So we have 10 racks of mess in our custom colo cage. Each rack currently has 20+ servers, most with dual network interfaces hooked up, most racks with two switches and 3+ apc remote power strips per rack. Each rack is an APC 4 post unit [url]
We have no cable management trays and currently tie up cables with velco and zapstraps, trying to keep power cables to the left and cat5 cables to the right. Unfortunately, even with all our effort, it's really turning into a wall of cabling that is basically insulating each rack and causing a temperature issue (or the potential for one at least).
Even worse, we want to add in KVM over IP hooked up on nearly every server. While I see the great benefits of the KVM, I can't see how on earth we are going to make the cabling work out!
I am trying to set up my first VPS account and it has gone reasonably well until I was actually going to point my domain to the IP I have received. I am absolutely confused as how to set up my own DNS and the instructions I have found have not made me significantly smarter..
I am on Debian using DirectAdmin control panel. Domains are registered through NameCheap. What I first tried doing was just using the two DNS adresses that were in the DirectAdmin administrator settings panel as it was installed but this didn't seem to work and when pinging these hosts I didn't get an answer at all. I reckon this is not the way to do it..
I've set up SPF records, reverse DNS, etc. but it seems that my 'virgin' IP is still being rejected as it's never sent mail before. I've sent an email to to MS as suggested in another thread, which was replied to later on saying "forwarded to our anitspam team"... but I haven't heard back since.
Any ideas what I'm doing wrong? Gmail accepts my emails without any hassle. I'm assuming (read: hope) ISPs are accepting my emails too... I was wondering if anyone has any idea how to test if other providers are accepting my email?
My company went with Liquidweb over 3 years ago on the strength of positive recommendations given in this forum. For the most part things have been good, but service and quality have visibly deteriorated in the last few months, and I feel that the community should know. Here are a few examples:
1) We ordered a new dedicated database server from Liquidweb. It started crashing randomly, requiring a full system reboot. The only software we were running on this server was Postgres, which doesn't typically halt linux systems. The first time it crashed we chalked it up to a fluke. The techs at Liquidweb said it was probably "due to serverload", even though this server wasn't heavily stressed at all.
A few weeks later it crashed again. I talked to a Liquidweb tech and he said there were some weird hard drive related messages on the terminal in the datacenter. He said he would have a systems restore "specialist" look into it. This was at 3AM in the morning. The next morning, the server was back up, but we wanted an explanation for the down time. Another Liquidweb tech put us in touch with a systems restore specialist, who said that "we don't know went wrong. the error seems so sporadic that we cannot debug it without an error message." I asked him what happened to the error messages that were on screen the previous night. He said that someone had reboot the system without taking note of the error messages! So basically, his attitude was to wait for it to crash again, rather than proactively try to solve the problem!
I grew frustrated with them and asked him to run an HD scan to check the integrity of the disk. He said that they didn't really have any tools to do that except for one, and seemed reluctant to run it. I told him to do it anyway. It turned up massive failures with the integrity of the hard disk (on this, our brand new server). The fact that I had to basically tell him how to do his job to get our server back running was not the kind of service we were paying for.
2. This morning. For no reason, one of our webservers was unable to contact any of the internal servers in our network, resulting in downtime. I called a specialist at Liquidweb. He didn't know what was going on. I asked him to check the network cables, because the servers were still accessible via their remote ips, just not on the internal ones. He went down to the server room and said that the network cable from our webserver to the switch was simply unplugged. I don't even know how that could have happened, given the fact that it had been working fine for months, and we hadn't had any changes of hardware. Don't these cables snap in with a clip? Can someone explain to me how that is possible short of someone tripping over the wire, then failing to put it back in?
3. Now. The Liquidweb network has been down for an hour. Completely down, inaccessible. This must affect hundreds of sites. The explanation, given on the support page (liquidweb.com/support), is:
"We are currently experiencing latency and packet loss affecting portions of our network. Our network engineers are currently working on the issue and we will update this page as more information is available."
It doesn't seem like a latency or packetloss issue. It's a connectivity issue. Their network is down. Their Dedicated SLA guarantees 100% uptime. I'm not a network expert, but this would seem to imply some redundancy or failover. Which should prevent this currently impossible situation from happening.
We have multiple servers with them, and are currently spending thousands of dollars each month. Given that Liquidweb is more expensive than many other alternatives, a material portion of our monthly fees go towards that unseen "premium" of quality service and quality technology that now seems to be rapidly falling.
I've been using Servint VPS hosting for the past few years and have been very happy with them. But unfortunately I have been experiencing problems for the last couple of months. My forums are regularly going down for a few minutes at a time and I have been submitting tickets to Servint.
Servint replied suggesting that my sites aren't going down. Yet I tried the sites on different PC's at different locations and they have been down. I started a thread on one forum and got confirmation from quite a few members that they experienced downtime. Servint have now accepted that there has been downtime.
I asked Servint for suggested solutions and they didn't provide any I specifically asked if I needed to upgrade the VPS package, they originally said an upgrade wasn't necessary but 4 days later said that I did need an upgrade.
I've upgraded twice in the last few weeks and as of today I am on a Super VPS @ $199 / mth - Servint have confirmed that they have upgraded me to this package But my sites have been down for about the last hour or two In my ticket today, Servint have said "the longest your sites were down was 5 minutes".
This is simply not true, and even if it was true, regular 5 minute downtime is not acceptable in my view.
I feel that no one at Servint is taking my issues seriously. They had repeatedly told me that there was no problem but now they admit that there is one and they don't seem willing or able to fix it - this has been going on for a couple of months.
I ask "what am I doing wrong", because I see such great reviews of Servint here on WHT and I don't understand why I'm not getting the same level of service.
I have very limited technical knowledge - should I be using another type of hosting that provides more in-depth tech support?
Is it possible that the problems I am experiencing are outside of Servint's control and that I am expecting too much from them?
I want to stay hosted with Servint, but I'm having great difficulties at present. Given the great reviews I see of Servint, I'm actually concerned that they will tell me that my business is not worth the trouble and that I should host my sites elsewhere. What should I do?
I'm trying to upload about 200 Gb of data and it became clear to me to route it out a specific connection sftp was the way to go.. (the ssh2 kind)
The problems I'm now having is that the 2 applications I rely on cannot get the job done.. CuteFTP Pro 8 can't even begin to get it done it crashes, errors out etc. and for while there it looked like the free program WinSCP was going to get it done but now it errors out/crash's and while it actually did get about 1/4 of the data done, it seems to think when it reported it done.. it got it all (that is when it doesn't crash for no reason, these crashes only occurred mainly when I tried to get it do 3/4's or the rest of the data)
So anyway.. recommend me a good client app if you can.. (that does real folder sync transfers) preferably ssh2/sftp, I'm uploading to dreamhost if that makes a difference I assume it doesn't though..
I have a box colocated in a datacenter, and it seems like one of my drives have failed, but I need to find out what drive I need to ask the datacenter to swap.
cat'ing /proc/mdstat provides a very vague answer, but I was hoping someone could give me a better picture.
The harddrives are plugged into port 0 and 1 of the supermicro motherboard.
Has anyone worked with the cable companies on internet connections for hosting? Eg. Comcast, TW.
I worked with a sales rep for Comcast a few years ago on a solution for our offices. He worked out a line that would give us 3+mbits up speed for less then the price of a T1.
It also included a dedicated line to our offices. Would using a cable line be a bad idea for a hosting connection?
I'm having a hard time finding a source that has the Supermicro CBL-0084L splitter cable in stock. Any suggestions where I could get my hands on about 10 to 20 of these at a reasonable price? Maybe more if the price is right.
I have had a few Colo and Dedicated servers but I have decided that the traffic I am getting on my sites warrants using a large setup so I have four servers that I need to colo to one site.
My major question is that when I go colo they generally only supply one Cat 5 cable and what is the best setup to have for a switch/router? Generally you get enough IP addresses to have one per server so my guess is that you can just plug the switch/router in and away you go?
I am going to have one server as a load balancer then two as the load balanced pair and then a database server.
I know typically at least CAT5 cable is to be used for FE or Gig-E Ethernet links, but can CAT3 cable be used at short distances? I know there is little to none cost difference in the cable price, but I am only allowed to used the preinstalled cable at this location which is CAT3 which is what Verizon typically runs for telephone cables.
i was trying to search for reviews on time warner cable and was not able to find any. I would like to hear from ppl using it like what is the quality of bandwidth and what is their pricing structure.
I have a Linux Server (CentOS 4.4) running, it has two network cards.
1. Onboard 100MBit (eth0), uses DHCP to obtain IP, this card is the only one that is able to connect to the internet. IP: 192.168.1.13 Subnet: 255.255.255.0 Gateway: 192.168.1.1 Bcast: 192.168.1.255
2. PCI Gigabit card (eth1), uses static IP, and is connected to my Windows machines via a CROSSOVER cable. IP: 192.168.2.2 Subnet: 255.255.255.0 Gateway: NONE Bcast: 192.168.2.255
Before I installed the gigabit card all internet was working fine. However now i cannot even ping? here is some more info:
I put this in the co-location section since I am co-locating a server that I host a few Websites on. The server is located in the Pacfic Northwest at a hosting company out there. As you may know, this is a "more remote" area of the United States.
Today, the company lost all Internet access when a Fiber optic cable went down. Not only was my stufff down but the entire hosting company was down. In 10 years of doing Internet development, I have never seen this happen to any hosting company I have worked with no matter how good or bad they were. On top of that, it happened one time last year as well.
According to my co-location provider, the problem happened a long way up stream. SO far that the lines cannot be backed up. Is this true? Could a fiber optic cable fail at some point where it cannot be switched over to another line?
I don't know if I should I believe that or not. It would seem to me that it is a matter of money and they may not have a back-up system in place if the pipe goes down. Is it possible? Who's fault is it?
I have a laptop and redhat box. The laptop has wireless card and connected to internet using wireless router. Can I connect to redhat box to laptop using cross over cable and use internet? If so, how can I do it?
Like the title says it: Is there anywhere in the bay area where I could colo a box and get a cable tv feed without paying an arm and a leg? Nothing illegal going on here either
I recently got my hands on a few unmanaged VPS to play around with and learn how to work on them (eventually plan on going dedicated, so this is a preparation for that). I know the basics of working on Linux via command line, but beyond that I'm clueless. Does anyone know of any good guides for setting up and managing a LAMP environment on a VPS?
I'm mostly interested in CentOS and Debian.
I can find guides specifically for 1 or 2 things, but so far the only useful (complete) guide I've found is the one here. I'm not sure if that's still up to date on todays standards as it was written 2 years ago?
Things I'm looking for:
- Installing and setting up a LAMP environment
- Jailing SSH
- User/Group management
- Firewall setup / security hardening (I've read the thread in VPS tutorials as well as the one in Technical and Security Tutorials about securing your hosting company) 2 more questions...
1) Wondering what would be better... webmin or ispconfig? From what I understand webmin is more OS oriented and allows easy configuration of various parts of the OS while ispconfig is more hosting oriented? I take it running both at the same time is not recommended/needed?
2) Still not entirely sure what OS to choose. In my VPS atm I have the following available (along with the likes of Ubuntu, Gentoo and SuSE but I think the list bellow is what I should use). Would love if someone could list some advantages/disadvantages of each.
How do i go about setting up a DNS zone using WHM for my new dedicated server? Also, what does record type mean (as in: A, A6, AAAA, CNAME, MX, NS, PTR, TXT, WRK)?
If someone can point me to a good tutorial or reference so that i can get my server up and running with multiple domains, I'd appreciate it.
We run around 300 domains for our clients; in the past we've believed that it was better to outsource DNS hosting, we've used a few different local companies but now we're getting to the stage that I'd like to consolidate all the records to one company.
Does anyone have any reccomendations for ultra reliable, easy to manage? Or is it better to put a dedicated machine in and run our own service?
I've got a few domains with Zoneedit, but I want to way-up some alternatives, I don't think the zoneedit admin is particularly user friendly and it's quite expensive $1000+ a year for what we need.
i have few dedi servers from one Us company, i am currently using their DNS service, we are into small level hosting, i want to run my own DNS, is it necessary to run a separate server for DNS?
Actually how the hosting companies do the name server pointing, for an example if i am buying a server and want to host a few domains in that server, what normally we do is we will change the name server to that companies name server ns1.domain.com ns2.domain.com
my question is if i am pointing my domains name server to the name server ns1.companydomain.com ns2.companydomain.com
how that company points the domain to my server for an example its ip is 72.xx.52.xx i am bit confused in this.
Also i have a doubt how they are creating this for n number of domains?
We are working on our pci certification ( fun times right? ) and i was wondering what other people do for server management in the dmz. Few things we are looking at listed below. We will be doing cisco zbfw for firewalling and using NAT.
#1 Servers have 2 nics, 2 ips, gateway ect. One of the networks would be considered a "management vlan/network". Other network would be for all other traffic, including natting to the internet, and traffic to the "internal" zone but locking down traffic to source,destination, and protocol level. On windows you really on have 1 true default gateway, and because windows doesnt just send traffic out the interface it came in, but looks at the routing table, some network routing issues popped up.
#2 Use only 1 nic/vlan/ip/gateway. Lock down traffic to source,destination, and protocol level for dmz to "internal" traffic and do an "inspect" statement to allow all necessary traffic back in and drop everything else. "Internal" to dmz would just be an inspect all because this traffic wouldnt need to be firewalled so management traffic would work just fine.
Does anyone know of any software applications available of which would allow staff/employees to log into SSH while actively logging all input and prohibiting certain commands from being run?
A list of applicable servers to log into would be amazing as well, although that might be reaching too far.
