Bulk import IPs into your Windows Server 2008 R2 Firewall

Feb 4, 2011 by Paul White

If you are like me you take server security very seriously.  You lock down all your ports, and you even firewall IPs that try to use exploits.  But eventually you determine that non of your clients do business in China or Russia, and its easier to just block those countries, rather than trying to block individual IPs.  Well this brings another problem.  Windows Server 2008 R2 has no user friendly way to do a bulk import of IPs.  Luckily I found a VB script that you can run and it will automatically add the IP blocks you want to block.

moved my server to internap houston data center

Nov 6, 2010 by Paul White

At the end of September 2010, my old Data Center had some lease issues, resulting in the data connection being pulled from the data center.  So I moved my 1U rack server to Internap.  Many are wondering why I choose Internap, hopefully this blog will provide some answers.

Google organic clicks affecting rankings

Oct 10, 2010 by Paul White

If you ask google how do I get the top ranking for my website, they will tell you its all about quality content.  But the problem is a search engine spider can't measure the difference between quality content and crap.  So this brings into question is google slowly starting to tweak their algorithm weighting it more on organic reaction to your website?

Acronoc Closing Houston Data Center

Oct 4, 2010 by Paul White

As some of you might have noticed my website and blog were down for a few days between Sep 28, 2010 - Sep 30, 2010.  Both my website and my client's are hosted on my colocated server, that WAS colocated at Acronoc's Houston Datacenter.  To make a long story short my server is now colocated with Internap. Click for the longer version of this story.

Constant Contact Review Pros and Cons

Oct 4, 2010 by Paul White

The chances are you have received bulk emails from promoters and businesses who use constant contact.  Some people are wondering if constant contact is worth it?  Recently I had the need to setup one of my clients on constant contact so we could blast to our maillist.  Normally we would blast from our own mail server but after the recent move to a new datacenter and getting a new IP, we are starting from scratch with our IP reputation and therefore suffer from terrible delivery rates.  Once the major ISPs can figure out what kind of operation we are running our email delivery should return to normal.  In this post I discuss Constant Contact's pros and cons from my short term experience with them.

ISP Feedback Loop list

Sep 22, 2010 by Paul White

If you run a mail server, and do any kind of bulk emails, you need to sign up with the feedback loops to ensure you keep your mail list clean, and your IP reputation in good standing.  I have put together a complete list of all known feedback loops.  I also include some background information on FBLs and return path who manages most of them.

How to stay focused during a coding marathon

Aug 18, 2010 by Paul White

Any Athlete will tell you that success is just as much about staying mentally focused as it is about being physically strong.  Well my fellow desk jockeys the same applies for you.  So in this blog I will share my thoughts on how you can be a more effective programmer. 

Website Security Tip remove catch all bindings

May 23, 2010 by Paul White

A few months ago I noticed that one of my clients websites seemed to be getting spikes of traffic.  However with spikes in traffic most clients would report an increase in sales or business.  When looking at the stats server, the requests were for pages and files that were not even on the server, and were for technologies ( PHP ) that I do not run on m box.  If you see requests for files like /prx2.php, /phpmyadmin/config/config.inc.php, /roundcubemail/readme, or /webmail/readme.  You might want to read this article.

asp.net Stopwatch is better than DateTime

May 2, 2010 by Paul White

In the continuing pursuit of getting my FLV scrubbing application to work correctly, I came across the need to time part of my code.  If you are used to using the DateTime object you might want to try something else.  Turns out DateTime is meant for Date and Times, and is pretty useless to use as a stopwatch when timing the performance of lines of code within your application.

FLV Scrubbing with throttling

Apr 30, 2010 by Paul White

In the old days of the internet if you wanted to provide videos on your website, you would use embed tags, or play an FLV via a flash SWF.  But the problem with this the huge amount of wasted transfer that results.  So I set out to develop a customized handler using asp.net that would allow FLV scrubbing, and also allow throttling to save on bandwidth.