Jim Groom – Reclaim Hosting https://www.reclaimhosting.com Take Control of your Digital Identity Tue, 30 Jul 2024 11:58:54 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.5.4 https://www.reclaimhosting.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/RHprofilelogo-100x100.png Jim Groom – Reclaim Hosting https://www.reclaimhosting.com 32 32 Greetings from Reclaim Hosting https://bavatuesdays.com/greetings-from-reclaim-hosting/ Tue, 30 Jul 2024 11:58:54 +0000 https://bavatuesdays.com/?p=30637 Continue reading ]]> Turns out a few days ago was Reclaim Hosting‘s 11th anniversary, crazy how time flies when you are providing a range of infrastructure options for higher ed and beyond. Recently Meredith Huffman and I sat down with Bryan Mathers to try and map all the different products and services we offer. The beauty of these sessions is that they often lead to new ways of framing Reclaim Hosting, and this meeting did not disappoint. We came up with the overarching theme of visiting various products as if they were places, and the postcards become the key element for visually capturing their essence:

Visual map of places you can visit in the land of Reclaim Hosting

Greetings from Reclaim Hosting

Back of each postcard: Greetings from Reclaim Hosting

Each card has the same background, and these postcards become physical elements we can give out at events like WP Campus and DH2024, both of which Meredith and I will be attending this week and next, respectively. So, anyway, here are the various postcards with each of the products, so awesome!

Domain of one’s Own

Domain of One’s Own

The industrial strength of WordPress Multisite hosting

Managed cPanel Hosting – pick your source

cPanel hosting, more generic remote

Some old gold Reclaim Cloud visuals

ReclaimEDU and Managed Hosting “Offload your dread…”

ReclaimEDU – a visualization of how our failover system works

ReclaimPress – the very bold label

ReclaimPress- because your WordPress site is your baby

A more abstract Andy Warhol-inspired record that came out of RclaimPress but can really be used across products like WPMS, ReclaimCloud, ReclaimPress, etc.

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DS106Radio Summer Camp https://bavatuesdays.com/ds106radio-summer-camp/ Mon, 29 Jul 2024 07:31:06 +0000 https://bavatuesdays.com/?p=30629 Continue reading ]]>

Bryan Mathers is at it again with his Remixer

While the Learning Management System may not be dead, I certainly feel better when it’s not around. In fact, the ds106radio Summer Camp from August 12th through the 16th is embedded in the idea that doing edtech is anything but isolating and depressing. The schedule highlights just that fact, with sessions about everything from the Austerity Blues to Dream Teams and Apollo 13s. And the platform? The open and free airwaves of the mighty ds106radio. I’ll get things going each morning with some impromptu radio with musings about such topics as “What is art?” and “Why you can’t kill what’s already dead.” This format allows for folks to tune in as they like and enjoy a frictionless experience all the while. Major kudos to Maren Deepwell for organizing the summer camp so seamlessly, and creating a free and accessible event that is open and available to anyone interested—my favorite kind of open! If you’re interested in playing along you can register here for reminders and updates or just listen in when the time comes.

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Team Reclaim https://bavatuesdays.com/team-reclaim/ Wed, 26 Jun 2024 11:13:13 +0000 https://bavatuesdays.com/?p=30399 Continue reading ]]> As Reclaim continues to morph, I ‘ve been thinking a bit about working teams. One of the real joys—and possibly under appreciated privileges—I’ve had professionally is being part of really amazing teams, which often translates to working with great people. I was living in New York City in the late 90s, just in time to witness (many times first-hand) the NY Yankees 3-peat World Series championships in 1998, 1999, and 2000. Now it might be easy to dismiss this team given they were chock-full of money and talent (they’re the Yankees, after all), but turns out the Orioles had an even higher payroll with arguably as much talent in 1998.* And also, remember the Mets!!! 🙂

Beyond the money and individual stars there was something more at play—a sense of joyful commitment to the work married with talent made them something else all together. Even the leagues of folks who hate the Yankees would crack a little with that particular team—they were hard not to respect because they played as a team and the greatness transcended any one player. What’s not to love about an impossible infield play by hall of famer Derek Jeter to rob the opposition of a hit followed by an equally impressive stop from everyman utility player Scott Brosius. It was greatness all around; they made each other better and as a result were unstoppable for 3 straight years—a herculean feat in any sport. To boot, they seemed to be having fun all the while.

Now edtech is not Major League Baseball, and this comparison is flimsy at best, but the NY Yankees of that era were emblematic of a great team, and one I witnessed first hand.† And for me the key seemed to be joy, having both a shared purpose as well as a lot of fun with your teammates. I think that translates very well for me with the work I did as an instructional technologist at University of Mary Washington alongside many amazing folks, but in particular Martha Burtis, Andy Rush, Shannon Hauser, and Jerry Slezak. They’re folks I miss being around regularly, but when we were together in the bullpen (maybe the baseball metaphor does work) exploring the magic of the mid-2000s web for higher ed was undergirded by a lot of laughter, and thankfully not spoiled by the years of million dollar state salaries. I’ve talked about the magic of working at the Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies (DTLT) on this blog extensively, so I will try and keep things moving along.

DTLT Reunion at Reclaim Open

My next team was in many ways taken from DTLT, as Tim Owens and I started Reclaim while working together there. We both eventually left the university, taking the newly minted graduate Lauren Hanks (Brumfield at that time) with us as we ventured into the unknown territory of Reclaim Hosting. We were a super small team for many years, it wasn’t until 2017 that we brought on Meredith Huffman (another fresh UMW alum). And with the addition of Chris Blankenship a couple of years after that (yet another UMW faithful!), we had the core of a team that would define the first 10 years of Reclaim Hosting.

Tim and Lauren in a recently Completed CoWork

This was quite an intense period as we stayed lean and grew quick, but at the same time it carried over a lot of the fun and experimentation of our time at UMW, only with a fraction of the meetings. On top of growing our shared hosting, Domain of One’s Own, and managed hosting significantly, we also had time to open up a CoWork space, a VHS store, and eventually Tim took over the arcade we built and spun it off into his own career—leaving the now civilized terrain of Reclaim. And not too long after Tim became the pinball wizard, Lauren left just this past September after realizing the previous eight years Reclaim was all she had known professionally. It was time for both to strike out for new territory, leaving old man bava to his devices. The contributions both Tim and Lauren made are too immense to list here, and in many ways I’ve not written either a proper goodbye on this blog for fear of letting either go—but I’ll save that discussion for my next appointment with Dr. Freud.‡

I’m not going to lie, I was a bit concerned this past fall and winter as I was saying goodbye to Lauren and buying out Tim’s remaining share of Reclaim Hosting, and my mental stated reflected that transition. At the same time, one of the things I underestimated was just how resilient and awesome the team we’ve been building over the last several years has become. Meredith and Chris have become the pillars of both support and infrastructure this new city on the hill was built upon, and in addition to that, bringing on Goutam Vijay Narang, Pilot Irwin, and Taylor Jadin almost three years ago now ensured a really solid base from which we could continue to provide the service our community was used to, while at the same to building community through avenues like ReclaimTV, Discord, Roundup Newsletter, and Reclaim the Blog—all of which we have never done to the same extent previously. In many ways we’re now getting the word out better than ever before, and it’s still retains the tone and humor of Reclaim always represented. Just 18 months ago we brought on Noah Dorsett who has done a phenomenal job helping us shore up security, helping us all sleep that much better at night. But when Tim and Lauren were coming to their end of their reign, Meredith stepped up to play and all around manager; Pilot stepped up to manage support like a star; and Chris remained Chris keeping everything online.

Team Reclaim at Reclaim Open

It is also worth noting, eight months after Noah came, we hired on Amanda Schmidt to buttress our growing Edtech group, which Taylor and Pilot were already helping us define.  It has been truly rewarding to watch Edtech find its legs, part of which has been the push for community building, and we have become able to support Reclaim Cloud that much more effectively, as well as introduce new offerings such as ReclaimEDU and ReclaimPress, we’ve done anything but sit on our hands.

But when Lauren left there was a serious HR and operations gap that we got truly lucky to be able to bring on Maren Deepwell as a contractor, her impact to keeping the team focused and sharing her vast expertise and mentoring has been invaluable. When I had to more extensive time off she worked with Meredith and the entire Reclaim team to make sure everything remained on track, and we scarce missed a beat—that fact alone speaks volumes to how much we have grown with our current incarnation of Reclaim.

I think part of my musings here might be that I just finished up annual reviews, and it was amazing to see how happy folks are at Reclaim—that for me is the number one indicator of success. By that metric, we are by and large killing it. And our team is still growing, with a brilliant hire of superstar Jason Teitelman, whose has been an amazing fit to further reinforce out focus on all things support. And just this month we have added Cass le Fay into a hybrid support/infrastructure role to provide Chris some relief with all things sysadmin—long overdue.

I would be remiss if I did not end with one of the most impactful changes that has happened in just the last two months, bringing on Justin Webb as managing partner, to manage finances and bring some of his long-honed expertise in all matters IT to bear on Reclaim’s future. We have worked with Justin for more than 7 years as a consultant, after being colleagues at UMW for almost 7 more—so the ability to partner with a know entity who has seen the inner-workings of Reclaim for so many years was a true relief. As the reality of not being entirely alone takes hold, I can feel the pressure and dread turn once again to joy and possibility.

As Tim stepped away the infrastructure team felt that hit, just as Lauren’s departure had us scrambling organizationally, so bringing on both Maren and, six months later, Justin marks the beginning of yet another era of Reclaim that has me excited all over again. Managing growth and valuing our services appropriately has it’s real challenges, and given Reclaim was never the work of one person, the fact that we’ve built a team that’s as good, and arguably deeper, than the one we had out first ten years really has me excited for what’s to come. It’s all about the people, and Reclaim has made all the right moves!

_____________________________________

*If you look at MLB payrolls since 1998, the Yankees have consistently been amongst the biggest spenders, but that has led to only 1 championship in 23 years—although arguably 2 given the Astros cheated. So while money always matters, there was also something else at play with this group.

†It was also hard not to be drawn in by the Chicago Bulls of the mid-90s and the god-like talent of Jordan even if you were not a basketball fan. But that team seemed to struggle with the cult of Jordan—whereas the Yankees championships were not as predicated on the one superstar (in fact, the one superstar often is an albatross in baseball, A-Rod anyone?). Now this could be a difference of sports, granted, but Jordan’s persona and talent were so ridiculously great that it was hard for any other player on that team to get much of the glory, which is unfortunately still playing out between Pippen and Jordan. What’s more, Jordan and the Bulls made Basketball a global phenomenon, which no team or player has been able to do for baseball. In fact, I’m seeing the impact of Jordan’s footprint 30 years later with basketball’s immense popularity here in Italy.

‡I think the same was true of Shannon Hauser when she graduated and “left” UMW

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Reclaim’s Daystream Nation https://bavatuesdays.com/reclaims-daystream-nation/ Fri, 21 Jun 2024 15:27:16 +0000 https://bavatuesdays.com/?p=30407 Continue reading ]]>

It’s an anthem in a vacuum on a hyperstation
Daydreaming days in a daydream nation

Not sure exactly what hyperstation means in the Sonic Youth song “Trilogy” quoted above, but I do love the way it sounds. Maybe it’s alluding to the future fact that Reclaim Hosting will create a “hyperstation” on Reclaim.tv. A regularly streaming daydream pushed through a make-believe vacuum tube out to a glowing web. I’m not sure that even makes any sense, but that’s what I hear and see in my mind’s eye. All this nonsense to say that Reclaim has been streaming pretty regularly for a while now to Reclaim TV, and I wanted to highlight a few of the recent streams, as a way to celebrate this development.

As a way to embrace the anachronistic web of vacuum tubes, I want to first point out the stream Taylor and I did featuring Protoweb:

a free public service that hosts historical Internet websites to demonstrate the Internet in it’s early days. It is also a community driven project consisting of volunteers with the goal of rebuilding and restoring early Internet services to offer a seamless browsing experience.

We were going to use it on my Windows 98 machine I have been playing around with, but I bricked that machine right before the stream, so Taylor used his MiSTer multi-system card to reproduce a Windows 95 machine, and it really is an impressive toy. It can re-create a wide-range of old consoles and computing systems, and it is not so much emulation as an engineering/programming feat to run many of those systems in their native form on a more compact, shared hardware. Now that I have a new Windows 98 machine running, it’s time to get it connected to the web to try Protoweb out, it really does get at the heart of what surfing the web used to be like.

Speaking of the retro web I also streamed last week about the “pain and pleasure” of returning to an old operating systems like Windows 98. It brings back a whole slew of prior knowledge, and reminds me how difficult even simple tasks could be with a bug-ridden system like Windows. Although, truth be told I am loving returning to this late 90s operating system, and have a few more streams to share on this experience for sure.

We also caught up with Stephen Downes a couple of weeks ago to get his take on cloud computing, and what his process has been as he moves more and more of his cpanel and/or VPS based sites to various cloud providers. Turns out he is a regular “consumer digest investigator” on the various cloud platforms,* and his ability to keep pace with the changes and use his own code, domains, and tools as his laboratory is remarkable. An edtech is many things, to be sure, but the ability to dig in on the infrastructure and make open source tools do your bidding is one definition I’m biased towards—Downes truly walks that walk with his own fleet of sites.

And coming in just a over an hour will be a discussion with “tell me again about my eyes” Tim Owens about how he is approaching marketing for the inimitable Reclaim Arcade—reconnecting with the OG Reclaimer.

And those are just the streams I have been involved with over the last month, there are many, many more accessible at archive.reclaim.tv that you can browse at your convenience, but here are a few I will highlight:

Taylor and Pilot caught up with special guest Quinn Dombroski (of whom Reclaim is a big fan) to talk about “Modeling Project Planning in DH throwugh Games.”  Quinn is just too cool and obviously loves what they do, and the passion for teaching and learning is infectious.

Maren and Meredith catch up with another very special guest, namely Bryan M. Mathers, to talk about his early adoption of newest product ReclaimPress. As it so happens, Bryan was not only an early adopter based on his needs for visualthinkery.com and his own website, but also he created the Reclaim aesthetic—up to and including the art for ReclaimPress. In fact, the visual “From Passion Project to Web Empire” is in many ways the metaphor we needed to explain what this service does differently than cPanel hosting in one, elegant graphic. As usual Bryan takes our thought chaos turns them into a compelling and elucidating communique that folks can wrap their head around.

And if you’re wondering if the Reclaim Support team can have some fun, Taylor’s creation of “The Best Support on the Internet” game show highlights Reclaim’s deep comradery, playfulness, and, of course, hosting knowledge. And while a bit indulgent, the streams are most fun because we’ve given ourselves the freedom to explore and share whatever we’re working on at the time.

In fact, I am so excited about our ability to stream regularly on Reclaim TV is that I imagine it as a multimedia-rich and often communal blogging process. I have long had the dream of us creating a “TV Station” for Reclaim, and over the last 6-12 months that vision has become a reality and I could not be more thrilled with the collective effort that has made it possible. YEAH!!!

_______________________________

*This is a paraphrasing of an Eric Likness comment during the live stream that was too good not to re-purpose here, so thanks again Eric, for being there!

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Reclaim’s Daystream Nation https://bavatuesdays.com/reclaims-daystream-nation/ Fri, 21 Jun 2024 15:18:05 +0000 https://bavatuesdays.com/?p=30403 Continue reading ]]>

It’s an anthem in a vacuum on a hyperstation
Daydreaming days in a daydream nation

Not sure exactly what hyperstation means in the Sonic Youth song “Trilogy” quoted above, but I do love the way it sounds. Maybe it’s alluding to the future fact that Reclaim Hosting will create a “hyperstation” on Reclaim.tv. A regularly streaming daydream pushed through a make-believe vacuum tube out to a glowing web. I’m not sure that even makes any sense, but that’s what I hear and see in my mind’s eye. All this nonsense to say that Reclaim has been streaming pretty regularly for a while now to Reclaim TV, and I wanted to highlight a few of the recent streams, as a way to celebrate this development.

As a way to embrace the anachronistic web of vacuum tubes, I want to first point out the stream Taylor and I did featuring Protoweb:

a free public service that hosts historical Internet websites to demonstrate the Internet in it’s early days. It is also a community driven project consisting of volunteers with the goal of rebuilding and restoring early Internet services to offer a seamless browsing experience.

We were going to use it on my Windows 98 machine I have been playing around with, but I bricked that machine right before the stream, so Taylor used his MiSTer multi-system card to reproduce a Windows 95 machine, and it really is an impressive toy. It can re-create a wide-range of old consoles and computing systems, and it is not so much emulation as an engineering/programming feat to run many of those systems in their native form on a more compact, shared hardware. Now that I have a new Windows 98 machine running, it’s time to get it connected to the web to try Protoweb out, it really does get at the heart of what surfing the web used to be like.

Speaking of the retro web I also streamed last week about the “pain and pleasure” of returning to an old operating systems like Windows 98. It brings back a whole slew of prior knowledge, and reminds me how difficult even simple tasks could be with a bug-ridden system like Windows. Although, truth be told I am loving returning to this late 90s operating system, and have a few more streams to share on this experience for sure.

We also caught up with Stephen Downes a couple of weeks ago to get his take on cloud computing, and what his process has been as he moves more and more of his cpanel and/or VPS based sites to various cloud providers. Turns out he is a regular “consumer digest investigator” on the various cloud platforms,* and his ability to keep pace with the changes and use his own code, domains, and tools as his laboratory is remarkable. An edtech is many things, to be sure, but the ability to dig in on the infrastructure and make open source tools do your bidding is one definition I’m biased towards—Downes truly walks that walk with his own fleet of sites.

And coming in just a over an hour will be a discussion with “tell me again about my eyes” Tim Owens about how he is approaching marketing for the inimitable Reclaim Arcade—reconnecting with the OG Reclaimer.

And those are just the streams I have been involved with over the last month, there are many, many more accessible at archive.reclaim.tv that you can browse at your convenience, but here are a few I will highlight:

Taylor and Pilot caught up with special guest Quinn Dombroski (of whom Reclaim is a big fan) to talk about “Modeling Project Planning in DH throwugh Games.”  Quinn is just too cool and obviously loves what they do, and the passion for teaching and learning is infectious.

Maren and Meredith catch up with another very special guest, namely Bryan M. Mathers, to talk about his early adoption of newest product ReclaimPress. As it so happens, Bryan was not only an early adopter based on his needs for visualthinkery.com and his own website, but also he created the Reclaim aesthetic—up to and including the art for ReclaimPress. In fact, the visual “From Passion Project to Web Empire” is in many ways the metaphor we needed to explain what this service does differently than cPanel hosting in one, elegant graphic. As usual Bryan takes our thought chaos turns them into a compelling and elucidating communique that folks can wrap their head around.

And if you’re wondering if the Reclaim Support team can have some fun, Taylor’s creation of “The Best Support on the Internet” game show highlights Reclaim’s deep comradery, playfulness, and, of course, hosting knowledge. And while a bit indulgent, the streams are most fun because we’ve given ourselves the freedom to explore and share whatever we’re working on at the time.

In fact, I am so excited about our ability to stream regularly on Reclaim TV is that I imagine it as a multimedia-rich and often communal blogging process. I have long had the dream of us creating a “TV Station” for Reclaim, and over the last 6-12 months that vision has become a reality and I could not be more thrilled with the collective effort that has made it possible. YEAH!!!

_______________________________

*This is a paraphrasing of an Eric Likness comment during the live stream that was too good not to re-purpose here, so thanks again Eric, for being there!

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That Mathers Aesthetic! https://bavatuesdays.com/that-mathers-aesthetic/ Wed, 27 Mar 2024 09:51:50 +0000 https://bavatuesdays.com/?p=30113 Continue reading ]]> The great Maren Deepwell (who Reclaim Hosting has been lucky enough to work with after her long stint as ALTs brilliant CEO) has created a visual anthology celebrating 10 years of Reclaim’s art. It’s a very cool video, and I highly recommend you partake in the celebration 🙂

I’m really proud of the brand we’ve been able to forge over the last decade. Trying to make a relatively boring product like web hosting compelling has been one of the funnest elements of the job. What’s more, getting to partner with the entire Reclaim team and the likes of Bryan Mathers to do it has been the real gold.

Gold Record plan for the newly launched Reclaim.Press

Bryan will quickly deflect any praise or compliment right back at you taking little to no credit for how much his own visual storytelling shapes our identity by capturing a raucous sense of cultural play without sacrificing a deep, company-wide commitment to an open and independent web.

Bryan Mathers early vision for the indie edtech record store with snide proprietor and all 🙂

There’s a fine line to walk between tongue and cheek references and an underlying commitment to what can be referred to as indie edtech or trailing edge technology. A belief that the new and shiny can often obfuscate the long history of edtech, but also erase any sense of its embedded cultural history that impacts ours daily lives.

The iconic, industrial visual label of Reclaim Cloud

The link between edtech and vinyl or edtech and an independent record store is not only playful, but also an argument for the production of online culture and the value of an independent space to do it. Reclaim understands itself outside the homogenizing box-store mentality of massive social media sites and hosting services, much like independent record labels such as Dischord that are anathema to the mainstream business of music. It’s about community, it’s about focus, and it’s about controlled, responsible growth. These are so many of the understated, subliminal messages in the Mathers Aesthetic that are directly linked to an ethos of indie edtech.

The ds106 album cover where Giulia Forsythe remixes Raymond Pettibon that in many ways pre-figures Bryan Mathers remixing

I don’t think it would be an overstatement to say that Bryan, however inadvertently, has become the Raymond Pettibon of indie edtech, and his aesthetic permeates far beyond the confines of Reclaim Hosting’s “album covers.” If I was being selfish I would refer to all the great work he has created for us over the years as the “Reclaim aesthetic,” but if I were to be honest it’s more appropriate to say “that Mathers aesthetic!”—and we have just been lucky enough to be early to the party. Go ahead, try and create your online identity with an AI prompt, we’ll be over here working with the artists.

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Reclaim Hosting: the Site on the Edgeport of Forever Uptime https://bavatuesdays.com/reclaim-hosting-the-site-on-the-edgeport-of-forever-uptime/ Wed, 13 Dec 2023 12:31:55 +0000 https://bavatuesdays.com/?p=29945 Continue reading ]]> This post was cross-posted to Reclaim Hosting’s new company blog “Reclaim the Blog,” so you can read this post there as well.

Screenshot from Star Trek Episode "The City on the Edge of Forever"

Are we ready for internet time travel with 100% uptime?

To be clear, forever uptime is a dangerous claim, and anyone that promises you 24/7, 100% uptime is flirting with disaster in the hosting world. That said, my experimentation with Edgeport—a new enterprise-grade DNS, CDN, and Load Balancing service much in the vein of Cloudflare—has moved beyond this blog and has extended to Reclaim Hosting’s main website: https://www.reclaimhosting.com.

As already noted, I was blown away by the fact that even with both containers that drive this blog completely offline, the site loaded without issue for the better part of nine hours. It could’ve gone on much longer, but I had to re-enable the servers to actually write about the amazingness of it all 🙂

What was driving the uptime, regardless of the servers’ health, was the application delivery network, or ADN, which reproduces and caches not only the static site, but also its dynamic elements (search, page loading, etc.) across a vast network of servers that ensure the content remains online even when the underlying infrastructure goes offline. It’s pretty amazing to me, and it makes one flirt with that elusive and seductive portal dream of 100% uptime, even though one must always account for the imminent entropy of any system.

Screenshot from Star Trek Episode "The City on the Edge of Forever"

www.reclaimhosting.com boldly going where no site has gone before!

But that being said, Reclaim Hosting has now gone where only the bava has boldly gone before it 🙂 The implications for our high-availability ReclaimEDU WordPress multi-region hosting is truly next generation. While we will refrain from promising 100% uptime, with fail-over between two servers (because Edgeport does that, just like Cloudflare), a robust content delivery network, and  CNAME flattening, we are able to post a lot of .9999999999s. With Edgeport we can harness all the benefits of the Cloudflare setup we engineered a year ago, but using a simpler interface and more approachable and affordable service.

But beyond the load-balancing and sophisticated application caching going on, the real power of Edgeport lies in the manifold security improvements it provides. Over a year ago we hired Noah Dorsett, who has proved to be an amazing addition on the Reclaim security front, and I asked him to try and boil down some of the features Edgeport offers for a meeting on high-availability hosting I was taking last week. So, in true Noah fashion, he did an awesome job and provided an understandable, succinct highlight of the security affordances Edgeport provides. Here is what he sent me:

DDOS Protection: The application layer distributed denial of service protection is great for hosting web applications, as these live in this ‘application layer’. Layer 7 DDOS attacks target this layer specifically as this is where HTTP GET & POST requests occur, and can eat up large amounts of server resources. These attacks are very effective compared to their network layer alternatives, as they consume server resources as well as network resources. With Application Layer DDOS, your site would be much more secure.

WAF:  A WAF, or web application firewall, helps protect web applications by filtering and monitoring HTTP traffic between a web application and the Internet. It typically protects web applications from attacks such as cross-site forgery, cross-site-scripting (XSS), file inclusion, and SQL injection, among others. This type of firewall exists in the application layer, acting as a ‘shield’ between your web application (aka website) and the internet. Edgeport uses a dual WAF, which can be a confusing term. What this means is that there is an audit WAF that logs traffic and updates rules, but does not perform blocking. This audit WAF passes information to a production WAF which uses this information to actively protect and block malicious requests/attacks against the website. A dual WAF is much faster than a regular WAF, and provides better security to boot. WAF rules are generated by Edgeport’s dedicated security team as well, which means your rules will always be up to date and performing efficiently.

Bot Management: Edgeport uses an agentless, server-side, machine-learning fueled bot management system to detect and stop bot traffic that could be slowing down your site or maliciously scraping content. The benefits of an agentless, server-side system like this is that you don’t have to run any code or do anything on the client end, and the detection is nearly invisible from a user perspective (and to bots as well). This allows the detection rules to catch more and impact performance less, keeping the website secure from all sorts of automated malicious tools and scrapers.

Image of bavatuesdays traffic over the previous month

You can literally see the moment, in terms of bot traffic, when I turned on the bot management tool in Edgeport

That last bit on bot management is a big difference I immediately noticed between Edgeport and Cloudflare. Whereas my daily traffic on Cloudflare clocked anywhere from 5,000 to 6,000 hits per day, when I moved to Edgeport those statistics dropped dramatically, closer to 1,000 to 2,000 hits per day. That’s not only much more in the realm of believability of actual traffic for this humble blog, but it highlights just how many bots had been regularly scraping and otherwise accessing my site, whichis not only a security risk, but also eating up unnecessary resources. So with Edgeport my site not only is safer, but is less resource intensive, and as a result more performant.

Now, to be clear, running Edgeport on my blog might be a bit of overkill given it does not need to be up 24/7 and it does not have the sensitive data and security needs of an institutional .edu site, for example. But if you are running a mission critical, high-availability site for your institution, then Edgeport opens up a whole new world of cloud-native security on top of the industrial-grade DNS, CDN, and load balancing service that are truly a powerful combination. It has provided Reclaim exactly what we needed for scaling our multi-region setups, and I couldn’t be more thrilled there’s a new player is this field that’s pushing the envelope, and opening up possibilities for smaller companies like Reclaim Hosting with infinite heart but finite resources.

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The bava Media Center https://bavatuesdays.com/the-bava-media-center/ Fri, 24 Nov 2023 21:01:46 +0000 https://bavatuesdays.com/?p=29853 Continue reading ]]> Image of an entertainment center with a bunch of component parts listed in the post

The bava media center, featuring a Sony Trinitron 19” television to the far left with a Commodore 128 right below it. Beneath that is a used Panasonic DP-U89000 DVD Blu-ray/UHD multi-region player for the new fangled higher-end media. The beige entertainment center (starting with component pieces) has the gold Pioneer DVL-909 CD/LaserDisc/DVD multi-region, below that is an Onkyo DC-C390 6-disc changer for your ultimate compact disc fix, Moving right, you have a Panasonic AG-6200 NTSC and PAL multi-region VCR (a must since arriving in Italy), a Marantz PM6006 stereo receiver (which is running out of spots), and on top of the entertianment center is an audio-technica A-LP-120-USB turntable, and to the right of that the 100 pound 27” Sony Trinitron—an absolute gem.

Image of two drawers filled with vinyl and laserdiscs

Beneath all the component pieces are two drawer filled with vinyl records and laserdiscs. This makes for some handy storage and keeping things clean, but the vinyl and discs always find a way to get out of their holders and strewn around the office.

 

As Tim knows from when we were building the Console Living Room and then Reclaim Video, I love to wire together and play with component systems like this. I’m not particularly good at it, but it gives me endless hours of frustrating delight. I have my current setup in decent shape, and almost every receiver input has been accounted for. Recorder is the only free input, and once I figure it out I am thinking that is a good input for the commodore 128—we’ll see. The above image highlight the mapping of the various inputs, here they are as oif today:

  • Phono ->  Audio technica turntable
  • CD -> Onkyo 6 disc changer
  • Network -> Pioneer DVD/LD/CD
  • Tuner -> Panasonic VcR
  • Recorder -> N/A
  • Coaxial -> Panasonic Bluray/UHD/DVD
  • Optical 1 -> Onkyo CD/Computer
  • Optical 2  -> Pioneer DVD/LD/CD

You’ll notice from the mapping above that I have the Onkyo and Pioneer going in as both RCA and Optical inputs. I have found recently that some DVDs do not pickup the optical feed on the Pioneer, so sometimes I have to switch the audio feed back to RCA.

But that begs a bigger question, how does this all look on the backside, which audio/video feed is going where? How is it coming into the computer for ds106radio casts? That’s something I want to work through given I’ll be trying to break it down on a stream this coming Friday. So let me see if I can make heads or tails of it here.

The Audio hijack setup is Shure MV7 microphone with a USB-C input into computer, the USB Audio Codec input is a USB-B input from the Audio Tecnica turntable. Those are pretty straightforward, the Cam Link 4K  is an Elgato HDMI capture card that is coming in from a switcher for two RCA devices: the Onkyo 6-disc changer and the Pioneer CD/LD/DVD player for the CD and video piece (if I need it). This switcher is primarly for converting RCA video inputs to HDMI, but works just as well with a CD player, so it was the best option I had to convert CD players into audio for the radio. The switcher has a button that allows me to choose between the two RCA inputs for each of those devices, which is pretty slick. Just need a better labeling system.

 

This RCA switcher could also work for the VCR input, and I can pull the Bluray and UHD feed in from another Elgato CAM Link capture card (although might need to get one that does 4K) straight to HDMI, no RCA conversion needed. The video streaming setup might be worth another post, but this does give you a pretty good sense of the audio inputs for the ds106radio/Reclaim Radio inputs that can do both vinyl and compact discs without issue….YEAH!

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Offloading Peertube Media to S3 https://bavatuesdays.com/offloading-peertube-media-to-s3/ Mon, 20 Nov 2023 20:04:22 +0000 https://bavatuesdays.com/?p=29723 Continue reading ]]> My last post documented offloading Azuracast media to Digital Ocean’s Spaces, and this is a follow-up on the offloading theme. Only this time it was for my Peertube instance hosted at bava.tv. I’ll be honest, this could have been a very painful process if Taylor hadn’t  blogged how he did it with Backblaze last December, so in many ways thanks his work made the process a piece of cake, so thank you, Taylor!

I made all media public in the Digital Ocean Spaces bucket, and also created a CORS rule to give the bava.tv domain full control over bucket. After that, I just got the keys, endpoint, region, and bucket name, and I was good to go:

object_storage:
  enabled: true
  endpoint: 'nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com' 
  upload_acl: 
    public: 'public-read'
    private: 'private' 
  videos: 
    bucket_name: 'bavatv'
    prefix: 'videos/' 
  streaming_playlists: 
    bucket_name: 'bavatv' 
    prefix: 'streaming-playlists/' 
  credentials: 
    access_key_id: 'youraccesskey' 
    secret_access_key: 'yoursupersecretkeytothekingdom'

Once I replaced that with existing object_storage code at the bottom of  the production.yaml file (found in /home/peertube/docker-volume/config/) and restarted the container the site was offloading videos to my bucket in Spaces seamlessly. Now I just needed to offload all existing videos to that bucket, which this command did perfectly:

docker-compose exec -u peertube peertube npm run create-move-video-storage-job -- --to-object-storage --all-videos

After it was done running it removed close to 120GBs from the server and my videos loaded from the Spaces bucket. The videos load a bit slower, but that is to be expected, and the next piece will be finding a way to speed them up using a proxy of some kind. But for now I am offloading media like it’s my job, well, actually, it kind of is.

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bava on the Edge https://bavatuesdays.com/bava-on-the-edge/ Fri, 17 Nov 2023 11:34:02 +0000 https://bavatuesdays.com/?p=29647 Continue reading ]]>

On the edge, I’ve been there
And it’s just as crowded as back home.

Dag Nasty, “La Peñita”

Yesterday I did a little experimenting on the good old bava.blog to test the notion of application delivery networks (ADNs). You probably have heard of Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) wherein static content is delivered via caches all over a service’s global network (most popular being Cloudflare). Well, in this new acronym, beyond the content the whole application itself is cached across the network, so when one (or in my case both) servers driving the bava go down, the site is unaffected, it begins to deliver the application itself through the network. Which means not only high availability, but virtually guaranteed 100% uptime.* I found it hard to believe, and I have been looking into edge computing thanks to Phil Windley’s recent post, but this was my first exploration of the concept.

Our cloud hosting at Reclaim Cloud is driven by the software developed for Jelastic, which was bought by Virtuozzo. It has been something we’ve been pushing pretty hard on with not only apps well beyond the LAMP stack, but also containers and the wonderful work of Docker, which in turn led us to start building a dedicated WordPress service on top of performant, affordable containerized WordPress hosting: ReclaimPress. As I’ve been working through ReclaimPress, I was shown the tool/service Edgeport. Very much positioned as a simplified, easy-to-use Cloudflare competitor, EdgePort was designed as a security-first, cloud-native Web Application Firewall with a global network that delivers applications dynamically, even when the origin servers are off. Their DNS options are an affordable alternative to Cloudflare for similar plans, which has been a key factor for me. To get in the door for enterprise at Cloudflare is somewhere in the ballpark of $3,000 a month (which the condescending Cloudflare sales agent was sure to remind me), whereas all the features we need–many of which are Cloudflare enterprise only—are part of a $199 a month plan at Edgeport. What’s more, I have not seen anything like ADN delivery networks at Cloudflare, so we now have a viable, affordable alternative to Cloudflare which can do even more. That makes me very happy.

I can harness a globally cached network, as well as load balancing fail-over, and the emergency backup of applications being cached and delivered in their entirety from the network (whether or not my servers load), and that is not even including the vast security tools that I have to dig into with Noah in more detail. It seemed like magic, so I spent much of yesterday testing it on this old blog.

I turned off both servers in the failover setup at 10:59 UTC and then powered them back on at 19:48, so just under 9 hours of downtime that did not stope a single page or post from working cleanly on my site.

Image of Log for when the servers were turned off and then back on

Log for when the servers were turned off and then back on

I had Antonella try and comment and that was not successful, and never thought to try logging into /wp-admin area, given it would seem impossible, but maybe not?  Will return to that, but perhaps comments and posting do work in an ADN?†

Regardless, it was fun to occasionally search for blog posts that I hadn’t read in years, and see them load without issue, even though both servers were down.

This comes at an amazing time at Reclaim when we’re going into our second year of stable, solid .edu hosting for a number of schools, and adding this possibility for not only guaranteed uptime, but increased vigilance and next-level cloud-based security is pretty thrilling. I really want to get out on the presentation trail again and talk this through because more and more these leaps in infrastructure are something we have been just able to almost keep up with, but this one almost feels like we are not only well-positioned to offer it, but maybe even early to the party.

Reclaim4life, small and limber is beautiful!

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*With the caveat that is an imagined Shangra-la if you push hard enough on the idea.

†Turns out they cannot make the database writable in the ADN, so it is read only. They mentioned it is technically possible, but not legally—which makes sense when you think about it in terms of security and spoofing, and then there is the whole issue of syncing back changes. It might make sense, if only for practical purposes, to keep everything write-only during any extended downtime.

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