Been a whirlwind week, seems like I haven’t really got a ton of sleep, just a lot on my mind honestly - mainly work related, but some personal stuff mixed in there somewhere 
I have been working the last 3 days though in testing this new spam appliance, and I must say - results are a little mixed, but still no false-positives, so I can cut the amount of traffic to servers and have the system actually create a Quarantine like your anti-virus program would.
So needless to say, I am pretty happy, I put this domain up for testing, the results were fair, 36 emails in thus far, out of that only 1 piece of spam made it though - 33 were spam, and the others were tests I sent from 2 networks to see if the new MX records had taken hold - but it’s working! So I am going to let it ride for the weekend, and go from there, but hopefully I can unleash 2 setups:
- Basic Filtering - All customers can get this, it helps two fold on my end as it increases effectiveness of spam filtering, but also removes load from SpamAssassin from running on the servers! Less load, more speed, less space, higher efficiency.
- Advanced Filtering - This one will offer a full blown access to a quarantine which customers can login to and manage if they got a message tagged as spam, but will also offer some fail-over on mail, as it will help store mail if the host is down (rare, but it could happen).
So pretty excited, looking at maybe $10 a month for a domain with 50 or less email addresses for the Advanced filtering, and $30 for 50 or more - but the pricing isn’t set in stone, but the next goal is to re-build the appliance a bit, bigger primary drive and swap the current primary to secondary and throw on a bit more ram, so pretty exciting!
But that’s been my week, some minor fun in there - was on the news, had lunch with some friends, dinner with some friends, so I am not completely a work-a-holic, but I could definitely use a nap :) Well back to it! Another 5 hours then it’s off to build the friend server!
In the hopes that there are spam bots out there crawling looking for tasty email accounts to swallow up, if you want one, snag this one:
chuck@subsonic.com
If your a friend, viewer, etc - send it email, we are testing out a anti-spam device, and trying to see what we get through filters, false positives, etc. so any and all mail helps - however please please please - do not sign it up for things just for the sake of trying to help - one or two is helpful.
More blog tonight, must finish up here at the office and head home sooner or later. Pray for my dad, he’s been sick the last few days, so prayers are appreciated. More later, brain scattered, bbl.
Well I am back in Bakersfield, and apparently my servers missed me, within hours of getting home, one server was hit by an attack, again, and again, and again - finally put in some tweaks to hopefully stop it for a bit, but then there was a network outage - so 30 minutes later that was squared away, and I snuck out to get a bite to eat.
All in all a wonderful break to the coast, a nice place to visit, stayed off the net and work as much as could be allowed, but the catch 22 to being the owner, syadmin, billing, support, and sole worker, is I can’t pass the buck but I have also fine-tuned my plan for Jan. 1, 2007 - a lot of changes will go into place then, pretty much a bulk of what I have been planning, some stuff customers will get before then, but the big stuff (new servers, and such) will come at the start of the new year.
The journey to Mac-Only is still on the table, looking realistically at the budget with the various big purchases yet to make this year, so at this point its wait and see, but I think it’ll be possible, a be sort of nice, my laptop has been odd lately, did some clean-up tonight, but still more to do, switched my NAS back on here, going to offload some project files, photos, and music, and possibly re-install from scratch.
But as always, things like my BIG road trip, are still in the “things I’d like to do” category, but sadly, it’s looking like more and more it’ll happen after the new year, which I am sad to see happen, but at the same time if I can lay down some of this new infrastructure, possibilities are endless as to what I can do, and give me more flexibility to be out and about, and not worry about not being able to reach something while in the middle of say Oregon.
Last but not least, I am shipping off the video card from BfP once it gets back CentOS will be installed, and I am going to purchase a copy of cPanel for it, and set it up at the office to be the new “Friend” server, armed with a 250GB drive, and shortly after the budget balances out a secondary / backup 300GB drive - so should offer some nice space for friends, and 1.5-6.0mbps of bandwidth (that’s still in flux - working on a finalized office plan) but should be a seamless move since none of my friends use Frontpage - so no complex moves really other than maybe a path adjustment, of which most folks can do with VIM from ssh or a quick jump into FTP - but need for donations on this front are still welcome, but again, not required - probably be setup by next Friday if the RMA goes smoothly.
Anywhoo - 1:30am is rapidly approaching, so I am going to swap chairs (back broke off this one) and settle in for some various lil projects.
One of the few side effects to long nights, early mornings, is getting worn out, and “SUPRISE!” it happened, yesterday I was dead, couldn’t think, couldn’t operate, couldn’t do much - had some mid-day glitches/scares as at first I thought someone got into one of my accounts, only to look at logs and note that my mac was made screwy by .Mac’s backup system, somehow the timing screwed up the password stored for my email, and in turn delayed the usual check, looked through all logs, all systems, server was clean, .Mac backup revealed it backed up “MORE” files than usual, which made it time out things, and hold up Mac Mail - this Mac has been a touch on the buggy side lately.
But life goes on, slept from 12 to 3 from 5 to 12, and have been awake for 3 playing with new options for billing systems, and so far, no go 
even though I enjoy this billing system since ALL the scripts are encoded with IONCUBE (yes, even the import script) I am stuck at the mercy of the developer, I understand the desire to keep one’s work secure, and not picked apart by competitors, but if I could just see how he worked this, I could probably drop in some tweaks - might just need to write my own I suppose.
Other things I suppose I could say, but the ol brain is getting tired, which is a good sign, granted I am craving food (Chicken Noodle or Breakfast Biscuts from Jack-In-The-Box) - I think I am going to give the bed another wack and see how it goes. Night folks, prayers appriciated, hopefully with them today I can at least be mildly human.
So much to do, so little time, so little sleep, and yet, the pile grows vs. goes down. For 3 days a server software glitch held me at bay, another on a SINGLE SERVER holds up stats for a large group of clients - I am awake at nearly 5am - trying to amp-down some, did for dinner, then things perk’d up, and now its all winding down again, servers are all updated minus 1, but even that will get patched up this weekend.
Sometimes I wish I had a 9-5 job, granted I love the freedoms I get now and again with my own business, but at the same time, its 4:35am, and there’s no one to talk to - apparently the rest of the world sleeps now and again - but all in all, so far this week has been promising, I am not going to let myself get down on it, I am calling AGAIN on my car today, as the engine light persists, evaluating a new billing system which could save me some a month, offer some fair features, and intergrates with cPanel in the realm of suspending accounts on lack of payment, upgrades, downgrades, etc. Just need some more real-live time with it, but it seems good.
But I just wish some of this was going faster, that in the hours I work, I got a TON done, vs. SOME done, but such is life, such is the downside to working on little sleep, great ideas, but the energy to get them implimented. So I guess its time to crash out for a while, hopefully a few hours of sleep will do me good, some server work with Kman tomorrow, some discussion on the office with Ron, and who knows, maybe I’ll get my sleep schedule back on track (hey, it could happen!) - prayers are appriciated, folks, definately could use em.
Night.
Well tonight started the journey on a new server, enter UNICRON! This is one for my buddy kman and his wife’s design studio, we are retiring their old server ION soon, and are slowly moving a batch of things over, I worked at his office till around roughly 2am, and enjoyed the steady snoring from him at which time he woke up and he went home, so I migrated here to continue the process.
Nice thing is we also deployed Scalix at his office, for you tech nerds, think OpenSource Exchange-ish - for you non-tech, think, really cool shared email/calendars - the install went pretty smooth, and for it being spare hardware lying around minus a new 80GB drive, it was a good setup! Going to swing in this afternoon and re-locate it in the office (off the tech-bench) and follow up on server moves, but so far it all looks good, some domains are already rolling, which is WONDERFUL, OpenDNS is very quick to pick up the changes, so I am seeing things running good.
But back to working on keeping DNS all sync’d up - I am doing good, not really too tired, a pretty full day, and evening, but so far energy is good, concentrating isn’t a issue yet, and I have some iTunes playing here on the Mac - so can’t complain too much - nice to have SSH and other tools be native in this enviroment, so lovely.
Possibly a new office, after a year or so now at 19th street, kman showed me a place that could work too, LOTS more room, good parking, cool location still downtown-ish, but another option might be at kman’s office (where I used to be) but not sure, that’s all up in the air, so if you could keep that in prayer with me, that could be good stuff.
Anywhoo…. Night All, if you see me online when you wake up, say hi! I’m on AIM.
Another morning where I’ll probably crash around 11am, wake up around 3-4pm - a good nap, but the joys of a odd sleep schedule rapidly approaching.
Well the last few days I have been hitting the ol research again into the question “What do I want to be when I grow up?” - while server management is nice, pays the bills, and is ocasionally nice on the schedule (though not so much last week) - I have been yet again considering out-sourcing server admin work to another company, or quite possibly - though with the prices I charge folks probably not - hiring someone - just this past week I hit a fun spot that’s always been a “what if?” 2 times in the week I had 2 set’s of servers with issues, once with Kman and The Office, and then Kman and My Servers, so twas a tad bit of stress, though not horrible, but at the same time, not enjoyable.
So I am on the lookout again for a company which can provide me with the resources (aka oh-so-wise staff), the know-how (to take care of me and customers professionally), and maybe even a all-in-one solution which offers hardware + sysadmin work, that’s beefier than my current server configurations, which would give customers more bang for their buck - another thing in my mind, like the other project/prayer request mentioned earlier, if this sysadmin trade off happens, I’d probably have real time to invest into it - as well as other customers servers I’d still manage.
I have also looked at bringing some customers and friends back to Bakersfield, we have backup power at the office, as well as a 4 T1’s, so it’d more than hold most people I’d carry over, and while not the “ideal” solution I’d hope for, it would cut some costs as I could build a really nice server, for under $2k and it’s re-occuring costs yearly would be under $500 - which ain’t bad from a money standpoint.
So what to do? Well probably pass out sooner or later first and foremost - just want to wrap up some research, but I’d bet 11am, hopefully I’m wrong, because I know I have to be tired!
