The Fubra Blog
LINX66 Presentation
Today saw day 1 of LINX66, the LINX members meeting at Goodenough College in London. As a LINX member we dispatched our MD Brendan to make a short talk to the group about one of our latest projects — our in-house datacentre.
The presentation briefly covered why we had opted to develop our own infrastructure, how we have gone about implementing all the ancillary services required in a datacentre environment, the network and technology we have built the main services around, how we had gone about detecting and overcoming the inevitable problems which crop up during the day-to-day running of such a facility, and finally the services we are offering at our facility. Brendan then took questions from the floor relating to the final price tag of the project, as well as addressing some of the technical questions relating to our environmental monitoring network.
For more information download the slides which accompanied the presentation (they’re in PowerPoint format).
Moving to Google Apps
This week we decided to take the plunge and finally migrate our internal e-mail system to Google Apps. I’ve been using Gmail personally since it launched, and I’ve always been impressed with its amazing spam fighting abilities and the general level of innovation throughout the system.
Up until now we’ve hosted our own e-mail servers in-house, and whilst that has given us a high degree of flexibility, it’s also been a pain to configure, maintain and keep spam free!
We’re particularly happy with gmail’s filters – previously we had to edit a maildrop filter file on our server in order to set up new rules. Not only does Google provide a simple interface to configure them, it also gives us the ability to choose whether they are marked as read when they come in. I know it’s possible to replicate this in a desktop mail client, but it’s much better to do it on the server – that way if you access your e-mails from multiple devices, they will be organised the same way on each one. This is particularly handy for us as we receive a fair amount of auto-generated notification e-mails from our various web sites which we don’t need to read as they come in but we do like to keep to refer back to.
So the key benefits to us are:
- Simplified and improved filter configuration
- Improved spam detection
- Excellent web mail platform
- Shared calendars
- Easier Administration for setting up new users and groups.
- Takes less time to maintain.
We also plan to become a Google App’s Authorised Reseller over the next few months, so that we can resell these services via hoston.it
Unattended linux installation
If you ever had to do multiple linux installations you know how laborious it can be. At times like this you may have wondered if it would be possible to carry out a fully automatic linux installation. Fortunately it is not only possible to prepare a fully hands-off installation, but also a one that does not require any discs. You can read how to perform a network installation on Paul’s blog, while in this post we will concentrate on making the installation fully automatic. Having a configuration described on Paul’s blog such installation is fairly easy to set up. There are four things we will have to do:
- Prepare a kickstart file
- Save the kickstart file in a place accessible for the installer
- Prepare an installation source
- Modify the PXE config so it instructs the kernel to use the kickstart file
.htaccess vs httpd.conf
If you are an Apache user you will have certainly heard about the two different ways to make configuration changes to Apache server. The first one is to make changes directly inside the main configuration file (i.e httpd.conf) and the second is to use .htaccess files. The second method allows us to make configuration changes on a per-directory basis.
There are some general opinions that tell you to never use .htaccess files on your web server, putting all the options in the main configuration file.
Howto: Setup a Mac Mini as a BGP Router
Thinking Differently… An update on our Mac Mini Routers at LINX
We have been quiet for a while on the subject of the mac minis we installed into LINX at Telehouse several months ago…
You may remember the previous article, basically we are using a pair of Mac Mini computers to connect our hosting platform to the LINX Internet exchange in London.
