All I can say is “Wow!” in regards to Google Apps. My spam has gone from 30-35 a day to 0. They have some kick ass filters. I know they analyze the mail in some way… but I don’t care. I send out very little e-mail.
First off, I just gotta thank Seej for the many years of free hosting. I also have to thank him for telling me to revisit Google Domain Services.
I remember signing up with Google Apps over a year ago because of the domain services they were going to be offering. I stopped pursuing it though on account of my domain registrar not giving me enough power to manage DNS. That has recently changed however and now I have a spiffy new e-mail server… virtually that is!
It all started when Seej told me his server started beeping and he was going to be migrating to a new box. He said he could move the mail services over to the new machine or I could use Google Apps. To make a long story short, I pointed my domain’s MX records and the “mail.” sub-domain to Google. Now, my entire domain’s e-mail is basically going through Gmail but I access it through plain old POP. My domain users can also access webmail using the Gmail interface… only at the “mail.” Extension. Super Neat!
The spam I receive has gone down by 95% because of Google’s filters. I had to reconfigure my email clients to use new POP settings… but I probably would have had to do that if I had moved to a new server anyway. My “www” traffic will be going over to the new server though. I may move that to a server on my DSL in the immediate future however. Its not mission critical so I might as well server it from home.
Wow. It’s been a long time since I updated my page.
Family is doing well. My wife is winning her horse rides (as usual). My boy is taking swimming lessons. I had to replace our hot water heater. I have all my MP3 collection organized for the first time in 6 years. (I’m encroaching 4000 albums.)
Well. Work-wise I got VMWare running smoothly with VMotion enabled. VMotion lets you move a running virtual machine from one physical host to another seamlessly. The VM Manager PC monitors the status of the VM host machines and if it sees one is getting overly stressed, it automatically moves virtual machines located on the overburdened host to an entirely different host. We’re not in Kansas anymore.
At my old job, I had a server running Nagios. It would send out pings or look for network services on devices that you specified and send message notifications out to the administrators if problems arise. After two days of trying to get a machine setup and configured, I gave up. The problem was that Nagios uses text files for its configurations. These files are archaic to modify and 3rd party tools like Monarch or Groundwork are a pain in the ass to setup too. I told myself that in two days I could write a small program to run on an existing server to notify us via email about problems… so that’s what I did using VB2005.
Using MySQL as a backend, each host in the database has a check interval, status, and so on. If a host is up, the server only checks it on its regular interval. If the host is down however, the program obsesses over the host and checks for its availability every minute. I also wrote a little client that shows graphically what hosts are up or down and gives a frontend to add more hosts. If a status change happens, an email is sent out to the administrators. Host ups and downs are notified.
Simple, configurable, and a small footprint… good stuff.
On the home front, I’ve been ripping streams of Sirius to mp3 format to listen to on my MP3 player and at work. That’s pretty cool. I also increased the wireless security on my P-T-P wireless link.