March 2010

Dear Client,

Things this last month have been pretty stable. We upgraded the mail server to a new release a few days ago with no issues.

About mid-month we did find that our bandwidth had peaked out completely. This was happening even during off-peak hours and started affecting normal mail and web traffic.

Tracking it down is always a challenge. We finally did, however, to find out that it was partly caused by some popular web sites we host having overly large images, but mostly due to one site having a popular AC/DC song on its home page. This song had been indexed by a music site and rather than copy the song to their site, they just provided a link to ours. Apparently this song is very popular in China, as most of the hits were coming from there.

The site owner took the song off their home page, but that had little effect as the other sites were now referencing it. Deleting the song file took care of it, but this brought up a more interesting question—how do we keep this from happening in the future? It could just as easily happen with any other popular file and result in inappropriate bandwidth usage.

A filtering package we purchased a few years ago provided the answer. It is flexible enough for us to give it a new rule and it enforces these rules with ease. We gave it a rule that any file (sound or image file) could only be seen if it was getting called by the website hosted here.

So if someone hits your home page and that in turn calls your mp3 or image file, it goes through with no problem. If someone instead types in a direct path to the file, or another site references a file here, it gets blocked.

While this works pretty well, we’re still monitoring the issue to make sure there are no unintended consequences. The good news is our bandwidth is back to normal and responsive.

On a personal note, our garden took a frost hit about a week ago, killing almost all the tomato transplants I’d started from seed. Dang. So we replaced them this weekend with ones from a local nursery. While there, we picked up some pepper plants(bell, jalapeno and habañero), okra, celery(!), and several varieties of tomato plants. Last month also saw several seeds/bulbs coming up: potatoes, garlic, shallots, radishes and an asparagus bed I started. That won’t be ready for a year or two at best. But the shoots are up. Also planted a couple of blueberry bushes that do well here.

We also replaced 13 citrus trees that were damaged severely 3 years ago by the hard freezes we had here one winter. Weren’t sure if they were salvageable before now, but it became obvious this season. Nothing like the taste of a sour orange to give it away. Ew.

Sincerely,

Ben Conner