Google is touting their Google Apps offering for business with a new post on the official Google Blog (link). The post presents a link to a gonegoogle.com site, which runs you through a calculator of how much cash you can save by “Going Google”. The calculator seems to be based on industry averages for things like uptime, storage costs, remote access, etc., and presents a nice little summary poster at the end. An example is given from guest poster smartfurniture.com. A nice little surprise comes up, though, when you click on the link to view the sample poster for Smart Furniture. ... Read more

In case it isn’t obvious: I switched up the theme for the site. I was never really too fond of the light-green touch of the previous theme and the code styling especially bugged me, but it was a fairly clean and so I just kind of stuck with it. Anyhow; comments & feedback appreciated.

I had not previously played aroung much with MySQL replication, but got the chance to do so recently. I’m doing some testing with a new mail filter setup composed of amavisd-new, SpamAssassin, and some other SA modules running through Postfix on Debian Etch. The setup uses Maia Mailguard as a web front-end and management system, including per-user settings and quarantines. We’re using MySQL for the database backend for Maia for storing quarantines, per-user settings and the like, but wanted to have a dual-MX setup with a secondary MX sitting in a remote site. ... Read more

Lately, our company has started developing user web portals for our clients. The main goal is to provide a central reference point for common links (webmail, helpdesk, remote assistance links … ), howto documents, and other files and resources. A secondary goal was to also allow user administrators to perform basic user management through a web interface. This would include things like disabling/creating/unlocking user accounts, resetting passwords, and modifying group memberships for access reasons. ... Read more

If you’re looking for an easy online storage solution for Windows (and have a gmail account kicking around), check out the Gmail Drive by bjarke. It’s a free shell extension for Windows that basically adds a new drive to your computer. When you try to access the drive through Windows explorer, you are prompted for your gmail login details (you have the option of saving the details to avoid having to login each time you access the drive). ... Read more

If you caught my previous post about Network Solutions’ practice of domain front-running, here’s the latest bit: They are now actually claiming that this practice protects people against front-running (see CW article for more details). Their logic? Well, if the domain gets reserved when you search for it, they are preventing scammers from registering the domain and selling it back to you… …uhm… Let’s try this again: I go to NS to search for a domain’s availability ... Read more

If you have not heard of the term cybersquatting, here’s the gist: Think of a domain name that someone else is likely to be interested in. Register/Purchase that domain. Wait for that person to try and register the domain for themselves. Sell the domain to them for a profit. Another spin on this idea is called domain frontrunning, where domain registrars track which domains are checked for availability (e. ... Read more