Summersault Blog

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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At work I happily run Mac OS X 10.2.8 and my main browser of choice is still Safari (version 1.0.3); it doesn’t really bother me that these are both a couple of years out-of-date since they remain in fine working condition. Sometimes, though, my crusty software does make me feel a little bit like a stick in the mud, what with Tiger coming out and Firefox catching on. But just the other day I discovered that, apparently, Google likes my software configuration quite a bit.
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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 Associated Press has reported recently on an interesting trend in browser usage that was originally revealed last week by WebSideStory, an independent Web analytics company. Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, which had enjoyed a market share upwards of 95 percent as recently as June of 2004, has now slipped below the 90 percent mark in the United States. Read the rest of this entry »

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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I love simplicity, and I found it today in shfs, a tool that allows me to
browse any server I can ssh into as a local file system.

Consider this common case: I’m working on some content for my website at home, and I’m ready to upload to my website. I can only access with SSH-based tools, to prevent my password from being sent in the clear, as FTP would do. That means my choices are basically ssh, scp, and sftp.
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When Summersault was first starting up and were sharing office space with the folks at Infocom, a local ISP now defunct, I remember the talk at the time about creating a wide-reaching local area network in the Richmond area that would allow network traffic flowing from one local organization to another to be routed directly, instead of taking the default circuitous route through the organization’s ISP, the national level point of presence, and then back down through the destination’s ISP. It seemed like such a good idea, and though Infocom did some peering with Earlham and RP&L, the local power company, things never really moved beyond that as far as I knew.
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After not having much luck creating a reliable VPN connection from my home office to the Summersault office network, I was looking for a middle-ground solution that would at least let me access internal website addresses that are otherwise protected by our firewall (e.g. corporate intranet, system status monitoring pages, etc.). Read the rest of this entry »