iCompute news

Recent changes

Mercy Memory upgrade

More Mercy upgrade info

Mercy upgraded to NetBSD 5.0.2

Mercy and mailserver Upgrade

E-mail password change form

webmail now available

E-mail server upgrade

IMAP service

DSL offering

Pricing

Recent Changes (10/2/2014)

This news site has not been updated in some time, and many changes have occurred. The hardware for Mercy has been upgraded, but mercy is no longer used to serve customer web sites. A new server, running on a VM is our new, faster web server. smile.icompute.com is the new server. As before, access to the server is always via the name of your web site. You can use ssh as in "ssh www.mydomain.com" to access your home directory on smile. There have also been upgrades to the upstream connection to the internet, and to the storage infrastructure, which is now on a file server, and served to the web server via NFS.

Mercy Memory Upgrade (4/29/2012)

Our web server mercy.icompute.com will have its memory upgraded this coming Sunday, 29 April from 6-9 AM. This should involve minimal downtime, and only bring down the web server for about 20 minutes.

Mercy upgrade info (1/2/2010)

The upgrade web of our server mercy.icompute.com brings a number of new capabilites to our customers. This includes:

  • Numerous security patches and recent fixes
  • A new version of our web server - Apache 2.2
  • An upgrade to php 5
  • An install of mySQL 5 server and client software
  • mySQL administration software (phpmyadmin)
  • Upgraded perl and CPAN utilities and libraries
  • Numerous other changes to utility software.

The biggest change for our users is our new ability to host database-driven dynamic content web sites, like Joomla!, WordPress, and Moodle. Contact us if you want to take advantage of these capabilities and we will help get you started.

Mercy upgrade to NetBSD 5.0.2 (12/19/2010)

The web server mercy.icompute.com was upgraded on 12/19 from NetBSD 2.1 to NetBSD 5.0.2. Several capabilities were added or expanded in the process. We now have Apache 2.2, with improved configuration and dynamic "module" loading abilites. We also have mySQL installed with PHP 5. This configuration supports many commonly used packages, such as WordPress, Moodle, and Joomla.

Contact us if you are interested in using our new facilities.

Upgrades of servers (1/18/2007)

This Sunday, the web server will be upgraded to a faster processor, and newer version of NetBSD. Plans are also underway to update the mailserver and install more spam filtering capability. For more information, see:

E-mail password change form (11/16/2006)

There is now a web-based form to allow iCompute.com e-mail users to change their passwords. See:

webmail service available (11/13/2006)

iCompute now offers webmail directly. Up till now, we have recommended that our users use http://www.mail2web.com to access mail when necessary. We now have our own webmail setup. See: http://webmail.icompute.com and check it out.

Upcoming e-mail Server Changes (11/13/06)

IBy the end of this year, we expect to upgrade our mail server to the latest release of EIMS 3.3. This latest release has a "graylisting" engine built in, and in early testing, it has shown to be promising in the fight against SPAM.

iCompute currently offers Postini services as an added cost option to combat SPAM. The upgrade of the mail server will add some anti-SPAM capability to the mail server independent of Postini.

Graylisting is not a 100% reliable technology. It depends on mail servers re-trying transmission of e-mail, and some legitimate servers do not retry. Graylisting will also delay legitimate mail from "new" servers up to the initial "graylist" time. (planned to be 25 minutes) Our emphasis remains on ensuring reliable mail delivery first and foremost. Please share with us your opinions on this problem. We want our solutions to meet your needs.

Click here to visit an (old but) excellent article on Spam.

IMAP service

IMAP is an alternate way to access your e-mail that allows you to manage your e-mail on the server rather than downloading it (using POP3) to your local computer. This method of access has several advantages, and is growing in popularity. For those of you who are interested in IMAP, let us know and we will arrange to enable it for you.

DSL offering

Some of our customers have expressed an interest in getting DSL service directly from iCompute.com. Although we can not yet offer this service directly, we have found an option that will allow us to offer this service at a reasonable price. Please contact us if you are interested.

Pricing

Remember, when billing time comes around, we encourage our customers to pay in advance. This saves both of us hassle, stamps, and effort. A payment of 10 times your monthly rate gets you a full year of service (a 16% savings). A payment of 5 1/2 months (5.5 months) will yield a full 6 months of service. (an 8% savings)

-Sysadmin

Click here for detailed information on iCompute system status and history.