Bobcares, a global leader in providing professional 24/7 Technical Support and Server Management, Software Development and Phone Support services to ISPs, Web Hosts and Data Centers announces a brand new iPhone application. The app is a well tailored solution for server monitoring and management.

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As a Webhost, I’m sure you’ll know more than your share of System Administrators, so take a moment today to thank them or maybe even send them a gift(wink wink)…cause today is “System Administrator Appreciation Day”. Its held on the last Friday of July, and this is its 11th year. A System Administrator is usually not someone you’d contact when everything is running fine, they are always contacted when there is a problem or something that needs to be done. So just for today, make a call, or open a support ticket and just say “Thank you”, I’m sure it will make that System Administrators day!

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DNS is for the Internet, what oxygen is for life. Though we constantly use it, we are unaware of its presence. DNS has come a long way since Stanford Research Institute’s Network Information Center (SRI-NIC) maintained a file called hosts.txt which contained host-names and their corresponding IP addresses, to a complex network of databases called name-servers.

DNS was originally designed to make it easier for us to memorize names (host-names) rather than numbers (IP addresses). Gradually, many applications and protocols used the host-names and IP addresses as a basis to authenticate the host. Thus DNS security came into being, since wrong information from a DNS server, can disallow a legitimate request from a legitimate client.

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Consider ‘Cyberspace’ as a battleground where computers and networks are saved or compromised everyday. Until recently, the struggle had been more or less equal, but now a new and a more powerful weapon is in use - The Rootkit.

Rootkit is the perfect utility, that makes a hackers life easy. An ‘opportunity for mal-ware writers’ is probably an apt definition of a rootkit. These tools enable administrator-level access to a computer or computer network. Root-kits have become more common and their sources increasingly difficult to identify. They leverage security exploits and trojans to deceive a user into trusting the installation is not malign.

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Have you ever wondered as to where all your server memory is getting used up? Have you noticed growing web-server processes and wondered if the process is actually using up all the memory?
Do you want to find how much memory is used exclusively by a process? The simple “ps” command can get you the memory details per process, but Read the rest of this entry »

Imagine a server than keeps crashing every other day. For most webhosts’ this isn’t something too hard to imagine. Every host would have gone through this phase, where they are clueless as to why their server keeps going down.

Most of the time, the blame falls on faulty hardware. Usually this is true, circumstantial evidence proving that no recent changes were made to the software, and hence the source of issue would most likely be hardware. This doesn’t always have to be correct, as there are other things that could go wrong.

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We’ve all heard about the wonders of Load Balancing, and how it can improve the performance of a site(s) or service. In this post we’ll take a look a few things you should know about before going ahead and setting it up for your site.

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MySQL is an important service in the Web-Hosting industry. Almost 80% of websites on the Internet are database driven. In a shared hosting environment, the availability of this service is critical.

Many times, I have come across the problem of some particular database query taking more time to execute or using more resources. Eventually the result is high load on the server. This can be due to a sequential query to select a particular value from a large table which is not optimized.

A simple approach can be adopted to find the query and table involved. To do this you can enable slow query logging.

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I recently stumbled upon a site I used to frequent back in college. It hadn’t changed a bit! It sure did bring back a lot of memories, but then I started thinking. Is that really good? The feeling of nostalgia was good, but other than that, I wouldn’t want to visit it again, there was nothing “new” about it. This is a trap that many people fall into. Once they find a formula that works, they stick too it! But if you take a look at some of the big names out there, you’ll see that they didn’t stick to it..they decided to change!

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There are many simple methods for detecting an intrusion. Though they would only help you identify intruders who do not bother covering up their activities and traces.

In real scenario’s, you might need tools that are capable of doing much more. Many of these tools are to be installed in a clean OS and you need to constantly keep track of its reports, and act accordingly.

So, what if you do not have these intrusion detection tools installed already, and suspect something is wrong in your server. Some simple steps might help you here.

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