Madgenius.com

Well... my iBook decided to piss me off. The screen started flaking out and I couldn't do anything. I rebooted and boom! Nothing. Uggh!!!!

So doing a little googling I found this on the apple forum Basicly I am screwed so hop in the car and go to MOA to the Apple Store and talk to a Genius First off I had to wait an hour, then finally get to one and he basicly tells me they need to send it in and get the mainboard replaced. Duh, I could have told them that, of course I was 5 months out of support so I gotta pay for it all.

Hopefully it will stay fixed

So I decided that I had enough of Windows and bought myself a iBook G3 with a 12" screen and 500Mhz CPU. I have to admit I love the interface, it reminded me of SGI Irix with it's OpenGL desktop. I immeadiately bought an Airport card for it but the small screen started to annoy me rather quickly. Also it had a CDROM drive no DVD and memory was only 320Megs. To upgrade all that would have cost me 200 bucks so I went back to Ebay and bought a iBook G3 with a 14" screen DVD and 640Megs of RAM with a 700Mhz CPU. Much nicer, I think I am in love with it.

Man, it sucks all the way around. Pictures of the distruction looting, and general lack of lawlessness. For good information click on some of these blogs on Katrina. Affects are going to be felt all over including here in Minnesota. Gas is already at 2.99 a gallon and a news site I host is getting clobbered. On the plus side I get to build a new database server for this site that should be able to handle the traffic.

I do work for a lot of small to midsized businesses around the Twin Cities area. So I was requested to build a mail server for a company. So I took a Dell Poweredge and installed CentOS 3.4 I also installed Webmin so it would be easy to manage. I am a big believer in making things easy for me and my customers, (but more for me LOL). Finally I installed Open Webmail which is a fairly nice web based email client with spell check, folders and filtering.

The machine ran well for a few months, spam starting becoming an issue so I installed SpamAssassin to handle that, I then got a wierd request from my customer. "I would like all jpg and gif files as blocked attachments" I thought this was a minorly odd request so I asked further about it. "We are having issues with people getting inapproperate attachments" ok, got the idea

So doing a little searching on the web I found a neat program MailScanner using SpamAssassin, and ClamAV for virus scanning it handles all your email problems, INCLUDING blocking attachments, if required. So installing this I asked my customer to give me a list of extentions he would like blocked, it was rather long.

After a couple weeks running in this new configuration I got another call from the customer. "People are now renaming attachments to get around the blocking" Finally at this point I had to put on my security hat. "Listen, I can keep trying to block things in your email but you guys need to start looking at the source of your problems"

Companies cannot expect software to solve problems around users, at some point they need to lay the law down and say "Hey, this is a business, you are using OUR property, if your not doing business-like work on it, you could be terminated or at least taken out back and beat really hard (I wish)"

Or I can bill you 100 bucks every time you want me to block stuff.

Greetings!

So I was reading Ping Zine! and they had a discussion about how webhosting companies are now using blogs to better inform there customers, so this is my try at it. I will warn you, my spelling sucks, I am not very PC and I can rant quite a bit. Also I have no idea how much input I am willing to put on this site.
So with that let me introduce myself, my name is Jon, I own Madgenius.com which I have been running since 1998. I also work for a software company in the Twin Cities doing IS Security. So mostly this blog will be about Madgenius.com but there might be a sprinkle of my other job in here as well, all depends on my rants that day.

Besides myself I have 2 people that I contract work out to right now, Matt at Art Massive he does my graphics work and webpage design work here is some work he is doing right now and David who does Java and PHP work for me. David also helped on the forking of CBMS to MadBMS a really nice ISP billing program. He has also done other PHP work for me as well.

Currently I am in the process of upgrading the support ticket system to a new version of Help Center Live!. Hopefully when I am done there will be more live support for customers of Madgenius.com. For any customers that have issues they can go to http://support.madgenius.com and open a support call.

Also in the marketing area I am now offering 3 months free hosting no strings attached for all new customers looking to try Madgenius.com. After 3 months if your not happy with the service you are welcome to leave. (Of course we hope you stay) If your interested in trying us out click here to request more information

Well this is a start, hopefully I will stick to this and post more on here

Jon
Madgenius.com