When a web site or application becomes too large to run on a single server, it’s frequently placed on multiple servers with a load balancer in front of them to spread the load and also to remove faulty servers from the pool. The F5 BIG-IP is one such load balancer. To ensure that faulty servers [...]

This morning I discovered that one of my favourite bands had released a new album. As a loyal fan looking for some new music to listen to on a Friday in the office, I promptly clicked “Buy Album”. Normally at this point the album will begin downloading, and thanks to the 100Mbps connection to my [...]

As someone who works in the hosted services industry, I frequently need to access web sites or other systems that are in the midst of a DNS change. When a change occurs it’s easy enough to flush the recursive DNS servers that I use, however the operating system itself also caches the DNS results. This [...]

Last week at World Hosting Days in Germany, Parallels announced the preview of the latest version of their hosting control panel – Parallels Plesk 11. This week the preview was made available for service providers to download and evaluate. Having used Plesk for 10 years now I was eager to take a look so I [...]

I’ve installed and configured Microsoft Exchange numerous times before, however I recently had a requirement to install Microsoft Exchange 2010 SP1 in Hosting mode for a client. To my surprise, I experienced issues sending mail between customer domains and this post describes my solution!