These days it’s quite easy to get incredible deals on shared hosting space. Mostly with dodgy providers in the US or former cyberlockers (like filesonic). They don’t give you SSH access, but only FTP. Rsync doesn’t work with FTP, but duplicity does. While not as robust and fast as rsync, it’s built to work with any service that can store files. Examples include any FTP-server, Amazon S3 and SFTP. Many tutorials suggest using a GnuPG-key for asymetric encryption, but for only protecting your content from the hosting provider, a simple symetric password should work just as well and makes things easier.

Webmail was updated to version 0.7 with a new skin. I also removed the last bits of MySQL-dependence of the email-system. This has the benefit that everything is simpler to administer and more stable.

Apple’s latest operating system for mobile devices has been out for a few weeks now. The upgrade was mostly an evolutionary one and didn’t add too many new features. One thing apple has done tough was to tighten their grip on devices after they have been sold, by tighter integrating them into their iCloud service. If customers should wish, they can now upload their pictures, calendar, address book, bookmarks, notes, documents or location to Apple’s servers.

About a year ago EditDNS was bought by Dyn Inc. They have in fact ruined the old site and tried to lure as many customers as possible to their site. They didn’t honor lifetime memberships at EditDNS and even charged money for migration. Their prices are absolutely unrealistic as well. Hosting your DNS with them costs more than hosting a whole server. Fortunately there are some alternatives left. Currently the site’s nameservers are mirrored in four locations, which should provide plenty of redundancy.

Hosted calendar and contacts service is now available for all users of email. It’s base on Card/CalDAV and should work out-of-the-box with all newer Apple devices, as well as most open source clients. For Android there are apps available.

In the early days of my server-career, I had to use lighttpd for RAM-reasons. Over time the limitations of lighttpd were mounting. E.g. no .htaccess-files, no auth with certificates, bad DAViCal integration, inconsistent LDAP-filters. Moreover after some time lighttpd uses up more and more memory. So for now I’m just using both of them to compare performance and overall ease-of-user.

We’re moving the server from Denver to Singapore this weekend. It’s possible that there is minor downtime or other temporary glitches. Sorry for that in advance.

There were some issues with webmail, after the upgrade to PHP 5.3. Should be resolved now. Let me know, if there are any issues.

I was interested in arrival times of emails this morning. This should reflect the world’s work- and communication patterns. Sample size is around 80,000. Here are the results. Most messages arrive in the late morning and from Mon to Thu. Sat is rather quiet. Times normalized to UTC+1 [nggallery id=13]

This Sunday, the new stable version of Debian was launched. I just upgraded the server. All the essential stuff seems to work. Apart from a minor problem with MySQL.