I just moved all my DNS hosting internally a couple of weeks ago, at first I was a little scared as I had used BIND before and always seemed to screw it up. About a month ago I discovered a Debian package called PowerDNS and decided to give it a spin. It uses a mySQL database to store all the DNS information in unlike the crazy flat files that BIND requires you to decipher. Since I like databases this seemed a lot less scary to me. It took me about 6 hours total to build the servers and move all my domains to the new name servers. It’s really simple and so far I’ve had no trouble with them at all. If you are tired of BIND or just want to play with something new: http://www.powerdns.com/content/home-powerdns.aspx
If you haven’t checked it out yet, http://crashplan.com/ is an amazing backup tool. The software itself is free for PC, MAC and Linux. You can use it to backup between computers in your house or to a friends house (even if it’s someone you really trust, data is encrypted so they can’t read your backed up files).
Now for what I think is a fair price, they allow you to backup an unlimited amount of data to their servers. I purchased their 3 year CrashPlan Central family plan and I have all my computers backing up to their servers. Again your data is encrypted with a key of your choice so no one, not even the guys that work on the servers can peek at your data.
I use it and I recommend it to all my clients.
It’s a good system, check it out!
I hate it when you install an update to software and it totally messes stuff up. I installed an update to my stats package and just realized I haven’t gotten data in a month…
November 21st, 2009
admin
You ever have those days where you can’t seem to get anything done. Here I’ve got a whole weekend to work and I can’t seem to get moving….Hummm, maybe some cookies would help.
I participated in my first mini comp last night at my rock gym. I had already been climbing for a bit when I heard about it, so I was a little tired. So they set it up so that all the routes had a point value and you had 45 minutes to climb as many as you want and then they totaled up your best 5. It was a great way to get introduced to competing. I know I didn’t win but I also tried a route that I might not have otherwise.
I had a hate / love relationship with Apple’s Mighty Mouse. It was a really good idea that had a a fatal flaw, the freaking scroll ball. I think I was cleaning it out about once a week this month.
So I ordered the Magic Mouse as soon as I heard about it. Got to say it addresses my hate of the scroll ball very nicely. It got rid of it and replaced it with a multi touch surface that works really well. The weight of the mouse is perfect, it really is a joy to use. My only complaint is the lack of a 3rd mouse button, I used it a lot to open links in new tabs when I am surfing the web. This is minor when compared to my pure hatred of the previous mouse and will hopefully be addressed in a future update.
Go play with this mouse at your local Apple store. It really is pretty sweet!
After 7 months of hard work, I’ve released our first version of Rapid Manage. We are calling it REO Edition as it has been tweaked to help realtors working with the repossessed homes manage all the properties that have been given to them. Some of these guys are managing 80 houses a month. Its really crazy how hard they have to work.
Found this on a forum and I use it every once in a while but not enough to remember it. So I thought I would save it here for future use.
You can determine the device that is you CD/DVD drive using the following command:
drutil status
Vendor Product Rev
MATSHITA DVD-R UJ-825 DAM5
Type: CD-ROM Name: /dev/disk1
Cur Write: 16x CD Sessions: 1
Max Write: 16x CD Tracks: 3
Overwritable: 00:00:00 blocks: 0 / 0.00MB / 0.00MiB
Space Free: 00:00:00 blocks: 0 / 0.00MB / 0.00MiB
Space Used: 66:55:27 blocks: 301152 / 616.76MB / 588.19MiB
Writability:
Now you will need to umount the disk with the following command:
diskutil unmountDisk disk1
Now you can write the ISO file with the dd utility:
dd if=/dev/disk1 of=file.iso
When finished you will want to remount the disk:
diskutil mountDisk disk1
So I’ve switched all my servers to Xensource now. Their product kicks the pants of VMwares ESXi. The best feature being the live motion. I can move a vm from one physical server to another and the outside world never knows.
Makes all the late nights so worth it.
So this week it will be back to coding. I’m looking forward to things getting back to normal.
I’m very disappointed with everydns.com. I spent a couple of hours getting all my domains transferred over to their dns servers and then as soon as I leave the house to go to the gym I get a call from one of my clients saying their site is down. So I turn around and run back into the house to find that everydns is totally down, none of their 4 “redundant” servers are responding. So I held in a few choice words and quickly found another dns host: DNSmadeeasy.com. Their interface feels a little dated but then I realized it’s just fast. I was able to get all my domains setup in about half the time as everydns and they have a few more options that they offered including domain monitoring. So NEXT time I have issues I will hopefully know about it before my clients do. I’ll report back later on my experience with dnsmadeeasy.com…but I have a feeling that it could be a good match for me.