AceTheHost

Archive for the ‘Software’ Category

I’m a fan of cPanel for a number of reasons, but a few stand out over all. First, let me tell you that cPanel is a basic web hosting control panel that comes with most cheap web hosting providers on the internet today. It’s not the only option out there; you will find some companies that offer other control panels such Plesk. I personally find some of these other control panels offer less features, are more unorganized, and can be difficult to navigate around.

My favorite features in cPanel come down to three main things: Password Protected Directories, Backup Wizard, and Custom Error Pages. Password protected directories are a great feature if you have a personal folder setup and want to limit access only to people who have the password such as family members or close friends. The backup wizard is amazing feature as you can completely backup your site to transfer to a new web host within about 5 minutes and 3 mouse clicks. Finally, the custom error pages are great if you want to create a unique and custom page for webpages on your site that can’t be found (also known as 403, 404, and many other error pages). These three features are just a few cool features you can find by using cpanel on your favorite website hosting plan. I’m sure there are huge Plesk and other control panel fans out there, but I’m all cPanel!

Brian McArthur, the director of technology at Advantage Professionals, a managed services provider in Charlotte, N.C., wanted a better way to perform bare-metal installations on a Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server. He and his engineering staff used a pre-boot execution environment or PXE Boot server and the kick-start process for automating Linux installations. While the approach is fairly common, McArthur said, “It was a bit cumbersome and never really worked exactly as we needed.” For one thing, the process was not automated, requiring staff to manually assign roles to servers—a time-consuming and inefficient process.

McArthur set out to find a more automated approach to bare-metal server provisioning to quickly facilitate the addition of new servers running the CentOS distribution of Linux in his company’s data center. McArthur went online, conducted a search and came across LinMin Corp., a Redwood City, Calif.-based systems management startup that focuses on Linux administration and management. McArthur downloaded a demo of the company’s product, LinMin Bare Metal Provisioning and within hours realized he had found the right tool. (more…)

Customers at the MySQL conference this week said Sun Microsystems’ acquisition of the database company could increase MySQL’s credibility among senior IT decision makers still skittish about using open-source software.

There were some, though, who feared that ownership of MySQL by a traditional IT vendor would diminish growth in the community of MySQL developers, who provide a regular stream of patches and new features for the database.

“The main downside is that the community might reject it [Sun’s purchase of MySQL],” said Yuriy Demchenko, a database administrator and Web applications developer at a large Canadian telecommunications company. “We’ll see if the community continues to grow at the rate it has.”

Demchenko said his company, which he did not want identified because he is not authorized to speak for it publicly, runs primarily Oracle and IBM’s DB2 databases, but his department uses MySQL for “semi-official startup projects” that sometimes end up running in production. He uses the community edition of MySQL “because it’s free.”

The upside of the acquisition is that it will make higher-level executives at the carrier more comfortable with MySQL because it is owned by a big, stable company, Demchenko said. His company already uses Sun servers.

Sun closed its US$1 billion purchase of MySQL in February and is hosting its first MySQLuser conference this week in Santa Clara, California, where it released a near-final version of MySQL 5.1. It has been at pains to emphasize its support for open source and similarities in the companies’ cultures, despite their (more…)