Posts Tagged ‘godaddy’

Mar

14

Review: Godaddy Dedicated Server Disaster Recovery

March 14th, 2010

We had an issue this weekend with one of our high utilization servers at GoDaddy dropping dead. We’ve still not been completely briefed on what happened, but the end result was that our server was dead and we had to rebuild it from scratch. I learned a lot about what to expect from Godaddy’s disaster recovery process in the meantime and thought I’d share my experience.

The first thing that stuck out to me was that there was no notification that the server was dead.  My partner actually discovered that there was a problem when she couldn’t access one of the sites on that server.  She immediately called GoDaddy who then informed us that the server was dead.  Maybe I am naive, but I would have expected that GoDaddy would be more on top of the situation and would alert us if they noticed a problem.

We had backed up all of the code running on our servers, but did not have recent backups of several of our databases.  I fully admit that this was a glaring hole in our own process.  GoDaddy knows that they have you over a barrell in this case so they charge you $150 to take the old drive off of your dead server and then hook it up through a USB enclosure.  This allows you to get at your old data.

Not only is the cost extreme, but the process is really involved from the client perspective.  From the minute we noticed the outtage, we really had to drive the GoDaddy service technicians to do everything.  We had to initiate the reprovision and then we had to contact them about reconnecting our drive.  We then had to get them to notify us when the old drive was reconnected.  They were also very unhelpful when I asked them for assistance in mounting the usb drive.

In conclusion, the whole process has lead me to rethink my relationship with Godaddy.  Their service technicians are extremely unhelpful, their hardware is flaky, and they’ll really take advantage of you when they see an opportunity.  I believe that from this day forward, I’ll direct my clients who need hosting to have that hosting done with a different provider.

Have you had a similar situation?  Feel free to post a comment and share your experience.

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Projects, Recommendations | 2 Comments »

Jan

30

Dropping Spam with Postfix and SpamAssassin on GoDaddy’s Dedicated Servers

January 30th, 2010

We recently ran into a situation where one of our users was receiving a large amount of spam to their forwarded email account. Our setup is a dedicated server running Simple Control Panel at Godaddy. We handle email for a few clients and this one in particular was receiving 100’s of spam emails every hour.  Pretty much as soon as we set up this client, we started hitting our 1,000 SMTP Relay limit which prevented us from sending any further emails for any other client on the server.

There is a simple fix to this that I had a difficult time finding so I decided to create a post on this for anyone else who might run into this issue.

The first thing I tried was to turn on SpamAssassin through the Simple Control Panel (log in to your control panel, choose “Email” from the “Server Configuration” section, and choose “Filter incoming email using SpamAssassin”).  The result of this is that SpamAssassin started analyzing the emails coming in and marking them as Spam.  This didn’t fix the problem because the emails were not being dropped, but were instead being forwarded onto the receipient, just now with the “SPAM” designation in the message subject.

The only solution I discovered was to utilize Postfix’s header_checks.  This uses a regular expression to check the header of the email message and then apply a rule to the message accordingly.  Here’s what we did.

  1. edit the /etc/postfix/header_checks file.
  2. add the following line to the bottom of the file:

    /^X-Spam-Flag:.YES/ DISCARD spam

  3. edit the /etc/postfix/main.cf file an make sure the following line is in your file (it may just be commented out):

    header_checks = regexp:/etc/postfix/header_checks

  4. Now restart your postfix process by using the following command:

    postfix reload

What this does is look for the existence of “X-Spam-Flag” in the header of the message.  This flag is put there by SpamAssassin, so it is important that SpamAssassin is running.  Once it sees the “X-Spam-Flag”, it will discard the message.  This will effectively prevent your server from forwarding any spam emails onto your user’s email accounts.  So far this has worked out well for us.

Tags: , , , , ,
Posted in Tutorials | No Comments »