Premium 3 letter domains up for grabs FREE

June 6th, 2009

If you have 5 or more domain names at EasyWebDNS, you can get one of the 3 letter .net domain names for free.

Offer valid while Domains last

What you need to do to get one of the domains listed below

1- Have 5 Domains in your EasyWebDNS account
2- Email freedomain [a.t] easywebdns [d-o-t] com with the domains in your account and the domain name you are interested in, We will then get back to you and push the free 3 letter domain to you.

If you like one of the domains listed, Act fast.

L4J.NET
L4Q.NET
L4V.NET

L4Z.NET
N4G.NET
N4J.NET
N4V.NET

N4Z.NET
D4Q.NET
E4Q.NET
F4Z.NET
G4K.NET
G4V.NET
H4Q.NET
I0E.NET
I8J.NET

J4V.NET
K2J.NET
L2Q.NET
O2Q.NET
O2Y.NET
O4J.NET
O4Q.NET
O4V.NET

O4Z.NET
P4Q.NET
P4V.NET
R2Q.NET

T4J.NET
T4Q.NET
U2H.NET
U2J.NET
U2Z.NET
U4J.NET
U4O.NET
U4P.NET

U4V.NET
V2Y.NET
V4K.NET
V4Q.NET
V4Y.NET
V4Z.NET
Q2L.NET
Q2V.NET
Q2Y.NET
Q4J.NET
Q4O.NET
Q7X.NET
Q9X.NET
J2Q.NET

G2Q.NET
G4Q.NET
P2J.NET
Q1U.NET
Q3U.NET
V2J.NET
I8O.NET
R4X.NET
J2Q.NET
N4X.NET
L4X.NET
O4X.NET
U4Q.NET

Domain Name Addons

May 29th, 2009

At the minute, i am working on Domain name addons, things like Dynamic DNS with domain names, Domain checking by SMS, Domain checking by E-Mail, and many other similar tools, Although much of the planning is done, there is still time for requests, If you are a customer at EasyWebDNS or plan to become a customer, or simply a domain buyer, Please let me know what features you would like to see, and i will work on adding them.

When i add domain stuff, i will be writing about them along with notes and other things on easy web dns, So as a revision here are the planned features

1- Nameservers that support Dynamic Updates
2- Checking domain availability by SMS
3- Checking domain availability by E-Mail
4- Wap Version of the website
5- Bind Tutorials
6- Load balancing and other tricks using the DNS system
7- Domain Availability Checking PHP script, free for all (at Domain Reseller Direct)
8- Allowing Domain Reseller Direct customers to allow there customers to check availability by SMS and E-Mail, a white label system

Any suggestions ?

Awaiting your responce

Cheers

ClueBringer for POSTFIX Setup

May 5th, 2009

Blue: ClueBringer Install File
RED: Change

ClueBringer POLICYD is an addon for postfix that limits the amount of mail shared web hosting users can send per hour.

Integrating ClueBringer for PostFix has not been the easiest of tasks especially when a complicated setup exists, Here i will try to make sense of the entire program, POLICYD cluebringer is written in Phython that i know very little about, i will try to make sense of the code with my C knowledge.

To begin with, i will go about this in the same order the installation file requieres.

1. Setup MySQL  (or whichever database you plan to use)

a. In database/ run…
$ for i in  core.tsql access_control.tsql quotas.tsql amavis.tsql checkhelo.tsql checkspf.tsql greylisting.tsql
$ do
$        ./convert-tsql mysql $i
$ done > policyd.mysql

This will build policyd.mysql, be sure to ALWAYS load core.tsql first, you only really need the
schema for the modules you plan to use, no harm in adding all of them though.

b. Load policyd.mysql into MySQL
$ mysql -u root -p policyd < policyd.mysql

Done with the trivial creation of database and users, converting tsql files to a mysql file and importing it, and having a database ready for cluebringer.

2. Put cluebringer.conf in your /etc directory and adjust cluebringer.conf with your MySQL database details

Let us take a look at the cluebringer.conf file, Other thatn copeying it to the /etc/ directory i will also raise the log level to 4 for debugging

log_level=4

And point the cluebringer log file to /var/log/cbpolicyd.log

log_file=/var/log/cbpolicyd.log

I will also fix the database credentials to use MySQL, and create a file for the log that cluebringer policyd can write to

3. Copy the cbp/ directory into /usr/local/lib/policyd-2.0/
mkdir /usr/local/lib/policyd-2.0
cp -r cbp /usr/local/lib/policyd-2.0/

Taking a look inside, I found a bunch of interesting files .PM, looked inside, nothing to do there.

4. Copy cbpolicyd and cbpadmin into /usr/local/bin
cp cbpolicyd cbpadmin /usr/local/bin/

Those are 2 interesting PERL files, they start with

use lib(’/usr/local/lib/policyd-2.0′,’/usr/lib/policyd-2.0′);

but there is no /usr/lib/policyd-2.0, No need to reach for the good old camel book yet, it turns out that adding this (Non existing location) to the include directory of PERL is not really a big deal.
5. Install the webui/*  into your apache directory, check out   includes/config.php  and adjust the MySQL server details.

No rocket science there.

So, up to this minute, no change has been done to the system, You see everything we have done up to this minute is simply adding files and configuring them to wait for some other program to execute them, No change has been done to the system up to now.

The first change that will be done to the system is when we approach POSTFIX to add POLICYD to its list of consultants.

Although we will not be asking it to do it directly (We will ask amavisd-new to do it), we do need to add some rules to postfix, according to the installation file.

6. Setup Postfix to use cbpolicyd…
Add the following Postfix config…
check_policy_service inet:127.0.0.1:10031
in BOTH  smtpd_recipient_restrictions and smtpd_end_of_data_restrictions.

In short, they want me to edit /etc/postfix/main.cf , If this is the first time you hear of this file, Or if you don’t know what the risk of being an open relay is, or if you don’t know what an open relay is, or if you know very little about email and the internet in general, and if you don’t know what SPF means, or if you don’t know how to write to this file, this tutorial is not yet for you, you need to start with a postfix book not here, You have been warned.
7. Copy your amavisd from /usr/sbin/amavisd and patch it with contrib/amavisd-new-2.5.3_policyd-200802070918.patch like this…
$ patch < contrib/amavisd-new-2.5.3_policyd-200802070918.patch
After this change your initscripts to start the patched amavisd.

AMAVISD-NEW, The patch that comes with cluebringer does the following to the amavisd-new file that is written in PERL.

———————————-

Ads 2 parts to the script

1- First it ads (The part in RED)

sub new         { my($class,$conn,$msginfo) = @_; undef }
sub checks      { my($self,$conn,$msginfo)  = @_; undef }
sub before_send { my($self,$conn,$msginfo)  = @_; undef }
sub after_send  { my($self,$conn,$msginfo)  = @_; undef }
sub mail_done   { my($self,$conn,$msginfo)  = @_; undef }
sub process_policy   { my($self,$conn,$msginfo,$pbn)  = @_; return $pbn }

2- Then it ads a part (In RED)

my($cnt_local) = 0; my($cnt_remote) = 0;
for my $r (@{$msginfo->per_recip_data}) {
my($recip) = $r->recip_addr;
my($is_local) = lookup(0,$recip, @{ca(’local_domains_maps’)});
$is_local ? $cnt_local++ : $cnt_remote++;
$r->recip_is_local($is_local);
if (!$r->bypass_banned_checks) {
my($bypassed_b) = lookup(0,$recip, @{ca(’bypass_banned_checks_maps’)});
$r->bypass_banned_checks($bypassed_b);
}
if (!$r->bypass_spam_checks) {
my($bypassed_s) = lookup(0,$recip, @{ca(’bypass_spam_checks_maps’)});
$r->bypass_spam_checks($bypassed_s);
}
}

# Check if we need to do last minute policy changes
if (ref $custom_object) {
$which_section = “custom-process_policy”;
eval {
my $new_policy_bank = $custom_object->process_policy($conn,$msginfo,\%current_policy_bank); 1;
%current_policy_bank = %{ $new_policy_bank };
} or do {
my($eval_stat) = $@ ne ” ? $@ : “errno=$!”;  chomp $eval_stat;
do_log(-1,”custom process_policy error: %s”, $eval_stat);
};
section_time($which_section);
}

———————————————————————————————–

The initscript that does the amavisd-new initialisations is /etc/init.d/amavisd
8. Copy amavisd-policyd.pm where you see fit, and add this configuration line to your amavisd.conf file…
include_config_files(’/path/to/amavisd-policyd.pm’);

9. Edit the top of amavisd-policyd.pm and change …
use lib(’/root/cluebringer-trunk’);  # to point to the directory which contains cbp/

my $DB_dsn = “DBI:SQLite:dbname=/tmp/cluebringer.sqlite”;  # to point to your MySQL DB

10. Fire everything up and browse to the web gui to configure

moving the blog

May 4th, 2009

So, This blog is moving to a much faster host !

Not exactly but here is how it is.

I have setup a server that is specialised in Wordpress, Joomla, and other very popular PHP scripts

The morale (And what’s new) abou this is the speed, i will tell you about it in a minute

After making a server in over 2 days nonstop work, And after securing it from spammers, hackers, and other annoying people, i modified the WordPress system to use non-trivial software on the server.

Don’t get me wrong, WordPress is one fine software and so is Joomla, but they have been written to work on as many systems as possible, And not tailored to a certain system and it’s  resources.

So, i will be selling Lightning Fast Wordpress setup, With modified Wordpress files to run on the system !

The system is expected to go live in 3 to 5 days, and will offer a free 1 month no credit card requiered trial, For those who opt to buy the service right away, the trial month is added to there account as a free month !

So, to top things off, A live chat person will actually set things up for the clients ! This is not just support, this is a  managed blog !

The offering is a 5GB space, on an 8 Xeon Processor server (Two Quad Xeon Processors) with 8GBs of ram serving Wordpress, this is nothing like our excellent PLESK offering, this is something you can find nowhere on the internet !

I will keep you updated on how things go as soon as we finish testing the server, Some very uncommon techniques are used to speed up your wordpress blog on this server, And for the same price as all our hosting level1 plans ($2.8/Mo), 5GB space and 100 email mailboxes, and a bunch of other nice stuff

Users on this server will not be restricted in any way, this is simply value added with no compromise for bloggers who want faster blogs (For both admin pannel and blog).

The only restriction to users who have not yet opted to use the server is email limit, this is because spammers usually hit on freee hosting, and we don’t want this server that we have spent so much time setting up blacklisted or sending spam to anyone, This restriction is removed as soon as the user is a paying customer !

Horde webmail : Content Encoding Error (content_encoding_error)

May 2nd, 2009

So, users were getting

Content Encoding Error (content_encoding_error)

Server response could not be decoded using encoding type returned by server.
This is typically caused by a Web Web site hosting presenting a content encoding header of one type, and then encoding the data differently.

For assistance, contact Customer Support.

And they did

Turned out horde comression for some encodings has issues, Solution was editing C:\Inetpub\vhosts\webmail\horde\config\conf.php, and change $conf['compress_pages']  to  false (Turn off compression)

Everything works fine for now, If i intend to host any mail on a Windows server that is.

Changing GoDaddy secureserver PLESK server hostname

May 2nd, 2009

So, changing the hostname on My CentOS Virtual Machine keeps reverting back to ip-xxx-xxx-xxx-xxx.ip.secureserver.net, Not exactly what i want, especially when there is a 1,000 Emails mail quota for all godaddy VPS, i don’t really use this particular box for anything important, But i do need to have things right on every single box i run, With 10 Servers and 2 Virtual Dedicated servers, i really can use every peice of related information i can use.

So, the PLESK over virtuzzo has a license key, and i very much doubt that it is related to the hostname, but i will keep you posted once i finish the following steps

1- Adding the domain name (Sub domain as domain) to PLESK so that mail routs internally without going to godaddy once things change, So servername.powerdonkey.com domain gets added to PLESK.

Changing in the following places

/etc/hosts

/etc/sysconfig/network

/etc/network/interfaces
Then /etc/init.d/networking restart
/var/qmail/control/me
/etc/httpd/conf/httpd.include
hostname servername.powerdonkey.com
/etc/hostname

/etc/init.d/hostname.sh start

For testing

hostname
hostname -f

In the psa mysql database , in misc table (FullHostName, sso_relay, sso_server, sso_server_user_url), While the first updates from within CP, the other two do not !

Now, what about that… will it requier a full server reboot, or just

/etc/init.d/psa stopall
/etc/init.d/psa stop
/etc/init.d/psa start

auto updating Wordpress and making it faster

May 2nd, 2009

Faster Auto Updating WordPress, Joomla, and other PHP scripts

So, we don’t think the popular PHP software packages are optimized at all (Knowing the developers had to make them cross platform compatible), We also think keeping them up to date is a hassle, and Auto installation scripts can mess up quite allot when they update, if you chose to modify your software, The auto updater can overwrite .

So, what has actually made it somewhere decent on the priority heap of my schedule is a modified version of this software that runs faster and auto updates, This should be added to the list of features in our standard hosting.

I will let you know how it goes, Very soon

catching spammers

May 1st, 2009

So, it is not only that i hate spammers, they also hurt us.

If a client we have is a spammer, the mail servers could get “Banned” at major email providers including Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo, etc… and we can not afford legitimate client mail delivered to Spam folders or blocked all together

We do have measures to limit the amount of email sent per domain, But an in depth analysis of the mail is also important.

So at the office, i setup an UBUNTU linux machine and installed ISOQMAIL, ./configure make then make install

On the server, i made a job to copy the mail log (/usr/local/psa/var/log/maillog) to a password protected, web accessible directory, On the local machine i made a script to fetch the files into a directory known to isoqlog.

So now i need to make 2 files, one with the domains and one with the config, the file locations of the logs isoqlog should expect to find logs in and the place it should output the data to !

As for catching the PHP scripts that actually send the mail, here is a trick… PHP sends through sendmail, and we can actually have an intermediate script that verifies the mail, Limits it, or does anything else that is needed before actually sending the mail.

1- Add a wrapper script file (/var/qmail/bin/mailwrap), this can be a PHP script if you like to eecute at command line, A copy should go to the actual mail script, the other to wherever you want to log or control activity !

Plesk for Windows Auto Update

April 29th, 2009

Plesk for Windows does NOT auto update, the feature is entierly not implemented.

What you do it Download plesk for Windows from the Parallels website, and run the installer, I upgraded today from 9.0.1 to 9.2.1

Sounds like it went smoothly (Did not check yet), but the update from 8.6 to 9.0.1 went smooth that is for sure

As for this update, the setup file (About 600MB) can be extracted if you open it with 7ZIP

Setting up MySQL on Ubuntu

April 29th, 2009

Setting up MySQL to connect to from PLESK for example is very simple

apt-get install mysql-server

Then, you will need to allow mysql to listen to the outside world

Edit /etc/mysql/my.cnf

and comment out the line

bind-address           = 127.0.0.1

then, you will need to allow the root user to connect from outside the server

On the command prompt

mysql -uroot –password=”aPassWord”

use mysql;
select host, user from user;

Now look for the root user with the hostname of the machine, assuming it came out as thishost

update user set host=’%’ where user=’root’ and host=’thishost’;

flush privileges;

quit

And you should be all set

If you don’t perform the above operations, PLESK will complain when you add the server to the list of database servers, You will probably see an error like

Error: Test connection to the database server has failed because of network problems:
Failed to connect to database: Can’t connect to MySQL server on ‘host.domain.com’ (10061)