XenoCafe's Latest News & Stuff

Yet another unreliable hosting company...

Mon, 28 May 2007 17:14:33 GMT

It's time for one of my rants again. This time it's over the excessive downtime this server has been experiencing -- not due to hacking, or lock-ups, or even shoddy scripts or clients doing naughty things, but because of the hosting company. Several months ago I moved everything off my home server onto this one -- I outgrew my DSL connection. I did some research and read some favorable opinions and chose the host I'm with now. Everything was fine at first until lately. Last week there was over three hours of downtime, and now another 10 minutes, plus more here and there. I gave them the benefit of the doubt and have rode it out, but now my clients are complaining, and as you all know, once that happens it's time to do something. I'll be looking for another company this June and plan yet another move -- this is getting rather annoying.

Server Outage Due to Shitty Belkin UPS

Mon, 21 Aug 2006 13:05:19 GMT

XenoCafe, my blog, and all other sites hosted on this server and my backup went down today for an undetermined amount of time. It wasn't because of my server hardware, or the operating system, hell it wasn't even my ISP, it was the piece of crap Belkin UPS I bought. I hate Belkin, always have and always will. I raced home during lunch to get the servers back up. Let my experience be a lesson to you. DON'T BUY BELKIN! Their products are total SHIT! Just like the company itself. You can read more about this on my blog.

Customize Your SquirrelMail Login Page

Fri, 11 Aug 2006 12:41:05 GMT

Yesterday I wrote up a simple tutorial with instructions on tweaking SquirrelMail to permit custom login pages for many virtual hosts using only one installation of the SquirrelMail code. In a nutshell, you edit three of the SquirrelMail PHP files and you have magic custom login pages for each domain you host. What makes it happen is a little custom function that checks the http host name and uses a switch/case structure to find the match. If a match is found it uses the PHP include function to insert the template to the HTML output. If there is no match it uses a default template instead. You can read more about it on my blog site and check out the screenshots of some of the webmail login interfaces hosted on this server. Be sure to download the source code containing the altered PHP files and a couple of example templates.