Noel's Muses

Whether it's DirectAdmin, cPanel, Plesk, or some other commercial hosting control panel, I pretty much dislike them all. They do their best to present an eye candy appealing image to help for good customer experiences, and I guess most of them do that well, probably far more appealing than the cobbled together scripts that I use allowing my hosts to manage their websites, but I guarantee you mine are probably more secure, efficient, scalable and redundant - capability beats looks any day!

In a few weeks time it'll be 2018, yet they still treat us like it's the 90's, limiting us to what daemons we can use on our own servers, limiting us to their choices of Linux distros, if it runs on RedHat, Debian, and FreeBSD, it'll run on SuSE, Slackware, Gentoo and others, but the biggest gripe of all, is they continue putting everything on one server. The process is along the lines of your customers sign up online, probably using Hostbill or WHMCS, it then shoots off to the current new hosts server's telling the Control Panel to set up the domain, its DNS, Email, Databases and Website structure - all on that one single machine, putting all your eggs in one basket, I guess they think hardware is infallible, where the truth is far from it.

Continue reading "Why I Hate Commercial Control Panels"

So your business is running an old analog multi-line PABX that you've used and trusted for years, you've also just been letter dropped that the NBN is ready for service in your area, ok, so that means you have 18 months to migrate to an NBN service before Telstra cuts off your existing copper services, you know it's wise to move sooner rather than later because you don't want to get caught out and be without a phone service when everyone waits till the last minute, and there's not enough techs to go round.

You decide you better start talking to some RSP's (Retail Service Providers), or worse - you get one of those pesky door to door sales people, either way, during your conversations all of a sudden your ears prick up because you've just been told that your trusty existing PABX wont work, it's incompatible with the NBN and you need to replace it.

Continue reading "NBN And PABX Phone Systems"

Australia's NBN, how it will affect your existing landline phones when you are migrated depends on how your home is currently wired and how many phones you have.

There's been a bit of rubbish being spread by RSP (Retail Service Provider - AKA: ISP) sales type people telling you your existing phones wont work when you're moved to the NBN. There is some truth to this, but no you likely do not need to re-wire your entire house or some such rot, or buy dect phones as only means of more phones, as many are being told, and despite other rhetoric from these sales geniuses, you can have more than one fix wired phone.

Continue reading "NBN With Multiple Phone Outlets"

In 2015, we ran a test on our most commonly used sites for IPv6 responses which yielded pathetic 8% results, so
this is a quick update to the article I wrote back then - IPv6 Reality Checks, but it seems here we are two and a half years later, only a handful of the previously IPv4 only hosts have managed to graduate to IPv6.

Continue reading "Ipv6 2017 Check Update"

With all the Edward Snowden revelations about the extent of activities of the U.S.A's N.S.A, we are all like oh how dare they the privacy invading bastards, we all attack and condemn them - rightly so! We now realise how far out of control they and other Five Eyes member nations really are, so we tend to take more steps to protect our privacy from their prying eyes, make no mistake they are privacy invading power tripping scum who spend more time spying on friendly nations and their own law abiding citizens - than terrorists.

Yet, I'm betting pretty much all of those outraged over the NSA's actions, spend most of their days on feciesbook facebook, probably an unhealthy amount of time too, revealing everything about their life, now, I wrote some time ago about what I think of the privacy invading POS that is facebook, but recently, information on what they collect by their own admission, came to life, and it would make even the most seasoned operative at the U.S.A.'s NSA and U.K.'s GCHQ jaw drop in puddles of drool...

Continue reading "NSA v Facebook - Who's More Evil"

*** Update A revised entry for 2017 can be found here.


Recent statements made on an Australian industry mailing list about how well IPv6 was doing, with some people reporting their traffic is split 50/50 between IPv4 and IPv6, raised my eyebrows, I was not entirely convinced about those figures, so decided to put that 50/50 to the test to see how it applies in my situation.

One of these gentleman told me that my test was flawed, setting it up to fail even, well, I disagree with that, since if 50% of the traffic is favoured as IPv6, it still stands to reason that if I disable IPv4, about 50% of my traffic should still work - albeit slower at times for local sites since I'm limited to a tunnel provided by Hurricane Electric in California, U.S.A, so I expect a bit of lag using local sites, anyway, getting back on point, that should then result in the remaining 50% or so of traffic to actually fail, which is kind of the point if one wants to test the theory of half of the sites working or not via IPv6.

Continue reading "IPv6 Reality Checks"