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Playing With Wire

The Internet Startup Blog


Survey of uptime monitoring solutionsOctober 27 2008

If you’re a regular here at Playing With Wire, you’ve probably already read our articles about Cacti. While Cacti does do a great job on visualizing load on your servers, it does not provide (by default) alerts when a server goes down.

When we launched YippieMove we quickly realized that we needed a reliable 3rd party that could ping our servers from several locations across the globe to ensure that we were not experiencing any problems with the access to our site. As we are quite tech-savvy here at WireLoad, we had a hard time justifying paying more than a few bucks per months for a service like this, since the service is so easy to write (we actually did write our own uptime-monitor with alerts a few years back using Curl, Crontab and some other tools, but would rather outsource this service).

So the search began. We required a few thing for this service:

  • Several servers across the globe that ping our servers.
  • Cheap. Preferably free (we don’t mind some ads).
  • Decent statistics showing response-times etc.
  • Reliable alert system by e-mail (luckily most US Cell providers allow you to send email to your phone, using your-number@theirdomain.com.)
  • Must allow monitoring of both SSL and non-SSL servers.
  • A minimum of 4 monitors (we needed to monitor playingwithwire.com, wireload.net, yippiemove.com [with and wit
YippieMove now offers volume discount and custom migrationOctober 16 2008

We are really excited to announce that YippieMove now offers both volume discount and custom migrations. Let me explain how these two things works and how it affects you.

Volume Discount

In order to qualify for a volume discount, you obviously need to migrate more than one account. We’ve decided that five accounts is a reasonable number to start offering volume discounts at. However, if you’re interested in migrating a larger number of email accounts, we are willing to work with you to make your migration as easy as possible.

Custom Migration

First, let me explain what we mean by custom migration. Normally, YippieMove integrates seamlessly with Gmail / Google Apps. However, with our custom migration, we enable you to migrate your email between virtually any two email servers (assuming they both support IMAP).

Since this is a custom migration, we can unfortunately not offer this service for single account migrations. However, we do offer volume discounts on custom migrations too.

For questions regarding volume discount and custom migrations, please contact our sales team.

One more thing…

Since last post we’ve kept adding more providers. As of this very moment, the number of providers we now support has exceeded 90. That’s quite a few. You would imagine that we would be satisfied with that numbers, but

YippieMove: Faster transfers and many, many more providers addedSeptember 28 2008

We know, we should post updates more frequently here at PWW about our work (and about technology in general). To our defense, we’ve been busy working on improving YippieMove. So what have we been up to?

Since our last post, we’ve added many more pre-configured profiles. At the time I’m writing this, the current number of pre-configured providers has reached 63! Keep in mind that this is only the number of pre-configured providers - any IMAP service may be used. We think that’s pretty impressive. To take a look at the list of supported providers, go to the About-page on YippieMove.

What’s even more exciting than the long list of supported providers is the improvements we’ve made under the hood. In order to improve the speed and flexibility of YippieMove, we have made significant changes to the back-end. With these changes, we have cut the transfer time in half (or even more in some cases). With the help of this new back-end, we were also able to improve the information passed on to the user about current jobs on the status-page.

Status-page

Monitoring Remote Hosts With Cacti, Part IIAugust 6 2008

Since we started writing here at Playing With Wire, we’ve managed to write two articles about Cacti. In January 2007 we introduced Cacti in the article “What’s Your Utilization, Kenneth?“. Six months later we wrote another article about how to monitor remote hosts with Cacti.

While the setup we described in these article worked out great, there were a few things that we didn’t really like about the setup:

  1. We connected with SSH from the Cacti server to the server we wanted to monitor (security issue).
  2. We were using regular SSH tunnels. While these are great, they do have a tendency to die (reliability issue).
  3. Due to security and portability, we wanted to isolate Cacti to a separate server (or VM).

1. Turning the tunneling around

The reason why we didn’t like to have the Cacti server connecting to the servers was simply that we needed one more user account on the remote servers. If these are production servers, it’s desirable to keep the publicly accessible user accounts to a minimum.

As it turned out, replacing the ‘-L’ with a ‘-R’ in the tunneling command turns the tunnel around. Instead of opening a port on the local machine, it opens a forwarded port on the remote server. By doi

YippieMove promoted and polishedJuly 31 2008

YippieMove has now been up and live for a few weeks. Here at WireLoad we’ve kept busy even after the launch, focusing on promotion and polish.

The promotion part is similar to how it was like when we started up Playing With Wire. Apart from the obvious - buying ad based exposure - we’ve been working on the most important part for a modern website. The website has to appear in search engines. So we configured a Sitemap and added the site to Google Webmaster Tools.

The Sitemap is a simple enough idea: you list what public pages you have on your site and provide auxiliary information about how often you think each page will change and how important it is to the site. Since YippieMove is written with Django we could use Django’s Sitemap framework. We couldn’t use any of the fancy shortcut classes but since YippieMove only has a few public pages a simple list did the trick. We could have written the whole Sitemap by hand by this logic, but in the future there may be lists of pages we can add more dynamically. Besides our list in Python is much less verbose than the XML of an actual Sitemap. Writing XML by hand is painful.

We use Google’s Webmaster Tools for all our sites. I don’t know if it actu