Modwest Blog

Happy Sysadmin Day

July 27th, 2007 is System Administrator Appreciation Day.

For the last several years, our most important systems administration work has been performed by Mike, our Operations Manager, and Tom, our Systems Engineer. Tom and Mike are responsible for big-picture infrastructure planning, setting up new servers, workstations, and services, and being generally responsible for the continuous monitoring, maintenance, and improvement of our technical infrastructure. On top of that, these guys get paged at absolutely any time of the day or night, 365 days a year, about:

• hard drive failures
• spam outbreaks
• hacker attacks
• servers running out of disk space
• network cards going bad
• datacenter temperature alarms
• bandwidth provider interruptions
• software failures
• etc etc

Despite everything that can (and unavoidably does) go wrong, I'm proud of the highly reliable hosting we provide, which is largely due to the efforts of our system administration/Operations team.

-JM

 

End of auto-forwarding to AOL

We monitor just about everything at Modwest, and one of the types of alerts we occasionally receive is that one or more of the servers in our mail cluster has a backlog of messages awaiting delivery to remote destinations. That happened this week, and upon investigation we discovered just the latest occurrence of a phenomenon with which we're well acquainted by now: due to spam complaints, AOL was blocking all email from all Modwest customers hosted on our shared system.

How could this happen? Surely Modwest has strong anti-spam policies! (Yes, we do.)

Well, there is a small loophole: We allow our customers to set up mail forwarding, which means you can have mail addressed to yourdomain.com (hosted by Modwest) automatically forwarded to another email address elsewhere (such as AOL).  Sometimes, messages that get forwarded to a customer's AOL account are then reported via the "This is Spam" button at AOL; this results in Modwest being identified as the source of that message. Enough complaints, and AOL blocks Modwest altogether.

Therefore, beginning July 27th, 2007, we are going to reconfigure all forwarding rules destined for AOL addresses to deposit received messages in the main account mailbox. Further, we will be disallowing all new forwarding rules with an AOL address as the destination. We'll notify Modwest customers who currently have AOL forwarding rules soon.

We hate to make any changes that restrict features, but due to AOL's policies, continuing to allow these types of forwarding rules can adversely affect every customer of ours.  If you have any questions, don't hesitate to ask.

-JM

MySQL 5: Smarter, Faster, Better

As we recently announced, Modwest now offers a choice of either MySQL 4.1 or MySQL 5.0 on our shared hosting system. We're now encouraging anyone looking for a database performance boost to migrate their existing 4.1 databases over to the fast new 5.0 server, which is handling about 80% less traffic currently. (Just be sure to watch out for the new reserved words and remember there are many possible reasons for a site to seem slow.)

In addition to advanced database features such as stored procedures and views, MySQL 5.0 implements a new "greedy optimizer" which they say can increase performance on complex multi-table JOIN statements by a factor of 1000.  So besides running on a server with a ton of horsepower to spare, MySQL 5.0 should be inherently faster as well. 

For more about MySQL 5.0 features, bug fixes, and performance enhancements, check out their "What's New" page. If you're ready to migrate, our FAQ has all the details.