Software
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?
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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.
Outbound Email Spam is teh suck
Jul 23rd
No mispelling, just playing ‘new internet lingo’ game. Did I win?
Let’s get serious…
This week, multiple customer accounts were breached. Starting approximately 3 weeks ago, a phish was sent out that some of our customers responded to, giving out their account information.
We looked through our mail logs and found the users who had been phished and we changed their passwords.
Along the way, we either missed some users who were phished, or another phish was done that we did not detect.
On Monday, 2 accounts that had been phished at some time were used to send spam through our outbound email servers. By default, our outbound email servers require SASL authentication. The abusers authenticated to our servers, and over the next couple of hours, we were thoroughly abused, and our servers started slowing down. Not enough to trigger monitoring, though. Kudos for performance tuning, spankings for not noticing this until a customer told us.
On Wednesday, we got hit again, by a single account this time, and 18,640 connections later, our servers were again getting exercised.
All this preamble, what is it for, Mike?
I’ll tell you – on Monday our outbound mail servers got onto some of the anti-spam lists, including Yahoo, Hotmail, Comcast. We did what we could to remove the IPs of our servers from the lists, but Hotmail (in particular) has a 72 hour period for removal. Ah well. 72 hours does suck, but it is survivable.
Then came Wednesday…and another account was abused, putting us back on those same lists we just got off of, and while still on the Hotmail list, our 72 hours got reset. Oh that is frustrating.
VMware vSphere takes me by storm
May 26th
Official download was available on May 21st, 2009, and I was waiting anxiously for my license keys for the new vCenter (management console) and host license keys (that which is the hypervisor)…
I got them on that day, and then proceeded to spend way too much time with it. For some people, addiction is a bad thing. For me…no need to guess.
I find playing and working with VMware (and the suite of tools available) to be on par with playing World of Warcraft. I can lose myself for hours and hours. With WoW, I complete quests, work with groups of people (9 or 24 others) accomplishing a goal. With VMware, I make clusters, I play virtual networking games, I make one computer act like many.
Since Thursday, I have upgraded my not-for-resale copies of vCenter and installed an Enterprise level host (well, upgraded from ESX 3.5 to vSphere 4 Enterprise). I want to get used to things. It hasn’t taken very long to get comfortable. Sure, some things have changed, but the core methods have not.
Hopefully over the next 2-4 weeks I can upgrade our VMware cluster(s) to vSphere 4 from ESX 3.5. The added performance benefits (according to VMware), the prettier and better organized client software (still no native Mac client, BOO!), and the eventual vNetwork Distributed Switch implementation.
My testing so far (ha, hard to believe what you can do in 4 days), upgrading the infrastructure shouldn’t be hard at all, and should be pretty seamless in our data center, though before the clusters get some love, I’ll be doing a few more test installs and test upgrades.
Until next time… VMware addict out!
