Technology, Theology, and Anything In Between

Here are some ideas for being “socially responsible” with technology, at least in the software engineering field:

1.  I’ve found over the last year, I was able to reduce my electric bill by not running a server at my house.  When I first started my business, I thought that it would be great to have a server and network at home.  That actually did work well for awhile, but caused my power bill to go up.  I live in an area where electricity can be expensive, and we don’t have options for “green” power, other than to buy credits to offset power usage.  While I did that for some time, I got tired of paying an extra amount of money for electric every month.  If you must run a server at home, consider using a server with Intel Atom chips.  While the Atom is not a fast processor, it certainly can get the job done in some instances.

2.  If you provide web hosting, consider using a VPS instead of a dedicated server.  A virtual private server allows you to take advantage of much faster hardware at a lower cost, and because it is on a computer which has other VPS systems on it, there is not much more power usage.  I’ve found that by moving the server functions from a physical machine at my house to a VPS, it is possible to take advantage of the server doing multiple functions, i.e., doing what I need it to do, plus serving webpages for my customers.  Even better is finding a datacenter that uses “green” power.  Some datacenters I know of that have initiatives to reduce power consumption are AdvantageCom Networks, and NetDepot.  There are plenty of others, but these two I personally use, and they have scored well in my informal benchmark testing.

3.  Some other low tech ways we have reduced our electrical usage include shutting off our extra freezer.  We buy our meat and frozen items as we need them, so we don’t overfill and waste food, either.  We have set our thermostat to 75 degrees to keep the air conditioner from turning on as much.  This summer, although being cooler, our power bill has dropped quite a bit compared to last year.

4.  Another means of being socially responsible is in teaching others about software engineering and other related disciplines.  Those of us who know how to make technology “work” should at leave give back some of our knowledge to the community for free.  I’m still struggling to figure out the best way to do that, so if any of my readers have an idea, please feel free to comment.  Especially teaching people how to use open source and free software replacements for proprietary software would be helpful.  In our current economic times, why spend money when you don’t have to?  Even better yet, have you donated to a cause such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation, or Free Software Foundation?

I do maintain multiple servers for my business in separate geographic locations, and all but one of them are VPS systems.  The one dedicated server is a Dual-Core Atom server, so even that system consumes less power than a regular server.  I would like my business to head in the direction of providing web applications, and as such, want to make sure I have the resources necessary to handle the load from a well-used application, without consuming more resources than necessary.

I was reviewing my blog statistics today, and realized that most of my hits come from people looking for reviews on AT&T’s U-Verse service.  If you haven’t read any of my other posts, I’ve had U-Verse since January of 2008.  I had the TV and Internet products at the beginning.  I was thinking of switching to the phone service, but they were going to charge an installation fee for it, so I decided that I would not bother to switch.  Besides, they gave me a good deal on a regular landline, so I figure that it would be best to stay with what I have.  I did cancel TV this year due to cutting back on my costs.  I still have the Internet product through them, currently the “Max” product, which is 10 mbps down / 1.5 up.  Since I’ve started to do more media stuff with my company, I thought a fast upload speed would be the best.

I’ve been very interested in Mennonite theology.  I’ve been reading several books recently by John Howard Yoder on pacifiism.  I like what I’m reading.  The thing that I like about Mennonites is that they really seem to be a “third way”.  It is hard to call them conservative or liberal, or any other label.  In fact, I’m reminded very much of the short time that I visited and attended a Plymouth Brethren church.  I seriously think they are on to something.  Maybe I will blog more about what I’ve learned in another post.

As always, if anyone who wanders over here has any ideas on what I should blog about, please do let me know.

I’m reading “The Art of Deception” by Kevin Mitnick.  It is interesting to read how it is so easy to get people to trust you and give information that would normally be held confidential.  It makes me think that I should be much more careful about verifying the identity of who is calling or emailing me.  Normally I’m careful, but it takes being vigilant and on guard at all times!

My most recent brush with social engineering was when I got the “Heather from Card Services” scam.  I didn’t give out information, but I can see how these guys do it.  They began by asking me a series of innocent questions, then proceeded to ask things like “what is your 16 digit card # and expiration”.  I immediately suspected something was up, because a read credit card company has never asked me for my expiration over the phone when I call them.   What made me even talk to them as much as I did was because they said they were from “Card Services”, and one of my cards list themselves online and in statements as “Card Services, FIA” or something to that effect.

So the lesson learned, and that Kevin is trying to teach us, is that it can be very easy to “mark” a target and go after information.  Especially when multiple calls are made and a little information is obtained each time, it can add up to being enough to steal an identity, break into a computer system, or something worse.   That is why he wrote the book, to show the rest of us how to analyze how ourselves and our companies interact with people (especially that call on the phone), and limit the amount of information that is given out until identity is verified.

Please keep a watchful eye on what you and your employees do, as you never know who could be trying to do some hacking or “private investigation”.

I’m on vacation right now.  I have a couple of  books by Kevin Mitnick, which I’m hoping to get through reading by the end of the week.  My thinking is that these books will help me understand how to secure my systems better, and also understand the “human nature” side of hacking.  I also have a theology book to read, actually it is church history.  That book is “Turning Points” by Mark Noll.  This book is about the points in history that the author believes to be most important in the history of the Christian church.

I’ve been setting up IPv6 on my servers, and also doing lots of traceroutes to determine what VPS systems I have give optimal routing for different networks.  So far, the one at Interserver.com has some nice routing to just about any top-tier network that anyone would be on.

Also, I’ve been experimenting with broadcasting video streams.  I’ve downloaded Quicktime Broadcaster, and will be playing around with making movies on my iSight camera.  Not very high-quality or professional, but will experiment so I know how to do video streams and feeds.  Note:  This is also a service I intend to offer with my consulting company.

I’ll post more thoughts on the books I’m reading in a few days.  If you are a regular reader of my blog, I’d love to hear from you, and ideas for discussion topics are always welcome.  I’ve been reading some books on science and religion, and hope to be able to blog and comment when I have my head fully wrapped around the subject material.  There is alot to digest in each book I’ve read.

I have been trying to configure my home network to use IPv6 for some time now.  I finally figured out how to do it, and wanted to pass the information along.

First, the part that I had the most trouble finding how to do, is that you MUST configure your Residential Gateway (RG) to be in “DMZPlus mode”.  I do not have the TV service anymore, and I’m not sure if the TV setup will still work if this mode is used.  Please proceed at your own risk.  You will want to be running your own router, and you need to go into the firewall options, and select the IP of the router connected to the RG, and then place this in DMZ plus mode.  Once this setting is adjusted, you must reboot or otherwise cause the router to renew its DHCP lease.  When this is complete, your router will now get the public IP address that U-Verse assigns.  This is crucial to making sure that IPv6 will work correctly.

I also run a router capable of doing 6to4 networking, the Apple TimeCapsule.  In the AirPort utility, go to the Advanced Tab, and then choose IPv6.  The “mode” should be set to “Tunnel”, and “Configure IPv6″ should be set to “Automatically”.  You can also check the box above to enable the IPv6 firewall, which I would recommend if you are concerned about intrusions.

One of the reasons that this was so difficult for me is that Apple doesn’t give much documentation (or at least I couldn’t find it) about how all the IPv6 settings work, or some examples on how to configure.  As far as I can tell, the settings mentioned about put the router into a 6to4 mode, where it is sending packets back and forth to the anycast 192.88.99.1 address.

Once all this was configured in the TimeCapsule, I was then able to renew some DHCP leases of IPv6-capable machines on my network.  They autoconfigured themselves, and I was able to browse several IPv6 sites (including my own).  I don’t know how quickly web hosting companies will be adopting this; some already have, which is how I have an IPv6 website.  One such company which offers IPv6 in addition to regular v4 addresses is nerios.net.  I’ve had good luck with them so far, and as of now they are providing a /64 block of addresses with their VPS servers.

To those who read my blog, I’ve been absent for some time now, as you can see.  I’ve been busy with a server upgrade.  I’m thinking of taking my business in the direction of offering web technology services with an emphasis on high-uptime, and being a one-stop shop for all kinds of hosting, except for game servers.  To that end, I’m testing several providers for their network speed, and server speed.  So far, things have been going well, but I need more customers!  If you are having trouble with your current web host, please drop me a line, and let’s talk about how I might be able to help you.  My pricing is flexible, and for individuals looking to host personal sites, my pricing will start as low as $100/year, depending on how much disk, processor, and bandwidth utilization you will use.

Anyone who has followed this blog knows that I’ve been changing the hosting companies I use frequently over the last year.  The reason for this is to find the optimal price/performance setup that will give my customers the fastest possible hosting while holding down costs.

I’ve moved away from any kind of Microsoft .NET development.  I would like to spend my money on developing free software applications and then hosting them.

One other notable thing:  I now have IPv6 capability.  The server that has an IPv6 /64 block is not as powerful as the others, so I can’t serve too many database-driven applications, but static sites should be fine.  I’ve also configured my home network to use IPv6, and I’ll detail that in another post.

I’ve found that Google is going to be a great tool for my business to use concerning email.  For the last 5 years, I’ve been using Microsoft Exchange server, hosted on a server at my house.  Because of this, I had to do all kinds of tricks to get email to arrive at the server, either by hoping my ISP kept port 25 open, or using some combination of POP3 or forwarding service.

This year, I realized that I needed to down-scale my systems.  For a one-person company, it just isn’t worth the time needed to administrate a server.  Plus, by shutting down the server, I save about $10-$20/month (yes, power is that expensive where I live).

If you were unaware of this, Google now allows you to use their email and services for domains.  As of the writing of this article, the price was $50 per year per user.  So a cost of $6/month seems reasonable to me, especially since Google mail is probably one of the best email systems that filters spam.  Over the last few years, I tried Exchange’s Intelligent Message Filtering, and using SpamAssassin on Linux servers, but I could never catch all the spam that Google’s filters catch, no matter how much I tuned the filters.  This was another reason for switching to Google — I simply didn’t want to spend hours training spam filters to get rid of the hundreds of spam messages I was receiving on a daily basis.

Some other things that are notable about Google for Domains — they give you a Contacts and Calendar application that will synchronize with devices that can communicate with Microsoft Exchange server.  Now, I can sync my PDA and other devices again!

Also, they give 3 GB of space for videos to be posted.   Since many companies are getting into web-based video, this should be plenty of space to serve video content to your customers as marketing material.  I’ve also been given 25 GB of email disk space, which should be plenty.  I’ve been using Gmail for personal use now for about 4 years, and I’ve yet to get over 1% used.

So for a small business person, I would suggest that if you are tired of administrating your own email servers, and you are looking for a robust and proven solution, Google for Domains might be the application that will keep you from going insane.  At $6 per month per user, payable annually (at least in my case), the cost is low enough that it washes.  I just think about what I charge for working on projects, and how the $6 per month saves me time that I otherwise would have used deleting spam.

Last, there is a sites feature, that will allow you to create several websites that you can use internally for your employees, or you can make public as a sort of extranet.  I’m not sure I’m going to use this, but for a company that also doesn’t want to get involved in web design or hosting, this could be a simply way to get a website up and running quickly.

For anyone who reads this blog frequently, please be aware that I’ve switched over to WordPress.  I decided that it was very inconvenient for blogger to have to keep republishing the whole blog every time I updated something.  Also, it will help keep things more secure on the server by closing an FTP account.

I realize that I don’t have any graphics as of yet.  I’m trying to aim for good content, and I’ll get some graphics later when I have time.

I’ve decided to dump Windows on my laptop. I had problems with XP being very slow. I tried to do a clean copy of 32-bit Vista. That worked, until something happened with that + TrueCrypt, and the system became unusable again.

My solution is to install Debian Lenny. So far, I’ve been very happy with this OS. Lenny is working great with the laptop, and so far I’ve not had problems that have occurred with other Linux distributions, such as not coming out of suspend mode, or freezing up. I did need to use fwcutter and install the firmware for my laptop’s wireless card, but that only took a few minutes. I had previously gone through this process when I had tried Ubuntu Linux.

I’ve always appreciated Debian’s update system, and the package management. It is so easy to keep configuration control over the programs I use. Right now, I’m using OpenOffice to compose this posting, which was a default install with Lenny.

Since I’m currently working on a Ruby on Rails project, the Linux setup will work well. To communicate with my client, I can use Evolution for email. I appreciate that all the memory I populated that laptop with is being used by programs or as cache memory. I’ve noticed no matter what Windows OS I use, the OS always swaps out to disk, even when few programs are running.

This is the closest I’ve ever been to a complete Windows replacement. I’ve been a Microsoft shop for some time now, but I’m thinking about stopping support. I just can’t afford to be spending money every year to subscribe to their latest and greatest software. My laptop is getting old, and I think Debian Lenny will keep it usable for at least a few more years.

Here are some ideas as a technology business that I’ve used in order to keep my fixed costs and expenses low. Maybe some of these will be helpful to those that read this blog.

1. If you use a dedicated server, consider a VPS or shared hosting. I was using a dedicated server, but soon found out that a VPS would work just as well for the number and kinds of customers that I have. The virtual private server allows me the same control as a dedicated server, but at a much lower cost. Some VPS packages also can be faster than a low-end dedicated server, simply because the VPS has to use much better hardware if it is split up between 4-10 users. One thing to watch out for: Make sure that page load times and database stuff doesn’t bog down.

2. VOIP. One of my recent posts covered this. The specifics here was buying a decent VOIP phone (Aastra 480i to be exact), and then using a SIP-to-Skype bridge (SIPtheeSkype). This combination allows me to use my Skype subscription for unlimited US calling, plus a inbound telephone number, for $54/year. This is much better than paying the phone company $40+/month, and with some companies, a contract is involved. DISADVANTAGE: You won’t be listed in the phone book. Considering the kinds of people that contact my business, this isn’t a problem. Who looks for a software developer in the phone book? Other VOIP providers worth looking at are Gizmo5 and RingCentral.

3. Business finance. I know the debt-averse attitudes many Christians have, but I can’t say I completely agree with them. Certainly, this economic climate which we are in is causing us to rethink our ideas about debt and savings, but debt still remains a tool for businesses to use, especially to float through hard times. My suggestion here is to find a local bank that has money to lend, and use a line of credit. Currently, my bank offered me a line of credit at 4% + prime rate, which last I checked made my interest rate 7.25%. Contrast this with Chase Manahattan, a business credit card that hiked my rates up to 14.24%. Most of my views on debt and credit are based on things I read from Gary Moore. He runs this website, Financial Seminary. My best advice with this point is look to get away from credit cards, and use bank loans and lines of credit. The APR is much better, and usually, the bank line of credit forces more payment of principal every month, so you won’t be in a debt for years.

4. Credit cards. I’m going to be accepting credit cards this year, to hopefully bring in more customers that will make small purchases. I’m going to use PayPal, which will give me better control over my costs. While the transaction and discount rates won’t be as good as a merchant account, there are no monthly minimums to worry about. Also, they have a money market account that earns 0.5% now, which isn’t great, but better than 0% in my bank checking account.

Hopefully some of these ideas will be helpful to you. We will get through this year and turn a profit!