Saving Money / Hosted in the clouds / University
I’ve moved my site to a new cloud hosted server, it seems this site never stays in the same place for very long. This time though it was for a different reason, cost cutting. About 2 months ago I decided a co-location box in a data centre was just two expensive and for what it was costing I wasn’t getting enough out of it. At the moment its hosting various websites some I’m being paid for but it doesn’t cover the cost. They weren’t never supposed too, I got the box to learn some new skills which I’ve learnt and already put to good use so the time has naturally come now for a cheaper solution.
The box is not the only thing having its budget cut. Being close to the end of University I thought it would be wise to consider my future finances as I didn’t know what, if any, budget I’d have come summer. My phone contract is another expense that is taking a cut. Although I’ve got a new phone I purchased this out right as opposed to getting another phone contract and in the long term I’ll be saving money once I’ve moved to a sim-only contract..
Here are the sums…
Current Phone Contract
£35/month * 24 months = £840
New Phone Contract
£15/month * 24 months + Phone £270 = £630
In the next two years I’ll have saved £210 and I’ll be able to sell my new phone when I get bored of it.
Back to the hosting, I’ve opted for the Rackspace cloud not really for any reason but I suppose I already got to play with Amazon’s platform during placement so Rackspace is something new to add to my skill set I suppose. Pretty good service so far, I got the call to confirm and activate my account at 2am after opening my it at 1.50am.
Although the service is flexible I figure it’ll cost around £15 a month taking a guess at my current bandwidth consumption. So lets see how much I’ll be saving on hosting for the year…
Current Hosting Plan
£50 * 12 months = £600
New Hosting Plan
£15 * 12 months = £180
So in the next year in total I’ll have saved £625! WOW, no wonder I have no money at the moment!
I’m glad I had this cost cutting idea two months ago and started to put a plan in place to complete. Since then I’ve been offered a job after university. It would be very tempting now to just keep paying for what I’m using rather than finding cheaper alternatives etc…
All I need to do now is find a hosted Exchange solution as I can’t do without that! The initial plan was at my next house to get an ISP that offers multiple static IP addresses thus I could then host my exchange server at home! Since then I’ve got a job and had to consider on where I’ll be living. As it turns out I’ve decided to commute from Newark and will move into a house there, but guess what, the only decent ISP in Newark is Virgin Media and they don’t offer such a service as I desire so I’m shelving that idea for the time being.
Although on the plus side it should be a cheaper cost of living so I’ll be saving more money.. Although I need to decide on what I’ll be spending this money on! I’ve got a few ideas..
My holiday in Spain at the FIB festival..
A nice huge TV!
Exchange 2010 – Automated Signature
I’ve been messing around with my Exchange2010 server today and found a solution to automating signatures; for example adding a disclaimer message or as I’ve seen in some work emails adding marketing messages to the bottom of emails.
In Exchange2010 you can do all this via a Transport Rule, this is new as you can’t do this on Exchange2007 or Exchange2003 as I have seen in a SBS 2003 set-up I manage.
To do this..
1. Open Exchange Management Console and navigate to “Organisation Configuration” > “Hub Transports” > “Transport Rules” > “New Transport Rule” .
2. Give the new rule a name and a commit and click next.
3. Select the condition “send to users that are inside or outside the organisation, or partners” and click next
3.1 May be worth to later create two rules one for sending to inside the organisation and another for sending to outside the organisation.
4. Select the action “Append disclaimer text and fallback to action if unable to apply”.
5. click the blue text “disclaimer text” and edit the field. click next and create the rule.
Test this by sending an email to someone other another address.
You can use the following macros for inserting user specific information to the signature..
Display Name: %DisplayName%%
First Name: %%FirstName%%
Last Name: %%LastName%%
Business Phone: %%Phone%%
Title: %%Title%%
As well as inserting Word formatted HTML..
This all seems a little pointless on my Exchange installation as I only have a few users but I imagine this could save quite a few pennies on storage as it stops the signature from being appended on Outlook and then saved in the sent folder, this frees up space in the mailbox.
I suppose it also centralises management of signatures for when you are adding disclaimer or marketing messages
Error On Migrating A Mailbox To Exchange 2010
After installing Microsoft Exchange 2010 I wanted to move my mailbox from Exchange 2007 to Exchange 2010. Using the wizard in Exchange Console I got this error
Error:
Active Directory operation failed on *DomainController*. This error is not retriable. Additional information: Insufficient access rights to perform the operation.
Active directory response: 00002098: SecErr: DSID-03150E8A, problem 4003 (INSUFF_ACCESS_RIGHTS), data 0The user has insufficient access rights.
Exchange Management Shell command attempted:
’*OUStructure*’ | New-MoveRequest -TargetDatabase ‘Mailbox Database nnnnnnnnnn′ -BadItemLimit ‘0′
- I found that this error can be fixed by editing the Advanced Security Settings for the user on the AD.
- Open “Active Directory Users and Computers”
- Click “View > Advanced Features”
- Select the users mailbox properties
- Navigate to “Security Tab > Adanced”
- Select the checkbox “Include inheritable permissions from this object’s parent”
- Apply changes
Afterwards the move should go swimmingly, however you may need to remove your move request a try again.
Linux Hosted
Over the weekend with some holiday time I’ve been back to my home town for a little break from city life. I went back Thursday night and came back to Birmingham very late monday night/early Tuesday. I was late as I had randomly ended up in Leicester with one of my good friends and we had gone to see Alice in Wonderland, which was pretty good.
It had been quite an eventful but great weekend, saw the family and friends, witnessed a car crash in which the offending party hopped up and drove off and moved my website to my linux host. I’m trying to make room for another server so I’m consolidating various services so I can free up an IP address but a new virtual machine running exchange2010.
The move didn’t go as smoothly as I had planned, the application I used to create a dump of the DB has filled it with random text doubling the file size and caused lots of issues when I went to load it up. I instead reverted back to using MySQLDump on the Windows command line console.
Didn’t have many issues with the new setup, Apache 2.0 didn’t like the previous .htaccess and reported an “Internal Error Page” was quite annoying as I didn’t know what was going on until I checked the logs. After loading up the proper .htaccess file I just needed to enable mod_rewrite using the following command.
a2enmode rewrite
I’m pretty happy everything is working now, one thing that did annoy me running WordPress in ISS 6.0 is that the WordPress iPhone apps did not work but now that do as I’m back on linux so look out for a few more picture uploads.
Just one more site to move and I should be able to setup Exchange2010.
Exchange 2007
I’ve pretty much finished setting up Exchange on my newish server over at UKS. I say pretty much but I started this post in December last year so its been going for some time now! I’m pleased with it. I found it quite usful installing it as it helped me fix some issues with the Exchange server I manage at work! I’ve been using the webui to access my email which I have quickly got annoyed with. As most do, I prefer firefox and as some may know you don’t get the fully featured OWA anything other than Internet Explorer, one main thing you can’t do is create message rules (Unless I am totally blind). Good news though as Exchange 2010 which is currently at RC stage fully supports all features in Firefox and other browsers.
Just with my current setup I can not upgrade / install Exchange 2010 as I have run out of IP addresses / have no compatiable servers… yet… so I will have to stick with 2007 for a while.
On other note I’m appreciating how awesome WordPress is, its so easy to upgrade/add plugins unlike PHPBB which I have been working with lately, it reminds me why I did not follow a career in Wed Development / Design.
Although, when is anything easy?
New Server
Over the past couple of days you may have notice the blog and various other sites I manage have been down over the weekend. This was mainly due to some downtime on the DNS servers, the primary, located in Newark was turned off as some building work was going on close to the server and I didn’t want tiny rocks getting in though the fans but also because I was moving the DNS server to a new host.
I thought I might as well get some experience on various systems in some of my spare time while on my placement year so I got myself a server. It’s a HP ML115 and it is now hosted in a datacentre just outside of Birmingham. I’ve beefed up the standard spec of it with some large hard drives and quite a lot of ram! It’s currently hosting 3 servers. One of which is a Windows server which is now hosting this blog. I’ve come across a few errors since as wordpress doesn’t really support IIS but I think I’ve finally cracked it. I’ve also noticed a huge decrease in page load time; it was starting to get annoying on the old host.
My next challenge is to install Exchange server. I’m struck between trying out Exchange 2010 or properly configuring Exchange 2007 but before this I need to finish configuring Active Directory.
