So packing has turned into sorting, ah well better to do it now than pack everything and sort later (yeah right) so we have cleaned out one room and now it is a holding room for the stuff to get rid of. I was going to get a skip for the building work that needs to done and yard clean up but will get one just a bit bigger to save the hassle

Why the move?

Well when we bought this place it was to get our step onto the housing market, we have done what we can but some things need to be redone and to do them properly the house needs to be empty so we had the choice move out temporarily have the work done and move back or upgrade. We took the upgrade path and of course happy wife means happy life.

We did look a buy a block and have a place built but that would have meant a 12 month wait minimum and land is getting very $$$$, the new place ticks pretty much all the boxes on what we are after and only took a month and worked out a cheaper option so away we go.

So what does it look like and where are the photo’s?

We keep getting asked that and I can only say they are coming, we do have some photos but I will be taking more when we get the keys for the before and after the paint job and will post them then.

more details to come…..

I received a report that a client had gone to their site and the browser had poped up a warning “The webpage you are about to open contains a virus” hmm not good.
So logged in via FTP and sure enough the home page and other index files had been updated and had an iframe inserted in the code, fortunately I hd copies of the infected files and uploaded them all good.

Investigation on the server revealed that the files had been updated via FTP so the password had been used, as multiple users had FTP access the quick and simple fix was to change the password to restrict access and up security on the rest of the site. Site repaired and changes made to the admin area of the site I thought I would check things and logged in. Bad Move on my part!

Browser locked up loading the page, WHAT!!! yep you guessed it the admin page had the same hack and I had missed it. I had not noticed but to compound the problem AVG had not started for some reason when the PC had booted up that morning so I did not get a warning. I shut down the browser but the damage was done the web page had silently contacted a site in China using a hidden iframe and downloaded the trojan. Little did I realise that the particular nasty was the same one that had caused the problem on the website. I wiped everything and loaded it from offsite backups, checked everything and all looked good and then fired up the MIA Antivirus and set it running.

Oh it found stuff and went about its business finding and quarantining infected files, whew got it or so I though.

Next day thought I would check things again just to make sure things were Ok on the site and what do you know they had the iframe hack again but only a few files, this is odd. Changed password again and re upload the files, checked back during the day and no further issues.

After that I went on to do some work on another site and uploaded some files, 20 minutes later the site goes off air. What do you know same problem, iframe hack but this time as the site is php the inserted code actually broke the page. Whats the chances of two sites for different clients on two different servers having the same problem, what could be the common point, yep ME!

A little time doing some research and I found out just what it does, apart from installing itself in various locations on your PC it infects the resident antivirus program and looks for any FTP program to use and any sites you access it edits every possible home page inserting a link back to its maker. As I manage quite  a few sites this is a major issue. AVG did not get everything so first delete it along with filezilla as it is now infected and install fresh copy of Avast (6 hours for a full scan) and ran that, ran malwarebytes (4 hours) to pick up any others and found another set of infected files. So went looking for another AV program and found some very good articles about Avira AntiVir including some about this particular trojan and the success at getting rid of all infected files.

After installing and running a full scan (9.5 hours) it found 93 infected files various viruses and trojans as well as a few others it matched through its heuristic scan so I can now report I am completely virus and trojan free

Just to be sure I set up a fresh copy of filezilla and set up an account on a test domain, logging on and uploading and downloading files for a couple of days.

As a precaution I had to change the passwords for every other account that the FTP program had in its list, although checks of all sites using another PC revealed that no other sites were compromised it was still better to be safe that sorry.

So be warned keep your AntiVirus measures up to date and make sure they are running!

Christmas and New Year’s are over although I spent most of it working doing server upgrades it was still a good time. Why do it then? Well for one traffic is low so scheduling major changes is not going to affect sites as much.

I can say welcome to the new year with everything now up to date and running the latest version on some shiny new hardware. The new US servers were already up to date but our original US server needed some major overhauls. In September we had a move to bigger and better hardware but were still running RedHat9 and the original versions of Apache, PHP and MySQL, while things were secure an update was way overdue.

After the upgrades the Eagle server is now running the same setup as the other servers CentOS5, Apache 2.2.8, PHP 5.2.6 and MySQL 5.0.67. As we did some extensive testing before the upgrades we only had a couple of small issues that were easily rectified.

The Australian servers were not left out of the upgrades, we had the option of setting up another VPS or moving to our own Dedicated hardware. Operationally it made more sense to consolidate things and get a decent Dedicated server to reduce management overheads so that is the path we took. As we were setting up from scratch on the new hardware it was loaded with the latest versions so the spec is the same as Eagle.

Once the new server was online and testing had been completed, it was just a matter of transfering everyone over and redirecting traffic from the old servers to the new server.

Redirection will be inplace for a couple of weeks just so nothing gets lost.

Connection with the nokia N73 is good most of the time but the proprietary connection on the cable that connects to the phone is a pain, get a loop in the cable and the connection can drop out grrrr nokia why didn’t you just use a mini-usb. Ok well finally had enouth this week and got myself a bluetooth dongle so I can connect with bluetooth.

Two options when I go to get one Swann and Belkin, the Belkin had more features was Version 2 yada yada yada so I though hey this is good lifetime warranty etc. So got that one and went home to get it running, two hours later find out due to reasons unknown the particular model I got (F8T012au) has the same id as a belkin network adapter and so will not work.

Ok back to the the shop and swap it for the Swann, home again plug it in and what do you know regognised straight away, couple of commands via the terminal widow and we are in business and on the internet and without that annoying cable. “Look ma’ no cable”

Ok which one works well this is it (SW120-BTA)

Ok it works I even managed to add some keyboard shortcuts to turn bluetooth on and off as required just to make things easier. I will outline the full process to getting it working in a separate post.

Bluetooth keyboard works well but still stuck with a small screen and its a bit fiddly. Next step up take the laptop, well from the ‘Black screen of Death” post you will see that while my laptop is good for everyday use I found that taking it for occasional use means lugging 5KG plus around not fun plus it is used as an everyday machine so things to unplug etc etc.

What to do what to do, well I looked at updating the phone and going down the pda/phone combo path then I found out about the UMPC. I had looked at the Mini-PC market before but with prices starting at $2000 for one it was just too much, well ASUS has brought out a compact unit called the eeePC at under 1KG running with solid state memory. They come in a few versions the 700 comes with a 7″ screen but I hung out for the eeePC900 which sports a 8.9 screen and 20GB of storage.

Is it any good I hear you ask, well I have had it for just under a week now and it is brilliant (I am typing this entry on it right now) the key board is small, well the whole thing is just under 23 cm wide so those that touch type and have big hands will find it a bit cramped but I two finger type so I find it ok .

Ok here are some pics top and Bottom View

Next we have a view of it open and a closeup on the keyboard so you can see just how small it is

Ok last two are of the machine in operation, sorry had to turn the flash off to get some detail in the shots.

Ok now that you have seen it you can see that yes it really is a PC, I chose the linux version my first one for a desktop machine even though out servers run CentOS so it takes a little getting used to but overall things are great.

For the browser using firefox , well I use that on the PC’s so no difference there, open office for documents and spreadsheets well I have that on the PC’s as well so again no difference.

Setup problems, well there are none unpacked it and plugged it into the network and it just works everything is pre-loaded. After reading some great tips at eeeuser.com a fantastic community of fellow eeepc owners I converted the desktop over to full KDE and hooked up the nokia so I could use mobile broadband.

Ok well that is it for now I will keep you posted on how things go.

All servers are now running with the latest version of cPanel and are finally converted over to maildir, no issues reported after the move so that went smoothly. The next stage is up upgrade all servers to php5 and MySQL5  we are currently doing testing to ensure the move can be done without any interruptions to service for existing clients.

Everyone has now been migrated across to the new hosting pans and those customers on the old legacy plans will for the most part have been upgraded as part of the process, if we have missed anyone please let us know.

Well no issues problems to report so back to work for me more news soon

Friday went flicker flicker and I though is that me or the screen, well it got worse and Saturday it was over one final flicker and out went the lights, secondary monitor still ok but laptop screen very dark. Shine a light on the screen and yep everything was there but no back-light. OK now what, this is the machine that has been running for almost 5 years straight now technology is getting a little dated (P4 1.6GHz 512MB) but still ok. End of last year saw a new battery and replacement hard drive due to failure so not a great deal left to replace but was it worth it?

I had been looking at upgrading and this looked like the perfect opportunity New machine or second hand?? hmmm well no rush I still can do work using just the one screen. Sunday off to check out what is on offer at Cash Converters, they occasionally have some good deals on equipment if it has sat for a bit and if I get it for the right price well I can save some $$$. Well they had a few laptops, the usual Pentium 2 and Pentium 3 machines cheap but not really what I was after. Next shelf nice little Dell P4 2.2Ghz not bad price ok, beside that a widescreen Compaq well that is going to be a bit but Ok lets look a little closer P4 3.06GHz, 768MB ram, 40GB HD $600, Ok whats the catch!

Upon closer inspection it had some wear on the silver finish and the black plastic was showing through on the touchpad and wrist rest but apart from that nothing else, compared to the Dell which was pristine it looked ratty. I asked to have a look at both quick glance over the Dell perfect but the Compaq had all the extras, everything worked (and how). It turned out it had been sitting there for a while and they really wanted to move it on as it looked like it would never sell. So I asked how much, they took it away and looked it up in the system and crunched the numbers they came back and appologised there was no case for the laptop or manual all they had was the laptop and the power supply, I looked a little put out by that and they went back to discuss it. I let them chat a bit and then went up to see them, the revised price was $470.

Did I take it, well I thought about it for a few seconds and said ok

It has joined the ranks as Number one machine with the Toshiba now reduced in rank to number two, with the size of the screen I have decided to run the system as three separate PC’s with individual monitors I may turn the number 3 machine intoa dual head and add a 4th monitor to the setup but three is enough for now. Using Synergy I control everything using the one keyboard and mouse. The Compaq runs in wide screen mode at 1280×800 and the other monitors are twin 19″ LG’s running 1024×768. Enjoy.

As part of the update we have also reduced the number of hosting plan configurations from 5 to 3. When we started we had three levels but we introduced two intermediate plans to give customers some more options, while this looked good at first it added to the complexity facing customers.

The new plans are based on out three most common settings and cover 80% of our existing customer base so most users will not be affected by the changes. Of the others the majority are on the old email plan and only have a holding page and are using the plan just for personalised email addresses, these customers will remain as is for the moment. There will be some new discounted package deals as well (hosting, domain, design) which will be released next month, including a business card package that will replace the old email plan.

Now that the site builder and shopping cart have been completed we will rebuild the entire website on that platform, so in addition to the new look you will also be able to see the software on an active website.

In addition to the update there will also be a regular newsletter (I’ll be trying for Quarterly) to  keep people up to date with the goings on at WEBY Systems. Of course the information will be posted here as well but if you prefer to get the update in your inbox that option will be available. Anyone will be able to sign up to the newsletter by following the link on the new site layout.

Christmas and new year were good apart from the BSOD on the 22nd and the unrecoverable crash of my laptop hard drive on Christmas eve . Thankfully I run daily backups just in-case, but still after installing a new hard drive it still took 14 hours to restore all programs and files to get everything back the way it was. Oh well with a clean install at least it gave me the chance to get everything up to date, even running SP2 now.

So whats been happening?

VoIP – It is still good news, very happy with the service and have set up a few clients with its as well so they can enjoy the cheaper calls.

WEBY Store – The store is going into some more sites, so far no problems found. Still have to build a demo site so I can show it off.

WEBY Site Builder – Following on from all the work with back end systems and partial content management systems the framework was laid to build a template based site builder. It is done and has been used for some of our new customer websites to allow them to edit their own sites through a WYSIWYG editor. This was one of those tasks that kept me so busy.

Secure Webmail – We already provide normal webmail for all of our clients as part of the standard hosting packages with Horde and Squirrelmail. Both work really well but are only the basic installation and the port the work on is blocked by some organisations firewalls. With that in mind we went looking for a webmail program that we could install that would provide all of the required features and also work on the normal http and https ports that would allow it to function through the firewalls.

We have installed a custom version of Squirrelmail with some additional features and plugins that will bridge the gap to what they would normally use in Outlook. To make things easier it has been installed on all servers and you can login from the domain that we have setup just for this purpose webymail.com.au.

Well that is about it for now, we have a few more projects starting this year as soon as we get the current ones finished. The next major thing happening is a complete overhaul of the weby.com.au website.

Until next time.