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Using Hard Drives
for Backup
One of the least expensive and most
reliable means of backing up a dedicated server is having more
than one hard drive in your server. Our own favor "best
return for the dollar" solution is to use a mirrored pair of
drives for the OS and application and a third drive for data
backup.
Our hard drive prices add little to the monthly.
The chart below illustrates that hard drives have declined in
cost by a factor of 10,000 over the last ten years and tape by a
factor of 10.
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While the math sounds like a hard
drive vendor came up with it - nobody can argue that hard drives
are faster than ever and can in most setups return a server to
working order in a more reliable and often much speedier time.
Unlike tapes that have only linear access - that is, you have to
scroll the tape to get to the files you want to access, hard
drives have no such limitation. We are fond of calling
tape just plastic with rust on it (iron oxide) around here.
Only the corporate world is still using tape - and that is in
part not on it's merits but because it is what they know and
understand.
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Dedicated Server Update Service
As most of our dedicated customers already know, the "net" is
not so friendly for the lazy and sleepy. If you don't
keep your server patched you will one day regret is.
Unfortunately, a haphazard job will endanger every server on the
network.
Even if you
maintain the infrastructure integrity with constant reviews,
patches, and virus and vulnerability signature updates - you are
not guaranteeing that you will stay ahead of the hackers.
However, if you don't you are insuring that your server will
become a weapon to interrupt your own business and very likely
other businesses as well.
Another disturbing
trend in recent years is hackers who hide their origins and the
companies that are making money off of helping them, such as
anonymizer.com. While you might believe they are wearing a
"white hat" after visiting their site, they are not helping
matters in my opinion in regards to hiding your IP. As you know,
when you surf the net, the owners of the web sites you visit can
see your IP address and could look up the name of your company
or ISP. These services strip out all information about where you
are surfing from, such as your browser type, IP address, etc.
A cool idea to be sure and just fine except when used by a
hacker. On the other hand, you cannot pursue the bad guys
when you don't know their IP. No IP then it could of been
the tooth fair that took your server down.
We urge you to take
advantage of our update service and be much more lazy about
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Are
you sure you are not
running SQL server?
Some Microsoft products install the SQL Server database program as
an underlying tool, without your even knowing. You can be sure if
you use regedit to check your server to see if SQL
Server is installed by looking to see if the registry key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\MSSQLServer\SMMQLServer
If you have this key, you likely have SQL Server installed. The
default install for this includes a database with an administrator
name of "sa" and a blank password. To be secure you must set a
password for this account using the instructions
provided by Microsoft .
(Before installing SQL
7, SQL 2000 or MSDE database engines on your server, please contact
the support department. If you install these on your own
server, it will be compromised before the patches can be applied.)
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IIS
Expert Utility
If you ever need to upgrade your server here - or elsewhere,
you might find it useful
to use a
free
utility called IIS Export. It is used to transfer web
sties from one IIS to another along with all the permissions,
virtual directories and other settings. Unfortunately,
users are the tough part on standalone servers.
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 Site Adder
Shareware Program
The program will
automatically add websites to IIS6, create the document directory,
create a default document, set the host header, IP and port options,
create the FTP virtual directory and create the zone in DNS.
You can
download this
program from the UK web site that also has some
other interesting tools.
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METABASE in
IIS 6.0
The MMC in IIS 6.0 will
look to the 5.0 administrator as a very similar interface.
However, looks can be deceiving.
One
of the changes that might interest some developers and certainly
hosting companies is the move from the proprietary binary
metabase file METABASE.BIN to the XML files METABASE.XML and
MBSCHEMA.XML. When loading IIS 6.0 reads the XML files
into memory and creates an in-memory representation of the
metabase. There are many interesting possibilities. You
can expect to transfer domains from one server to another with
more ease, to rollback to another version via the new metabase
history feature that keeps track of the changes and writes them
to disk and finally to programically effect changes to the XML
files easily. We see nothing but good in the move to an
XML metabase.
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LINUX
SUPPORTERS CRY FOUL
Microsoft brought out
several research reports that were commissioned from Gega
Research and the META Group - they are favorable to the cost of
Windows over Linux. The reaction of the open source
community was predicable. You can see the reports yourself
by visiting the the
GET THE FACTS page on Microsoft. The point Microsoft
is trying to make is that just because it is free does not mean
it is cheap.
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DEFRAGGING YOUR SERVER
We all know that fragmented files on disks cause
 degradation
if the machines performance. And if you also host SQL on
your server and you have never defragged you are in for a shock
- you will find your hard drive heavily fragmented. Of
even more concern might be the fragmentation not just the data,
but of the file system itself, which can create reliability
issues. You have a built in defrag tool and you
should use it. Even though the tool may not be the best
for large volumes and most importantly does not feature a
scheduler
in in, you can just run it
manually.
Executive Software's Diskeeper claims to be better and they
very likely are - however the average cost of the server edition
is around $275 a server. If you want a more affordable
solution we can rent the software for your use for
just $16 a
month with $0 setup fees. We will install it and create
the schedule so that you never have to think about it again.
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APPLICATION POOLS
Take it from
those who manage a room full of servers - applications can and
will bring down not just a site, but an entire web server.
This happens from time to time on IIS 5.0 running the ASP.dll.
With IIS 6.0 you now have separate application pools.
These application pools are discrete from the other pools.
The idea here is to allow
an application to crash and not bring down other application (or
domains) on the server. While it is still a little early
to speak with a lot of experience on the reliability of Windows
2003 - from our perspective things are looking good. We
expect overall server downtime to decrease across the network
due to memory leaks, access violations and other errors that can
effect all the entire web root on a server.
IIS 6.0 will even automatically restart failed processes and
restart them periodically if you set it up that way.
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New 7.x DeepMetrix Web
Stats
We have added the new version of DeepMetrix . It promises
to be the best statistics program yet.
It can be rented at a cost of $50 for 50 domains.
SecureWebs, Inc.
463 West Fifth
Colville, WA 99114, United States
1-509-684-2511 or 1-888-838-8860 |
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