What do you win?

Two winners will receive one Macheist nanoBundle which includes the following software:

Software currently unlocked in the bundle

MacJournal
Totally revamped and rebuilt for Mac OS X Leopard and Snow Leopard, MacJournal organizes all your important information and helps chronicle your life faster and easier than ever before. Create a personal journal with MacJournal’s simple-to-use interface with two-level security.

RipIt
Movies stored safely in your computer can’t get lost, scratched or broken. Use your Mac’s built in search tool, Spotlight, to find a movie in your collection… instantly. Moving files around on your computer is a lot easier than alphabetizing shelves full of DVDs.

Clips
Clips is your Mac OS X clipboard reinvented. Use Clips to increase productivity during your daily computing experience. When Clips is running you won’t even notice it. Try Clips today and finally see clipboard and snippet management, the Mac way.

CoverScout
Color the gray gaps in your iTunes library: CoverScout 3 helps you find missing cover art in your iTunes library with style. It’s never been easier to complete your music collection: simply search, apply, edit and print. CoverScout has been optimized for Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard

Flow
On the Mac, you’ve become accustomed to software that’s not just powerful, but elegant too. Armed with the belief that file-transfer should be no exception, we made Flow. Flow brings the best of the Mac to your server’s files and folders. Flow makes working remotely every bit as intuitive and natural as working locally.

Software currently locked in the bundle

Tales of Monkey Island
Telltale’s latest episodic series is Tales of Monkey Island, a five-episode saga featuring mighty pirate Guybrush Threepwood and his motley crew. Tales of Monkey Island pulls the legendary franchise thundering and plundering into the modern era with an epic storyline conceived by some of the same team that dreamed up the original games.

Rapidweaver
With powerful tools under the hood, yet a beautifully-familiar user interface built especially for Mac OS X Leopard, RapidWeaver is ideal for anyone looking to create a beautiful website. RapidWeaver has all the tools you need to quickly create pages you’ll be proud of.

How do you win?

• You may leave a comment on this entry using a valid email address and include what application you’re most looking forward to using from the nanoBundle.
• OR you may post a public Tweet in the following format: “I want to win a nanoBundle from @holdfire to use [your desired appl] – http://bit.ly/hfbundl“. Where [your desired app], you’ll just replace it with whatever app you want to use the most in the nanoBundle.

Contest Rules

1. Winners will be emailed as well as announced in a blog entry on Holdfire’s blog which will also include a tweet on our Twitter account.
2. Winners may be from any of the 7 continents and will be responsible for any related taxes or restrictions according to their state laws.
3. Multiple entries will only be counted as one entry.
4. Make sure your tweet is public; If you have a private profile, we can’t see it!
5. No purchase is necessary to win nor are you required to be a Holdfire client.
6. Participants must be 14 years of age or older to enter.
7. Contest entries are valid only through 3/3/10 10PM CST until 3/6/10 12PM CST.
8. Winners will be picked at random on 3/6/10 1PM CST and announced around 3PM CST the same day.

Good luck to you!

We have also suspended the use of all previous nameservers except for ns1.holdfire.net, ns2.holdfire.net, ns3.holdfire.net and ns4.holdfire.net. Although some users on Orchid may still utilize orchid1/orchid2 for the time being as those have not yet been flushed out.

We are also in the process of making our hosting more transparent so that if you want to resell to your own clients with the Holdfire label attached to it, you will be able to do so. We’ll be straying from using ‘Holdfire’ itself on our reseller servers to allow you to have private label hosting for you and your own clients. More details will be made shortly.

Thanks!

We receive the error “ModSecurity: Access denied with code 406 (phase 2). Invalid UTF-8 encoding: invalid byte value in character at ARGS:resource_title” from all instances of Mint on all of our servers. We looked into it and according to several posts on Mint’s troubleshooting forum, Shaun has recommended the user include an .htaccess file in the mint directory with the following which will disable mod_security for that directory only.

References:

• Mint 2 appears to not be tracking stats
• Referrer only tracking links to homepage
• Mint refuses to track pages with titles with codes like &-#-8-2-1-7-;-s

This decision was based on the lack of interest in the two plans removed as well as simplifying our selection for potential clients. While more options are great to have sometimes it can be too confusing–we’re going to keep it simple! And since we removed two plans we decided to “upgrade” the remaining packages with more disk space or bandwidth (or both.)

We also expanded in other areas and now offer the ability to purchase virtual private servers and dedicated servers. Each have three plans to chose from and give you the ability to customize them based on your needs. On either of the servers you can select your operating system, control panel and add the option for fully managed support. However, with our dedicated servers while there is a main setup, you can opt to add extra harddrives in any RAID configuration, order extra IP blocks, upgrade/downgrade your main harddrive, and of course opt for other add-ons available.

You may see some bugs here and there with our website and other products (forum, blog, support area) but we’re trying to squash them as we see them. If there’s something we’ve missed, send an email or support ticket letting us know–it’s greatly appreciated!

Because of this we have deployed a new server to replace Chirp. As we have many clients on Chirp, we will only be migrating accounts on certain days. To organize this process as best we can, we will only migrate via alphabetical order per day. A-G will begin migration on Sunday September 6th, H-N on Monday September 7th, O-U on Tuesday September 8th, and V-Z on Wednesday September 9th.

When your account has been migrated over in full, you will receive a new account details email which will include new nameservers, and the new server IP address. The chirp nameservers will remain in effect (although will be pointing to the new server on 9/10) until September 20th to allow all users time to change them. After this they will be deactivated and if you have an account still using these nameservers, the domain will be unable to connect properly.

If you have any questions about our migration, please submit a support ticket.

The reason for utilizing a different secure password for each resource is to ensure that attempts to gain access to any of your accounts are prevented. You may be thinking that this is something hard to do or that you may forget the password you created but for how many simple options (free and paid) there are today, this is no excuse.

Majority of websites today allow you to reset your password simply by entering in your e-mail or username. So even if you were to create a hard uncrackable password and did forget it, you can always get your information back or reset simply by doing this.

There are many different ways to store these hard to remember passwords that are uncrackable. Some of the applications out there that can store these for you such as the all mighty popular 1Password for OS X, RoboForm for Windows, KeePass for Windows and LastPass for OS X/Windows/Linux. There are other ways as well, like simply creating a text file on your computer. While this may not seem secure it usually is especially if you hide it well or name it differently.

You can generate passwords without an application by going to websites such as Secure Password Generator by PcTools or Password Generator by Bytes Interactive. There are many more on the web too which you can easily find by doing a search for “generate password.”

Now that we have gone different ways to generate and store your password, also have the option to create a safe password. You don’t need to rely on a password generator, but rather by using creating one on your own. To help you create your own password, I have created an example that you can utilize.

Pick 3 easy-to-remember words so that we can get started on creating a password. For example, say you love cooking, your boyfriend’s name is Steve (or girlfriend, et al.) and your favorite number is 14. You can then combine the letters from those three words make a password such. My example password from ‘cooking,’ ’steve,’ and ‘14′ was sCtoeOvKEi14G. I put it into one in my own method to remember.

You should notice that not only did I make every other letter something different, but I also capitalized some of the letters to make it even harder for someone to guess. Even if you didn’t utilize a method like this but, I highly recommend you capitalize some of the letters and use numbers as well.

Lastly, more websites are increasing their security measures. Some may allow you to fill in a field to where answer a question that you either created or selected from a list. While I do recommend you fill these out, I also recommend that they be difficult answers. For example, if the question were “What High School did you attend?”, now a days this answer could be very, very easily obtainable especially with social networks like Facebook. You might want to answer it with something completely different that you will still remember.

Hopefully you have found this post helpful. If you have any questions or feedback, feel free to leave a comment. Pass this on to those that you think may not have secure passwords especially family members. While you may not think it, people are out to get your information and secure passwords are vital in helping to ensure that does not happen. So make sure to change them if you have not already and do so every so often.

Just remember to be careful when creating your passwords, password question/answer, who you tell, where your store them and so forth.

To receive your free domain, simply chose any shared or reseller package from our order cart, then enter in your desired .COM domain. You will then be taken to the package description page where you will select annual from the billing options.

Voila!

Over the past few weeks we’ve been hard at work getting things put together, as well as a bunch of other features and extras that we plan on offering here at Holdfire. With the addition of our blog, we also added on our Twitter account, and while we have yet to really push this, we have our forum that we are aiming have active and an integral part of our community.

As for our other new extras, we have a few Holdfire ventures that we’ll be presenting soon, and hope that you take advantage of the services offered up!

And last but surely not least: For awhile we’ve maintained our account center at holdfirebilling.com, but have recently decided to stray from using a 2nd brand. Our account center is now accessible by my.holdfire.net. Because we have a lot of URLs floating around that point to Holdfirebilling.com, we have set up a 301 redirect via .htaccess so that all files are redirected to their respective URLs on my.holdfire.net.

For the time being our site redesign has been put on hold, as well as our blog. Don’t fret though, we’re going to try to get back into the grove of things shortly. If you’ve got any recommendations for features you’d like to see here, please feel free to comment and let us know. We’re all eyes!

1. You will need to log into your cPanel account and create a new email address with the username of “backups” so that you have an email to send your DB backups to.
2. While still in cPanel, go to your MySQL section and create a new database user. Attach that user to the database you want to backup.
3. Open up your favorite FTP client and sign into your hosting account.
4. While in your root directory (before public_htmll, create a new directory titled “backups” and then navigate to it.
5. Download the file db_backup.php, and then open it in a code editor.
6. Find line 33-34; This is where you will enter in the details for the database that you want to backup.
7. Find line 27 & 45. Where you see “cpuser” enter in your cPanel username.
8. If you want the backup sent to your email address, find lines 47-49, and fill out appropriately.
9. If you want the backup uploaded via FTP, find lines 57-61, and like the email portion, fill it out appropriately.
10. Once you’ve made those edits, save and then upload to the /backups/ directory you created. CHMOD the file to 644.

Hopefully you’re not too tired just yet! So far we’ve created a directory that is outside of your web directory, so that your backup script can sit comfortably. You’ve also added in the details for the database you want to backup, what email you want it sent to, and if you want it backed up to another (or the same) FTP account.

The next thing we’re going to do is set up a cron job. This essentially is going to automate the process of backing up your database to the schedule you set for it. So you’ll be able to let it sit without having to worry about manually backing things up yourself. Find line 27, and copy the snippet that looks like this:

Navigate to the Advanced tab in cPanel, and then click on Cron Jobs. You’ll see two different options to chose from, but you can go ahead and select Standard. Now you’re going to take the line 27 we copied, and paste that into the “Command to run:” input box. Now we have the choice of setting up the schedule for the cron job to run. I recommend leaving the settings at default. As it is right now the cron job will run a backup every month, every day at 3am. Of course you can change any of those options, but I would not backup more than every day. You don’t need backups every minute! Also, at the top it gives you an option to add an email so you can receive an email about the output; Leave that blank. We’re already going to be receiving a daily email with your backup, so this isn’t necessary.

So, go ahead and save your cron job. Now you’ve got a backup system set in place for your database :).