Summersault Blog

If you’re going to be a true Mac fanatic, you have to spend at least a few hours a week reading the Mac rumor sites that churn with gossip about forthcoming products and business decisions from everyone’s favorite technology underdog. The current rumors a-flurry are all about Apple’s forthcoming September 7th press conference, and the possibility that they’ll announce an iPod / Mobile phone combo. Drool.
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At this very moment, hundreds of people around the country seem to be flocking to the Summersault-hosted website belonging to Dancing Rabbit, an ecovillage located in Missouri. Why? Their intentional community was featured in tonight’s episode of the FX show “30 Days“, hosted by Morgan Spurlock (of “Supersize Me” fame). We at Summersault have had professional and personal ties to Dancing Rabbit since 1999, and we’re happy to be hosting their site (even with the onslaught of traffic!), especially given our own mission of working to build and sustain communities. We hope the national spotlight is favorable to them, and is an educational opportunity for those wanting to learn more about community building and living off the grid.

A few of us were recently having a conversation with some colleagues about how effectively our respective staffs spend the time we’re present in the office. There’s a new related study out that shows U.S. workers “waste” up to 2 hours a day, with the important distinction that older workers (55+) only wasted an average of 30 minutes per day, while the younger whipper-snappers are the ones who apparently can’t stay focused.
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If you already know about the world of website content syndication, RSS news feeds, feed reader/aggregator software, and all that jazz, you might wonder why I’m bothering to post Yet Another Article about it. I’ll just go ahead and say that I have purely evangelistic motives: I would love to see content syndication adopted more widely, both by end users, and by website content producers. So if this is old hat, you’re welcome to move along, not much to see here. If you’re wondering what website content syndication is and how it might make your life better, read on!
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You’ve spent the time and money to build a website or you’ve hired someone to build it. You wait a couple of months but you only receive a couple of visitors per day tops. You start to worry that maybe you’ve wasted your time and money on something that isn’t going to yield any results. What do you do?

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A few years ago when I was working remotely on a regular basis, I looked seriously into creating a Virtual Private Network (VPN) setup for our office network. A VPN is a handy thing: it lets your desktop computer(s) at the remote location (e.g. home office, client office, etc.) appear to be on the local network at the main office, which means network services like printing, file sharing, e-mail, etc. can all happen seamlessly without special “remote access” privileges, firewall modifications, and so on. Many organizations with telecommuting staff use VPNs these days to reduce the overhead and hassle of having remote systems that need to interoperate with the rest of the organization. This post talks about how, after a frustrating experience last time around, I easily got a VPN up and running this time.
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The Sober.P worm, which spreads itself through infected e-mail attachments, seems to be hitting the U.S. fairly hard this week. I just noticed that it started coming into Summersault’s mail servers en masse - at least compared to our normal virus load - earlier this week.
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I’m not usually one to rush into upgrading an operating system, but Apple has made the act of upgrading it’s OS X OS more of a pleasurable experience than most any other software upgrade process I know of in my experience with Windows, Unix, and Macs combined. It’s the difference between going to hospital to have a major organ extracted, dropped on the floor, dusted off, and replaced (all Windows upgrades, FreeBSD upgrades that involve kernel recompiles, etc.) and going through an outpatient procedure where you eat cheese and sip wine while they work on you, and you leave you with a fresh set of eyes, an extra arm with a cutting edge accessory attachment, and about ten years added to your life (Mac OS X upgrades since my switch in 2002). So I didn’t mind putting a central tool in my life - a PowerBook G4 Titanium - on the line for a little bit of surgery when Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger arrived yesterday.
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The “Domain Name System” (DNS) is essentially the phone book of the Internet. It’s what translates human readable domain names like “summersault.com” into computer-friendly numeric addresses that identify where a particular website, e-mail account, or other service related to that domain actually lives. Like most of the rest of the Internet’s technologies and supporting systems, the DNS system was not designed for level or type of usage it currently experiences. Over time and through some poor policy decision making, the DNS infrastructure has become, in the context of what constitutes a reasonable quality of operations given modern expectations about network technologies, essentially broken. In recent years, as commercialization of the Internet continues and more and more services become available, DNS has become broken in new and painful ways that have a daily impact on our operations as a hosting company. Even if you’re a casual user, the dysfunction probably affects your own use of the Internet more than you know.
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A Realtime Blackhole List (RBL) is a list of computers on the Internet that made it onto the list because they were caught spamming, sending out viruses, or some other unsavory activity that met the list maintainer’s standard for being listed. Mail service providers all over the Internet then use these lists to decide whether to accept or reject mail from those listed computers (or, in many cases, just “tag” mail from those computers as suspect). As Summersault has continued to rely more heavily on RBLs for keeping out unwanted junkmail and viruses, we’ve also increasingly found the need for being able to maintain exceptions to those lists. This post talks about how to setup your own RBL system for listing those exceptions.
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