eAPPS upDATE Newsletter

eAPPS upDATE Newsletter
Published by eApps Hosting
March 2008

In this issue:

News - Postini SPAM Filtering Service Implemented
More News - Report on eApps visit to Europe
More News - eApps certified under Safe Harbor provisions for European Data Privacy
Best Post Winners - Community Forum Monthly Best Post Winners!
Promotion - Community/Forum Sponsorship Referral
Feature - Meet eApps
New Applications and Versions - yum now available!, Updates to Tomcat and Subversion
Article - Vince Lombardi on "Catching Excellence"
Tech Tips - Working with files from the command line

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News
Postini SPAM Filtering Service Implemented
On March 8, 2008 we implemented the Postini SPAM/Virus filtering service. This service will filter your mail and quarantine emails that contain viruses or have a high probability of being SPAM. Postini is a highly effective solution that requires little in the way of administration. Initial reports from customers are very positive. The use of Postini is not mandatory for eApps Hosting customers, but it is implemented by default. For information on how to maximize the benefits of using Postini (including how to block spam that bypasses Postini because it was sent directly to your IP), or to learn how to discontinue the use of Postini, please refer to the Postini User Guide at http://support.eapps.com/hsp/postini.

More News
Report on eApps Visit to Europe
As reported last month, eApps attended the WebHostingDay conference in Cologne, Germany. The event was extremely valuable to our education of how to provide hosting services in Europe. During the trip, we also visited several of the premier data centers in Germany, Luxembourg, and Amsterdam. Based on what we learned, we are eager to continue our plans to establish a presence in Europe. If this was a matter of simply co-locating a server in a European data center, it could be accomplished quite easily. However, we are doing the required due diligence to ensure that our European operation has maximum performance, availability, maintainability, and capacity for growth. We want to ensure that our European services perform on par with our US based operation. Look for more definitive news in the April newsletter regarding this exciting initiative.

More News
eApps certified under Safe Harbor provisions for European Data Privacy
European Union regulations prohibit the transfer of personal data to non-European Union countries unless they conform to certain standards designed to protect the privacy of the data. The US Government supports the European regulations and in conjunction with the European Union has developed the 'Safe Harbor program' under which US corporations can be certified that they are in compliance with the standards. eApps Hosting is pleased to report that we are now certified under the Safe Harbor provisions for European Data Privacy. The certification is under our legal name, Strategic Systems Consulting, Inc.

Best Post Winners
Winners Announced for March's Best Post in Community Forum
Each month we select at least one outstanding post on our Community Forum and award a $50 credit to the account of the selected contributor(s)! The winners for the March 2008 newsletter are . . .

Please stop by the forum and check it out, ask a question, offer a suggestion, or answer a question. You might just win a $50 credit in April!

Promotion
Community/Forum Sponsorship Referral!
Our marketing department is at it again. We have found that a sizable number of people find us through a community or forum related to the technologies we offer and support. Of course, we appreciate the site visitors and the business it brings us. So we are interested in learning more about any communities that may benefit by being sponsored by eApps Hosting. To this end we have allocated some of our marketing funds to sponsor some worthy communities.

If you know of any community that 1) is related to the technologies we offer and support and 2) would benefit by being sponsored by eApps Hosting, you can get a referral fee from eApps, posted as a credit to your account. Here is how you can claim your referral credit.

Identify a community that is related to our supported technologies (Java, PHP, Ruby on Rails, mysql, Drupal, etc).
Send an email to sales@eapps.comwith the subject "Community/Forum Sponsorship Referral" You must include the following in this email: a) your domain so we can find your account, b) the link to the community/forum 3) how the community is related to technologies offered by eApps Hosting

We will review your application for the credit and reply with a confirmation that your account was credited for $10 for the referral. If we actually sponsor the organization, your account will be credited an additional $40. All eApps customers are eligible for this promotion. The promotion is valid through April 30, 2008 and has a limit of one referral per customer for a total credit not exceeding $50.

New Applications and Versions
yum now available!
For customers on our new CentOS 5 plans, we are pleased to announce the availability of the following new application:

yum - this is an automatic updater and package installer/remover for rpm systems. It automatically computes dependencies and figures out what things should occur to install packages. With yum you can easily install and update rpms into your VPS.

To install yum, login to your control panel, click on Sytem tab, then Add Application. Select the application you want to install and click Next. If you are interested in moving to the new CentOS 5 environment, please contact billing@eapps.com.

Updates to Tomcat 5, Tomcat 6, Subversion
For customers on our new CentOS 5 plans, we now have updated versions of the following applications:

Tomcat 5.2.26
Tomcat 6.0.16
Subversion 1.4.6

To install updates, login to your control panel, click on System tab, then All Applications. Select the application you want to upgrade and then click Upgrade to Latest. If you are interested in moving to the new CentOS 5 environment, please contact billing@eapps.com.

How to determine your operating system

Login to your control panel, click on My Account tab, then Subscriptions. Then click on the subscription you are interested in. At the top of the page you will see your Operating System.

Feature

Meet eApps

This month's featured staff member is Victor Tarhon-Onu. Victor works in our Technical Support department, assists with the development and testing of new services, and also works on network related projects. He recently assisted with the testing of many of the applications in our new CentOS 5 plans and made a significant contribution to the Postini project.

Victor was born in Tirgu Neamt, a small town in the Northeast region of Romania with a population of about 20,000 and an interesting history. After graduating from high school, Victor passed the admission exams for the University and moved to Iasi,
the second largest city in Romania. His first "job" was in 1998 as a volunteer System and Network Administrator for Technical University "Gh. Asachi" Iasi, where he was studying. Victor soon moved on to paying jobs where he took on increasing responsibilities, including planning and development of system and network administration projects. He started an open source project in 2003 for IP accounting called BBStatus, which introduced him to the service provider industry.

Victor is married, with no children. He enjoys working with technology even in his free time, but to get a break he takes road trips and goes hiking in the parks and forests with his wife.

About working at eApps Hosting, Victor says "There are 4 months already since I joined eApps and I've found wonderful open-minded work mates, interesting projects and a very good and healthy working environment."

Article
Vince Lombardi on "Catching Excellence"
For those of you too young to remember, or who do not follow American sports, Vince Lombardi was the legendary coach of the Green Bay Packers, a team that dominated the National Football League in the 1960s. In fact, the Super Bowl trophy is named after him. Lombardi is known for his quotes, such as "winning isn't everything, it is the only thing." But Lombardi had a lot more to offer than cliches. He was a man that truly understood the difference between good and great. The following is an excerpt from an article by Jeremy Schaap based on an interview with Bart Starr, the Hall of Fame quarterback for the Packers. The article, published on February 3, 2008 on www.parade.com, explains how this extraordinary leader's quest to "catch excellence" impacted the lives of Bart Starr and his teammates.

>>> It was almost 50 years ago, but former quarterback Bart Starr still vividly remembers his first encounter with the man who would change his life. The new head coach of the Green Bay Packers, Vince Lombardi, was addressing the players, who had won only one of their 12 games the previous year.

“He opened the session by thanking the Packers for allowing him to be their coach,” Starr says. “That tells you something about the man. Then he quickly turned to us and said, ‘Gentlemen, we are going to relentlessly chase perfection, knowing full well we will not catch it, because nothing is perfect. But we are going to relentlessly chase it, because in the process we will catch excellence.’ He came right up on us, within a foot of us in the front row, and then he said, ‘I am not remotely interested in just being good.’”

Starr, then 25 years old, had just three years earlier been drafted out of the University of Alabama in the 17th round. After hearing Vince Lombardi speak for the first time, he felt a surge of confidence and optimism.

“We took a break,” Starr says, “and I ran downstairs and called my wife in Alabama, where we were living at the time, and all I said to her was, ‘Honey, we’re going to begin to win.’ I mean, it was that obvious. This was the kind of leader that we had.”

Now 74, Starr still relentlessly pursues perfection. Case in point: A day after we speak to each other for this story, he calls back. He wants to amplify and clarify his answers to my questions. “I can do better,” he says. Five days later, he calls back again. Starr says he can do even better. Lombardi is still in his head, urging him on. For Starr, perfectionism is a way of life. <<<

Click here for the full article.

Tech Tips
In our February newsletter we offered information and tips on SSL certificates. This month we provide tips on working with files from the command line

Search and Replace in Multiple Files

Have you ever had the need to change a string of text in multiple files? Here is a fast and easy way to make a change in multiple files using Perl commands (from the CentOS wiki).

Example: Replace every instance of yourdomain with mydomain in all .html files in current path using Perl.

perl -pi -e "s/yourdomain/mydomain/g;" *.html

Same as above but make a copy of original file for backup.

perl -pi -e.bak "s/yourdomain/mydomain/g;" *.html

Or, if you prefer a lightweight solution, you can use sed:

sed -i 's/yourdomain/mydomain/g' *.html

(Add -r if you want to use extended regular expressions with sed.)

Uncompress mulitple .zip .gz or .bz2 files

Here are some handy commands for uncompressing files (from the CentOS wiki).

.zip

for file in *.zip; do unzip "${file}"; done

.gz

gunzip *.gz

.bz2

bunzip2 *.bz2

tar.gz

for file in *.tar.gz; do tar zxf "${file}"; done

tar.bz2

for file in *.tar.bz2; do tar jxf "${file}"; done

Splitting tar archives "on the fly"

Splitting archives requires a lot of space because you need space equal to twice the size of the archive. To conserve space, there is a way to split an archive "on the fly." To create a tar archive that splits itself on the fly use the following set of commands (from Red Hat Magazine):

First create the archive:

tar -czf /dev/stdout $(DIRECTORY_OR_FILE_TO_COMPRESS) | split -d -b $(CHUNK_SIZE_IN_BYTES) - $(FILE_NAME_PREFIX)

To extract the contents:

cat $(FILE_NAME_PREFIX)* >> /dev/stdout | tar -xzf /dev/stdin

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