Nick DeNardis

Most technical people I know have at least one server in their house to share files and or keep backups of their important stuff. Mine is on 24/7, it takes quite a bit of time to manage and I always worry if my data is really secure. It happens to sit in my basement in the same house my main computer, if there were a disaster all the data would be gone with everything else.

AmazonS3 is by far the best thing to happen to small time data management, well even large scale data management. And a software application JungleDisk that seamlessly connects your computer, Windows, OSX, Linux directly to the storage service.

A server running 24/7 uses a lot of energy. Lets say on average a mid range computer without monitor uses 152 watts of power. That is almost twice the amount of energy a TV needs. So doing a rough estimate of the math,
((Watts * Hours * Days) / 1000 kwh) * 1.4 kWh Rate = Cost per Year.
((152 * 24 * 365)/1000) * 0.14 = $186.41 per Year.
Now that is a lot of money not including the hardware and the time it takes to maintain the software and configuration.

I have JungleDisk setup two ways, a bucket for “files” which is my documents that I need to get to often and I use it like a Documents folder. And another “backup” bucket which I use for automatic backup each night of my whole system.

I have ~20 gigs stored on the drives and it only costs me ~2.50 a month for the storage, so $30.00 per Year. 1/3rd the cost, no maintenance time, and no initial cost for the hardware or setup. Not to mention your data is now in a secure 24/7 location and your helping to save the environment.

Since Amazon has so much storage it can efficiently handle the distribution across its systems. It can use a greater percentage of each of the drives producing a smaller cost (wattage wise) per gigabyte stored. This cost savings would not be able to be achieved if everyone had a house with a personal file server using 152 watts of power and only using 30% or so of the actual space on the drive.

I encourage everyone to try it out. Amazon has no setup fee or no minimum amount to spend per month, in fact my first few months only cost me $0.02 each. In the spirit of saving the environment I am announcing that I am turning off my home file server as of today. No more 24/7 usage and a definite relief on me and the environment.

For other ways to save the environment, check out today’s major initiative named Blog Action Day.

Sending email from a web site using PHP’s mail() function is a pretty routine task. Contact forms, friend requests, alerts, errors… Servers hosting one or two sites the time to send an email is not even noticeable, but on a server that hosts 200+ sites the time creeps up the two to three second range.

In a shared server environment like we have at Wayne State University, we have found there is no easy way to keep track of the emails being sent through php’s mail() function. It would take an analysis of the mail server logs or a friendly sysadmin of another server to alert you if there is a bot taking advantage of a mail() script on your site.

To combat this we are developing an extension for PHPSimpl’s Mail class to instead of send out an email directly to inserts the message into a database and every five minutes a cron runs to send out all emails in the table and records them in a sent table.

• Making pages load faster, a DB insert is faster than a mail() function.
• Frees up server resources to host pages instead of doing sendmail’s.
• Determines really how many emails are being sent from the web server.
• Keeping track of what sites are sending mail from what pages and by who.
• The ability to flag emails before they are sent with keywords like “Viagra” and “Enlargement”.

We are currently just testing the system and hope to include it right into PHPSimpl as a main class but it still needs some stress testing. So far the tests have all came back positive, we have discovered a few of our own forms that have been taken advantage of and we resolved some potential issues.

We also over estimated the amount of emails being sent out, we thought with 200 or so sites it would be ~500-700 emails a day, well it turns out once we fixed a few of the forms we are only sending out ~100 emails a day, not bad.

The graph at the top of the post is the last 5 days and how many emails have been sent out. Today the 6th there has only been 4 emails so far at the time i took the screenshot, 8am.

On the 4th we saw a spike in bot related emails, after some investigation and a few recaptcha additions we just about halved the number of emails the next day.

Next week we hope to have the system fully functional and have a better analysis and report of our findings.

I just got a newsletter about Sprint Xohm and they didn’t say much about anything but did include a nifty video. I thought the video was pretty compelling and was not like any of their other videos i have seen before.

I think Xohm will revolutionize how we are connected to the world, it will give devices that normally would need to be connected with wires the ability to actually be useful.

Anyways on to the video.
Watch the Xohm Preview Video