Rayed's Real Life

I am moving all my emails (except work email) to one single email using my own domain (myname at mydomain), and I am going to use Google Apps service, basically I am getting GMail for my own domain, I even have my own start page and tons of applications.

The provided storage is unbeatable, and after Google provided IMAP service, it is really tempting.

So guys if you want to contact me please do at myname at mydomain.

This week, I started my new job at CITC, I am leaving STC, I’ve spent the last 6 years working for SAUDI NET and SAUDI DATA.

Alhamdu Lelah, the last 6 years were amazing, I learned too many thing, made friends with too many people.

Thanks to everyone participated in this great experience, and special thank to Abdullah Aldosari who add the extra spices on it

rayed.com to new server with upgraded softwares:
FreeBSD 6.2
Apache 2
PHP 5
MySQL 5

After spending 6 years at SAUDI NET, Abdullah Aldosari has left us and joined Mobily.

Abdullah was our system architect, with large arsenal of skills talents, we have working very tightly all these years. SAUDI NET sure lost a very valuable team member.

Abdullah it has been a pleasure and honor to work with you.

Ubuntu Linux is really easy OS with many interesting features, one of the best sites to help you with your Ubuntu experince is Ubuntu Guide, the site has many useful tips on how to do thing in Ubuntu.

One of the tips is how to install Internet Explorer under Ubuntu, I saw Fahad AlShenaifi do it, he is our Ubuntu expert since he is using it exclusively for the past year or so.

So I decided to give it a try, 5 minutes later I have IE6 on my machine (I have fast link so your mileage may vary)

Dovecot version 1.0.0 finally released, after almost 5 years of development.

Dovecot is IMAP and POP3 server, it is one of the best and easiest servers I ever worked with, easy enough for home environment, and flexible and powerful enough for service providers.

I’ve tested it earlier before and hopefully we will migrate to it later this year.

Dovecot integrate very well with Postfix mail server (Postfix handle SMTP, Dovecot handle POP3+IMAP), and can easily support virtual hosting.

Stay tuned for more articles about Dovecot to come.

Since we migrated Saudi Arabia international lines from ISU to us, we started to host the most unpopular web page in the kingdom, Internet Block Page.
We started hosting it on Apache web server, but we noticed timeout problems with the server, to discover that slow clients reserve many Apache process which lead to consuming all of Apache processes.
Lighttpd came to the rescue, I replaced Apache with Lighttpd and so far it is doing a great job. Lighttpd is a prefect fit since the website only serve one static page, and this where Lighttpd shines.
This doesn’t mean Lighttpd is better than Apache, each one has its own uses, this small comparison table for both:

Apache	Lighttpd
Prefrok	select
Dynamic (PHPm, Perl, CGI)	Static (html, gif,jpg)
CPU bound	I/O bound
Very flexible	Flexible enough