Complete
Domain Name Registrars
New option, new registrar reselling through Drak.net's provider: http://www.domainspricedright.com/ Nope, bad:
This afternoon, WildWest Domains (GoDaddy) refused to cancel us at the end of our billing period for the services in June, and instead canceled as of that very moment. "Domains Priced Right" is GoDaddy. It's their reseller account that they merge people into after their reseller account is "abandoned".
Apparently, they were not all that enthusiastic regarding the reason we were leaving.
It was quite an...ah... enlightening conversation. :)
No, I think it was vindictive - We paid $229.00 for the super reseller thingy a year, so they kept $40 of the money we directly paid them and nuked the service early. Then we got around $100 a month in commission because we had quite a number of folks on there, and we priced it pretty low since that was the purpose of getting the Interface, and they'll keep that couple of hundred dollars as well.
Yeppers, all in all, pretty unethical, but not unexpected considering their reputation. They're a hard sell, shove it down your throat, our way or the highway kind of company, and it's pretty well known that ceasing to do business with them is not really something that they like.
So, $250 lost, lesson learned, and I know what registrar I won't recommend to anyone. :)
Current domain name registrar:
1&1 ~$6/year but I don't think they extend a year when you transfer in? In any case, the price is to draw people in and get them to buy cheap, but terrible, hosting services. Just doesn't seem sustainable...
Best Bets
From going through the "list of ICANN accredited registrars" in alphabetical order:
- BlueRazor ~$7.25 -- they don't do bulk management/discounts at this time
- Second Tier from ICANN list:
- FoxEdge.com ~$7
- Answerable - tried, terrible control panel, ~$6.99 (looks like a reseller)
Note: tons on the iCANN list are fronts for snapdomains and Namescout.
Other Options
- DrakNet Domains - $8.80 a year ( http://www.draknetdomains.com/ )
- Nearly Free Speech - $7.50; they're actually reselling from Public Domain Registry, which is a front for ResellerClub.com, a Directi business (as is Answerable); the best it gets, at $3,000 up front, is $6.49 for a regular domain.
- OpenWebSource.com ~$8.88 - right cause, but I think just a reseller for myorderbox.com
Investigated and Unsuitable
- GKG.net - no services whatsoever, forwarding or even assigning DNS records costs extra. "Host elsewhere" is allegedly free, so this may be an option for VPS hosted sites where we manage the nameserver.
- ResellOne (Everyone's Internet) ~$6.50 -- put down a huge deposit to get that rate, and their interface, the technology on their own site, was so bad I wouldn't trust them with a dime.
Tried and Evil
- Active-Domain
- Getting evil: DomainSite.com
Do it ourselves
- Figure out what's involved
- Get ICANN accredited
- Promote the development of open source registrar software
- Is TDomain manager what we seek?
- Or any of these Address Management links?
Apache access control the Agaric way
Clients don't like their test site competing with their live, production site for Google results. Therefore, we have put our entire set of test sites behind a pop-up requiring basic Apache authentication.
For ongoing maintenance — adding new people to access the test environment behind the authorization wall — the operative command is:
Roughly following the instructions here:
http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/howto/auth.html
sudo mkdir /etc/apache2/passwd
sudo htpasswd -c /etc/apache2/passwd/passwords dan
New password:
Re-type new password:
Adding password for user dan
sudo htpasswd /etc/apache2/passwd/passwords benjamin
New password:
Re-type new password:
Adding password for user benjamin
I love that no matter how many times I do it
I love that no matter how many times I do it – leave off a semicolon, have more opening than closing parentheses, or have an extra curly brace – the PHP parser still finds my error unexpected.
It's that kind of unconditional confidence that a coder needs to get through the day... and the night.
With XAMPP, permission denied for MySQL user with % (all) host access but works for localhost
For reasons not known to man nor beast, on XAMPP on Mac OS X (and not XAMP but another all in one WAMP stack, but not that name either) will not work with the wildcard availability host name (%). It will work (or anyhow may work for you, it worked for Agaric!) with the @localhost for host name.
Too-true Typo of the Week: the wanders of unit testing
The too-true typo of the week, from Kyle Mathews' Unit Testing Success Story:
The Lullabot crew had a recent podcast on the wanders of unit testing.
The wanders, indeed.
Update or commit: See what's changed in a version-controlled file with svn diff
When you run
sudo svn status -u
and see
M 6549 www/.htaccess
you can see exactly what's up with those changes with
svn diff www/.htaccess
Showing something like:
Index: www/.htaccess
===================================================================
--- www/.htaccess (revision 6549)
RSA host key changed, requires validation: what to do
RSA host key for example.com has changed and you have requested strict checking.
Host key verification failed.
In the line above it will actually tell you where the bad key is, with known_hosts being the file and 2 being the position of the problem key:
Offending key in /home/you/.ssh/known_hosts:2
Drupal is a Do-ocracy
In response to (and crossposted from my comment on) Drupal Community Philosophies by Angie Byron:
One matter of terminology:
Getting out of the local permissions / server login catch 22
The first step to getting out of the local permissions / server login catch-22 is to know you're in it.
Perhaps you found this page searching for "Permission denied on publickey even though I can log into the server with a public key it doesn't make any sense grrr argh how dare it deny me i created it why won't it work permissions are correct this isn't right" or something like that.
Most people are fools...
Why do most people go around and say that they think Microsoft is evil and Apple is awesome?
On a daily basis, I find myself wondering why they've been fooled by the hype and the trendiness of Apple. These people in question go on diatribes about how the windows model has made people slaves to the OS, Microsoft is evil, Vista sucks, blah blah blah.
