There are a lot of reasons why I have several servers co-located at digital forest. First, they have a long history as a reliable co-lo facility. Second, I know the CTO, and trust him. Third, they charge a reasonable price relative to service. (Some people have tried to convince me to switch to Brand X, often a major national hosting company, but when I've investigated out of curiosity, I find there's no real savings, and they nickel and dime you over every last thing.) Fourth, they're local, so I can run down and work on servers in a pinch.

But there's another very important reason. They communicate. They had a small failure in their cooling system last night, and redundancy saved the day. However, they need to do some system work, and rather than just do the right thing technically--pictures here!--to ensure temperatures stay low, they also did

My column in yesterday's Seattle Times is about a familiar familial problem: providing technical support. Now, while it's possible to offer suggestions by phone, and a little in-person consulting, all of us who have more technical ability than any other family member (or friend) has found themselves asking someone to read off menu names, and then performing audio body English--willing them to click the thing you're trying to tell them to click.

I discovered that Timbuktu Pro, remote-control computer software, coupled with Skype, is a reasonable, albeit expensive solution for long-distance tech support. The expense is high--a two-user license is $180 to $200 depending on platforms. But once you have Skype and Timbuktu Pro installed on both machines (yours and the supportee), you can literally seize control of that foreign machine and show the other person what to do, or accomplish the task for them.

I've been calling it the

Odd request, but this might percolate out over Technorati: I discovered that Commission Junction's DNS is misarranged so that the domains they use for affiliate program tracking and redirection are failing. I called Akamai, which handles their DNS, because CJ lacks good contact information on their site. Akamai looked into it and said that there was a change, but it was made by CJ, and thus they can't modify it. So I'm posting this in the hopes that someone associated with Commission Junction or its Valueclick division will get it and drop me email at glenn@glennf.com so I can explain what's wrong. I'll remove this post when things are fixed.

(CJ manages affiliate programs for ecommerce sites with publishers. My isbn.nu site uses CJ for several bookstores. When you see a price result on my site and click, that redirects through a unique combination of CJ domains,

If you're interested in easy-to-use encryption that would protect communications, take a gander at my article this week in TidBITS on public key encryption. This method of encryption allows two or more parties to scramble data in such a way that only a recipient with an appropriate key can decipher it. With more familiar encryption (symmetric key), the same key is used to encrypt and decrypt a file or message. With public key encryption, a pair of keys are used: one public, one private. The public key encrypts; the private decrypts.

Public key cryptography is a broad term, and is used as an element of PGP, a software package that manages people's public keys and uses both public key cryptography and symmetric key cryptography for optimum results.

It's also part of Zfone, which uses what's called a Diffie-Hellman key exchange to provide private calls between two voice over Internet protocol

AOL fights spam, sure, but they have these great arbitrary rules in what you send their subscribers. Although I run a very clean double opt-in email list with conservative bounce policies (bounces quickly turn to suspended email attempts based on a variety of simple rules), I just had a bunch of "permanent" delivery errors with my Wi-Fi Networking News list. The crime? Including a link that used an IP address (a Google cached entry, as it turns out) instead of a full domain name for a Web site.

This is a bit heavy handed, although I'm sure it stops a lot of bad phishing attempts.

The extensive list of SMTP-embedded error codes that AOL has developed is impressive.

I'm sure it's not just me, but my Web sites are getting hammered with weird retrievals. I only notice this pattern when things bog down, and I had to install some extra monitoring tools because of how bad it had become. A few days ago, my Movable Type system went insane because someone was trying to post a massive number of comments. This didn't work--I have moderation enabled--but it did slow the entire server down. I wrote a little script to figure out how many non-robot hosts were pounding on my machines, and found that the number was pretty frightening.

Some out of control automatic retrievals--including one from a Wi-Fi firm--were engaged in very ugly behavior. The Wi-Fi firm was retrieving an RSS feed for its internal news site by performing a full request every two minutes! That's right: no HEAD or Etag-based request to see if it the RSS

For quite a long time, I ran my own Web servers, DNS hosts, email servers, and such. I still handle my own Web sites--mostly because of particular tuning needs and scripts and systems I run--but I've offloaded email and DNS and never been less burdened by it.

For email, I use Fastmail.fm, which offers heaps of storage, transfer, and access options--including secure Web, POP, IMAP, and SMTP--at what is a preciously low price. I pay a little over $10 per month to handle a bunch of domains and aliases and a reasonably high volume of email. They have a well-tuned version of SpamAssassin installed that tosses thousands of spams a day and filters a few hundred more that I can review later. (You can fine-tune those parameters, too, to toss more or less or put more in a holding tank.)

They just launched an easier referral program that will

This linked photo is no longer available.

When you pull 30 miles of Ethernet into a new facility, you wind up with a comfortable pile of snipped ends, good for sleeping on at 2 a.m. while servers are rebooting (according to my co-location facility's CTO).

My co-lo is digital forest, and they're moving from the outskirts of town up northeast, where they've resided in sleepy Bothell, to the edge of Seattle--literally as the southern border of town touches their server room's edge--in a spanking new building. Spanking new in 2001, that is, when the tenant who had the building constructed went belly up, leaving it mostly empty for four years.

I took pictures with their permission of my tour. You can follow the saga of moving hundreds upon hundreds of active servers on a procession across the lake and down the highway in the wee wee hours every night