and want to move away, they will charge you to have control of your domain and allow the transfer to proceed. But they will not make it easy, they seem to do everything in their power to stop the transfer proceeding.

[9] Renewals
They will renew your domain and services and charge your credit card even when you have asked them not to, and even after you have transferred you domain away from them.

All of this is totally true. I advise anyone to stay well away from UK2.net, they are just money grabbers.

I’ll post more of my experience when (or if…) I’ve resolved my situation.

Well this time it’s not Pipex’s fault, it’s BT now, and the stupid invention of TPON - Telephony over Passive Optical Network. I’ve been without internet (and thus currently forking out £25 a month to host the most important websites I run on Newnet) for two weeks, and it’s really annoying.

To outline, I’m trying to get Be Unlimited which allows the use of Annex M, allowing higher upload speeds (ideal for running my servers). From the outset, there were problems. When I first ordered, Be said that there was a problem with my line. I rang to/fro between Be and BT trying to understand the problem, eventually getting the blood out of the stone that my line had a TPON tag.

Nevertheless, a few days later I was given an activation date and my activation pack was sent through. Hooray, I thought! Along came 10th July… I got home, no internet. I rang Be, they told me it could be up to 9pm until it gets activated. 9pm came, and went with no sign of internet. Today, I have been told this by Be:

Dear James, I just spoke with BT Openreach and they told me that unfortunately they can not replace the fibre optic line to a copper in that area and they advised me to cancel the order because the fibre optic line is not compatible with broadband orders.

Well that’s just great. I went on the Think Broadband forum (see thread here) to enquire (as well as replying to Be essentially saying, I don’t care, get BT to sort it out pronto). If the case really is that I’m still on TPON and there’s no copper overlays left, then it looks like I’m screwed. That’s just great. I’ve spent hundreds of pounds on server equipment recently, which will now be wasted.

However, I’m not letting this lie - I am determined to get Be Unlimited service, and I will do everything I can to make that happen.

And if it doesn’t work, then I will be a failure - a web developer… without internet?

Interesting concept… thanks a bloody lot BT.

Just a quick one - with regards to my post about PHP4 dying, I’ve just seen on PHPDeveloper.org a blog post on the Developer Tutorials Blog about migrating from PHP4 to PHP5 for developers- check it out.

PHP4 for me since starting at Netbasic has been a mere lifeless form of PHP that I used to get into web development. But reading this article reminded me that PHP4 will soon die.

Well, as I said recently, on a day for the PHP community dubbed as “8-8-8″ (referring to 8th August 2008), PHP4 will officially be halted. This means there will be no more development done for PHP4. Any new bugs will remain forever. Any developers still using PHP4 won’t get the support they used to. There won’t even be any security updates to seal up loopholes and hacks.

But on the upside, PHP5 will be the choice. We’re already on PHP 5.2.6 (stable), and the next version is well on the way. Now the article I linked to poses several questions:

• What if in 2 months time, evil hackers will find a bug in PHP4 that is exploitable?
• What if they write a spider that crawls the internet in search for applications that run PHP4?
• What if they target all those sites with malicious code?
• What if indeed there will be no fix for this exploit?
• What are you going to do?

There’s a simple answer to all these questions :- people really need to upgrade to PHP5. It’s really that simple. For developers, I think there’s actually very little to do (the odd thing is listed in the PHP5 Migration Guide). My move from PHP4 to PHP5 was simple and very very pain free (perhaps I was lucky?). Personally, I think it’s the web hosts that need to get their bums in gear. Following my article about Newnet, they’ve actually started using PHP5 for new hosts, and are offering free migrations from PHP4 to the newer PHP5 UNIX servers, so good on them, I fully back Newnet 100% in this descision.

At the end of the day though, a day will come when web hosts really do NEED to upgrade, perhaps because of some horrific bug that will destroy the universe. If I were those web hosts, I’d do it sooner rather than later. But as is the way with some companies - they use the ethos “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. I used to think that, but I’ve learnt recently that with some things, even if it ain’t broke, you can make it more secure, work faster and work better.

Thankfully, here at Netbasic, we use PHP5 already, so I’m happy as chips.