Tech Stuff

Right now we are just running the Agent Scoreboard development box on EC2. Eventually I want to move our production system to the platform for the scalability that it offers. The main problem I have come up against was email delivery from the system. Emails sent to a gmail.com account and a couple others were delivered successfully, but had issues sending to yahoo, hotmail and various other servers. Once I sat back and thought about this it made perfect sense. I can not set a reverse DNS entry for the IP the server is running on. This is getting my messages flagged as possible spam or getting rejected totally. Looking around found a couple sites that with act as an SMTP server for us for a reasonable price. Here are some that I found: authsmtp.com, dnsmadeeasy.com, easydns.com

Since the EC2 platform is administered via web services some people have come out with some handy tools to make it easier. If you are running Firefox this one is a must have. Sure beats the dos based tools that I started using. This tool is useful even if all you do is start it up to make sure you don’t have any instances still running that you didn’t know about which would be racking up a bill.

http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/entry.jspa?externalID=609