Today is the American national holiday of Thanksgiving. We gather from all over the country and sometimes the world for the purpose of sitting down around the same table and sharing a meal with our closest family members. The news reported that 37 million people are traveling the highways on this day to be with their families. That is more than 10% of the country’s population on the roads at the same time trying to join their relatives for dinner. Dwell on the enormity of that for a moment.

In the hustle of life its easy to forget that this is really what is most important, family. We work to live not the other way around.

From our table to yours, we wish everyone a happy Thanksgiving!

On this date, eight years ago, our world changed.  Never forget.

Technological advancements are not without caveats.  For instance, our VOIP provider is having issues and as a result our primary telephone line is not working for some callers.  Luck would have it that all of our other (secondary) lines are working without any issues, while the only one that truly matters is down.

For the next several days call this secondary number: 847-368-9490

We have used this particular telephone company for the past 2 years without any major issues and this is the first time we have seen how they respond to a real customer service trouble ticket.

Working with their first and second level support really makes me appreciate our own support team.  Our people know what they are doing and they don’t have idiotic scripts to read while you are aggravated on the other end of the phone call.  We don’t waste your time with endless “for this department press this, for that department press that”.  We don’t have you wait on hold endlessly while reading basic notes.  We don’t transfer you to five departments before reaching the correct person.  Bad customer service is infuriating.

If we don’t have a resolution tomorrow, we will move off to another carrier, telephone support is too important for our customers.

You don’t appreciate good service until you need it.

Whatever you celebrate, we can all join together and wish each other a happy holiday season.  With such awful weather (in Chicago), it’s the perfect time to gather indoors and spend time with the family.

Due to holidays our team is operating on a skeleton crew for the next few days but we are still here for you if you have any questions, concerns, or just want to say “hello!”

Have a happy and safe holiday season and we’re looking forward to working with you in 2009!

Its November 4th, election day in the USA, and all the nonstop political coverage is almost over. Whatever your political leaning, I’m sure we all agree on one important thing, electing our leaders is one of the few true freedoms we have. However you vote, its better than failing to show up. If you don’t like either candidate, then write in your own name. This is a much better way to protest than through aparent apathy. Howvever you vote, just vote.

Let’s hope that whomever takes the White House is going to unite the country that has been so bitterly divided politically for the last few election cycles.

As life gifts us with happy moments, we must always remember the tragedies of our past that shape our future.  9/11/2001, always in our hearts.

Someone emailed me these pictures and could not help but post them up for your amusement! This is the very opposite of how a data center is supposed to look.

It’s good to be popular but it definitely comes with it’s own problems.  For instance, today, some clever folks decided to run a Distributed Denial of Service attack on the eBoundHost.com domain name.  They knocked us out of the web for a little bit of time, but luckily our monitoring system sounded an alarm and a tech was dispatched to fix the problem.

What happened?  A standard server simply cannot cope with several hundred servers trying to access a website at the same moment.  At first things work fine, then they slow down and finally, the server runs out of allowed processes.  The Apache web server is now effectively useless, hence the title: Denial of Service attack.

How does the attack happen?  Someone’s grandmother receives an email on her AOL account that promises to have pictures of her favorite relatives.  She opens the picture only to infect her computer with the most nasty Trojan virus known to mankind.  This Trojan proceeds to let his friends know that there is a party happening at grandmas house.  They come to visit and also infect the computer.  All sorts of fun things can be installed this way, for instance, software that turns this computer into a node on a botnet.  This botnet zombie is now fully in control of some 16 year old in Vietnam/Russia/Turkey/etc, and this computer can now participate in things like sending spam or a Denial of Service attack.

There are definitely ways to deal with this kind of situation.  First off, there are devices you can buy that deal with known DDoS patterns.  There are lists of known zombie ip addresses that you can block out on the router.  There are ways to deal with this type of situation.  Luckily this does not have all that often, and it is usually enough to merely let the attack work itself out.

This time the attackers were nice enough to have left us a signature of their work, and for that we are very grateful.  It really made the cleanup effort much easier.  So I wanted to say the following, we know you are out there and we know what you can do, and we are very impressed

Happy holiday weekend everyone!

Tomorrow is the fourth of July. This was the day The Declaration was approved and signed.  The day the Colonial Experiment became the American Dream.  The day everything changed.

This particular July 4th, is especially interesting.  I do not remember the last July 4th during a presidential campaign year because I didn’t happen to pay particular attention.  But today, our two (main) candidates will go on television and make flowery speeches and promise the world to us, just as long as we are willing to vote for them.  And then the political analysts are going to dissect and analyze every word and gesture and try to hide behind a journalistic lack of bias while steering the conversation in a particular direction.  And then the public is going to have private conversations about how a particular candidate is bad for our country and how the other guy/gal is going to be our savior.

Today’s political process seems very dirty.  The candidates appear inadequate, each in their own way.  The political commentators are biased and dishonest.  And the public seems to be the exact uneducated, unwashed masses, that are looked down upon by people who consider themselves the ‘elite’ and call the space between New York and Los Angeles, “flyover country”.

Somehow, I get the feeling that not much was different a hundred years ago.  Some Presidents have been unworthy of the title.  Newspaper publishers have been cheaters and liars, and the public, well the public literally didn’t bathe much.

But this is just an illusion.  The candidates at this level of the game are really the best of what is available to fill the Presidential shoes.  They may be unable to spell ‘potato’ or hold the book upsde down, but nobody can possibly stand up to this kind of scrutiny and constant pressure.  The candidates are good people who have already shown themselves to be good leaders.  The journalists are definitely opinionated but they maintain as much neutrality as possible and are balanced out by their colleagues on the other side of the political spectrum.  And the people are more politically savvy than they are given credit for.  When it comes down to it the system is brilliant.  And with all this imperfection, we somehow overcome the shortcomings and grow past the mistakes of our leaders.  Somehow, our country has been the innovator in almost every scientific field.  Somehow we have one of the highest qualities of life, and own the best ’stuff’.  Even with the bad economy, most people have an excess of food, a flat screen television, relatively new car, a cell phone and computer.  We have it so good that we are STILL selling SUV’s the size of Caribbean inner city buses.  We invented the Internet.  We invented the automobile.  We invented the telephone.

Whoever wins the upcoming election, things are not bad now and they are probably going to remain pretty good.  The reason for this, in my opinion, is the very nature of our society.  We are Open Source.  We have checks and balances, we have the right to criticize our leaders, to replace them if necessary.  The right to become candidates and fix the system from the inside.  The system is not perfect, but we are always working on it.  We are a society that is truly governed by the people, from the people and for the people.

On behalf of the eBoundHost team, we wish a happy 4th of July to the world.

About servers. Everyone reading this post is making a connection to a server. In fact, you are making a connection to at least a couple. There is a server in your office or home that is allowing you to proxy onto the internet, most likely a wireless router, which connects through another server, the DSL or cable modem. There is a caching DNS resolver server on your ISP. An entire army of router servers between your home and our data center. And the last server in the chain is our web server, which actually hosts this content.

Lets narrow down the definition of a Server. We are not going to talk about IBM mainframes or Sun UltraSPARC based blade systems. Today, we care only about the servers which comprise the majority of the infrastructure of the websites you visit. These are normal computers just like you have in your house or office, with the exception of being confined into more efficient packaging. They use familiar Intel or AMD processors, normal DDR2 or faster RAM, and SATA hard drives. What really separates them from home PC’s is the software. But software is not what this blog is about.

Here is what one of our older servers looks like (below):

To compare, here is one of eBoundHost’s newest servers.  This form factor is unofficially called the ‘pizza box’ due to its small dimensions.

The first thing you will notice is that the new server is not as tall. Our older hardware uses 2u (units of space) while the new servers use 1u. This allows for greater density. Some servers use as much as 7u but these are specialty machines that are filled to the brim with hard drives in gigantic RAID arrays.

Side to side comparison:

These servers fit into specialty (read expensive) racks that have 42u of storage in each rack. This means that when filled with 2u servers, we can only install 21 machines instead of 42 1u servers. It’s a dramatic difference when you talk about a server room full of racks such as in our facility:

Of course the entire 42 units are not available for servers, there are switches, power distribution units, firewalls, intrusion detection equipment.  All considered, we are happy to have 30 servers in one rack.

There is also the consideration of electricity and heat. A rack full of servers eats electricity like a hungry SUV, and produces just as much heat pollution. 30 servers stacked on top of each other, blowing air into the same direction, require an amazing amount of cooling, which needs big air conditioners that move a lot of tonnes of air. That’s all I’m going to say about that. Data center challenges is going to be saved for another blog entry.

To jump back into server hardware. Here is the same 1u server without its cover.

Motherboard, CPU, heatsink, RAM, hard drive and a very powerful cooling fan. Seems simple enough. Another picture:

Every server is custom built. When an older machine comes off line, we generally sell it through eBay and build a new server to take its place. The nature of hardware is such that components wear out and fail eventually. Our clients and our reputation are far too important, so we give old hardware the boot and use all new equipment.

Here are some servers in action. The following pictures may not be completely safe for geeks, they may cause weakening of the knees and a desire to run out and fix something. Please refrain, it will pass:

These (above) are dedicated servers. Inventory tags have been obfuscated in order to protect the innocent.

(below) Are some specialty machines which have 15k SAS (fast/expensive) hot swappable hard drives in RAID array. Used for our shared servers, VPS machines, and some powerful dedicated servers.

Each server is built by our staff. We love them so much that we have hundreds of them

More to follow, there is so much to cover: data center, operating systems, server software.