It has been a long time since much of any news came from BsnTech Networks.  Well, there is plenty of news going on now!

There has been continous upgrades over the past few weeks to our infrastructure.

• The Decatur location got a speed boost which will allow for quicker downloads and faster speeds when loading pages.
• The Paris server received a large memory upgrade; the upgrade doubled the memory from 2 GB to 4 GB.
• The Paris server was reloaded with the Ubuntu Linux operating system.  Windows 2000 is now running as a "virtual server" on top of Linux. 
• A new e-mail server has been established on the Paris Linux server.
• A new processor, motherboard, memory, and hard drive has been received for the Decatur server
• New server statistics are available for viewing

• Decatur Location - new Internet Connection!

Comcast has taken over the Decatur area for Internet communications through cable.  Previously this service was provided by Insight.  Because of the change, the service is now on a "Business Internet" service.  Business Internet service through Comcast has preferential treatment over standard residential customers.  Because of this, our speed tests have concluded considerable increases in both download and upload speeds.  Our download speeds (which means sending something to a server - uploading websites or e-mails) showed 23 megabytes per second.  This is a very large increase over the 10 megabytes per second it once was.  Upload speeds also improved dramatically.  Through Insight, upload speeds (which means customers are pulling your website or you are checking your e-mail) went from 512 kilobytes per second to 2.5 megabytes per second, a five-fold increase.

• Paris Server Updates

The Paris server has had some performance issues as of late.  Because of this, the memory was increased from 2 GB to 4 GB of memory.  Because the operating systems used is a 32-bit system, the system can only use approximatley 3.5 GB of the memory.  If the system was updated to a 64-bit operating system, all 4 GB could be addressed.

BsnTech Networks was researching the idea of using Virtual Servers.  A Virtual Server is the idea that you can run multiple operating systems on one computer simultaneously.  Each operating system has its own advantages and disadvantages.

During the researching phase, this cause the Paris server to be very unstable.  The software package used is called VMWare.  We discovered that the server would randomly reboot several times during the day when VMWare was running Windows 2000 as the host operating system and any other "guest operating system", or "virtual server."  This included Linux and another Windows 2000 install.  We believe that VMWare has trouble with Windows 2000 and 64-bit processors.

The Paris server was then reloaded with Ubuntu Linux as the "host operating system" and VMWare running on Linux.  Windows 2000 was then made a "virtual server" and it now has been running flawlessy for several days without one reboot or one error.

Because Linux is now available on the server, we are now able to do much more with containing our e-mail system.  The new system that is used is called Exim4, and it runs ClamAV as a virus scanner and Spamassassin as the spam checker.  There are several other checks that are in play as well - SPF (Sender Policy Framework) which check records to ensure that the sending IP address is allowed to send a message from that domain (an example would be ensuring that a Hotmail sender is coming from a Hotmail server instead of someone forging the address on another computer).  In addition, blacklisting has also been setup to deny messages from dial-up, cable, and DSL customers that are not allowed or should not be sending messages directly from their home computers.

Exim4 has several available configurations as well.  We now block e-mails sent from specific e-mail addresses to ensure that they are always rejected.  In addition to rejections, the configuration has also been established to ensure that e-mails coming from certain people are always accepted.

• New Decatur Server Coming Soon!

A new server has been received for the Decatur location.  Because of the changes going on in Paris, the current server has been overloaded with handling all forms of communication during the period for reloading at Paris.  The current Decatur server has only 512 MB of memory and a single-core 32-bit 1.8 GHz processor.  The new Decatur server will have 2 GB of memory and a dual-core, 64-bit 2.1 GHz processor.  The dual-core processor will effectively provide 4.2 GHz of processor power.

The new server will be setup identical to the current Paris server.  It will be loaded with Ubuntu Linux with a Windows 2000 virtual server running from VMWare.  When BsnTech Networks finally makes the transition from Windows 2000 providing e-mail and web storage, this can all be transformed into the Linux system and Windows 2000 will be part of our history.

• Server Statistics Available

BsnTech Networks now publishes server statistics right on the website!  This is done by using the Cacti graphing system from the Ubuntu Linux system.  The graphing system is capable of graphing several items; memory usage, CPU usage, network traffic, web server statistics, e-mail server statistics, and many other features.  Right now, we have released to the public our statistics for network traffic, web server traffic, and e-mail server rejections and deliveries.  This will give customers an idea of how much mail is rejected and not delivered to their e-mail account.