Charles Engelke's Blog

I registered engelke.com in 1998, and have been running all my own infrastructure for it since then. It was a good learning experience to set up my own servers and provide DNS, web and e-mail, but I no longer feel like dealing with all that. And thanks to all the services now available I no longer have to. I just completed moving most of my domain’s infrastructure to free hosted services. I migrated my wife’s domain (lauriewhite.org) at the same time.

First up was DNS. Registrars now host name services for domains registered with them, and have pretty easy web interfaces to configure them. My domain is at Network Solutions, and it took no time at all to change my registration to point to their servers instead of mine, and to configure all the entries. Laurie’s domain
was registered with Nameboy, and their DNS control panel wasn’t as easy to use, but it still didn’t take much work.

Next, e-mail. This was my main motivation for the changeover. I was tired of worrying that my servers would crash when both of us were out of town, causing e-mail to be lost. Google Apps to the rescue. I registered each domain with them for free, and set them to handle all the e-mail for the domains. I then went back to the DNS servers and changed the MX (mail exchange) records according to the directions on Google Apps. I kept my old servers running for a few days, but in almost no time e-mail stopped being delivered to them and went to the Google accounts.

The only dynamic content on the sites was our blogs. They were run on Movable Type, and could be exported to a text file for loading on another host. My first thought was to host them on TypePad, which is owned by Movable Type and runs on essentially the same software. That would have been easy and free, but the blogs wouldn’t show up as being on our domains. Not a huge problem, and it could be solved by upgrading to a paid account for $90 per year (total for both blogs).

But I’d heard a lot about WordPress; mostly raves, and comments about how easy it was to migrated a blog over from Movable Type. And it was free to host, after which I could pay $10 per year per blog to have them showing as being on our own domains. Since it was free, I gave it a try. It loaded my exported blog perfectly, but the post addresses were different, as were the image addresses. So I edited the exported file, deleted the entries, and re-imported them. It looked perfect, so I paid the $10 to host it at blog.engelke.com (requiring another trip to the DNS control panel to point that address at the right place), and then did the same for Laurie’s blog.

The moves are all done, and I’m pleased with the results, and the fact that the whole thing only costs $20 per year. I’m also not locked in to any provider. I can move any component to any other host pretty easily; certainly as easily as this move from my own infrastructure.

We’re not totally off our own infrastructure. We each have regular web sites at engelke.com and lauriewhite.org. I’m looking at migrating them to other hosts (perhaps Amazon’s S3) but right now I’m using Apache and rewrite rules to redirect requests to the old blog address to the new ones. I’ll move the web sites sooner or later, but I’ll keep running my own web server for experiments and short-term solutions anyway. They just won’t be critical, so I don’t have to worry about them crashing.

Eight months ago, I posted a note about spam on my GMail account hitting 10,000 messages in 30 days. Well, that was nothing:

That’s not only more than four times worse, it has now exceeded an average of more than one spam message per minute over the last 30 days!

I never got comment and trackback spam on this blog, until about three weeks ago. Then I started getting swamped by it. What happened?

I switched the URL for MovableType CGI functions (used for searching, commenting, and managing the blog) from HTTPS (i.e., a “secure” page) to just plain HTTP. I did this because the older version of OpenSSL I had been using had a known insecurity, and I didn’t feel like rebuilding all the software. It was easier to just turn SSL off.

So these automated spambots don’t know how to spam sites using SSL? Or maybe they just don’t know they should try. Either way, it’s interesting. I may go to the trouble of rebuilding the software soon so I can go back to the old way. In the mean time, I’m trying to require TypeKey authentication for comments, which I don’t think I have working right.

Well, not quite yet, but it’s definitely terminal. When Microsoft bought the company, this seemed a likely outcome, and today they confirmed it by announcing Microsoft Office Groove 2007 BETA. From the FAQs, it’s clear that there will be a product with Groove in its name, but the Groove we’ve known will cease to exist.

Groove’s glory was its lack of infrastructure. For $50 you bought Groove and installed it on your PC. If someone you knew did the same, you could create and share a Groove space. No servers to manage, so services to subscribe to. Sure, there were servers “out in the cloud” on the Internet, but they were managed by Groove, not you, and your purchase entitled you to use them. And public key cryptography prevented any disclosure of your data to those servers, even as they relayed it to other, authorized, users. And users with different versions of Groove could still usually share workspaces with each other, or at least most of the contents of the workspaces.

It was beautiful. But Microsoft doesn’t work that way. So Groove will no longer work that way.

Buy Groove once and use it for good, paying for upgrades if you wanted them, or skipping them if you preferred? No more. Now you will “subscribe” to Groove, instead of buy it. After all, Microsoft says that, “In talking with customers, we found that the flexibility to purchase Groove on a subscription basis held strong appeal with small businesses and workgroups, primarily due to the lower up front cost and the ability to get software updates made available during the term of the subscription.” Sure, we all hated that one-time $50 cost! (To be fair, Groove raised the price repeatedly with each new version, but it never got to be high enough to impede getting external business partners to buy it and give it a try.)

Install the client and go? No infrastructure, just use those Groove servers out in the cloud? No, no, no. You’ll have to buy Office Groove Server 2007 or Office Groove Enterprise Services. And, though the FAQs don’t mention it, that software will have to run on a Windows server, and I’m sure you’ll need a separate CAL for each user. Oh, and you’ll either have to put them directly out on the Internet (which I don’t like to do with Windows servers) or else make sure everyone you connect with has a VPN connection to your Intranet.

Well, maybe I’ll just stay with my current version of Groove. Not if anyone you plan to share workspaces with moves to the new Groove. “Anyone you invite to a workspace created with Office Groove 2007 must upgrade in order to accept the invitation.” Although, if you create the workspace with an older version, you can invite people with the new versions to it. For now.

Despite all that, do you want to give it a try? “The most important thing to know about upgrading to Groove 2007 is that this is a one way trip.” So don’t expect to just try. Not even on a test PC. You have to upgrade not only your Groove software, but also your Groove license, after which every other PC you use Groove on has to also be updated. One way.

This is a real shame. Groove was a great product that did pretty much one thing (securely sharing files with anyone, anywhere), and did it superbly. But that’s not sexy, and it never sold well. Groove also had a lot of other capabilities, but I never saw any of them get used anywhere near as much as the file tool. I don’t think that the new Groove will have any real value. If you’re going to have everybody you collaborate with work on a single Microsoft server, you already have (more complicated) ways to share data.

Last weekend I setup up a server with Ubuntu Linux, and it has just blown me away! Not so much as a server operating system, but as a desktop.

I needed to get an Internet web server up for a demonstration of bid-based cost estimation. I was away from the office, so I didn’t have time to give IT any notice of the need. So I figured I’d use my own Internet server to host it. But there were problems. Really, just one problem: the demo needed to use MySql, and I couldn’t compile it on my OpenBSD server. There is a MySql binary package available that I could have installed… if I were on a more current version of OpenBSD. And I didn’t like to idea of upgrading the operating system on a public server that’s already in use.

I’d bought a really inexpensive Gateway server a couple of months ago ($199 plus shipping!) so I finally unpacked it and started to set it up. I burned an OpenBSD boot CD-ROM, since I’m comfortable with that OS, and its security, and started the installation. But OpenBSD couldn’t see my Serial ATA hard drive. I could have fiddled with the BIOS to make the drive look different to the OS, but after a few tries, I knew I wasn’t getting anywhere. So I decided to install Linux.

I’d read people raving about Ubuntu, so I downloaded and burned an installation CD, and fired it up on the new server. The installer asked me about three questions, then installed everything perfectly. Not only did I have the core OS, I had a really nice GUI and a full set of applications (Firefox web browser, Evolution e-mail, OpenOffice suite, and many others).

It’s really easy to use, and I think it’s suitable for non-technical users. And it runs my demonstration really well, even though the server has only 256MB of RAM. The application is faster than on my Windows PC with 1GB of RAM.

I highly recommend Ubuntu to anyone who wants to set up an easy to use, stable, and inexpensive PC.

In the Make magazine blog, Phillip Torrone talks about Claude Shannon’s “most beautiful machine” that has one function only. When you turn it on, it turns itself off.

When I was a kid, there was a mass-produced toy that did this. Flip the on switch, and a hand came out of the toy and flipped the switch off. I think it was based on “Thing” from the Addams Family. I couldn’t find any pictures of it via Google, but here’s a similar toy that’s a bank. Instead of turning it on with a switch, you put a penny in a cradle, and the hand comes out and snatches it.

Back in the late 80’s I often rented Fords with something similar to this machine. There was a lever in the center console. When you pulled the lever, a light flashed to tell you to push it back. (Imagine my disappointment to discover that the lever actually had another function, releasing automatic shoulder belts after a crash.)

I always hated Javascript, because it seemed like web pages that
made heavy use of it never worked. And they did things in
Javascript that could be done in straight HTML, more easily,
more portably, and more reliably.
So how come I’m so happy with Appia,
when it currently has 5826 lines of Javascript in it? (Compare that to
the only 22,611 lines of Perl in today’s Appia source for what I
always call a “Perl application”!)

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Some time ago, I posted a note about malicious
code, with lots of details on how to detect and avoid it. That
note is still accurate, but the biggest threat now is a bit different
from back then: spyware. So this note focuses
exactly on that, and how to deal with it. (Also, that note was
very long and detailed; this note is short.)

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I said I’d skip trying Outlook 2003 for now because I couldn’t even
sync it with my Palm, due to Palm’s unwillingness to let me download
that capability from their web site. Well, I borrowed a Palm
install CD from someone so I could install the Outlook conduits
for use with my Palm, and am giving Outlook a try.

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Well, my PC acted up yesterday, so it was time to wipe the hard drive and start over. Our IT group got me a new disk image right away, and I started moving my data over. But, since it was a brand new PC, I decided to try some new things out. For example, I’m not going to install ZoneAlarm; I think the new XP SP 2 firewall will meet my needs. (It doesn’t do as much as ZoneAlarm, but I think it covers my vulnerabilities.) And I decided to try Outlook 2003.

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A while ago I
mentioned that Adobe Acrobat 6.0 takes forever to start up,
but doesn’t do a single thing I care about better than earlier,
faster versions of Acrobat. I just upgraded to a new PC, and it
had Acrobat 5.0 on it.

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A few weeks ago I wrote about
Changing
Software Programs, and said I liked
Mozilla
Thunderbird and would stick with it over my old favorite,
Eudora. Well, I changed my
mind, and I’m back to Eudora.

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How can I migrate my ” personal” (note the leading space) mailbox?
Just copy the Eudora ” personal.mbx” file to the Local Folders
directory in the proper Thunderbird profile directory. Rename it
to something without a file extension. Reopen Thunderbird.

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