Software
Apache 1.3 – you were loved
Feb 4th
So, across my RSS feed today, I saw a blurb…
Apache terminates ‘outated’ web server
What?
I clicked the link and was sent off to The Register for their report on the issue.
Apache 1.3 was released in July, 1998 – 12 years ago, and still in operation today.
At ipHouse – we use 1.3 as the tried and true Apache webserver on our cluster. We’ve not had either issues or problems; and security updates are few and far between. I guess after 12 years no one cares anymore to hack such old code or something.
Goodbye Apache 1.3, we had a long relationship, but your sister is younger and better equipped for todays Internet. Don’t cry, we’ll remember you fondly.
Hello Apache 2.2 – we are look forward to a long relationship on our network behind our F5 load balancers.
*sniffle*
Summary: Apache 1.3.42 is the final release according to the Apache Software Foundation. They recommend moving to Apache 2.2.14. Apache 2.0 will end once Apache 2.4 has been released, and finally, Apache 2.3.5 is in alpha stage.
Reference:
Shell service available
Jan 29th
Been a long week and I had to deal with some red tape internally (of my own creation!), but finally have some working shell service to sell to people who want it.
I had posted last week about the issue(s) of shell services and decided that I would do the work to put this kind of service together as I have both the experience and gumption to do so. Even includes my smiley, happy-go-lucky support attitude!
So it is available and sales is ready to take the orders. I don’t expect a lot of people signing up for this, but it takes care of a sect of customers that still want to do things in a manner that isn’t web based, that isn’t all mouse driven.
I can relate to that!
- Ubuntu Hardy
- FreeBSD 8
- emacs, vi, joe
- mutt (no elm, no pine – all Maildir oh well)
- procmail filtering
- IMAP, POP3, SMTP, with SSL and STARTTLS goodness
- reasonable and ample disk storage quota on our NetApp gear
Let the nerding begin!
UNIX Shell services, what’s the fuss?
Jan 21st
Wowzers, quite a little thread going on in a newsgroup, but really, what’s the big deal?
I think I know…
Not everyone uses the Internet for viewing web pages and downloading pr0nself-help videos and television shows. The Internet itself has become much easier for the layman to use, and with that, these historical services are no longer needed and support for them is harder and harder to come by.
In the past, most service providers (especially the ISPs that service residential users) used to offer some kind of UNIX shell for their paying clientele. Over time, the number of service providers has decreased, and of those that are left, the percentage of them that offer this type of environment has decreased by orders of magnitude. I’ll speculate on why further down this post.
UNIX shells are fascinating experiments in shared computing resources with a very long history.
Over Subscription vs Over Capacity – huh?
Jan 15th
Recently, a whole slew of tweets showed up across my feed dealing with the perceived and measured issues across multiple public cloud providers infrastructure.
Image via Wikipedia
One of the posts comes from Chris Hoff (this post in particular) that describes quite clearly what the differences are.
Service providers (anyone doing cloud services, virtualization, colocation, bandwidth, whatever) live upon the idea of over subscription. We make our revenue banking on the fact that not everyone needs their full allotment all the time.
With over subscription there is a chance of reaching a state of over capacity. Anyone using this business model needs to understand that they must be ready for it to happen. It isn’t an issue of ‘will’ but an issue of ‘when’. Good engineering can keep the ‘when’ at bay, virtually forever, and that is what you need to be prepared for.
Another recent posting via The Register (featuring @GeorgeReese) had some data dealing with network latency within the Amazon EC2 network. I don’t have any opinions about what was in this article, but it is something that is going to come up again and again as this new model of computing (for the masses) solidifies and grows up on the Internet.
Comments?
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_c.png?x-id=e4ff4cfa-35d8-4078-9c3d-e929e6b33a9d)
Example cost: Virtual Private Cloud on VMware
Sep 4th
In the last 6 months, I have helped multiple customers achieve their dream of a virtual machine environment built for them exclusively, but with abilities to control their virtual machine setup, configuration, turn up, tear down, etc. These dedicated infrastructure environments are in the ipHouse data center.
This isn’t ‘cloud computing’ as many people think of it (thanks to Amazon EC2 and the like), but it is pretty close to that vague definition, and with far more control available in terms of everything-vm-wise.
What do I mean? With this virtual private cloud, a customer can set up 3 Ubuntu systems, 2 Windows Server 2003, 1 FreeBSD, and 7 Windows Server 2008 systems. There really isn’t anything novel about this (again, reference Amazon EC2 and the like).
What is novel is that the customer can configure these VMs as they wish. Disk space allocation, partitioning, memory configurations, number of vCPUs. Basically, if you can do it on a physical server – you can do it virtually.
Another differentiating feature is that VMware vSphere 4 supports many operating systems while most public cloud providers offer a very limited number in comparison. This choice alone can be enough to warrant looking at this kind of solution.
No per hour fees, no storage fees (above what the customer has purchased), highly available (if configured to do so), dynamic resource scheduling (if configured to do so), bandwidth fees that are predictable. (see VMare vMotion and Storage vMotion, VMware HA, VMware DRS via website)
I’ll build a configuration example offering shared storage between the VMware physical servers. I’ll be doing some cost estimates for the per month fees. These estimates will be high and are purely shown for example. You would want to contact ipHouse Sales to get a real idea for the costs involved.
