Most sysadmins share a slightly compulsive tendency to need proof that things are working properly. This is particularly evident if said sysadmin is setting up a corporate mail server – it has to work first time, no excuses.

One of the more painful parts of that process has been testing the newly configured SMTP server before delegating the domain’s MX to it. This involves speaking SMTP through your telnet client, or re-configuring your mail client to speak directly with the new server, then un-re-configuring it.

Neither is a difficult task, of course, but it’s a solid 30 seconds (minimum) that I’d rather not spend.

So I whipped up a handy little SMTP test tool, which does the SMTP-speak for you, and renders the whole conversation in your browser via an IFRAME.

Neat, handy, and of course free. Try it out.

Last week I had a chat with Mitch over at The Web Hosting Show, where we discussed – among other things – why I’m so obsessed with uptime. It was therapeutic, particularly knowing that his listeners number many in the hosting industry. Improved uptime and performance is what we’re pushing at Wormly, and I’m pleased to able to explore new avenues in doing so.

I don’t subscribe to many podcasts – I’m definitely in the casual listener category – but those that I follow are podcasts which focus on a very narrow, targeted niche. Mitch’s show definitely fits the bill, and his focus on the hosting industry offers listeners a lot of value. Nice work, Mitch!

Listening to our short interview, one thing that does strike me is just how varied the English language is. Despite my best efforts to slow down, my rapid-Australian-speak contrasted quite drastically with Mitch’s slow and measured twang. Keeps thing interesting!

This week my home network witnessed the passing of an era. For over 10 years now, I’ve been running a variety of Linux -based servers at home mainly as development boxes, with a bit of personal web and mail hosting on the side. It made a lot of sense to do this, as old hardware could easily be recycled into a useful second life running a light weight linux distro.

But this morning I finally switched the last one off, and a slightly eerie silence descended on my home office. My new laptop, with the help of VMWare, is more than capable of wearing all the software development hats, and I’ve jettisoned all local email hosting because Google can do it better.

VMWare is the facilitator – I’ve always preferred to use Windows on my desktop, and use GNU/Linux in the server environment. Virtualization makes it extremely easy to have all the operating systems you need on a single machine.

Quiet – and Greener

Compared to my desktop, my laptop is whisper quiet. That’s a nice bonus – No more buzzing and whirring 24×7, something I was so accustomed to that I didn’t even notice it until it ceased to exist.

One of the most obvious advantages is the electricity savings – something that in these intervening 10 years has moved from being a non-issue, to being at the forefront of server management and highly visible everywhere in the face of carbon emissions – and the reduction thereof.

So it feels good to have just one PC at home – a laptop – that gets switched off when not in use. It’s an improvement, although my green credentials still need work given the redundancy built into our uptime monitoring network.

The other obvious advantage is having full access to my development environment whilst I’m on the road. I have quite a number of travel comittments this year, so I expect to make good use of that capability.

The final benefit is the ease of producing backups. The full virtual machine sits in a tidy 8GB disk image, and a backup snapshot becomes as simple as shutting the VM down and copying the file that contains it.

Fewer Points of Failure

Considering backups raises an interesting point – the less hardware that is in use, the smaller your chance of hardware failure. Consider how much time it takes you to rebuild a server even if you had a great backup regime, and virtual servers become much more appealing. If my host laptop fails, getting my servers back up should be as simple of copying a handful of files and reinstalling VMWare.

What will the tomorrow’s data centers hold? One enormously powerful grid computing appliance, containing 1000s of virtual servers? The idea of combining hundreds of physical servers into a single computer, to then run hundreds of virtual servers on it does seem a little strange, I’ll admit.

Update: Further reading on this concept at SitePoint.