I couldn’t help but take this picture at lunch today.

Just as the news that the Microsoft Xbox 360 external HD DVD drive was declared extinct, I found a use for it: load up my new Asus Eee with Windows XP. It is hopefully the last OS that has to be loaded from an optical drive and lets not forget about the F6 floppy driver loading routine (thankfully not needed for the Eee).

I was going to use a Bytecc IDE to USB with an old drive I had laying around. But why not let this already defunct technology marvel go out with a bang. It worked great.

Anyway, I loaded up the Eee with an nlite-ed version of XP for a mere 480mb footprint. I followed this great tutorial over at i64X.com, thanks Jason!

My first impressions of the Asus Eee are very good. I am finding all sorts of uses for it. I already voided the Newegg warranty by installing a gig of Geil RAM, we’ll see about voiding the Asus warranty and installing some hardware hacks (maybe GPS, bluetooth and 3G?). I promise, this isn’t going to turn into a Eee blog, but I will have more on it soon. This thing is amazing!

You have undoubtedly heard about this outstanding book/movie. Well if you haven’t seen the movie yet, the consumer copy is being released on March 4th. This is a must see (and/or physically own if your primitive squirrel instincts are in overdrive).

I will warn you; when I saw this movie in the theater this past fall, it inspired me to do all sorts of things, including selling all my DVDs/CDs on half.com. With that said, the link to the right is to the Amazon Unboxed pre-order.

This is one you can’t miss.

I just installed Windows Vista SP1 and so far have noticed quite a performance improvement. Nothing scientific here… just “click of the mouse” impressions. But everything seems more responsive and smooth. One tangible difference is network file transfers. While moving files, pre-SP1 to a network drive I would get consistently 25mb/sec. Now the same transfer is moving along at 32mb/sec. Again, nothing concrete, but that is a 28% improvement. This is just one of the notable changes in SP1.

I have always enjoyed vista. There are a lot of XP die hards out there, understandably not wanting to upgrade. I built a new computer when I migrated to vista, so I didn’t feel the impact as much. The benefits have been great; environment is pleasurable and reliability has been top notch. I picture the trade offs like this…. sure windows 98se was faster than XP on the same hardware . It’s only natural that XPsp2 will be faster than Vista on the same hardware. Every OS has it’s issue, even the prim and proper Apple got slammed for Leopard bugs. Change always brings new issues, but it also bring good.

I have to thank Microsoft for this service pack. Yes, I know… they technically fixed something that was “broken”. But, it isn’t often that you see this noticeable of a performance gain without upgrading hardware or bumping your vcore.

Installation was flawless, 32 minutes on my system. (i twitter-logged it)

I downloaded the stand-alone update via MSDN. Microsoft is expected to push the release date up to late February as apposed to mid March. If you wait for automatic updates to kick in, you won’t get it until mid April.

I am quite happy.

“A study conducted by IDC determined that only 41% of small companies and 35% of large organizations monitor Internet DNS response times.”

“DNS failures account for as much as 29% of system downtime costing companies millions of dollars.”

The Domain Name System (DNS) is arguably the single most important part of the internet. Just think: If websites only had a numerical lookup… our Rolodex’s would be massively confusing. Why don’t webmasters/hosts treat DNS with the same priority? DNS servers carry such a high importance. Without them, no internet. They are often the target of massive Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attacks. Are your DNS records configured properly and secure?

DNS Performance & Security Enhancements

Most of the Internet is run on Berkeley Internet Name Domain (BIND) based servers. There have been a lot of failed attempts to create a BIND alternative (GnuDIP, MooDNS, Dents, OakDNS, CustomDNS and dproxy). A couple of active projects are PowerDNS, NSD, djdns and MaraDNS. All boast better security and performance improvements in different environments. If you are hosting your own DNS, you owe it to yourself/network to review your options.

Another performance and security innovation that is becoming increasing popular across many stateless services on the internet is IP anycast networks. It is a network addressing and routing scheme where data is routed to the nearest or best destination. It helps provide higher availability and load balancing. Many of the TLD servers name servers are already running on anycast networks. In fact these servers survived the massive DDOS attack last year. UtraDNS, Netriplex and DNS Made Easy are among the few providers to deliver DNS over an anycast network. I imagine many more fill follow suit.

Minimizing down-time with TTL

Most of us have been effected by DNS outages. There is not much you can do when a record gets out of whack or a server goes down. You can flush your local cache, maybe even try to resolve against a different server, but the only real cure is time. That is because each DNS record has a setting called Time to Live (TTL). This is how long the record should persist. Once this time expires, a new record is fetched. Also, if the servers aren’t available, you don’t get a record.

A good rule of thumb when setting your TTL is to use your average visitor time. For example, if the average visitor spends five minutes on your site (check your analytics), you should set your TTL to 300 (in seconds). The idea is; in the event of a failover, it has the least impact on visitors and doesn’t require a performance hit for numerous DNS lookups. Some DNS providers won’t allow a TTL setting this low. A lower TTL mean more DNS queries and ultimately more expense.

Should I outsource my DNS?

A lot of network architects will actually advise webmasters to host their own DNS records. The route/latency will be the same as HTTP traffic, thus making lookup time approximately the same as a web requests. It also reduces the risk of outages caused solely by DNS. If they are hosted on the same subnet, routing glitches are minimized. If they are on the same server as your website, it will even further reduce the risk of DNS only outages.

However, if you don’t have the time/experience to monitor, review logs and maintain your DNS servers, outsourcing is a great option. But beware, all DNS networks/servers are not created equally. If you are hosting your records with a budget registrar, chances are you are at risk. They are often the target of DDOS attacks, endure lengthy outages/maintenance and have congested networks. Security by obscurity; in the last two years I have had clients with DNS outages lasting greater than 6 hours at two of the major registrars.

The Cadillac of DNS currently is NeuStar’s UltraDNS. They have a globally redundant/optimized network with proprietary DNS software powered by Oracle replication. However, they charge by the query, so if you have a busy site, it will get expensive in a hurry. Another high-end service is Netriplex. For small to mid size company’s the only way to afford either of these services is to increase unfortunately to your TTL.

The best budget priced service with high-end features/support I have found so far is DNS Made Easy. They have a great feature-set, excellent and knowledgeable staff all at a great price.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

There have been reports of falling Search Engine Results Placements (SERPs) taking drastic drops soon after a DNS change. Changing just the IP address has not caused any notable problems. It is domain contact and name server changes that have have caused the speculation. Many claim it resets the sites Google “trust points”. There are many influences on SERPs and SEO is always a moving target, so take this warning with a grain for salt. But I thought it was worth mentioning.

For More Information

DNS Wiki – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_name_system
DNS Forum – http://member.dnsstuff.com/forums/
Web-based DNS Tools – http://www.dnstools.com/
DNS Surveys – http://www.seoconsultants.com/tools/dns/surveys/

Welcome.

If you are reading this post, the migration is complete. As promised, an all new site, with all new content.

With this much needed upgrade, I chose Linode.com as a host. They have many distros to choose from and a great management console. I am also partial to hosting facilities located in Texas for the geographic advantages. In the migration, I implemented Amazon S3 storage for all my static files. I have also scratch built a wordpress theme with minimalist styling and speed in mind. I still have a lot of tweaking to go, but it was time for launch.

More to follow…

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… turns into this …

… beautiful isn’t it.