After reading the slashdotted google hacked sites fiasco, I (and by the look of it, the rest of the Internet) decided to check out Google Webmaster tools.

Verifying all my sites was a pain (the verification server probably got slashdotted, and when it was working, it wasn’t resolving DNS properly), and took about a week. But now that that’s over, it gives me some useful info. It really helps, to get a view of your site, as google sees it.

Most of the use for me, is the Preferred Domain tool (i.e. make google prefer www.yoursite.com over yoursite.com), and the Site Content tool.

I’ll look into sitemaps another time :-)

OMFG, I just received a bounce from an e-mail I sent 6 months ago.

The mail was written to postmasters, complaining about their MTA’s not understanding 45x codes. Sounds like that is just the beginning of their problems…

/me wonders if that “lost connection” was 6 months ago, or ran for 6 months before it got lost…

This is the Postfix program at host gs-smta-01.broadbandscope.net.

I’m sorry to have to inform you that your message could not be be delivered to one or more recipients. It’s attached below.

For further assistance, please send mail to <postmaster>

If you do so, please include this problem report. You can delete your own text from the attached returned message.

<postmaster@mail.sfd.co.uk>: lost connection with mail.sfd.co.uk[81.140.0.66] while sending message body

From: Stefano Rivera <XXXXX@rivera.za.net>
Subject: Misconfigured mailservers (greylist incompatible)
To: postmaster@sfd.co.uk, postmaster@mail.sfd.co.uk, postmaster@broadbandscope.net
Date: Mon, 17 Jul 2006 15:47:17 +0200
User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.9i

Sorry, but you guys have no technical contact listed anywhere, so I just mailed all the relevant postmasters.

Your outgoing mail servers don’t seem to retry mail when they get temporary errors (45x series). The problem servers for me were gs-mta-04.broadbandscope.net [81.140.160.226] and gs-mta-03.broadbandscope.net [81.140.160.225].

I’m having fun with a uk2.net dedicated server.

A video-hosting site that I admin is currently hosted on a colo box with some very expensive bandwith. While the burstable bandwidth we can get on it is amazing, it’s staggeringly expensive, and we have a small quota. Thus we can’t sustain too much traffic.

For poorer customers, I want to look at some cheaper bandwidth… UK2.net are having a special where you can try a dedicated box for £0.99 for it’s first month. With 2TiB of traffic / month (2 orders of magnitude more than the co-lo box) it is more than up to the job, and upgrading to an un-metered 10M link is cheap.

So, I’m trying out the mid-range option. I get a GiB of RAM, 80GB HDD, and more bandwidth than I know what to do with. A bittorent :-) test shows that it’s reasonably well connected.

Now to set up a demo website and see how it compares to our current uber-expensive box.