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.

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.

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:

Extremely slow but still DSL. My phone line got off line for more than a month, after that phone worked but with out DSL for another 2 weeks, during this time I only connect using 28K dial up connection, which is really really slow.

Update: I upgraded to 512K and it is awesome, it wasn’t slow Windows was downloading tons of updates 🙂

These days I really don’t have time on the Internet, but I really want to talk about some of these issue in more depth later.

• My phone line (including DSL service) is out of service for more than month, and until now no hope 🙁
• IGW the new ISU: STC is now handling Internet gateway operation, the service is still has some issues, and we are still understaffed.
• Dev4Islam: Project to devlope open source Islamic and Arabic software and services. We aim to collect data and make it available for other so they can build better software.
• Java + Delphi = C# Anders Hejlsber the creator of Delphi, create a great language for Microsoft.
• Lucene is a full text search library, exteremly fast, and the API is awsome. I tested it Lucene .Net port it is really super fast.
• Swish-e same as lucene, this what I use for Alriadh.com, still very good.
• Alriyadh.com new feature: user login for better experince, no need to rewrite your name and email when you want to submit a comment or send article to a friend, and you can bookmark your favourite articles, any thing else we should add.

Screen Shot of Quran program:

Pure-FTPd is a FTP server with many features that enable you to host virtual accounts, these are the features that I loved and tested:

• You can put the user information in MySQL database, without having to create a real UNIX account for each user.
• It also have the feature of creating the user home directory when the user logging, so all you need to create a new user is to add it to the database.
• CallUploadScript this feature will make the server run a script whenever a new file is uploaded, I used this feature to scan the file for viruses as soon as the user upload the file. (I use ClamAV as my virus scanner)

Installation (FreeBSD)

# cd /usr/ports/ftp/pure-ftpd/
# make install
# vi /etc/rc.conf
:
pureftpd_enable="YES"
pureftpd_upload_enable="YES"
pureftpd_uploadscript="/path/to/pureftpd_uploadscript.sh"
:


Check all IMAP folders:
By default Thunderbird only checks the inbox for new messages, but since we use server side filter emails don’t have to go to inbox and sometimes go directly to destionation folder.
Fortunaltely Tunderbird can be configured to check all folders, but it has to be done manually, put the follwoing lines in “user.js”:

// Download mail from all accounts on startup
user_pref("mail.check_all_imap_folders_for_new", true);

The file doesn’t exists by default so you need to create it in your “profile” filder, this link will help you to locate your “profile” folder:
http://www.mozilla.org/support/thunderbird/edit#profile

Cricket

Cricket is trend monitoring software, it allows you to monitor trend for any device you want.

I wrote 2 extensions for Cricket to monitor Lighttpd web server, and Memecached caching server.

Lighttpd web server

“lighttpd (also called “Lighty”) is a web server which is designed to be secure, fast, standards-compliant, and flexible while being optimized for speed-critical environments. Its low memory footprint (compared to other web servers), light CPU load and its speed goals make lighttpd suitable for servers that are suffering load problems, or for serving static media separately from dynamic content. lighttpd is free software / open source, and is distributed under the BSD license.” Wikipedia

For the past 9 years I used Apache Web Server exclusively, Apache is very stable and feature rich web server. The only downsize is consuming a lot of computer resources, Apache is a multi-processes server which mean you will find many Apache process running in your system and if we say that each process cosume 2MB of RAM and you have 5 Apache processes running this mean it needs 10MB of RAM.

Python, my favorite computer language (althought I don’t use it that often) released 2.5 beta version.

What amazed me that their website is now changed with new look, and Python has a new logo too.

SAUDI NET is hiring and we are looking for fresh graduates in CS/IS, we have very large expansions that will give you many great chances to work with different technologies.

SAUDI NET is part of Saudi Telecom Company (STC) so you will get all the STC employees benefits.

If you are intersted send me your resume at (rayed at saudi.net.sa)

These days Internet backbone in Saudi Arabia is having many problems affecting mainly DSL customers in some areas. I guess it must be related to the boom in new DSL connections.

To make things worst the school vacation just started and the Internet browsing became very very slow.

Thank god that I host my website at SAUDI NET so no speed prolem with it.

Last Tuesday, I enabled Geylisting on SAUDI NET mail servers, and you can see the decrease of spam we are getting (the blue line):

The first day of enabling greylisting we got many complaints about delayed emails, but after that all emails flow with delays.

To learn more check Greylist @ Wikipedia

FreeBSD my favorite operating system released version 6.1, they finally put the new logo.

For more information about FreeBSD checkout FreeBSD@WikiPedia

After three months delay from the inital plan I finally got DSL access.

My friend Abdulaziz Alqudhibi offered me NetGear DSL Modem/Router/Access point for really great price but it will take two days to install, but I couldn’t wait so I went to the market and bought a SpeedTouch 585, I hope I won’t regret it

ClamAV is an open source Anti Virus software for UNIX systems, we use it here in SAUDI NET to stop Virus in email message it stops thousands of viruses everyday, I also use it in our personal hosting service that we provide for our customers, unfortunately some customers upload virus intentionally and unintentionally, so I installed ClamAV to scan and delete viruses.

Last week I noticed one of our trouble making customers uploading sospious files, I ran “clamscan” on the user directory but it didn’t detect it, when I tried to download it my PC anti-virus software “MicroTrend” stopped the download warning me about the Virus. So I went home and downloaded it again and scanned it using Norton AV, it didn’t detect it either!

SAUDI NET is testing new dialup service, the new service uses PPP compression to give faster links, the difference is noticeable espically with HTML pages. Of course images and binary files get less compression which mean you won’t notice a big difference with them.

The service is tested with SAUDI NET prepaid service only (Phone: 3604567), if tests went ok we deploy it on SAUDI NET EasyNet (Phone: 3660077).

Improvemnt of performance depeneds on your browsing behaviour, but 25% is the average increase. So if you connect using 45K you will really get 56K, and if you connect with 52K speed you will get 65K.

We found a small configuration error that broke the transparent proxy from working on some DSL connections, it should work now with every one, Enjoy!

Today a friend of mine opened my old web site http://myweb.saudi.net.sa/rayed/ and I noticed that my flickr badge is working again! I thought he used an external proxy, but he wasn’t 🙂
Flickr is open again but is it for good or it is just a mistake from ISU.
I enabled my Flickr badge again, I miss Flickr!
UPDATE: ISU blocked flickr again 🙁
UPDATE: It is open now, I am confused!
UPDATE: It seems that Flickr is open in Riyadh proxies, and not on Jeddah proxies, I hope it is closed by mistake.

but after two months 🙁
STC is under going a massive deployment in DSL lines in 2006, they announced that they will increase the number of DSL lines kingdom wide from 50,000 line to 500,000 line by the end of 2006!
So I decided to call the STC service number 907, and order DSL, they gave me an appointment today to tell me if the line is ready or not, no called me, so I called and they told the “Moather” exchange -which my area belongs to- will get DSL access in 26/1/1427 Hejjri which corresponds to 25/2/2006 according to IslamicFinder
I’ll be waiting.

We’ve just launched transparent proxy solution on our DSL service, since I don’t have DSL at home I can’t test it yet 🙁
But if you do and have problems please let me know.

Very busy shooting studio 🙂

It is thrilling to see these words:
http://www.adslgate.com/dsl/showthread.php?t=10976
http://www.adslgate.com/dsl/showthread.php?p=85995

Nice Dilbert strip (click to enlarge):

We’ve just added new services and features to SAUDI NET portal my.saudi.net.sa:

• New prayer times service, with alerts 🙂 , just click setting and add it to your page.
• Two newsfeed: alriyadh.com, and alarabiya.net through RSS.
• New option in the setting for external link target, either to open them in the same page or new one.

Tadawul returned powered by SAUDI NET logo once again.

This week SAUDI NET customer care team left NCCI building and moved to one of the STC (out parent company) headquarter buildings.

The customer care works in shifts 24 hours a day, and today it is the first time since I came to SAUDI NET 5 years ago I come to my office and no one else in our floor except me.

I rarely chat with the guys in customer care, I am not very social person after all, but today I really missed them a lot, I really feel a huge void in my life, very sad moment indeed.

http://my.saudi.net.sa/webcam

Osama Aldosary started a Saudi Ubuntu email group at Yahoo Groups, join us!

Click to join subuntu

We’ve just upgrade SAUDI NET main mail server 350GB, RAID-5, simply awesome.