General

New Service: Server Recovery

As many of you may be aware we have always provided a cPanel server recovery service when asked. We have now formalised this service for anyone who needs it should they have OS disk problems:

  • Root compromise – if your server gets hacked and is therefore no longer trustworthy
  • OS disk failing – if the OS disk is starting to log errors indicating an immenent drive failure
  • OS corruption – if the file system is becoming corrupt
  • OS upgrade – if you want to upgrade from an old unsupported OS to a new one
  • Corrupt kernel – if you’ve upgraded the kernel and it has rendered the server unbootable of any kernel
  • Any situation which leaves your main OS disk unbootable

More details on the Server Recovery Service page.

Why you should use :fail: – addendum

I have added the following to the Why you should use :fail: page on our site:

Causes emails that will never be delivered onto the exim mail queue because checks such as sender verification are still carried out when processing such emails and if they cannot complete they will stay on the exim mail queue and repeatedly reprocess the email until it is finally discarded (usually 4+ days). This can cause very large mail queues full of spam which is repeatedly processed causing severe performance degradation

Moving to IMAP and away from Microsoft

Well, with the advent of courier-imap and multi-session login for IMAP now available we’ve decided to move our sales@waytotheweb.com joint mailbox from POP3 access using Public ShareFolder to using an IMAP account on our local server. I’ve moved over to Thunderbird and am enjoying using it. There are some important functions from Outlook that I miss, especially having it remember frequently used folders to move mail items to, though there is a workaround. I am enjoying being able to view emails in the format they arrived in rather than the bastardised format that Outlook stores email – it still amazes me how an email client can both store email bodies in a different format to which they were delivered and to also ruin email headers to make them next to useless. Unfortunately, Outlook is a well featured email client, but I’m not sad to see the back of it.The move was important to us. We keep all email, going back to before 1998 when we started this business and so it needs to be a robust solution. The main gotcha was that courier-imap doesn’t like you using either a slash or a dot in folder names, which meant for a lot of renaming for some parts of our folder structure. Other than that, the only real issue with Thunderbird/IMAP is the somewhat flaky new email detection, but I’m getting used to it 😉

Firefox v1.5 and Googlebar

I upgraded to Firefox v1.5 yesterday without any problems. Quite a few extensions were disabled, but either upgrading or simply reinstalling them fixed them all up except for the excellent googlebar. Since they no longer seem to be developing it anymore, I decided to hack the XPI file and it works just fine in v1.5 of firefox now.For those that are desperate for their Googlbar, you can download my hacked version of googlebar-0.9.12.01-fx.xpi. Just install it and then restart Firefox.