Category: Technology

Altering Hosting Service : The Gift That Keeps Giving

I moved my website to a new dedicated server about 3 weeks ago. As well as the usual DNS nonsense, I found out today that a whole load of emails have been blocked…

I have a mailbox at the hosting company to handle all my email. That all gets sucked into Gmail. That’s the way it has been for ages and life has been good. Since I made the move, the “new” mailbox looked like it was working fine, but I hadn’t noticed the spam filtering was turned on to a really high level and it was blocking loads of good emails. As a result, a lot of really important emails were gathering in the spam folder of my mailbox at the hosting company, something I never check.

I’ve now turned off the spam filtering on that mailbox, so it all gets sucked into Gmail and that handles my spam, the way it always did…

I’ve been working through the emails this evening, but it is highly likely some have fallen by the wayside, so if you were trying to send me something important over the last few weeks and I’ve not replied, it’s possible I’ve not actually received it. 🙁

This all came to light because people were talking about the ACED OpenWorld emails, which I hadn’t got. 🙁 Thanks to some emails from Debra and Doug (who was mostly at the pub) and some Twitter DM-ing from Vikki, I got the information, registered for OpenWorld and booked my hotel. The deadline was tomorrow. Phew! 🙂 Just got to sort the flights now….

Cheers

Tim…

 

F5 Load Balancer Training Course : Day 3

After the previous day’s “networky” stuff, day 3 was back to some stuff that was more relevant to me. Amongst other things, I got a quick primer on IPv6, which was pretty useful and we looks at iApps and iRules. It looks like I will be writing lots of iRules using TCL to replace the functionality of our Apache reverse proxies. Fun, fun, fun… 🙂

We finished at about 15:00, so I hit the road and managed to do the M25 and M40 in a reasonable time. It wasn’t good, but it could have been a lot worse.

The challenge now is to get to work on Monday and try to start putting some of this stuff into practice before I forget everything. 🙂

Thanks to all the folks at F5 for a good course. Thanks also to the other folks on the course for putting up with my noob questions. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

F5 Load Balancer Training Course : Day 2

Day 2 was a lot more “networky”, so it was pretty tough. I got through all the labs and stuff worked, but if I’m honest I didn’t really have a clue what I was doing. 🙂 Added to that, I won’t have privilege to do most of the stuff we covered when I’m on the real kit, so I’m pretty much going to forget it all in a few days. 🙁

Once again, it’s testament to the course that a complete networking gumby like me was able to survive the day.

Day 3 has got some sections that are more relevant to me. I’ve been swimming, so now it’s Monster, Diet Coke and Coffee for breakfast, check out of the hotel, then head off to start day 3.

Cheers

Tim…

PS. I went to see Dawn of the Planet of the Apes last night.

Today I will mostly be saying, “DBA not kill DBA!”, and, “DBA not trust human!”

F5 Load Balancer Training Course : Day 1

As I suspected, I’m the only person on the course that doesn’t know what a network is. 🙂 If I had not been tinkering with the reverse proxies over the last year I would have been pretty much lost.

The course itself is well structured and the teacher is good. The fact I’ve not flounced out in a huff is testament to that. 🙂 The pattern will be quite familiar to anyone who has been on a hands-on course before. Discuss a topic with slides, then do a hands-on lab that works through that stuff.

It takes a while to get into the swing of things and I’ve proved to myself I am incapable of reading other people’s instructions, so it’s a good job I usually write my own. Now I’m starting to get used to the interface and command line, I’m hoping today will be a bit easier.

From a brief discussion, what I need from the load balancers seems *drastically* different to most of the other people in the room. I think this is going to be quite a long and arduous road when I start having to apply some of this to real situations. I sense a lot of external consultancy… 🙂

It is interesting coming from a different background to the others in the room and seeing how we approach things from different angles, and with different emphasis. I’ll write a blog post about this when I’ve finished the course, because it’s been something that has been brewing in my mind for a while…

As you will probably already know, I followed the day with a visit to see Guardians of the Galaxy.

I’ve been swimming this morning and now I have to log on to work to fix some stuff before starting day 2 of the course.

Cheers

Tim…

F5 Load Balancer Training Course

I’m on an F5 Load Balancer training course for the next 3 days.

I have no idea what to expect and to be honest, I really don’t think I should be here. 🙂 With the exception of a bit of fiddling with Apache reverse proxies, I don’t really know anything about this stuff, so I’m not sure if this will go over my head or be intensely slow and boring…

If anything comes out of it worth blogging about I certainly will.

Chertsey is like a seaside town. It’s full of cafes, restaurants and odd little shops. When I was searching for a place to swim Google came up with loads of pool installation and maintenance companies, so I think it’s a pretty rich area. I found a local swimming pool, but I’ve had to remortgage my house to afford to swim there. 🙂 I went this morning at 06:30 and it wasn’t too crowded. It’s unusual to find a private gym with a 25M pool. Most of them in the UK have tiny little things that you can’t swim in. It was a bit on the warm side, but then I guess you have to expect that when it’s not a training pool. Hopefully I won’t be too much of a slob by the time I get home.

I’m thinking I might do a cinema visit every night to play catch-up.

Cheers

Tim…

MobaXterm 7.1 Released

If you are using a Windows desktop, you need MobaXterm in your life! Version 7.1 has recently been released…

I know you think you can’t live without Putty, Cygwin and/or Xming, but you really can. Give MobaXterm a go and I would be extremely surprised if you ever go back to that rag-tag bunch of apps…

Cheers

Tim…

PS. Includes “Updated OpenSSL library to 1.0.1g (for “Heartbleed Bug” correction)”