Andrew Taylor

A few weeks ago I was given the opportunity to go for a day out of the office to the headoffice of Initial Style. Style is part of the Rentokil Initial group and provides conference venues and facilities. They’re currently in the process of being sold off as part of the restructuring of the group.

It’s nothing particularly exciting, but since trips out are rather rare for members of SysMan and TechDev I felt it was worth a mention

My job for the day was to install a reverse proxy server running Rentokil’s own flavour of Linux and pound. This is to act as a middle-man between requests from the outside world and the in-house web booking engine (an IIS-hosted web site). The reverse proxy was sited in the DMZ, so access to it from the outside is strictly limited (just to port 80 at the moment). It then sanatizes requests (blocking anything deemed “bad”) and passes them to the back end server in the protected network. It basically adds a safety layer to prevent having to expose an IIS box directly to the world.

Surprisingly this all went rather well, other than a mis-configuration of the default gateway, the pound and firewall settings were all correct first time. Which was rather pleasing.

I went to the offices with the web development manager from the office here. Whilst I was sorting out the reverse proxy he was meeting with two prospective web hosting companies, along with various members of Initial’s IT team, to discuss the outsourcing of the hosting of Initial’s web site when they are sold off. The site’s currently hosted in-house here at Garland Road, but obviously this couldn’t continue once they were no longer part of the group.

One of the companies was 4D Internet, who I worked for between graduating in summer 2004 and starting at Rentokil in the December. The decision is very close at the moment as to who gets the contract, but 4D may have the winning proposal with their flexibility and management offerings. Without wanting to jinx anything, I’ll say no more until the decision is made :p

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