We are pleased to announce that on March 28th Contegix will be implementing a new tool within our support operations. For some time now we have been developing a new support ticketing system that will function as a core component of our day-to-day support activities. While it may not always be apparent to our customers, there is a great deal of activity that takes place behind the scenes that allows our technical engineers to continue to provide the high quality of support we promise our customers. We currently utilize an off the shelf product that has served us well for several years but, unfortunately, still left us with some operational inefficiencies. As a company dedicated to high quality customer care we wanted a ticketing system that would meet our unique demands with the utmost efficiency.   Therefore, we decided to build our own. We are now prepared to introduce the spoils of the time, effort, and dedication we have exercised in building our own application.  We call this new tool Noctane.

As a company we knew we needed a support ticketing application built around our version of technical support. We did not want to buy an application and adjust our support vision to that application. We enlisted our partners at Relevance to assist us in taking our vision of a support ticketing application from idea to final product. I would personally like to thank the team at Relevance for their continued efforts in helping Contegix develop Noctane from concept to actual reality. We would not be launching Noctane on March 28th without you.

Our first release of Noctane will allow Contegix technical engineers to be more efficient in our handling of your support requests and provide us better up-to-the-minute visibility of each active support request we have for our customers. We are confident these new tools and the efficiencies they will bring will only be a benefit to our customers and the overall Contegix support experience.

We will continue to expand on this first Noctane release both for our internal use and for our customer’s use. We are currently conducting development on a customer support portal that will be a key component of Noctane. This will provide our customers a new way to access Contegix Support and provide you more insight into your support issues with us. We are excited to introduce this new feature to our customers later this year.

The change on March 28th will have little to no impact on our customers. The migration process from our current support ticketing system to Noctane will not create any delay in the responsiveness to which customers are accustomed. We have taken all the necessary precautions and completed due diligence to ensure there is no impact on our normal support operations on the 28th.

There will be a few minor changes starting the 28th:

• Contegix ticket numbers will now have six digits instead of five (CNT-20100311.123456)
• Any open support issues on March 28th that are active at the start of the migration will be manually migrated and will receive a new ticket number; however, the old, five digit, ticket number will still be present
• Any support issues that were previously resolved prior to March 28th that are reopened will also receive a new ticket number

We are excited to implement Noctane into our support operations and excited to continue to provide industry leading technical support to all of our customers.

Thank you,

Jason Smith
Director of Client Services

Here at Contegix we take pride in the superb team of technical engineers we have on staff.  We have a great team of dedicated engineers who truly enjoy the work they do each and every day for our customers.  We have a team of superstars, and we thought some of our customers might be interested in learning a bit more about what makes our engineers really tick.   Therefore, we give you the opportunity to “Meet the Contegians” through Q&A sessions with our engineering staff.

First up, Mark Rogers, technical support lead.

Mark, where we you born?

St. Louis, MO

What is your favorite open source project?

Pylot, www.pylot.org.  I’m pretty biased though, considering I’ve contributed code to it in the past, and I am listed as a contributor.  It is a sweet load testing application that works in Windows or Linux though.  It is definitely worth checking out if you ever need to do some load testing.

What is your favorite Linux tool?

There are a few items in the land of Linux that firmly cement me in my operating system of choice.  Some I can get elsewhere I suppose, but I can’t live without Klipper, Grep, and BASH.  Sure, I can get most of these in OSX, except for Klipper.  I know there are knock-offs available, and that I could install the KDE stack if I had to, but it’s just not the same.  Klipper managing my clipboard is the best tool I’ve ever used.  With how much copying and pasting I do in my day-to-day life, it’s nice to see the last 300 or so items that I’ve highlighted on a whim.  It comes in handy just way too often.

What is your favorite operating system?

I’m a big fan of Ubuntu.  It’s stable, has deep repositories, and has a ton of community support.  At work I need a distro that is stable, but I also need to be able to install random, off-the-wall packages at times for the various needs I have at work.  Plus, I love to play with new applications all the time as well.  The chances of finding an RPM seem to always be small, but finding Debs is generally easy.

What do you like to do in your spare time?

Well, I blog www.f4ntasmic.com and like to write code.  My personal language of choice is Python, and thus I’ve been playing with Django a LOT lately.

Any personal projects you are currently working on that you would like to talk about?

Well, when I was learning Python I decided to write an application that wraps the Confluence Remote API’s xmlrpc calls.  It is actually handy at times since just about anything you can do in Confluence; you can do via this application remotely.  You can add users, remove users, update posts, add new posts, and so on.  This can all be done without ever loading a browser.  You can find it at Confluence Remote Manager.

What are you currently running system-wise?

I’m running an Acer Aspire right now.  Specs are as follows:

Intel Core 2 Duo 2.2 GHZ
3GB of RAM
250G hard drive
Nvidia GeForce 9500 (I think.  I could be wrong, but its’ nice.)

What books, magazines, and journals are you currently reading?

I’ve had a subscription to PC Gamer for about five or six years now, so I’m always reading that.  Even though it’s recently jumped the shark in my opinion with this new EIC.  Bring back the editorial columns please!!!  Not really reading any books right now.  I have a stack of Ruby books I need to read, along with some stuff on PyGame.  They’re just staring at me, begging to be read.  If only I could just suck the knowledge out via osmosis or something.

What was the last book you read?

Python Web Development with Django.  It was a decent read, and it got me rolling with Django.  The online docs for Django are great and all, but I learn so much better from books.  Plus, this was one of the few books already updated for Django 1.0.

What is your favorite book of all time?

Fahrenheit 451.  Amazing book, terrible movie.  I personally feel everyone should read the book at least once, so that they can see the dangers of law by opinion and censorship in general.

What music and movies do you enjoy?

I enjoy all sorts of music genres like rap, death metal, hair metal, anything from the 80’s, a bit of country, some pop, and other random stuff.  My favorite bands in rotation right now though are the White Stripes, 3OH!3, and Mindless Self Indulgence (only their first CD.)  Movie –wise I enjoy most of the David Lynch films (Mulholland Drive, Blue Velvet, Lost Highway), and other movies that tend to make me think.  That’s not to say I don’t love mindless comedies and action flicks though.  I’m a huge fan of parody movies like Scary Movie, Airplane, Naked Gun, etc.

What was the last movie you saw?


Yes Man with Jim Carrey.  Pretty funny overall.  It’s Liar Liar, but this time he has to say, “Yes” to everything instead of not lying.  Incredibly original and creative.  ☺

What is your favorite movie of all time?

That’s tough.  It’s one of three:

SLC Punk
The Jacket
Pulp Fiction

I don’t think I could pick just one.

What was the last concert you attended?

It’s been awhile since I’ve been to a concert.  I think the last one might have been Nine Inch Nails like eight or nine years ago.

What is your favorite band of all time?

If I had to pick just one, it would be Nine Inch Nails.

What do you like most about working at Contegix?

I get to play with random cool technology just about every single day.  I never know what the day has in store for me, and for the most part, no two days are the same.  It helps keep life rather interesting.

What do you like most about our customers?

That’s a tough question.  Customers are so unique, that it is hard to find a global reason on why I like all of them.  We are home to some major open source projects and players, and I love that.  I love to see customers building a business with open source software, and to contribute to the open source community in the process.  We also have customers that are building applications that you can see the potential in, and that I find myself browsing at times.  I guess I just enjoy that a lot of our customers are very creative and seem to be living the dream of doing what they enjoy.  I’m glad to be a part of that in whatever capacity that might be.

The winners were not supposed to be announced until May 1st. Yet, you can not keep the publisher and the USPS from their missions…

We are very proud to announce that our customers and the readers of the Linux Journal have selected Contegix as the top linux-friendly web hosting company, ahead of some of the biggest names in hosting. The June 2009 issue of the Linux Journal features the results of the Annual Reader’s Choice awards, where the Linux community votes on top products, tools, and services in the market. Contegix had a higher percentage of votes than any other hosting company included in the survey. We are proud to share the “favorite” distinction with many other excellent Linux products, such as Ubuntu – the “favorite primary Linux distribution”, Apache – the “favorite web server,” and Python – the “favorite programming language.”

From the article:

Talk about a meteoric rise, Contegix went from one write-in vote in 2008 to champion of the Favorite Linux-Friendly Web Hosting Company category in 2009. Otherwise, four well-known names have remained among your perrenial favorites for years, namely Rackspace, GoDaddy.com, DreamHost and 1&1. Of the four, only Rackspace broke the 10% barrier this year for Honorable Mention, while the other three were just shy of the mark. GoDaddy.com was category winner last year, and DreamHost and 1&1 were the two Honorable Mentions.

Everyone here at Contegix would like to thank our customers, our partners, and the members of the Linux community who voted for us. This award would not have been possible without your support. You trust us everyday to manage your infrastructures. We are grateful for that privilege and the award you bestowed upon us. You are the reason we do what we do.
Finally, we would like to thank the Linux community in general for continuing to develop the technologies that we know and love and that make us passionate about being the best Linux hosting company we can be.

(Picture of Phil Jacobs from StyleFeeder who sent us our first congrats tonight.)

Contegix is proud to announce our platinum sponsorship of Atlassian’s upcoming user conference, Atlassian Summit.

Summit is Atlassian’s first ever user conference, designed to provide information to developers, users, managers, and anyone else interested in the Atlassian suite of collaboration and development tools.  Some of the agenda points include:

• the future of collaboration and dev tools
• roadmaps, feature previews and demos
• how-tos on deployment, tuning and mods
• in-the-code labs on plugins and APIs
• presentations from your peers
• “meet the engineers” workshops

As the platinum sponsor for Summit, Contegix hopes to show the Atlassian user community our dedication to Atlassian’s products and customers, and how users can pair Atlassian’s software with Contegix’s hosting and management for a truly powerful collaboration and development environment.

Summit is being held at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco from May 31st to June 2nd.

For more on Summit, visit Atlassian’s Summit homepage.

NR Notify is a simple ruby based notification tool for New Relic RPM. With NR Notify you can add email and SMS notifications to your Ruby on Rails and Merb applications. By using the the New Relic API, NR Notify provides email and SMS notifications based off of your “Traffic Light” settings within New Relic.

Features:

• Multiple Email Support
• Multiple SMS Support
• Adjustable Alert Escalations Policies
• Supports Multiple Rails Applications
• YAML Configuration
• Adjustable Update Interval

New Relic Notify is easy to setup. All you need to do is adjust the config.yml to your liking and run the included Ruby script. However it is recommended that NR Notify is ran under a service manager such as daemontools or runit. This also requires a SMTP server to deliver the emails.

For more details on NR Notify please visit our project home:
http://code.contegix.com/wiki/display/NRN

For the project source please visit:
http://code.contegix.com/svn/NRN/trunk

Back in December when things slowed down a bit we were asked to try to use the free time to catch up on documentation.  One of the specific areas of documentation that is usually neglected is that of what is on the servers.  My first thought when I saw the request was “why isn’t this happening semi-automatically”.  In order for us to document a server we run commands and then format the output to be understandable and pretty.   There is little or no reason why these commands could not be put into a script and ran automatically.

So I started out writing a bunch of little scriptlets to do the different parts of the documentation procedure.  When Mark saw what I was doing he suggested that we take this a step further by having one big script that does all the documentation and outputs it in wiki-markup that could go straight to confluence.  So we collaborated on building a big documentation script.  Then through work on another project to build a tool that would allow engineers to copy files to a customers server through the central midpoint server I realized we had the potential to push and pull this documentation with little effort.

Meanwhile Mark was working on a program that would allow an engineer to post a document to confluence from the command line.  With this program and the copy program the workflow was complete.  By building a wrapper script using some of the logic in the copy program I could push the documentation script up to a customers server then pull the output back, remove the litter files on the server then push the output document up to confluence all in one easy command.

Once things were working as intended it struck me that our initial attempt at the documentation script was not nearly detailed enough.  So I went back and rewrote the hardware section to use the Dell utilities or fall back on standard Unix utilities if the Dell software isn’t present.  Then I started to rework the J2EE application section.  So far the J2EE section has grown over ten fold in size and the documenting of Tomcat containers is almost finished.  There is much work to be done yet on getting better information for the other containers and applications within them.  After that will be a rework on the apache vhost documentation.

A sample screenshot of magic documentation

Contegix has been hosting the initial meetings of the Gateway Groovy Users, a group dedicated to Groovy and Grails.  The first two meetings were on the small side ( 6 people ) but they were productive.  Plans are underway for our first “big” meeting.

Contegix is the natural place to host a group for Groovy and Grails, since both of these open source projects are part of codehaus.org, which is hosted at Contegix.  Attendees to our meetings have the unique privilege of being in the hallowed halls that house the main source code repository of the tools they love!

If you are already using Groovy or Grails (or Griffon) or are interested in these technologies, please join us at our next meeting on Wednesday, March 11, 2009 at 6:30pm.  We will be having a presentation on developing desktop GUI applications with Groovy.  Then, for those who want to stay, we will be starting on a group project.  It promises to be a great learning experience and a lot of fun.

Hope to see you there!

At Contegix, the NOC engineers spend a lot of time working with Atlassian’s products. We are in a constant cycle of installing, maintaining, and upgrading Confuence, JIRA, etc. for customers. We install their plugins, help work out the kinks, and make sure the applications stay running as close to 100% of the time as possible. Oddly, up until lately we’ve mainly only used one application of Atlassian’s internally – Confluence. Of course, we use Crowd here and there as well, but it’s transparent and I never need to worry that it even exists in our infrastructure. JIRA is used for projects with our development consultants and special projects. Everything we document ends up in Confluence, and that allows us to be more productive as we have this incredible encyclopedia of knowledge constantly at our disposal. The need for JIRA by the engineers didn’t every really seem excessively relevant in the past, nor did Bamboo, Fisheye and Crucible. We’re a hosting company with system administrators, not a software development company. In our minds, it didn’t make as much sense. At least, it wasn’t overtly clear that we needed JIRA.

We have Subversion running to handle the code for most of our internal projects, emails to and fro between engineers worked as bug reports for the internal scripts we use, and email was used to announce new versions of various scripts. We’d also use Confluence in a backwards way to help manage some of our internal projects as well, which wasn’t the best solution. It worked, yes, but it wasn’t optimal. We didn’t know any better though. We’re administrators, not users! How were we supposed to know that JIRA was so slick?

Well, the advent of JIRA Studio has taught us a solid lesson, the NOC engineers needed JIRA a looooong time

ago. We often ran into problems in the past where one person would write a script or an application, but it wouldn’t gain widespread use amongst our engineers. The simple fact was that either not everyone knew about it or the script would need updates; however, it wasn’t being properly maintained. This would lead to a wide variety of editions of the script floating around – the absolute death of the script in the first place. Then, we’d revert back to everyone doing everything by hand again. It was an endless cycle that would start everytime someone wrote a mediocre or decent script. We wouldn’t give the script the proper care and love it deserved, it’d gain moderate use for a bit, and later find itself in the script graveyard. The other alternative reality was the individual engineers wrote their own scripts, but never really found the means to openly share their scripts. All of that soon changed, as our illustrious leaders bestowed upon us a great and magical gift… JIRA Studio (add your own fantasy based sound effects here, I prefer trumpets personally).

All of a sudden, we went from having no way to manage our many scripts that have been tossed around the office like dirty laundry, to having so far five projects managed in JIRA Studio. We haven’t had the instance up for more than a couple weeks, and I’m sure the number of projects we maintain internally with JIRA Studio will only increase. It’s amazing how much easier it has made life for us already though. We have subversion repositories for our individual projects, issue tracking, code reviews, great tools to analyze our repositories with, plus a solid documentation backbone. Each project is sectioned off to what feels like its own little world, yet it’s still a part of the big picture that is our developmental operations here at Contegix. We have scripts for customers, programs that make our internal life less chaotic, along with our very website just in case anyone feels the need to make improvements to it.

I think the best part of the whole experience is that we’re all finally starting to share code, discuss new ides for automation, and expanding our thinking quite a bit. Gone are the days of not enough time, not enough resources, or too much effort. We don’t have to worry about those issues now. Now I can whip up a script that has a solid base to help out our company, create a JIRA Studio project, and as a team we can nurture the script to a fruitful life.

It’s odd how just having a launching pad for our internal development projects has opened our eyes quite a bit. Before we were quite content doing a lot of our work by hand, because our development process wasn’t exactly the best. The big problem with automating what we do is we’re dealing with your (our customers) production systems. If we’re going to develop automation tasks for your systems, they absolutely must be 100%. We won’t mess around with your systems by testing half baked scripts on what for many of our customers is their livelihood. That was the past though, because now we have solid testing sandboxes setup for our automation tests, along with JIRA Studio to help us manage the process of developing our applications. We’re already starting to see the benefits as bug reports roll in, fixes roll out, and new projects are being started. I’d say this is the beginning of a new era for Contegix, as we’re now more capable of streamlining of our efforts thanks to JIRA Studio

I guess my overall point is that if you think JIRA Studio isn’t right for your company, because you’re not a development team, you may want to reconsider. I don’t believe we ever though we needed JIRA, and we don’t need it, but I sure don’t want to go back to life without it!

Beginning in September, we began to quietly upgrade our backup system. The previous system worked well and never lost customer data. It was the perfect system when we purchased it in December 2005. It suffered a few problems, including slow startup restore times and a sad dependence on filesystem inodes for the indexing system. This led to scaling issues that would have drastically impacted us by mid-2008.

After a lengthy investigation into option, we decided to use NetVault from BakBone Software. The decision was made due to fulfilling specific criteria – native Linux client and server software, support for MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Oracle hot backups, Disk-to-Disk-to-Tape (D2D2T) capabilities, and the ability to implement quickly, very quickly. The last one was key to minimizing our costs for the implementation as we knew we would need to maintain the old system for a minimum of 60 days after the last server was migrated. This also led to RedHat and Bakbone producing a case study.

Feel free to read it here.

In an ongoing effort to improve service to customers, Contegix will be making some upgrade infrastructures to our core DNS services. Effective October 20, 2007, Contegix will be making changes to cache value, called TTL (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_to_live#Time_to_live_of_DNS_records), of all DNS records to one hour (3600 seconds). In the past, most TTL values were set at 24 hours except during migration or changes where this value was lowered in order to minimize downtime. This was the Contegix default.


Hopefully, these FAQ below will help answer any questions:

Q: Why is Contegix making this change?

A: This change is being done in order to help facilitate quicker changes to customer DNS records. Customers previously had to wait up to 24 hours to see the change replicate among all DNS servers throughout the Internet. With the change, this time has been shortened to 1 hour.

Q: According to the Wikipedia link, lower TTLs cause heavier loads on the name servers. Is the infrastructure capable of handling this?

A: Absolutely. The core Contegix DNS infrastructure is capable of handling this load and much higher. Current name servers are sitting approximately 99% idle with an average response time of 5-8 milliseconds. This level is being held even with TTLs at 600 seconds or lower for over 4,000 DNS records. In addition, the change for reverse DNS (IP to hostname lookup) has been using the new value for over 6 months with no noticeable load difference.

Q: Will Contegix still allow custom TTL values – lower and higher?

A: Absolutely. Contegix will continue to offer customers the option of having lower and higher TTL values. Contegix remains one of the few providers who allow TTL with values below one hour. Please file a support request if you wish to have a different value set for an entry after the changeover.

Q: What action do customers need to take?A: Unless the customer has specific TTL requirements, no action is needed upon the part of the customer.

Q: What if I do not host my DNS with Contegix?

A: No changes are required on your side.

Q: I like what I hear about Contegix’s redundant DNS infrastructure. Can I move my domain(s) there?

A: Contegix provides DNS hosting as part of our services. You are welcome to move your DNS hosting to us. Contact support at your convenience and the engineers will guide you through the process. Please do not change your DNS until you have contacted support and planned a migration strategy.

As always, thank you for your continued business. We look forward to helping you build the best infrastructure available. As promised, this is one additional announcement on our continued improvements to drive more customer value.