Guten Tag

Wir haben vergangene Woche einen neuen Proxy Server und Loadbalancer (Apache Mod_proxy) vor unseren Cloud Hosting   Webserver installiert. Um von diesem Dienst zu profitieren, der die Geschwindigkeit der Ladezeit der jeweiligen Homepage erheblich verringert, gehen Sie wie folgt vor:

1. Ändern Sie den DNS-Record Ihrer Webseite auf die IP-Adresse 82.220.55.108. Nach dem DNS-Renewal wird Ihre Seite über den Loadbalancer beschleunigt.

2. Dies hat zur Folge, dass in der  Statistik die Zahl der Hits geringer wird, weil einige Inhalte vom Proxy zwischengespeichert werden. Die Visits werden dank Mod_rpaf auf den Webserver korrekt angezeigt. Statistik- Tools (z.B. Google Analystics und Awstats) müssen nicht angepasst werden.

3. Wenn Sie ihre direkten Änderungen auf Ihrer Website vornehmen wollen beachten Sie bitte, dass der Proxy Server die Inhalte zwischenspeichert und Veränderungen am Design zeitverzögert angezeigt werden.

4.Um den Proxy- Cache zu umgehen legen Sie eine Alias- Webseite an ( z.B. dev.website.com) und lösen den DNS für diese Alias Webseite auf die IP 82.220.55.107 auf. So werden Ihre Änderungen in Echtzeit angezeigt.

Dieser Service ist im Webhosting enthalten, und wird ab Ende Februar für alle Kunden zum Standard

Wenn Sie den Proxy- Service jetzt schon verwenden, bitten wir Sie uns ein Feedback zu geben, so können wir Änderungen vornehmen und unsere Dienstleistung optimieren.

Vergangenen Monat erschien der Halbjahresbericht 2011 von der Melde- Analysestelle und Informationssicherung (MELANI) des Bundes.

In diesem Bericht macht die Melde und Analysestelle auf die erschreckende Zunahme von Spionageangriffen auf Unternehmen aufmerksam. Im weiteren stellt der Bericht fest, dass immer mehr vertrauliche Firmendaten im Email Verkehr gehackt und erschliechen werden.

Geben Sie also diesen Spionageangriffen keine Chance und sichern Sie Ihre Email Anhänge mit DasDEX ab!

Geschätzte Codebase Kunden

Wie bereits angekündigt, dürfen wir Ihnen endlich das lang ersehnte neue Codebase Hostingpanel präsentieren. Das auf ISPConfig 3.0.3 basierende Panel überzeugt durch eine saubere, vereinfachte Benutzeroberfläche die trotzdem mehr Einstellungen und technische Möglichkeiten bietet als bisher. In dieser Cloud – der Tecnostore Cloud – werden komplexere Applikationen ihren Platz finden und auch Reseller eine verbesserte Plattform kriegen um die Kunden besser im Überblick zu behalten.

Die Cloud wird in einem eigenen, in der Schweiz situierten, Datacenter mit redundanten Leitungen laufen. Die Servicequalitat wird somit erheblich verbessert um Ihnen eine Reihe von attraktiven Angeboten zu offerieren. Die bisherigen Hostingangebote werden eine Preiserhöhung haben, die genauen Preise sind noch unbekannt. Sobald näheres bekannt ist, werden wir Sie informieren.

Und so sieht das neue Hosting Panel aus:

Mitte November werden wir uns mit genaueren Anweisungen bei den ersten Kunden melden.

Freundliche Grüsse

Ihr Codebase-Team

In July we will launch the new Das Archiving Products Line. The first time in the history of DAS we feature a whole product line for various archiving applications. Also for the first time, we will release pure software products without dedicated hardware.

The new product line contains four different products:

• Das Personal – For SoHo use on local workstations and laptops.
• Das Professional – For small and medium sized enterprises for network wide use.
• Das Developer – A cloud-enabled program library, that provides developers not only with the full range of archiving features, but also many cloud features to enable distributed architectures and billing for pay-per-use licensing models.
• Das Hybrid – The classic of the Das Archiving Products. For high volumes of data, this solution will be delivered pre-installed on 24/7 certified hardware.

Also, there is a vast set of new features included in every product. Amongst others:

• Business Data Management: Recognize duplicates, file types and unused files. This reporting enables you to determine more easily which files can be archived permanently and which files are not appropriate in your business (e.g. MP3 files downloaded by users)
• The Group Account feature: Allows you to share archives on DVD, BluRay or an online storage facility with your customers, suppliers, business partners or friends and family.
• Online Archive included: Every product includes up to 500 GB online archive space.

When writing tickets for a task to achieve in development or marketing, the results are far better when the ticket is complete and doesnt need a lot of research.

There are tickets for many purposes, support, bugs, requirements, and tasks are just a few of them. This article focuses on requirements and tasks.

For a ticket management to work perfectly it needs to be integrated into the documentation system and revision control. At Tecnostore Group we use the Trac wiki and issue tracking system to achieve this.

The perfect use of such a system eliminates any other flow of information in the development process. Reading a ticket should give the developers and marketing people all the informations needed for the product development.

Defining the requirement

• What should be implemented: A clear specification of the required functionality / output.
• Who is the initiator of the idea: For questions and clarifications, also to notify about changes.
• How should it be implemented: Detailed technical information (e.g. The Ticket “Design splash screen” should contain the desired file format and size)
• The proper estimated task duration should be between 4 and 16 hours (0.5 to 2 work days)

Analysis / Triage

• When should it be closed: The target milestone / version
• How should it be implemented: Detailed technical information (e.g. a Ticket “Design an archive file catalog” could contain the information “Inherit from FileBaseCatalog and write method addToArchive() )
• A more accurate time estimate.
• Tickets that are less work than four hours should be merged with related ones. Our Ticket management system knows the resolution “merged” for this.

During Development

• What was done, a small comment on closing at least.
• If there was source created it should also be documented by comments.
• If there were files created that are to be checked into revision control, the log comment has to be linked to the ticket.

At Tecnostore Group we always look forward to embrace new technologies. At the moment we’re working on version 10.06 of our DAS archiving products. For the first time ever, they feature an RSS reader consuming streams from this blog.

With this technology our customers stay informed without having to browse our homepages themselves or getting a lot of e-mails. It also enables us to communicate available updates, tipps for the products and more important information in an instant.

Technically the feed distribution is done using .net without any external libraries. Only dependencies used are the System.Xml classes and the Controls library. The components implemented are a GUI-Control to display the feed, one to display single feed items, and an RssConsumer class.

All this components will be released to the public in september as a part of the CodeFrame, an easy to use lightweight .net application development framework.

Sometimes the little hints are the one which make a technicians life more easy.
It seems like also Apples OS X Snow Leopard has no option for showing hidden files in the finder. But I found following well-tried hint at quarkstar.at:

Read the rest of this entry »

Over the last three months, we introduced a new corporate design. Also we introduce a new communication and information management platform – our corporate blog.

The blog is built with WordPress. All new articles are deployed to our company and product homepages. This happens using RSS-feeds and content syndication technology.

So, while the corporate blog will contain all the articles, the product and company homepages stay simple.

In the future, you will also meet guest bloggers on our corporate blog.

This podcast gives you a short and proper introduction to the first steps in the cloud using elasticfox:

What is cloud computing? The basic idea is to have an abstracted model to separate physical IT infrastructure from logical IT infrastructure. Think about the OSI-Layer model and map it to the various infrastructure sets. (e.g. A customer is interested in the availability of a service. He doesnt care about the availability of the exact physical system.) This is called “Infrastructure as a service” short: IaaS

There are other aspects in cloud computing, which provide PaaS (Platform as a Service, e.g. Hosting) or SaaS (Software as a Service, e.g. Salesforce). Since EC2 allows logical
Since EC2 envirements allow a massive scaling of logical infrastructure, often the term “elastic” is used to describe parts of this technology.

EC2 compatible solutions (e.g. Eucalyptus and UEC) provide IaaS Services. The logical it is split into several components:

• A Cloud Controller: The frontend coordinating everything. It’s accessed by an API, on the client side there are the ec2 tools on the shell or plugins like elasticfox for firefox.
• A Storage Controller: This unit provides all the storage for the cloud. The storage comes in form of S3 which is also accessible over the web by API tools. It stores files as “Objects” in a “Bucket” objects can be made into “Bundles” by adding a prefix in front of their name. Another form of storage provided is EBS (Elastic Block Storage), which are partition images on the Storage controller, accessible by virtual instances (see below).
• A Cluster Controller (Eucalyptus term, Amazon refers to clusters as “regions”): This unit controls the physical hardware and network configuration in the cluster.
• Cloud Nodes: The physical servers running the cloud infrastructure.

The logical infrastructure built in the cloud consists of virtual servers, the so called instances. Instances are stored in form of templates. Every instance launched is started from the template, and looses all changes on termination. So specific configurations and data have to be stored in S3 or EBS. This seems a weird paradigm change at first, but makes perfectly sence, once you look at the migration paths available: Any kind of instance can be upgraded by upgrading and testing the template and then relaunching the instances. This massively reduces migration and administration cost, and makes this tasks just… elastic!