Lime Daley Announcements

One of our upstream providers (Sprint) has been having connectivity problems for the last hour, and worse, even after routing to/from them is turned off, they have something misconfigured, so they are grabbing traffic that they don't own, and so generating circular loops into never-neverland.

The worst of it seems to be over, and most traffic seems to be resolving well, but it is not 100% up yet. (More)

A hearty welcome goes out to the FYI.net and IGDC.com customers whose hosts are closing down in the next couple weeks.  Lime Daley is going strong, and we are happy to provide service to you.

Switch and Data, the company where our servers are located, experienced a complete power outage last night for a couple seconds, causing all servers to be rebooted.  The technicians were doing some scheduled maintenance, but the outage was unscheduled, they are looking into the problem further to try to prevent the problem from occurring in the future.  The outage reduced our current month's uptime to 99.9955%, the lowest it has been in a long time.  (More)

Watch out for calls or e-mails from companies claiming to verify your information.  I got a call today  regarding one of our customer's domains, trying to get information to "verify" the ownership.  Presumably they are trying to take over ownership of the domain.  An easy question to ask them is if they are the current registrar for the domain.  (Of course they could lie about that, but Domain Registry Support is honest enough to ignore the question and just keep restating who they are, rather than saying "No, we have no reason to be calling you".

DomainsMadeEasy, the company we often use for registering domains, does email once a year (according to ICANN policy, though most companies don't seem to follow that policy).  Unfortunately, the email does look very similar to the phishing scam emails (I guess the phishers do a good job of imitating the real thing).  They will not ask for any money or any other information, because they already have it, and you just have to verify that it is correct. 

        Lime Daley internet hosting is in its fourth year of officially providing internet hosting, though some of you have been using services unofficially for longer than that. In that time, we have grown to 22 customers, primarily small companies and organizations, a large handful of individuals and a couple mid-sized companies, resulting in about a thousand email addresses and one hundred web sites.  We are in the process of contracting a guy to take over some of the web development tasks. THANK YOU for making Lime Daley a success, and please let others know about the service you receive.  We do have a referral program, and a couple customers usually receive free hosting due to referring so many people.

        PHP4 support was discontinued by the authors as of January, 2008.  Lime Daley will be moving everyone to PHP5 this Friday, May 30.  We will go through each site to try to make sure it is still working, but depending on what PHP applications you are using, particularly if you wrote it yourself, there might be issues in migrating.  There are two temporary solutions that you can use if your code doesn't work in PHP5. (More)

Statistics update for all of Lime Daley's servers.  It is always amazing to me to see how much spam is sent by known spammers, and is trivially easy to throw away.  I just checked the current stats, and Lime Daley is on target to reject 2 million spams this year.  That doesn't include spams that are more questionable (122 thousand), and will be passed onto the user's spam folders for them to verify that they are spam.

It would be nice to lower the "questionable" emails further, but it is hard to do that and maintain a 0% false positive (where real email is considered spam).  I consider real emails that don't get delivered, and worse, don't even get reported to either the sender or the receiver) as completely unacceptable, and so have to put up with the questionable spams being put in a spam folder.

On the other hand, since there are around a thousand email accounts on the servers, that means each person get an average of 122 "questionable" emails in their spam folder each year, which doesn't seem that much of a burden, particularly since lots of people (on competitors' servers) put up with a much higher number than that.

Lime Daley now supports SSL for all email connections for all customers, if they use their assigned domain name for accessing our servers.  Contact the support department for details, but generally, the appropriate name is <domainname>-mail.limedaley.com.  This hostname can be used for SSL (and non-SSL, though we recommend SSL for security, TLS is also available) connections for SMTP, POP, IMAP as well as webmail and configuration by going to https://<domainname>-mail.limedaley.com.

A wild-card SSL certificate makes this all possible, and avoids the warning messages typical at other providers when using self-signed certificates.

We had a database problem today that required some email account passwords to be regenerated.  We apologize for the inconvenience, and have contacted most of the affected customers by phone or alternate means.

On May 5th, between midnight and 6AM, Sprint will be shutting down their network for four hours.  The network will automatically failover to one of the other providers, so you should only see some network slowdowns and possibly some outages for thirty seconds or so as the routes switchover.

I had hoped that this blog would be used for more interesting things other than outage reports, but so far, that hasn't happened.

This morning a circuit breaker blew at the ISP, causing one of the servers (containing one customer) to go down for 30 minutes.  The power switches are probably going to be reorganized today, and all of the servers might be rebooted at some point, not exactly sure what the status is at this point.  If that outage occurs, it should be for a minute or two for the affected servers.

The good news is that the last outage was in August of 2006, so we are doing pretty well.  I recently discovered a company that is reporting statistics on the uptime of our first server, so that is kind of neat.  They don't appear to check very often, so I am not sure if the statistics can be counted as that accurate, but for now, having them report 100% uptime shows that I am not making it up.

I discovered only yesterday (despite suspicions for a month or two) that when the network was switched a while ago, bandwidth caps had been placed by our ISP. They have been removed, and I was able to hit 80Mbps incoming and outgoing - I don't have a faster connection anywhere else with which to test it. But, for those of you who had noticed the previous 1Mbps cap and not complained, or figured it was your connection, you can be happier now.  (More)

Well, it was bound to happen sooner or later. Lime Daley had its first outage. My ISP had a router that failed, and caused the network to go down for 5 minutes.
Five minutes isn't all that much, but isn't really acceptable for me. So, I will probably move the machine to my other host, who has redundant internet connections, and is supposed to be immune from this sort of thing. (The other provider does have a planned maintenance outage for one of its providers in a couple days, so it will be interesting to see if the redundant part really works.

A couple people have asked about putting a "powered by LimeDaley" logo on their site, so we made a couple logos for you to choose from:
Transparent logo:
Transparent logo with border:
White background:

I have installed a number of plugins for your use. You can read about them on LifeType's Plugin Documentation page.
The plugins I have installed are:

• categorybrowser: for making next and previous links within categories
• editcomments: for editing comments that your users leave on your blog
• jupload: for uploading resources easier, (requires java)
• recentcomments: for adding a list of the most recent comments to your blog
• remembercommentdata: for allowing your commenters to save their name and web page in a cookie
• templateeditor: for customizing your site

• Main
• Archives
• Albums
• Links
• Admin

«	November 2008					»
Su	Mo	Tu	We	Th	Fr	Sa
						1
2	3	4	5	6	7	8
9	10	11	12	13	14	15
16	17	18	19	20	21	22
23	24	25	26	27	28	29
30

• Sprint Outage
• Web Hosting Provider Closing Down? Join Lime Daley!
• Power Outage
• Domain Registry Support - Phishing Scam
• Thank You! To Our Customers
• PHP4 to PHP5 upgrade
• Spam Statistics
• Easier User Administration, Webmail, etc.
• Password Reset For Some Email Accounts
• Network Maintenance

• Maintenance [6]
• General [10]

• RSS 0.90
• RSS 1.0
• RSS 2.0
• Atom