January 15, 2005
Internap Power Outage
Internap suffered a power outage at Fisher Plaza in Seattle, Washington on Friday January 14th.
From eWeek:
A sudden power outage has knocked millions of Six Apart Ltd.'s LiveJournal blogs offline.
The power failure occurred on Friday evening at the Internap data center affected more than 100 servers that keep LiveJournal's blogging network up and running.
"LiveJournal is currently completely inaccessible, and we're waiting on Internap for an estimate when power will be restored. Once power is restored, the service will be brought back up slowly so that we can ensure data integrity," Six Apart said in a notice. "We'll [provide an] update with an estimate for when the service will be brought back up once we hear back from Internap."
On the LiveJournal site, visitors are being directed to an powerloss update page that provides more information on the battle to get the 5.6 million blogs back online.
"The worst thing we could do right now is rush the site up in an unreliable state. We're checking all the hardware and data, making sure everything's consistent. Where it's not, we'll be restoring from recent backups and replaying all the changes since that time, to get to the current point in time, but in good shape," the update notice read. "For now, please be patient. We'll be working all weekend on this if we have to."
"We're going to be buying a bunch of rack-mount UPS units on Monday so this doesn't happen again," the company added.
December 04, 2004
MiraPoint RazorGate
At work we have been evaluating the RazorGate project. This product is a Anti-Spam and Anti-Virus mail filter appliance product.
Administration: The web interface is quite bleak. Very light weight and not incredibly user friendly. There isn't a whole lot of configuration to the product, you enable the various features and not much else. It does keep extensive logs on the messages that pass through the device. The server supports SSL. Also it has a telnet interface which I have not used extensivly but can do real-time displays if mail traffic.
Anti-Spam: One if the first things I noticed is right on the anti-spam it says that it is based on SpamAssassin. The rules it uses are based off a service that Mirapoint provides. They are very strict rules. From what i've found if the message has HTML is will get makes pretty highly. They use a 0-300 score level It does White and Black listing. and use RBL lists.
Anti-Virus: It is based off of Sophos for antivirus. This seems to work pretty well. her have gotten out fair share of the common virii out there and they have been caught. I have not seen any on the antivirus on the internal mail server.
Untested Features: This box will also act as a basic mail server handling POP, IMAP, and Webmail. Mailhurdle, they advertise this anti-spam feature very highly but i have not tested it out.
Over all this is a pretty effective appliance. i would recomend it but you will as with any anti-spam solution have to play with the filter to get the right ballance of score for your mail traffic. We have had to make heavy use of the White list.
