If you’re one of our dedicated server customers, you’ve got the option of a paid support package, the choices being Anchor Secure and Anchor Complete. Whatever you choose (or if you decide you don’t need one), we just hope it’s the right one for you.

One of the services we provide with a support package is keeping your system up to date. For Linux machines this means installing updated packages as they’re released, and for Windows this means staying on top of Windows Update. We can do a lot of this without you ever noticing, but Windows Updates almost always require a reboot of the machine, which we schedule with our customers by email.

This brings us to an amusing little snippet from one of our customers.

Anchor: We’re going to reboot your server next Wednesday at about 11pm, please tell us if that’ll cause any problems.

Customer: Ah, I was not aware of Microsoft’s update schedule.

Great Lord almighty, there are undiscovered tribes in the Amazon that know that Microsoft releases patches on the second Tuesday of the month!

Ever been constructing a verbose and complex reply to an email on a webmail site, only to have the browser crash when you were about to hit send? Or perhaps putting the finishing touches on your Wikipedia edits to the particle physics article (I know I have) and have all of your hard work lost in the blink of eye?

Fear not, salvation is at hand! Although many Web 2.0 sites providing text-editing will save drafts and provide a reasonable text editor, nothing beats your favourite text editor of all time, Vim. Or Emacs. Or whatever you would prefer to use. Why shouldn’t you be able to use any text editor you like? It’s your computer and your time after all!

If you are using Firefox, your problems are over. Introducing It’s All Text. Install this handy plug-in to your Firefox, set the default editor to your liking and you are off and running! Now any text box on any webpage will show a small edit button on the bottom right corner allowing you to launch the editor of your choice. Edit to your heart’s content using the tools you are most familiar with, then save and exit the editor and have all your work sent back to the browser text box.

Even if the browser crashes mid-edit, your editor program will be unaffected and your work will be safe. You can save your work in the editor in addition to any swap or draft files it creates for even more safeguards.

It’sAllText works in Firefox 3.0. If you have older versions of Firefox you may wish to check out MozEX which is a similar plug-in.

Wanted to send your buddies a pirate message but the words just won’t come? No trouble, just visit the Pirate Talk Translator and convert your regular landlubber-speak into bonafide pirate-ified slang!

If you use the popular Pidgin Instant Messaging client, then you can download the Purple Plugin pack which contains a talk filter. Set it to Pirate and you can have your instant messages translated into pirate-speak on the fly!

We get the request from time to time, “can you track XYZ in the website statistics for our web hosting?” We get a bit of “Your statistics reports aren’t very pretty”. We include two very commonly used statistics generators with all shared web hosting, AWStats and Webalizer.

Both of these tools generate statistics using the logs that the web server keeps for every page request. These logs look something like this:

88.179.0.194 – - [11/Dec/2008:04:48:03 +1100] “GET / HTTP/1.1″ 302 20 “http://www.google.fr/search?hl=fr&q=anchor+blog&start=10&sa=N” “Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; fr; rv:1.9.0.4) Gecko/2008102920 Firefox/3.0.4″

Without explaining the log file in detail, in summary, the above line tells us:

• What IP address each request comes from
• The date and time of the request
• If the user clicked on a link to get to that page, the URL of the page they came from
• Some details about the type of web browser they used

That’s it! There’s not a whole lot of information. From this, the statistics programs make a whole lot of correlations, or guesses and produce some graphs. Given how little information there is to begin with we have to accept that there’s a limit to how much information we can provide in the reports.

If you need more information there is an alternative. Years ago the alternatives were expensive commercial software, that was until Google purchased one of the companies and started to provide the service free of charge, calling it Google Analytics.

You’ll find plenty of information about this free service on the Google website but suffice to say it will generate just about any statistical type of report you can imagine. The graphs are also much prettier than ours.

Analytics works by using a small piece of code that is inserted into every page on your website (Javascript). With each page request, the code inserted reports information back to Google which is collated to generate the statistics. 

Because the data is collected at the browser level rather than via the web server logs, the information available for statistics generation is much much greater, hence the prettier graphs!

Note: You may need to get your web developer to help you insert the code sample.

Unfortunately as much as we’d like to to let the servers fend for themselves over the end of year period whilst we take a well earned break we can’t, there’s always someone that forgets a password or decides to break their website during the holiday period.

Anchor will be available on all business days – that excludes public holidays and weekends over the break. We will operate on reduced staff numbers on other days reflecting the reduced support load.

There will be a provisioning embargo in place for dedicated servers and co-location services between the 17th of December and the 5th of January 2009. Note that this embargo only applies to provision of new services – it does not effect support of existing services.

Throughout the holiday period – dedicated server & co-location customers will continue to receive 24 x 7 support using the after hours telephone number. All systems will continue to be monitored and suitable response provided as required.

Important dates to remember:

• Wednesday 17th of December : Dedicated server & co-location provisioning embargo begins
• Thursday 25th of December : Closed
• Friday 26th of December : Closed
• Monday 29th December -> Wednesday 31st December : Open
• Thursday 1st of January : Closed
• Friday 2nd of January: Open
• Monday 5th of January: Business as usual. Dedicated server & co-location provisioning embargo ends.

Happy holidays from the Anchor team!

http://www.blacksocks.com/

I came across this rather amusing company a little while ago. They’ve been around since before the turn of the millennium but I somehow hadn’t stumbled upon them until now. What with everything turning web2.0-ey nowadays, I’d say they’ve got themselves a nice little niche.

In case you’re too busy to visit (or too much of a slacker, TL;DR!), the concept is simple: you pay a yearly subscription fee (they call it a “sockscription”), and they keep sending you pairs of nice new black socks. It’s a very cute idea that has wide-ranging appeal and applicability. It also abides by one of the general rules for sysadmins, which is to automate whatever you can; the less time you waste thinking about repeatable tasks, the more time you have for fun things.

Right now I’m lamenting the state of the Aussie dollar, as the billing amounts will be in USD. However, this is far too compelling a concept to ignore, and the current state of my sock drawer is positively unacceptable with only two pairs of plain blacks socks (both with holes, no less!). One does not wear white sports socks with black patent leather lace-ups, it’s just not done (hey, I like to dress up). I’ll have to put in an order as soon as possible, those kneesocks look like just the ticket.

かえして！ニーソックス

We’ve had some enquiries from customers recently regarding security compliance scans, the most popular of which is the PCI DSS. For those not in the know, this stands for the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard. It is of course a fascinating topic, covering best-practice standards for processing and storage of customer information.

The enquiries we get relate to a security scan carried out by an Approved Scanning Vendor (ASV). The usual report format is a list of potential “vulnerabilities” detected, with a severity rating of 1 to 5 assigned to each. Anchor’s shared hosting servers never have any problems with this, so the report reads like a missal of mundanity.

TCP port 21 is open, an FTP service appears to be running! Crazy, I know…

The thing is, this scan is really just one small part of a much larger framework. The core requirements of the PCIDSS don’t specify at all how the scan should be performed; it’s really about secure storage and transmission of data, and accountability and auditing.

Do our customers’ applications really encrypt the data they store in the database? I don’t know, but it sure isn’t checked as part of the scan. Requirement 6 is “Develop and maintain secure systems and applications”. Mm-hmm, that’s a good idea…

Security is really a commodity nowadays, a fact highlighted most perfectly in the vending of SSL certificates. In case you hadn’t guessed, the PCIDSS scans we’ve seen can proudly join the ranks. Thankfully there’s scanners who really know where their towel is, looks good to me!

http://www.scanlesspci.com/

http://blogs.zdnet.com/security/?p=1114

http://jeremiahgrossman.blogspot.com/2008/04/my-blog-is-pci-certified-by-scanless.html

1. The user does something that fails, due to server-side problems, and you wish to inform the user of this problem so it can be fixed.
2. You redirect to a page with a URL something like /error.php?message=Something+has+gone+wrong.+Please+fix+it+and+try+again
3. The user fixes the error on the server, and (since staring at the location bar isn’t a whole lot of fun) simply hits ‘reload’ in their browser.
4. This causes much wailing and gnashing of teeth, as the problem apparently persists.

I’ll give phpMyAdmin partial credit for at least HTML escaping their errors, but… the stupid, it BURNS!

It seems our satire has not been received as such by all and so we have had to remove this post.