Country bans: Good or not?

During my daily routine, when I check all the sites I have to, Google Webmaster Group, and other forums I visit, I noticed a, well… Let’s say trend: more and more webmasters think that it’s a good idea to ban whole countries from their websites and servers. So is this wise or just a result of a momentary panic?

Let’s see first why would do it? The most convenient explanation would be that you get attacks, let it be SPAM or DOS, from a specific country and to stop it, you just ban the whole country. Let’s say you have a basic server, running Apache. To ban a country is quite easy, you supply a feed with the IPs you want to ban and you’re done. Even with IPTables would be easy enough to ban a country, say most half an hour with searching included.
Let’s take a small number of aggressive clients, say 1.000 clients concurs for connection to the servers/website, and you decide to ban a whole country. The most offensive country at the moment of this post is China. China has approximately 1/6 of the World’s population. Basically if you ban 1 billion people from accessing your site just because of those 1.000 who are attacking it, well… it’s pity. You can only lose, mostly visitors coming from search engines. You will have you webserver standing steadily, but you lost revenue, as visitors equals revenue. And as a general rule of the thumb, the aggressive clients WILL give up after a moment, switch off the server, shut down the ports they are using for an hour, something, anything, but ban a whole country?!

The second case, you ban countries just because you don’t offer anything for those countries. Or you think you don’t offer.
This was very painful for me to learn, but for some reason big corporations’ webmasters do it often, and it’s so frustrating. I test a lot of IT equipment, usually stuff which didn’t appear yet in my country, I try to visit the manufacturer’s website to download a driver and I can not, because the IP I have, and all the country has, is banned from the server I want to access! How foolish…

Recent case is one of my tests with an eMachines notebook. I knew the firm is owned by Acer, yet Acer has no drivers for eMachines equipments. I check the website, emachines.com and miracle: I can’t access it, it times out. This is a common case when your IP is banned on server level, since the server won’t serve you anything, no 403 message, no nothing, not even a single ICMP package. So I tried to access the website through a server which is located in a different country, still in Europe. No luck. After a few more tries with EU servers, I try with a US server, located in Dallas. And what a joy: I could access the above link. Later I tried with a Canadian server and I could access the website. In total, I tested it with 46 servers which are under my management, and ONLY the US and Canadian servers could fetch the site.
Yet, eMachines started to export notebooks in my country and since they are cheep, people buy it like sugar, but their only option is the provided driver CD/DVD… which is not good for XP
So if you need an XP driver for something, you either code it for yourself (i know), or you switch to Vista as the drivers provided on that media is good only for this OS.

So, what do you think, is it good to ban a whole country or not?

Acer eMachines E510 – The beauty and the beast

In the past few days I was able to test an eMachines E510 notebook, fabricated by Acer.

The notebook’s design is quite nice, the case is black and the LCD is high quality, bright and my only issue with it was the reflections. It’s like a mirror, you can see yourself in it. Quite annoying.

The processor of the notebook is a an Intel Celeron with a FSB working at 533 MHz, the clock speed is 2.13 GHz and 1 Meg of cache. The notebook is shipped with 2 gigs of memory so in combination with the processor, this computer is an extremely good choice for, even advanced and graphics, animations heavy office work.

For the sake of why not, I decided to try to view a HD video (720p). For my shock, it was played smoothly. As the E510 has an additional VGA port to send the video output to an external device, for example a HD Ready TV-set with VGA input port, the eM-E510 is excellent for viewing high definition clips and movies directly on your television.

Usually notebooks are not recommended for playing games. This rule applies on the eMachines E510 too. Even though the processor speed and the amount of RAM is high enough for playing mid-range games like the Elder Scrolls: Oblivion, when i tried playing it, the performance was poor. This is the result of the low-end video-card integrated in the system, an Intel GMA X3100 with shared memory (up to 358MB).

The notebook comes with preinstalled, bootable Linux. Changing the OS can give some headaches for the beginner user. By default, the SATA mode is set to AHCI, Advanced Host Controller Interface. If you let it as is, setting up *any* type of Windows will fail.
My first test was to install Windows XP Professional, but while setup, the installer couldn’t find the installed HDD, a Hitachi 160 Gig (5200 rpm). This could be solved only by setting the SATA mode to IDE, when the installer ran without any issue. The next issue appeared when, after the first boot Windows informed me about some missing drivers: for the Broadcom LAN card, the video card and the High Definition Audio sound card. I thought not a problem, since I got with the notebook a DVD containing additional software and drivers. I was wrong: the DVD contained drivers ONLY for Vista, so my only option was to download the drivers from the internet, but since the LAN card wasn’t working, the option wasn’t plausible.
To install Windows XP on an eMachines E510, you have to switch the SATA Mode from AHCI to IDE from within the BIOS, else the installation will fail. To use AHCI with Windows XP, first you have to install XP in IDE mode, install the AHCI drivers, THEN switch the AHCI on in the BIOS.
Update: there’s a workaround posted in the comments section of this page, please scroll down to see it.
The next test was installing Windows Vista Ultimate. As the installer is much more advanced than the XP’s, i thought there will be no issue. Again, I was wrong: the computer halted when Vista tried to configure its software. The solution was again to switch the AHCI off, then the installation didn’t fail. But just for the sake of the fun, if you switch later AHCI on, Vista will not boot. At all. The only fix was coming from Microsoft’s Knowledge Base. If you read it, the whole thing is very logical and dumb in the same time.

The Li Ion batteries resisted 1 hour and 57 minutes when the notebook was used for typing this article and 54 minutes when I was viewing a HD video. I’d rate this performance as excellent for its class.

The WLAN device was working properly in any condition. It was able to connect to a desktop computer from almost 100 meters, but at this distance the drop of the transfer was considerable.

The price of the Acer eMachines E510 is $500 + VAT where I live. Generally, the performance was very good for office work and even for HD media display. In comparison with its price, I would say that it’s an awesome choice for business-men or bloggers who travel a lot. I’d recommend it for almost anyone.

Important Update: One of the comment authors, M!llu was kind enough to provide the XP drivers for the eMachines e510 notebook on an alternative download site, accessible for anyone, thanks to Rapidshare. You can find the download-links by clicking here. I checked all the files and couldn’t find any threat in them, not even false positive.

Update: If you’re sick of searching for XP drivers for the eMachines e510, the official support website of eMachines provided them here: http://support.emachines.com/em/driver/nb/e510.html. If you click the link, you will find both Vista and XP drivers, and additionally the users’ manual for the eMachines e510.

This post has been automatically translated in the following languages: Croatian, French, German, Italian, Polish and Romanian