for keeping track of my digital experiments

Surprising, never knew that Comcast filters out email from IP addresses without PTR records. I mean I am able to setup SPF records, but that’s about it, unless I lease another VPS or dedicated box and setup my own dns servers so I can run domain keys.

Connected to 76.96.62.116 but greeting failed.
Remote host said: 554 IMTA22.westchester.pa.mail.comcast.net comcast 65.254.216.210 Comcast requires that all mail servers must have a PTR record with a valid Reverse DNS entry. Currently your mail server does not fill that requirement. For more information, refer to: http://www.comcast.net/help/faq/index.jsp?faq=SecurityMail_Policy18784
I'm not going to try again; this message has been in the queue too long.

Well that sucks, I just sent off a notice to the Amerihosting guys. I wonder what they’ll think? I nabbed the following off of experts-exchange.com (excerpt from the user called bluetab). (Did you know that if you are using Firefox on experts-exchange.com you don’t have to register or pay? You can just scroll to the bottom and read the answers.)

I used zoneedit to create RDNS records for my IP address block and it worked great. It was just a pain to get it setup.
We created a record in ZoneEdit. The IP block has to be formatted as such: XX.XXX.XXX.XXX-XX where the -XX represents the subnet masks /29 for example. After ZoneEdit assigned us name servers we had to send a request back to ATT (our T1 provider). The email basically told ATT to change the nameservers for our IP block.
“We are requesting a change for reverse DNS zone delegation.
Please change the DNS servers for DSE IP block XX.XXX.XXX.XXX-XX on Circuit ID DHEC-XXXXXX to:
ns12.zoneedit.com
ns14.zoneedit.com”

So it can be done! I just hope it works with a single IPv4 address …

I probably should have told you (the normal reader) about the upcoming server move earlier, but I’ve been out of it. I had my wisdom teeth removed on Tuesday. I figured it wouldn’t be that big of a deal for most of my visitor to experience some down-time. Here is what the Amerihosting people (the guys who do the hosting for my VPS) told me:

On Saturday, July 12, we will be moving the server hardware from the current datacenter to our new facility. The estimated downtime for this move will be 6 hours, and will start at 2 PM EST.

Hope that doesn’t dampen the visitor traffic too badly.

The setup
Recently I started leasing an OpenVZ VPS (virtual private server) from Shinjiru hosting. Their servers are located in Malaysia in seven different data centers. Mine happens to be located in Kuala Lumpur. The customer support I experienced was very good. The sales reps responded to my emails in less than a business day, with English that was pretty good for not being native speakers. I was even able to negotiate a lower priced VPS plan, since I didn’t need any control panel.

The technical details
The choices for operating systems are a bit old. I was hoping to use Debian 4.1 or CentOS 5, but the best I could get was CentOS 4.4. Their default VPS image install includes SSHd (obviously), Apache 2 with Perl, PHP, PHPMyAdmin, AWstats, Analog, MySQL, sendmail and a POP3 server. Unfortunately YUM was not installed, so I had download the source and compile it. Not that it is extremely difficult, but processing tar.gz files and getting the install configured just right is tedious. After I compiled yum I then had to get the configuration files just right. I learned that certain packages don’t like to be updated or installed in an OpenVZ VPS, such as gcc or any gcc dependencies. Thanks to the RPM Search, I managed to get all the dependencies worked out and installed. My first priority after getting yum to work was killing off ftpd and installing vftpd. After getting things cleaned up, I installed the Webmin minimal version (from source). I didn’t want to use yum on this one, because the full version has all these extra utilities with the package that I don’t need.

The conclusion
Shinjiru offers great offshore hosting. It would be even better if they had newer operating systems. The latency is pretty good as offshore servers go. The latency for my VPS runs around 300 – 330ms when I ping it from my home DSL connection (Qwest DSL in St. Paul, Minnesota). If you want some great offshore hosting (where even warez is ok) then I would say that Shinjiru is going to be your best bet.