Hey everyone, glad to be posting once again over here. It’s been a while since I hit the “New Post” button on this blog, and god it feels good. I just wanted to give you a quick heads up on what we’ve been up to these last few months.

Server (over)load

Ahoy! Yes, this has to be the number one on the list because with no doubt, it is the first and foremost reason why we’ve getting almost no sleep for the past months. If your reports ever got delayed — all appearing at once later — or if you ever received a “timeout error” or even got to see the infamous “fail feathers” on the Control Panel, well this is why. Scaling issues. And again. And again. And when we thought the battle was finally settled, yes, again.

And there we were, once again, up to 3 am in the morning fixing things to keep the servers running as usual.

We’ve dealt with complex setups in the past — on different projects here and there — but you must know that Prey is a whole different beast. The fact that there are hundreds of thousands of devices hitting the servers and posting data constantly, every single second, with huge (and I mean HUGE) spikes every 20 minutes poses a very singular challenge.

I’m not going to dive into the specifics about where our bottlenecks were or how we managed to fix them — that’s a topic for a future post –, but I can happily say that we finally managed to tame the beast. We made some big changes in our server infrastructure, optimized our report processing backend, tested and tuned the web servers, the app servers, the database cluster and even the Linux TCP/IP stack to our optimum settings, and of course, set up a real monitoring environment to ensure that everything keeps running smoothly. Even after whatever happens on 21/12/2012. :)

So that’s it — the timeout days are over. Next one!

Team getting bigger

As you know, for a very long time Prey was just me and Carlos (and before that it was simply me). However I’m very glad to tell you that our team is no longer a two-man-army but a — drumroll please — FOUR man army! Besides me and Carlos, Diego Morales has joined the team to help us on the business side of things, and a new member is just about to join as well. Diego’s been a tremendous addition to our team and we hope things will get better in the forthcoming weeks.

Welcome Diego!

And by the way, we also moved to a new office! We’ll send some pictures later once we get everything in place — now where IS that keg anyway? (Hehe, just kidding).

Developers, developers

Yes, developers. That’s what we are, after all, and that’s what we like to do. So I guess what makes me really glad right now is that, now that the battle is over, we’re finally back on track. Our code editors are open again and our hands are fully dedicated to builing new stuff for Prey — rather than only responding to support requests asking about the timeout issues!

We’re also in the process of moving all our code repositories to the Prey organization at Github.

There’s about 82 or 83 new things that we want to do and believe me, it’s difficult to choose where to start. But there’s a couple of things currently underway that we’ll be letting you guys know about in the following weeks. Hold on — why don’t we start right away?

iPhone version

Oh yes, Prey now runs on iPhones, iPads and iPod Touches. Didn’t you see it? The awaited-for-longer-than-i-can-remember iOS version of Prey is no longer vaporware, it’s 100% realware and available for download at the App Store. There’s a bunch of things to know about the iOS version so we’ll be posting something new about it in a while.

In the meantime, check it out and let us know what you think! (And don’t forget to rate it as well).

By the way, I just remembered — we need to update the FAQ!

Control Panel updates

If you’ve logged in the last few weeks, then you should’ve noticed a few changes we’ve been making to the Control Panel. First of all we built a new page that consolidates all reports — yes, we heard you guys — making it easier to browse through them, and also having a much faster way to delete the ones which are of no use.

Additionally, we added a search input for Pro accounts which hold over 10 devices, so you don’t need to browse through the full list of devices to find the one you’re looking for.

Benvenuti nel Pannello di Controllo

(That stands for “Welcome to the Control Panel”, by the way).

It took a bit longer than expected but the work of our translations team has finally come to life. Thanks to the amazing work of over 10 people — guided by the great Benny Rodríguez from Spain, we can finally unveil five new languages for the Control Panel: Catalan, Turkish, Dutch, Russian and Italiano!

So if you’re in the land of spaghetti or the land of vodka and you don’t know english too well, there’s no need to pick up the dictionary any more. Hit your flag of choise at the upper right corner and boom! If you find out there’s a wrong translation, though, please let us know so we can fix it.

By the way, this has all been possible thanks for your constant support and feedback, and specially to the ones who’ve believed in us by upgrading to Pro. After all, the servers don’t pay themselves and we do need to have lunch, so thanks everyone and we hope to keep bringing you new stuff and improve our service day by day.

That’s it for now folks. Happy hunting!

It’s been over a year since we launched the Control Panel and it was about time we made some changes. During the past months we’ve been noticing which things work and which needed to be looked at, thanks to the constant feedback we’ve received from you guys.

So, first of all, thanks everyone!

Here’s a brief list of changes we’ve made to the Prey Control Panel, which hopefully will make it easier for you to manage Prey and keep an eye on what’s going on with your stuff.

Here we go.

To the left, not to the right

This is probably the first thing you’ll notice when visiting the new version of the Panel. We used to align everything to the right — honestly, out of no reason in particular — and though it looked good, that didn’t necessarily mean it also worked good. We were constantly battling with alignments, keeping stuff into position and, you know, trying to make the thing look not-so-awful in IE.

So we decided to turn things around and follow the logical way of reading, which makes it work a bit better while also keeping the structure more in place.

New grid view

This is a cool new feature. You can now watch your devices in grid mode in addition to the traditional list, which not only lets you capture them all in a glance, but also allows you to filter and sort them either by their status or their names, among other things.

This feature is currently disabled for Internet Explorer as the rendering speed is really lousy (sorry guys) and we still need to figure out how to make it work better. Everyone else will enjoy it, as it works really good.

Tabs for keeping better tabs

First of all, we separated the different sections of the device management page into tabs, so you can find much faster what you’re looking for. We also renamed the “Update” button to “Save changes” as it makes much more sense, and we also added a second one at the top so you don’t need to scroll the whole way down to apply your new settings.

SSL support, at last

As promised, all forms which handle passwords on the Control Panel are processed through SSL (e.g. login, signup, profile). So, having that the signups from the installers are now also handled through SSL, this means your user info will never again fly in the wild. This makes us much more comfortable when logging in and out of the Panel and probably you will, too.

No more language switching

Yes, it’s gone. We finally seemed to catch the inglorious bugstard that was causing the Control Panel to randomly switch to a different language without your request — although it was quite a funny bug in our opinion, hehe. The Control Panel will now also check your browser’s HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE header so in most cases your language will be automatically selected if there’s a localization available.

From our tests the bug is no longer there, but please let us know if you see any funny behaviour again.

Different colours for buttons

Small one but important nevertheless. Some of you told us sometimes you’d accidentally remove a device when you actually wanted to add a new one, because of the fact all the buttons were orange. Well, not any more.

And that’s about it! Next time you log in you’ll see all these changes (hit Ctrl+R to reload the files in case it looks weird), and you’ll also notice small differences here and there that hopefully will make your life easier.

We hope you like the new look of Prey’s Control Panel and hope it works for you as it works for us. Happy hunting!

This time it’s the Control Panel’s turn. We’ve heard all of your requests and that’s why we decided to take a while and polish all the rough edges, to add new features and thus make it easier for you to manage Prey and track your computers for when the time comes.

‘Nuff said. Let’s start from, well, from the beginning, shall we?

1. Forgot/reset my password

Having trouble remembering your password? Fear no more!

2. OK/Unverified devices

This looks like the normal welcome page of the Control Panel, right? Well, look again closely. You’ll notice that the second device reads “Unverified” below its title. That’s because we added states for devices, which will make it easier for you (and us) to know when a device is properly set up or not.

Basically, when you add a new device in your Control Panel, it will default to an “unverified” state, which won’t allow marking the device as missing until the link is actually verified. Whenever the server gets a request from the device (meaning it was correctly configured) it will switch to “ok” and then you’ll be able to activate Prey. This way you won’t have to test the configuration by trying to activate Prey: the Control Panel will simply tell you if it is!

3. Module fine-tuning + new Alarm module

Yup, that’s right. Now you can fine-tune the different modules by changing each of their settings directly in the Control Panel, not having to edit the config files by hand in your computer.

if you look closely your eyes will tell you that there’s another module in there, and you can believe them alright. We just added an Alarm module which allows you to trigger a loud sound on the computer for 30 seconds, which may help you find your computer if it is located nearby. We advice you, though: be careful with this one!

4. Better reports, brighter pictures too

Reports now render all the information — we like to call them traces — collected on the computer. This means you should now see, depending on the active modules, the internal (private) IP address of the missing device, its MAC address, its current uptime, the list of active connections, and so and so on.

This is not noticeable on a first look but it surely is important. Now the Control Panel post-processes dark images so you’ll have a better chance of knowing who’s behind your computer if the picture is taken at night or in a dark room.

5. IE support

We’re not that fond of IE — to be truthful, we have bad dreams about it –, but since we’ve gotten a lot of requests to have better support for IE, we decided to hack our CSS and make it look good better on Microsoft’s browser.

For now the official supported version is IE7 (IE6 people it’s time to upgrade!), but IE8 should render just fine. Any comments please let us know on the mailing list.

There’s also been some minor interface improvements here and there, which will make the site look a bit slicker on others browsers too.

6. New translation system

We also worked out a new system for managing translations in an easier way. This will allow to make translations available faster, thanks to the work of the amazing people who have offered their help. We’re very excited to have this finally out, since there’s a lot of different languages on the way!

By the way, to everyone who have contacted us regarding translations, sorry for taking so long but we’re finally ready!

7. Bigger, bolder server

Yes, Prey has lived only for a couple of months on its current home, but it was already time to make room for more growth. In fact, just today we passed the 200.000 report mark! You shouldn’t have noticed the change (everything was done real smooth), but if you experienced any glitches during the migration process please let us know so we can handle it better next time.

That’s all for now. Hope you enjoy the updates on the Control Panel. As always, suggestions are most welcome, and as always, thanks everyone for the help and the constant feedback. More news to come soon!

At last!

We’ve finally completed the migration to what will be our home for the next months: our own VPS for the control panel and website. This means we won’t get any more 500 errors because of server overload, and in general the service will work faster, leaner and meaner.

This wouldn’t have been possible without the contribution of several different people who kindly made a donation to our Paypal account. However our current funds are still very low so if you would like to give us a hand please make a contribution. Any amount will be appreciated.

By the way, our VPS provider (Linode.com) allows for referral codes on account signup. So if you’re in need of a good hosting solution, we recommend you try a Linode VPS, their machines are great and the prices are even better. If you do so please enter this code when signing up: e3a20152e86710707df51cb16484a6ab66a493dc (you can also use this link). We’ll get a $20 discount!

Thanks again everyone who made this possible. Thanks for letting Prey keep growing.