Notes

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Amazon EC2 speed and latency from Australia

On November 13, 2012, Amazon launched a new region in Sydney. I recently had a requirement to provision an application within Amazon EC2. The web based application was going to be accessed primarily by Australian users, and as a result I wanted to know which of Amazon’s 7 public regions would be likely to provide the lowest latency for users

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F5 BIG-IP health checks and HTTP errors

When a web site or application becomes too large to run on a single server, it’s frequently placed on multiple servers with a load balancer in front of them to spread the load and also to remove faulty servers from the pool. The F5 BIG-IP is one such load balancer. To ensure that faulty servers are removed from the load

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The insecurity of security questions

One morning I discovered that Apple had introduced predefined security questions that you can’t customise. I’m not a fan of these, and in this post I explain why.

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Clearing the local DNS cache on OS X Lion

As someone who works in the hosted services industry, I frequently need to access web sites or other systems that are in the midst of a DNS change. When a change occurs it’s easy enough to flush the recursive DNS servers that I use, however the operating system itself also caches the DNS results. This means that even though the

First look at Parallels Plesk Panel 11

Last week at World Hosting Days in Germany, Parallels announced the preview of the latest version of their hosting control panel – Parallels Plesk 11. This week the preview was made available for service providers to download and evaluate. Having used Plesk for 10 years now I was eager to take a look so I installed the software on a

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Hosted Exchange – Undeliverable Mail

I’ve installed and configured Microsoft Exchange numerous times before, however I recently had a requirement to install Microsoft Exchange 2010 SP1 in Hosting mode for a client. Exchange hosting mode is designed for those who provide Exchange hosting services to multiple tenants or organisations within the one platform, and is the successor to Microsoft Hosted Messaging and Collaboration (HMC). Being

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Upgrading from Kindle 2 to Kindle Touch

I am and always have been an avid reader. I’m almost always in the middle of a book, or have just finished one and am looking for the next book to read. This wouldn’t be so difficult, except for the fact that I travel regularly. One book often isn’t enough to last for the entire trip and there’s nothing worse

Happy New Year

Sure, it’s a little bit late – but Happy New Year! So what did I do in 2011? My New Year’s Eve was celebrated aboard the beautiful Radiance of the Seas on Tasman Sea approximately halfway between Auckland and Sydney. The evening started at 6pm with dinner and the first bottle of Moët & Chandon. Throughout dinner a further two

Solving Plesk 10.3.1 cron issues

My personal web site and other web sites that I operate have been hosted on various servers running Plesk since 2002. I’m comfortable with the platform, and usually upgrade to new versions after experimenting with them in my lab. This past week I made the decision to migrate all my sites from the current machine (running Plesk 10.3.1) to a

The start and end of an era

In 2001 a new era in my life was about to begin. I was 17, in the final year of my Higher School Certificate (HSC) and based in Sydney. I had also started performing a customer service role for a Brisbane based hosting company Aussie Hosts. This role continued over the next few years while I was studying at University.

Notes