Granted, this is a web hosting company so, for the most part, you expect this blog to be primarily about web hosting. Occasionally, an event takes place and I feel the need to say something about it because to ignore it seems patently ridiculous. George Carlin dying is one of those events.
I don’t know when I first heard Carlin - it seems like I’ve just always known who he was and he’s always made me laugh. I do know I first saw him on HBO, and was amazed that he was saying the things that he was saying. Other people have HBO Boxing Nights where everything stopped for the big fight - I had Carlin HBO special nights, where everything stopped. I would sit with college friends and drink, then later I would watch it on the small screen in my own apartment, and later I would snuggled down before my LED Big Screen with my husband and dog in suburbia. Most of my adult life, Carlin was there to re-phrase the obvious, point out the absurd, and make me laugh about it.
So, screw web hosting for a day.
Today I want to share one of my favorite bits Carlin did which is probably a little lesser well known. The following is “Modern Man”:
I’m really going to miss him, and honor one of the most mainstream radicals we’ve ever had the honor to be touched by.
I’ve been pre-washed, pre-cooked, pre-heated,
pre-screened, pre-approved, pre-packaged,
post-dated, freeze-dried, double-wrapped
and vacuum-packed.
1-866-DRAKNET is no longer DrakNet’s phone number. Well, ok, it may currently still be, but it won’t be for long - I know, it was really, really cool to have our name in a toll free number and all. I’m a little bummed, too. But unfortunately, it’s time to retire it.
Now that we’ve taken on more staff, we’re moving over to Skype completely for voice communications which, honestly, there shouldn’t be much of.
Our new number, 1.512.377.6138, is our Skype-In line, enabling you to call us directly even if the concept of Skype freaks you out a little bit. Our toll-free line was nifty because it was exceedingly vain and had our name in the number and all that, but it was also limited to the United States alone and significantly limited our International clients and how they could contact us since we didn’t have a local number whatsoever.
As a small company, costs are always a factor and we’ve found that the lower accounts that call pretty much just ignore those invoices for calls, meaning an Intro Account on a ten minute phone call has become a loss leader that, frankly, were we anyone else, we would have nuked the account for the repeated phone calls. We also found that those of you that have been with us long term picked up the phone if you wanted to pick up the phone, and that was the end of it.
Phone support does cost a significant amount considering that doing support live while typing and looking into things takes longer - many, many hosting companies have cut out telephone technical support altogether due to the cost. We’ve sought different solutions to that cost/benefit ratio, and our first attempt was charging for support on the phone to balance out the costs of having it at all.
That didn’t go over too well.
Skype is not 100% as reliable as “regular phone service” yet, however, the costs are phenomenally lower than telephone service. It enables us to give cheaper and more widely accessible access that’s easily expandable as we add more staff while not utilizing hardly any extra power to do so (which we also find a really neat green solution) and without having to buy anything (which we find a cool anti-consumerism solution).
And oh, yeah - we’re not charging for the lower account levels anymore. If you’re an Intro account, you can call - you’d have to talk an awful lot for Skype to make your account upside down. (This does not change the fact that Skype goes to 1 person, and the ticket goes to an actual department of multiple people, so remember you’re not going to get serviced as quickly calling unless you get really lucky.)
We also find that a toll free number considering prevalence of cell phone free minutes anywhere simply isn’t necessary - and if you really don’t want to pay and have no other option, Skype us at drak.net - anyone utilizing us is almost sure to have a computer and setting us Skype was much easier than we thought it would be.
We’re also going to begin integrating Skype’s features to connect you to each other, and to us - we’re going to schedule Skypecasts on different topics of interest. If you have a topic you’d like to see, let us know and we’ll try to cover it. We even have some guests scheduled.
So, don’t think of it as losing the cool toll free number. Think of it as gaining wider access to the DrakNet community and staff! And if you’re trying to call us, remember to call 1.512.377.6138 or skype us at “drak.net“.
DrakNet has added an additional way to contact us - you can now call DrakNet free on Skype!
For those who don’t know, Skype is is a software program that allows users to make telephone calls over the Internet. Calls to other users of the service are free of charge, while calls to landlines and cell phones can be made for a fee. Additional features include instant messaging, file transfer and video conferencing - though, sorry, I am not doing the video thing. Ya’ll don’t want to see me in my pajamas reconfiguring Apache.
Currently, only Jen (that would be me) is on Skype, and you can connect with me by calling “drak.net“. Since Skype is free for us, calling me via Skype is free for you and you will not be charged the 50 cents per minute for any direct support that you feel you need via … um, speech. Because this isn’t really a phone.
We still wholly recommend submitting a ticket instead of calling, and we absolutely recommend submitting a ticket before calling - we’re still fairly adament that telephone technical support is not the most effective means of technical support and actually causes your issue to take longer to work out than it would via ticket. We do, though, understand sometimes you just want to talk to a human being.
If you have a microphone and speakers, you can download Skype and sign up for an account and call us from your computer at no charge. You won’t need to pay anything to sign up at all, and Skype to Skype calls are absolutely free.
Most folks know that DrakNet has worked with the Bonneville Environmental Foundation to “green” our company. Well, we’re also on their mailing list and we got an email yesterday letting us know that Jack Johnson has also chosen BEF to green his 2008 World Tour.
Jack’s gone a step further, though and we wanted to tell you about it since it gives you a chance to raise money for BEF just by getting educated - he’s got a number of video ads on his web site located here addressing a number of issues, and if you click this link and watch the video:
Video Title: Bonneville Environmental Foundation Ad
Date Added: 06/11/2008
Community Group: Bonneville Environmental Foundation
Areas of Interest: Climate Change, Ocean / River / Watersheds, Renewable Energy
Video Language: English
Video Duration: 1:51
on his web site all the way through, the Jack Johnson All At Once charitable foundation will donate $1 to BEF.
In addition, any BEF Green Tag orders placed online by September 14 that reference Jack Johnson will be matched by his foundation. In other words, your purchases will have double the benefit to the environment!
For those of you who live in the Pacific Northwest, you can visit the BEF Blog ( blog.b-e-f.org) to learn more about how you can win a free pair of Jack Johnson tickets for the August 20 show in St. Helens, Ore.
Nope, we don’t host Jack Johnson - but we do listen to him an awful lot while working on the servers!
Due to a recent issue with sending mail, we wanted to expand a little more than we do in the FAQ on the complexities of sending mail. It’s one of those things that seem like it should “just work”, and yet in practicality that’s not really the case.
Years ago, port 25 was the port in which you connect with your email client and send mail on. Actually, port 25 is still the default SMTP port, but for many of you coming in from some of the largest ISP’s both in the country and (to us) internationally, the only port 25 you can get to is the one that your ISP provides you. Some major ISPs known to do this are:
AT&T, MindSpring, BellSouth, MSN, CableOne, NetZero, Charter, People PC, Comcast ATTBI, Sprynet, Cox, Southwestern Bell, Sympatico.ca, EarthLink, Verio, Flashnet, Verizon, MediaOne, Optus, Frontiernet… and yes, there are more.
So, first, what is “Port 25 Blocking”? In a nutshell, it means that your ISP has instituted a block that prevents its users from sending outgoing mail via any third party mail-hosting services. Your domain hosted here is a third party mail-hosting services and so understanding that, depending on your choice of ISP, you may be prevented from using that aspect of your domain service by your Internet Service Provider.
Before the chest thumping consternation begins, the fact is that the reason they do this is pretty sound. Disallowing connections to any other smtp port means that they have much less spam coming out of their network and if someone does try to spam from their network, it goes through mail systems that they have control over. They can institute software traps to catch spammers before they get out, as well as lock down infected computers on their network that have, usually unbeknowst to the user, become part of a botnet due to a virus infection. This block became much more prevelant after the MyDoom virus of 2004, which slammed mailservers the world over and those ISP’s that had been dragging their feet found themselves implementing it in the MyDoom aftermath.
They are trying to do the right thing - it is unfortunate, though, that in order to keep their network (and all networks) safer it limits what you as a legitimate user can do.
So, how do you know if your ISP does this? Well, you can simply google your ISP name and Port 25 Block and you will likely find someone, somewhere that wrote about it. You can check the Terms of Service and it will likely state it somewhere in their policies. You can also simply call support and ask them - this isn’t a secret, and they’ll be happy to tell you.
There are some alternatives you can try - you can switch to port 26 instead of port 25 and see if you can get to SMTP on our servers that way. You can also try port 587. As time goes on, these alternatives are less and less likely to work, and your best bet is to use your ISP’s SMTP server - it won’t affect the “from:” email address display to whoever you are sending to, and your ISP’s ability to authenticate you is fairly simple, as you are a computer on their Network who has already authenticated. It should also be noted that by using these “workarounds”, you’re essentially violating the terms of what your ISP wants you to do and these aren’t guaranteed to work forever.
Ok, so what happened last week?
Well, DrakNet uses the SpamHaus blacklists to block mail at “Exim’s Level”. What that means is instead of accepting all the mail that’s delivered, then running it through many levels of processing, we refuse IP addresses that are in the Spamhaus blocklists. This greatly, greatly reduces the load on the server as the processing for the mail that we accept is actually the single highest resource usage hog on every server we have. Nothing that we do, or you do, is more resource intensive other than backups, and those only happen once a week. Mailscanner runs continuously.
Previous to last week, only XBL and SBL (proven spammers and proven hijacked computers) were set as default blacklists in Exim. cPanel switched to Zen, which also included the PBL list, and once that was added, some of you had problems.
The Spamhaus PBL is a DNSBL database of end-user IP address ranges which should not be delivering unauthenticated SMTP email to any Internet mail server except those provided for specifically by an ISP for that customer’s use. What this means is that if you have been “getting around” your ISP’s rules by using port 26 or 587, the use of the PBL list will stop you from connecting to our server because by your Network’s rules, you’re not allowed to be doing what you are doing. You can find out if this affects you by
If it is on the PBL List, you can request it’s removal and the criteria are a bit lower than the other lists (XBL and SBL) due to the fact that it is an advisory list and not a known problem list. If you are on the XBL or SBL list, you have a bigger problem than we can go into here.
Other alternatives are to simply use your ISP’s SMTP server - which is what they want you to do, and what you really should be doing to comply with their rules. You can also switch to using GMail, which we described how to set up in an earlier article. If you need an invite, let us know.
One of our recent additions to our servers at no charge through our non-profit program is the Wake County Autism Society.
The Wake County Autism Society (WCAS) is a nonprofit organization supported by volunteer board and committee members. They are an affiliate of the Autism Society of North Carolina (ASNC), which is an affiliate of the Autism Society of America (ASA). They work together to benefit individuals and their families affected by an autism spectrum disorder (ASD).
We believe that individuals with an ASD can be productive members of our community or can grow through appropriate interventions and treatments so that they become productive members. In addition, we believe that the Wake County community can grow through acceptance of and interaction with individuals with differences to be a complete community that welcomes a diverse population.
Though we’re in Texas, we received an application from them that really reminded us why we absolutely love this program. In the field that we have asking the organization to answer why we should support them, we read:
We feel that we are an extremely progressive non-profit which is struggling under the weight of so many families begging for information concerning services and programs in our area. As you probably know, it truly is an epidemic, and the numbers of children being diagnosed is rising drastically. Please visit our current website to see what we do. Our current hosting service comes up for renewal in a month, and they are raising the rate on us. A truly ‘free’ hosting service would be a blessing.
I’m not sure why the raise in rates kind of “got me”, but I have to admit it did.
We actually shared some of this application with some friends in a discussion about why we choose to do this and how sometimes it really does just make us feel all warm and fuzzy inside. Interestingly, one of the friends we shared it with reminded us that we had another friend who lived in that area and also had a son with Autism. A quick email to her and we found out that friend had depended on WCAS for support in her own struggles - and yet that wasn’t how WCAS found us.
This friend also informed us that we had to give them free hosting, which thankfully, we had already decided to do or she may have reached through the Internet and slapped us around a bit.
This was one of those really neat stories that also just happened to demonstrate what an incredibly small world it really is.
OK, ok, we admit we’ve been playing with our new server too much and we have been totally and completely irresponsible in our quest to be good global citizens.
H. Zagou BOKOE was born in 1985; he is married and is responsible for two people. A very courageous and determined man, he has owned a shop selling paint for three years. Business is booming because he is the only one in his district and he sells good quality paint. He has a large and steady customer base. Not having enough funds, he is often short of stock, and his customers complain all the time. Faced with this situation, he might lose his customer base.
To bolster his business and to prevent his loyal customers from going elsewhere, he is requesting a loan to enable him to increase his capital and to buy paint in bulk in order to make a profit. This will improve his household’s standard of living.
Translated from French by Daniel Kuey, Kiva volunteer
Monsieur BOKOE H. Zagou est né en 1985 ; il est marié et a à sa charge deux (2) personnes. Très courageux et déterminé, il tient une boutique de vente de peinture depuis 3 ans. C’est un commerce florissant car il est le seul dans son quartier et vend des peintures et de bonne qualité. La clientèle est abondante et régulière. N’ayant pas assez de moyens, il est souvent en pénurie de stock et ses clients se plaignent tout le temps. Devant cette situation, Monsieur BOKOE risque de perdre sa clientèle.
Pour renforcer son commerce et éviter que ses fidèles clients n’aillent s’approvisionner ailleurs, Il sollicite un crédit qui va lui permettre d’augmenter son capital et d’acheter en gros les peintures pour en tirer plus de profit. Ceci améliorera le niveau de vie dans son ménage.
Yesterday, we “upgraded” the four older servers to remove PHP 4.X track from your available options. As it’s getting close to the PHP4 End of Life moment (2008-08-08 is D-Day for PHP4) we wanted to go ahead and make the jump now as both versions have been running for almost a full year. We also took the time to upgrade PHP to 5.2.6, as well as compile mysqli as an option. Everything went well and it appears most of you have made the jump to PHP5.X, as there was no mad rush to the ticket desk.
We also wanted to let you know that there are two new staff members covering the tickets, and if you’ve submitted one within the past few weeks you may have met them. Thomas Williams, and Brian Hochstein have joined the team - they both have some familiarity with hosting, and while Thomas is familiar with hosting in general Brian’s pretty familiar with DrakNet as a whole, so give them some time to get up to speed and if you feel you need to have your ticket upped, please don’t hesitate to ask politely. As always, abuse of our staff is just not tolerated here - we’re geeky tech hippies and too laid back to smile while people call us names, so give them some slack while they’re learning about ya’lls quirks.
You’ve got a few weeks left to get yourself on the MySQL 5 server with some leeway time, as in mid-July we’re upgrading all servers to MySQL 5. We’ve had very few requests for this, so we’ll warn you now we’re not going to have an immense amount of sympathy if your stuff is not compatible with the current recommended version of MySQL. We can get you moved over in a few minutes while maintaining your old installation so if you need to take advantage, do so, and soon.
We should get back to our snarky banter posts soon.
This morning when you go into your cPanel, you’ll see a new button under Software/Services called Old Script Finder. Old Script Finder searches your web site for old, out of date scripts by searching for signatures on some of the most popular, and most security issue-laden if not updated, scripts being used today.
After installing, we ran a report on all five servers. There’s only eight sites on the new server and half of the scripts (3 of 6) were out of date. Half of them. Before you take a deep breathe in shock at that news (considering the server hasn’t even been up a week), let’s get to all of you other folks on the older four servers… I’m sorry to say wasn’t a single one that didn’t have 80% of the scripts out of date - ranging from just a few steps behind to woefully, woefully so far behind that the message was “script obsolete”. Even we were a bit surprised at the statistics.
Currently, we have only the most basic options on this script enabled - every Saturday, it will search all the servers and it will take stock of who’s scripts are out of date. That report will appear in your cPanel. It will tell you what script is out of date, where that script is located, what version you have and what the current released version of the script is. There is also a button for you to run the script on your own to take a look in your own directory if you install something - please use it sparingly as this is a fairly resource intensive endeavor.
The catch is you need to look at it, and you need to take action.
Hopefully, this handy tool will help you get a handle on updates and give you information you didn’t have before. It should also help folks that have installed scripts and forgotten about them - I took a look at some of the things that were found and I get the feeling that a few of you are going to be shocked at what’s hanging out in your web site.
If the statistics don’t get significantly better, we’ll take the next step and have the server email you regarding your out of date scripts. If that doesn’t get a response, at some point, we may start locking them down after repeatedly warnings are ignored.
For a list of scripts that are looked at, click the more information button below.
Alakazam is now up and running, and houses several folks that moved as well as several new sign ups. Since this are running smoothly there it’s time to address the rest of you antiquated folks.
We’re going to step each thing up slowly so that we can narrow down what upgrade is causing what problem, should you have any problems.
June 16, 2008
On June 16th, we’re going to cease offering PHP4 across all 4 remaining servers and move exclusively to PHP5 only. This is for security reasons, both for the server and because any php scripts that aren’t compatible with PHP yet aren’t really going to be scripts we want on the servers. You have had many, many months with both to prepare for the move over where you had both available to you and we feel it’s now time.
July 7, 2008
We’ll upgrade to MySQL 5 from MySQL 4. Again, we have a box with 5 now - if you have any question or concern that your site will not work with MySQL 5 or that you’ll need to do work on it to make it compatible, you need to speak up now. After July 7th, everyone will have 5 and if you need 4, you won’t be able to find it here.
August 4, 2008
Finally, we’ll be upgrading Apache. The only real issue will be that your password protection will need to be redone after the upgrade. If you have password protected directories, you may want to submit them to us so we can make sure they are re-secured.
Please note that the following programs have no need to be tested and are compatible with standard installations:
1525 Cypress Creek Rd., Suite H #154,
Cedar Park, TX 78613 US: 1.512.377.6138 | UK: 44.20.7558.8517 | AU: 61.2.8011.4876 Skype: drak.net (English Only) Home | Shared Hosting |
Reseller
Hosting | Soholaunch | Contact Us
company. Well, we’re also on their mailing list and we got an email yesterday letting us know that 
