Slashdot Mirror

OpenStack? Run Windows VMs?

Doesn't look like a problem for the world's largest OpenStack installation.

As for free ACID-compliant DBs, that's what Postgres is for...CAP theorem and all that.

Diversity is simply the latest code word for anti-white male.

LOL White Males are doing it to themselves! Come on, just look at the list of White males acting anti-socially, among them:

- the entire group of White males running for President as a Republican (blowhard Donald Trump leads that list)

-a whole bunch of mass murderers: Charles Manson, Charles Whitman, Timothy McVeigh, Dick Cheney

- a lot of global "political" leaders to numerous to list, starting with Vladimir Putin and Josef Stalin in Russia and Adolf Hitler in Germany

If you White males want people to not be against you then you White males need to quit acting like the world revolves around you all. You need to quit fucking over non-White people just because we make you uncomfortable.

Not sure why people are picking on poor Amazon, this bias towards White males extends industry-wide in the IT field. For example take a look at Rackspace Hosting's senior leadership team:

http://www.rackspace.com/en-us/about/leadership

100% White, 95% White male. This in Bexar County Texas, which is 60% Hispanic. Maybe if they have a little more diversity in the senior leadership team their stock price would not be sucking so much:

http://finance.yahoo.com/q/hp?s=RAX

Down $15 in three months, if I was a RAX stockholder I would be asking a lot of questions about why the senior leadership team is all-White.

If their stock price had gone up $15 then nobody would give a rat's ass but giving White males a pass just because they are White males when they are driving down the price of the company's stock is just plain bad business.

This example really tells you a lot about the state of "diversity" in IT these days...

automatically encrypt your data locally and upload it to multiple locations. These locations can be public locations as only your private key can decrypt the incremental (or full) backups.

Some backends:

• azure backend (Azure Blob Storage Service) Microsoft Azure SDK for Python - https://github.com/Azure/azure...
• boto backend (S3 Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Storage) boto version 2.0+ - http://github.com/boto/boto
• cfpyrax backend (Rackspace Cloud) and hubic backend (hubic.com) Rackspace CloudFiles Pyrax API - http://docs.rackspace.com/sdks...
• dpbx backend (Dropbox) Dropbox Python SDK - https://www.dropbox.com/develo...
• copy backend (Copy.com) python-urllib3 - https://github.com/shazow/urll...
• gdocs backend (Google Docs) Google Data APIs Python Client Library - http://code.google.com/p/gdata...
• gio backend (Gnome VFS API) PyGObject - http://live.gnome.org/PyGObjec...
• D-Bus (dbus)- http://www.freedesktop.org/wik...
• lftp backend (needed for ftp, ftps, fish [over ssh] - also supports sftp, webdav[s]) LFTP Client - http://lftp.yar.ru/
• mega backend (mega.co.nz) Python library for mega API - https://github.com/ckornacker/..., ubuntu ppa - ppa:ckornacker/backup
• OneDrive backend (Microsoft OneDrive) python-requests - http://python-requests.org/ python-requests-oauthlib - https://github.com/requests/re...
• ncftp backend (ftp, select via ncftp+ftp://)
• NcFTP - http://www.ncftp.com/
• Par2 Wrapper Backend par2cmdline - http://parchive.sourceforge.ne...
• rsync backend rsync client binary - http://rsync.samba.org/

Round robin DNS and nginx as load balancers. Then we auto scale cloud servers on the back end to handle the PHP load. Scalable MySQL: http://www.rackspace.com/cloud... File System: https://www.drupal.org/project... Cloud files is really the key here, otherwise you have to use an NFS of some other kind...which kind be a nightmare otherwise.

Even more interesting related to this - a patent troll tried to sue ANY APP (yes, not just the hardware, but all apps) that used an auto-rotate feature. Even though their patent was granted 9 years after the Radius Pivot.

Luckily Backspace got pissed off when they were sued over it, and made sure it was invalidated...

http://www.rackspace.com/blog/...

You don't buy expensive, power-hungry [hard]ware that's going to cost an arm and a leg to store, power, and cool for the next year when you only need its brute force for a few hours.

But he is planning to do conversions over and over, one after another, handling problems as they occur. As such, one of his goals is that the conversion be as speedy as possible, and he specifically said that he doesn't want to share a CPU with other cloud users. He wants one fast CPU devoted 100% to his project.

Makes sense to me.

.

Cloud servers with no virtualization and 100% of the CPU? That's what OnMetal is for, motherfuckers!

Ok here is the bloated form for people like you who can't seem to operate a search engine and need every term explained to them or directly linked.

Docker (which is an open platform for developers and sysadmins to build, ship, and run distributed applications. Consisting of Docker Engine, a portable, lightweight runtime and packaging tool, and Docker Hub, a cloud service for sharing applications and automating workflows, Docker enables apps to be quickly assembled from components and eliminates the friction between development, QA, and production environments. As a result, IT can ship faster and run the same app, unchanged, on laptops, data center VMs, and any cloud) isn't niche. It is one of the core technologies for DevOps (a concept dealing with, among other things: software development, operations, and services. It emphasizes communication, collaboration, and integration between software developers and information technology (IT) operations personnel) which is designing application infrastructures where IT provides a platform for in-house and integrate micro-services (that are small, independent processes communicating with each other using language-agnostic APIs to form complex applications) rather than providing monolithic applications (single-tiered software applications in which the user interface and data access code are combined into a single program from a single platform) to departments. Many PaaS (Platform as a Service, a category of cloud computing services that provides a computing platform and a solution stack as a service) systems are based on Docker particularly Helion, CenturyLink, Rackspace its a big player for AWS...

So much easier to understand right?

I seriously recommend this blog from Rackspace to those who are so caught up in cloudy-cluster-off-premises-corporate talk.

This rising complexity and cost on the multi-tenant cloud is hitting customers in four main ways:
- They spend more on engineering time and talent to architect for failure on the multi-tenant cloud, which is complex and hard.
- They also spend more on engineering to deal with inconsistent performance, which is even harder.
- They spend more on infrastructure, because over-provisioning is one of the major ways to compensate for inconsistent performance.
- They spend more through the virtualization tax, which can diminish disk and network performance by 5 percent to 20 percent.

KEEP your existing hardware as a live back up for when it starts raining in the cloud. Better yet, build in cost for new hardware on your rack over the next year to lower costs / maintenance and get some experience in building and operating your own in-house cloudy thing.

There were three arcades in the mall near where I lived in the '80s, a proper arcade, a bunch of cabs next door at the movie theater, and a few more cabs next to the Montgomery Ward's entrance. Now that mall is the headquarters of an internet hosting company.

I was in college in the early '80s, and could play Gravitar for like half an hour on a quarter, and two-fisted Gauntlet, pumping dozens of quarters into one character to get a high score on another character that had a single quarter. (high scores were divided by number of quarters inserted)

I remember being really unhappy about Pole Position when it showed up, in that you could only go four or five laps per credit no matter how well you played.

Can we just step back and first agree that not every website on the internet is a full-fledged business hell-bent on removing your privacy and liberties for the quickest dollar?

Yes, sure, we can. I have a Web site. I don't attack people's privacy. And I don't have ads on the Web site. It's free for all. But if someone inserts ad scripts into his Web site, he sells his visitors to the ad companies. He has no control over what exactly they serve. It could be viruses. It could be obscene ads. It could be political ads (but I repeat myself.) It could be a message from Greenpeace, or from Japanese whalers.

Why? Do you not derive any entertainment from the internet in any form?

One can derive entertainment from things that are free. One can make things free that aren't too hard to provide. Some collectors of paintings offer them for public viewing, even though it's their money that paid for the paintings. People knew how to share even before they formed a language.

I can only assume you don't compensate anyone for accessing or interacting with someone's web presence

There are a few services that I find useful and worth of paying for. Others have more choice - some gaming networks, some movie streaming services, some Internet radios... but I have no use of them. I do pay for ARRL, but it includes more than just access to the Web site. I do pay for eQSL.cc. I would generally pay for a useful (to me) service.

So in your 'none-or-the-other' ecosystem, any website with an appreciable, growing fanbase should put an "Oops, got too popular" closing message once they outgrow a free or nominally-priced host that this essential charity is no longer financially feasible?

Demand subscription. If 100,000 fans are indeed in love with the Web site they will pay $1 per year to run a few servers at Amazon. If they do not pay, they get no service. Those rules are very simple and easy to understand, as opposed to the current "free" service that comes with light years of attached strings, and then with endless bitching that some users cut those strings off.

Perhaps we should more accurately define "expensive", but I would imagine bandwidth costs alone for site ranked among the top ~1600 (Alexa approximation) would be fairly sizable. Then you have hardware: servers, memory, networking equipment.

Will that cost $100,000 per year in hardware and rent and bandwidth? Rackspace has these prices: $150/mo pays for 500GB of bandwidth per month. Let's say we have the same 100,000 users who refresh the site ten times per day. So we need 1 million accesses per day. Each access is 10 kB, so we need 10 GB per day, or 300 GB per month. This is still included in the $150 deal. But if you need more (say, all your users are doing 100 page loads per day!) you can buy bandwidth for 18 cents per GB. Since you collected $100K per year, that would be $8300 per month - this will buy you 46 TB per month. Wouldn't that be somewhat sufficient, even as we assume that all 100,000 registered users connect every single day, and not once in a while as it usually happens?

In your post, you've outlined that there is no room for being in the middle... which is pretty much where all the most awesome stuff comes from. How do they get to exist?

They can exist in any way they want, as long as they don't sell privacy of their visitors to pay their bills. How would you like a bar where some trivial service is free, but they take a copy of your ID and publish it for any ID thief to see? It's like arguing that purse cutters at the market square must be allowed to cut purses - how else can they sustain their small business? But, of course, not every revenue stream is legal, or ethical.

Yes. Rackspace even has an outage on their main website that lasted *days* just few months ago, if you wanted to access it via IPv6. Sadly, there was not easy place to report the outage. The technical contact in whois is something at netnames.com? So I just ignored it.

Anyway,

    https://status.rackspace.com/

lots of reports of small issues. You should know this stuff if you are running an instance on their hardware!!

Congress, say.

And of course 'instantly' would be too gestapo for real life. We'd really want a grace period with escalating warnings, followed by fines, followed by pulling-the-plug.

And it'd be much better if industry came up with this on its own first. What's the state of the art?

Rackspace talks about security,
http://www.rackspace.com/managed_hosting/services/security/
but doesn't seem to offer proactive vulnerability scanning, and if they did, they would charge for it instead of just doing it.

Godaddy seems to offer this as an extra cost
service instead of just doing it:
http://www.godaddy.com/security/website-security.aspx

Here's one wordpress hosting provider that promises to install all security updates within one hour (wow):
https://wpengine.com/security/

So, industry guys, can we get our act together and offer security scans and upgrades as part of the basic service plan?

Just looked again, says $16.06, not $16.00. Link is rackspace.com -> products -> cloud servers -> pricing

Bad summary. According to a post on the Rackspace blog, "we negotiated a mutual forbearance agreement that required either party to give 30 days’ notice before bringing suit." It isn't that they had agreed to pay the troll, it's that Rackspace was doing their best to get the details about the alleged infringement without waiving their right to bring a countersuit. Source: http://www.rackspace.com/blog/why-rackspace-sued-the-most-notorious-patent-troll-in-america/.

It might as well be spam in my inbox.

Why not just link the damn blog post by Rackspace itself? link

You have to take off your IT hat and think about it from a business perspective. A cost center like IT is a nightmare from an accounting perspective because it puts a lot of weight in the capital expenditure column (while cloud hosting is a operational expenditure, which is much easier to swallow).

Have a quick read on this topic:
http://www.rackspace.com/knowledge_center/whitepaper/getting-on-the-right-side-of-the-capex-vs-opex-divide
(disclaimer: it's from a company that offers cloud hosting)

Now if you take actual numbers (from Azure but you can get equivalent with a mix of AWS and Google):
-hosting a 10GB SQL Server database on Azure: $50/month (backup, licenses and maintenance included)
-add up to 10 web apps: $100/month (backup, licenses and maintenance included)
-add a service bus with 10 million messages a month: $10/month
-add two Windows VM to run those weird proprietary apps that can't go web: $20/month

You are now facing a $180/month bill for a 3-site redundant infrastructure that gives a 99.9% uptime SLA (that's Azure, other may vary) that is absolutely not dependant on the local staff vacation schedule. Over 3 years this means a bit under $7k for machines you don't have to buy, power, cool down and maintain (except for patching those 2 VMs). A single physical server will cost more than that (many times if it's running Windows and SQL Server) and there is no way you can get a 99.9% uptime with a single server that you have to patch, maintain, etc. and that may end up offline a few days if the RAID controller goes bad and the battery is backorder.

Now let's run numbers for office stuff (email, groupware, etc);
-Exchange online is $4/user/month (max 25GB inbox). For the 150 employees in Company C, this means about 7k$ a year.
-Full online services (unlimited email, archiving, voicemail integration, SharePoint, etc) is $20/user/month. this means about $35k a year.
(again - same is available from other providers like Google)

So the total for a full cloud scenario with unlimited email and no need for hardware/backup/maintenance/monitoring is around $40k/year. At Company C their current IT staff alone cost them about 10-15 times that; if by hosting their applications, databases and emails in the cloud they can get rid of 1-2 dudes they are in the black. Plus savings on hardware, power, cooling, licenses and whatnot. And guess what, with fully monitored and maintained cloud services, Company C could probably live with a very small IT group.

As for SLAs: when you have a 15-person staff, with vacation, sick days and variable skill set you cannot expect to have the same availability as a well-staffed, established cloud provider. Volume speaks.

So spin this any way you want, the cloud is a good scenario for Company C (and there are a lot of them out there).

http://www.rackspace.com/blog/rackspace-cloud-block-storage-making-progress-towards-a-fall-release/

"Nearing fall release"?!? Help us out!

Not without cost, but a 256 MB server is only 1.5c/hr. You could spin you a standard 2 db, 2 webhead, behind a load balancer development environment to play with for just 7.5c/hr. (Don't do it with the RHEL builds, they have flat licensing fees). You can play with any of the API language bindings, or directly in curl. Our API docs are freely available to anyone, and we use a RESTful API. I wish I had seen this before, but I don't check this email often. If you're actually interested, feel free to email me at the listed email address. Make sure to put something useful in the title, so I don't discount you as spam, and I'd be more than happy to help you get started. I'm one of the stronger folks with the APIs since they interest me personally, not just professionally. Or you can check out the docs: http://docs.rackspace.com/api/ Or both.

You can get a vm at rackspace for about $11 a month: http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/cloud_hosting_products/servers/pricing/

Or of course, there is always the ever popular Amazon..

http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/cloud_hosting_products/servers/

It was apparently Rackspace, judging by the PDF document linked in the original submission.

"It's tagged as rackspace. http://www.rackspace.com/"

I just went to that website, as well as every single link from the main page. At each page I used the find function to search each page for a single word. I did not find it....anywhere. That being said, maybe they simply overlooked the concept.

The word I searched for?.........."SECURITY".

It's tagged as rackspace. http://www.rackspace.com/

So, how do the taggers know this? Or are they guessing?

It's tagged as rackspace. http://www.rackspace.com/

Seems like VMware to me: http://www.rackspace.com/information/newsroom/pressreleases/rackspace-private-cloud-leverages-vmware-to-extend-enterprise-computing-on-demand/

The funny thing is, even $5 VPS boxes allow you to set rDNS, the way most VPS providers have them set up with a SolusVM web-based control panel. You can change the rDNS every minute if you want.

More expensive VPS's (like Rackspace) allow that, too, though apparently Amazon does not.

+1. It is very nice to be able to spin up 50 instances, run the hell out of your job, then delete them. It gets done faster, and you don't have to deal with maintenance, upgrades, and obsolescence. Realized you need more RAM? Just adjust it! And so on. It'll likely come out cheaper than owning your own after you add up all the hidden costs (power, cooling, space, time, etc).

The only downside is there are no GPUs. But that's not really a downside: if you do end up developing a GPU version, your cluster configuration would completely change (1x2 cores per box, 3-4U boxes with many PCI-E slots, instead of 2x8 cores or however many you can economically cram into a 1-2U pizza box), so the investment you'd make now would be completely wrong for that future development. With cloud servers you minimize sunk costs.

I use Rackspace Cloud and it performs as promised. It's definitely worth a look.

You can already sorta do this with rackspace, among others. The problem is... how many bloggers, etc expect to get slashdotted enough to justify the cost?

The cheapest windows vm at rackspace is $58.40/mo. http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/cloud_hosting_products/servers/pricing/

I recently moved one of my clients' sites to a RCS (in this case CentOS 5.5), and it's working out quite well. I have full control of the OS and packages, and do not worry about the hardware. For a small licensing fee per month, you can Windows OS options (although I don't know a lot of details).

It's scalable (load balancing, scalable RAM, etc), and it's inexpensive. Definitely worth a look here.

For a few more bucks, you can have managed Cloud Servers, etc.

    Have you read the Rackspace AUP?

Any conduct that is likely to result in retaliation against the Rackspace network or website, or Rackspace's employees, officers or other agents, including engaging in behavior that results in any server being the target of a denial of service attack (DoS).

You may not publish, transmit or store on or via Rackspace's network and equipment any content or links to any content that Rackspace reasonably believes: ...

is excessively violent, incites violence, threatens violence, or contains harassing content or hate speech;

    Really, I wouldn't want to be hosting them either. They're bound to be under some pretty significant DoS attacks just from the announcement. There can and will likely be violence that happens if they do their book burning event. There's no question, they are burning Qurans is very obviously to incite violence. What else are they doing it for? To save the environment? To get rid of Quran overstock? To destroy damaged Qurans from their library. No, they're trying to pick fights. Unfortunately, he's doing it from the relative safety of the US. He should go play his game in the middle east. He's taunting a fight that he's not prepared to win.

Build a virtual PC on Rackspace, whichever OS you wish, Fedora or Windows Server 2008 R2 among several others, and remote to it. A dollar a day buys you a whole lot of power, and you can buy it by the day.

1. If you're looking for a shared web host solution (maybe under 50-100k unique hits a month), you can't go wrong with http://www.asmallorange.com/ . I used their "small" shared hosting package for several years and never had a problem.

2. If you're looking for a VPS with quite a bit more available resources than a web host solution and you like to setup your own *nix box, you'd be good with http://www.linode.com/ http://www.slicehost.com/ (those two primarily support Linux, but you can setup a NetBSD Xen slice by hand if you are so inclined), or if you really don't want any brakes when it comes to setting up your Xen VPS, http://www.prgmr.com/ (they also primarily support Linux, but they have a HOWTO on their wiki on how to setup NetBSD.)

3. I haven't found a good unmanaged dedicated host yet, though I hear http://www.softlayer.com/ is great. If you want a managed dedicated host, you can't go wrong with http://www.rackspace.com/ .

And that's a solution that solves the grandparent's problems, specifically that cable modems really aren't that fast - not when compared to enterprise bandwidth. But there's still huge demand for off-site storage for enterprise in the cloud.

At Rackspace Email, we use Amazon S3 for data backup (link to blog). Depending on what step you're at in an email's life, and whether or not you count raid, we've got between "a few" and "a bunch" of copies of your email in our datacenters; but just in case, we also ship it off to Amazon (with an eventual consistency model) so that if something happens to our stuff, or you delete it accidentally, or whatever, we can pull it from S3. It takes a while to pull a 5GB mailbox from Amazon, but it's not that long - not when you've got enterprise pipes.

I think it's really a question of a ratio of data to bandwidth. The internet, you see, is not a big truck, it's a series of tubes. If you dump data onto it over time, expecting to be able to retrieve it instantly, you're going to have a bad day when you find out those tubes aren't big enough for your horse racing bets. Where was I going with this?

I dunno, there should be some sort of maxim; something along the lines of "you shouldn't store more information in the cloud than you can pull down in 24h given your current bandwidth". Or else, you're going to have an unsatisfactory experience.

On the other hand, there are plenty of times that even end-user consumers should investigate cloud storage. Jungle Disk (full disclosure: rackspace acquired JD) is a little piece of software that interfaces between an end user and either S3 or rackspace cloud files, and in windows, just adds a drive letter to your "My Computer" where you can dump files to the Cloud. For a couple of bucks, you can store (for example) a reasonable MP3 collection.

Whatever, this whole article seems to be a troll. There's definitely a huge demand for Cloud services, and SaaS in general. It's growing (industry-wide) by leaps and bounds. See the state of the cloud for more info.

due to the advantages of 'having their miners virtually next door to the mother lode of data centers.' The new NSA facility is just a few miles from Microsoft's data center of the same size.

They forgot to mention the other mother lode of data centers.

Also, San Antonio has a lot of IT people with security clearances, which may also be useful for them.

Check out Rackspace. You can get just email from them or email and server space if you want. http://www.rackspace.com/solutions/mail/index.php

Yeah, I was going to say - RHEL hasn't flown under the radar. It's expensive. So, not everyone wants it - consumer home markets will use Fedora, and smaller businesses use CentOS. But, where I work, we have thousands of servers running RHEL.

"flown under the radar" indeed.

~Wx

From their web site:

http://www.rackspace.com/information/announcements/datacenter.php

--

Dear Rackspace Community--

Since the recent Dallas/Fort Worth data center downtime event, we have been doing a lot of communicating with our customers. And even though the situation has been stable at the data center, we are going to continue communicating. We will not stop until every one of our customers is satisfied with our answers and understands exactly what occurred, how our affected customers will be compensated, and what exactly we plan on doing to ensure that a similar incident will not reoccur.

I've asked the team to compile and provide answers to the most frequent and pressing questions on our customers' minds. This is where we stand right now. More, importantly, this is where our customers stand.

How Can a Truck Cause A Partial Data Center Outage?
I understand how there can be confusion about this matter, but the truck knocking out the power transformer was not the cause. The truck was only the catalyst for a string of events. Ultimately, what caused the outage was the utility company cutting their power to the data center at an inopportune time for us, but an opportune and necessary time for the emergency response teams to safely rescue the accident victim.

Without notifying us the utility providers cut power, and at that exact moment we were 15 minutes into cycling up the data center's chillers. Our back up generators kicked in instantaneously, but the transfer to backup power triggered the chillers to stop cycling and then to begin cycling back up again--a process that would take on average 30 minutes. Those additional 30 minutes without chillers meant temperatures would rise to levels that could irreparably damage customers' servers and devices. We made the decision to gradually pull servers offline before that would happen. And I know we made the right decision, even if it was a hard one to make.

What Happened to the Redundancy in Your Data Center?
The critical systems are redundant at the data center. In fact we have utility and generator power sources for our DFW facility and these systems are routinely tested and maintained. When the traffic accident took out the primary utility power source, our initial fail-over to generator power worked seamlessly and resulted in no service interruption for customers. It was only after the switch back to the secondary utility power source that an unexpected series of events, unrelated to redundancy, resulted in outages.

What Are You Doing to Address The Address The Root Cause?
To be honest, our Data Center Engineers and our top-tier providers are still devising an action plan and working on a permanent solution. After initial investigations, we have a good idea what exactly needs to be done. Now we are working on developing the plans to get it done quickly, but properly. As soon as we know more, we will share the information with you.

I know these are answers to only a few of the countless questions out there. I wanted to make sure you have the most accurate answers to these pressing questions--not word of mouth or gossip--but directly from Rackspace and me.

Your Account Managers, your Support Teams and the Rackspace customer portal will continue to update you with the latest information. I will continue posting as long as I have important news to share with you.

Sincerely,

Lanham Napier, CEO & The Rackspace Team.

In the second incident at approximately 6:30 PM CST Monday, a vehicle struck and brought down the transformer feeding power to the DFW data center. It immediately disrupted power to the entire data center and our emergency generators kicked in and operated as intended. When we transferred power to our secondary utility power system, the data center's chilling units were cycled back up. At this time, however, the utility provider shut down power in order to allow emergency rescue teams safe access to the accident victim.

http://www.rackspace.com/information/announcements/datacenter.php

At least they're not denying a problem, minimizing impact and shruging off blame. Things break. Things break badly. People make mistakes and fail to deliver. Yet, it is the response to these failures that shows the true measure of a company (and a person).

For the important stuff, I use Rackspace. Starts at about $300/month for a decently-specced linux/freebsd box. Network, reliability, and support are top-notch. In the case of major problems like hard drive failures (which are going to happen eventually when you have enough boxes for enough time), they have been incredibly responsive and done everything I could have hoped for in order to get me back up and running ASAP.

For everything else, I use 1and1. Starts at about $100/month for a decent linux/freebsd box. I haven't had any real problems (network outages or hardware failures) in all the years I've been with them, but their support is pretty slow to respond to minor stuff so I'm not sure how they'd be with major issues. They provide remote serial console connections so you can even reboot your machine and run it in single-user mode, nice for doing upgrades and recovering from stupid firewall misconfigurations.

Rackspace is expensive but they've never let me down. And it's the only place I know where you can call their toll-free number at 3am and the first person who picks up the phone can have an intelligent conversation with you about FreeBSD kernel tuning.

In five years there's never been any unexpected downtime or network problems, and scheduled downtime has been measured in minutes per year. In the one case where one of the drives in one of our servers failed, they worked hard to get it taken care of ASAP.

Seriously, this reminds me of a news story in recent weeks where a company installing cable managed to break open a gas line. Incinerated the workforce and a passerby.

What is it with negligence and installation, these days? There's no shortage of people you can call to check if there's something nearby you need to avoid. If you prefer to do the job yourself, you can always hire a ground-penetrating radar.

(Given that it's cheaper to rent one of those toys than to replace a house or pay families compensation for deaths through negligence, it wouldn't be such a bad idea for companies to use these as standard.)

Given how much cost-cutting and corner-cutting that companies almost have to do, to stay competitive and profitable, I expect this problem to get worse, as the information demands make upgrading copper to fibre increasingly necessary.

I'm not so sure I agree. Over the past three years I've done a considerable amount of work in the adult web industry (yes, actual work of the non-fun variety). The most professional hosts that allow adult sites aren't exclusively "adult hosts". Actually, many adult hosts are terribly unreliable and/or unprofessional, and few of them offer managed hosting, which is what this person needs.

That said, there are a number of extremely reliable, professional managed hosting companies that attract a lot of adult paysite owners. Rackspace Managed Hosting in Texas is one of them; Netgroup Data Center in Denmark is another. (They don't come cheap.)

But this person seems also to need to know how to implement the software side as well, and I can't say for sure whether even a managed hosting company is going to be able to pick up all the slack. Maybe it's time to call IBM...

Managed Hosting
Backed by Our Award-Winning Fanatical Support(TM).

Featuring Our Exclusive:
- Zero-Downtime Network(TM) with a Money-Back Guarantee
- 1 Hour Hardware Replacement with a Money-Back Guarantee
- Instant Emergency Response

The irony of this is almost too rich to believe. Did these guys actually just commit corporate suicide in front of the entire internet?

According to this Indymedia.org article and AFP report, the request to seize Indymedia servers hosted by a US company in the UK (covered in this previous slashdot story) originated from government agencies in Italy and Switzerland, not the United States. Because Indymedia's hosting company, Rackspace, is a US company, the FBI coordinated the request and accompanied UK Metropolitan Police on the seizure under the auspices of the Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty (MLAT), an international legal treaty, but, according to an FBI spokesman, 'It is not an FBI operation. Through [MLAT], the subpoena was on behalf of a third country'. Rackspace's statement reads, 'In the present matter regarding Indymedia, Rackspace Managed Hosting, a U.S. based company with offices in London, is acting in compliance with a court order pursuant to a Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty (MLAT), which establishes procedures for countries to assist each other in investigations such as international terrorism, kidnapping and money laundering. Rackspace responded to a Commissioner's subpoena, duly issued under Title 28, United States Code, Section 1782 in an investigation that did not arise in the United States. Rackspace is acting as a good corporate citizen and is cooperating with international law enforcement authorities. The court prohibits Rackspace from commenting further on this matter.'

I guess that's what Rackspace means by Fanatical Support(TM)

But don't you think there might have been some not very clueful but honest customers?

So it's the FBI's fault if you don't bother to research your hosting provider before moving your mission critical data there? I'm not saying it doesn't suck to be them (if there were any innocent but not very clueful customers -- which with Foonet is a large assumption) but let's be real -- why would you host your business website with any "IRC Shell provider" let alone Foonet? That's what these guys are for.

I don't want to stretch the anology too much, but the police would not extend there search/seizures in that manner, even if that were the case.

No they probably wouldn't. But the point is still valid. Would you put your business in an apartment building with meth labs in it?

On the other hand, it *is* just an awkward analogy. I'm not sure how the police can proceed in a case like that. Let's say they don't disconnect the network. What if the evidence was on the very machine which hosts some honest business? The employees might have a means of logging in on just that machine. So unless you have very detailed knowledge of the location of the evidence, you might have a hard time deciding what to confiscate and what to keep running.

But what part of the article didn't you read? The employees themselves were involved. How could you trust them? How could you leave the machines running? What if a cron job was setup to kill any evidence every 24 hours if it wasn't turned off? The only thing to do was seize the machines and image the hard drives. What would you have done in the FBI's shoes? I'm sure the whole "let the employees get the data for us" then seizing the machines "because they weren't going fast enough" was probably a ploy to see if they would try to destroy any evidence in front of the FBI guys. They might have incremented themselves. Cops do this all the time to try and get confessions/extra evidence out of suspects. They were doubtless going to seize the machines the entire time.

To take it a step further and go back to my "meth labs in the apartment complex" theory let's say the landlord and owner of the building was the one involved? He has keys to every apartment in the complex. That right there would probably give the cops enough grounds to search every apartment in the building -- the same thing that happened here.

It does suck if there were any innocent customers -- but they learned a valuable lesson and I'm sure the impact wasn't that bad for them. If your website going down for a few days is going to put you out of business then you shouldn't be hosting said website with anybody other then Rackspace or a similar business. Foonet doesn't cut it.

But don't you think there might have been some not very clueful but honest customers?

So it's the FBI's fault if you don't bother to research your hosting provider before moving your mission critical data there? I'm not saying it doesn't suck to be them (if there were any innocent but not very clueful customers -- which with Foonet is a large assumption) but let's be real -- why would you host your business website with any "IRC Shell provider" let alone Foonet? That's what these guys are for.

I don't want to stretch the anology too much, but the police would not extend there search/seizures in that manner, even if that were the case.

No they probably wouldn't. But the point is still valid. Would you put your business in an apartment building with meth labs in it?

On the other hand, it *is* just an awkward analogy. I'm not sure how the police can proceed in a case like that. Let's say they don't disconnect the network. What if the evidence was on the very machine which hosts some honest business? The employees might have a means of logging in on just that machine. So unless you have very detailed knowledge of the location of the evidence, you might have a hard time deciding what to confiscate and what to keep running.

But what part of the article didn't you read? The employees themselves were involved. How could you trust them? How could you leave the machines running? What if a cron job was setup to kill any evidence every 24 hours if it wasn't turned off? The only thing to do was seize the machines and image the hard drives. What would you have done in the FBI's shoes? I'm sure the whole "let the employees get the data for us" then seizing the machines "because they weren't going fast enough" was probably a ploy to see if they would try to destroy any evidence in front of the FBI guys. They might have incremented themselves. Cops do this all the time to try and get confessions/extra evidence out of suspects. They were doubtless going to seize the machines the entire time.

To take it a step further and go back to my "meth labs in the apartment complex" theory let's say the landlord and owner of the building was the one involved? He has keys to every apartment in the complex. That right there would probably give the cops enough grounds to search every apartment in the building -- the same thing that happened here.

It does suck if there were any innocent customers -- but they learned a valuable lesson and I'm sure the impact wasn't that bad for them. If your website going down for a few days is going to put you out of business then you shouldn't be hosting said website with anybody other then Rackspace or a similar business. Foonet doesn't cut it.

There are a lot of other ways that this site more or less shows signs of being a forgery.

A traceroute reveals that this site is located with rackspace.com's ip space, located on one of their Red Hat servers running Apache. A pretty robust webserving platform, right?

Let me get this straight. The site's webmistress "Dana" has "tried everything within her power" (according to the blog), including deleting the entire site and rewriting it... but she hasn't contacted the hosting company, to inform them that they're the victims of an ongoing attack?

visit Rackspace's Security Page . Gee, you'd think they MIGHT have a resource or two when it comes to tracking down a persistent hack. Think they might be interested? If not, then I'm sure as hell never going to do business with them. Unless, of course, there is no hack...I SUPPOSE that would explain their apparent disinterest... But maybe its something a little more obvious... Perhaps she's got some crazy man in a bee suit hiding in the basement tapping into her DSL connection, packet sniffing and decrypting all her passwords so he can make changes to the images in his spare time between mini-bosses in Metroid Prime, 24 hours a day.. (I can just HEAR the old scary story punchline...."Get out! The call is coming from INSIDE THE HOUSE!")

Next, every single one of the bee facts on the Fun Stuff page has been plagiarized from elsewhere on the internet, though many of them have a typo or two just in the right place to make it tougher to find a source. If this isn't a hoax, then this is simply poor and sloppy web design. NO contact info whatsoever, anywhere on the page, except for a HOTMAIL address..(gosh, isn't hotmail OWNED by microsoft?), but she "usually doesn't check it very often"? Yeah. No proofreading whatsoever? (You'd think a bee aficionado who's TRYING TO RUN A BUSINESS, wouldn't misspell the name of "the Varrao Mite"[sic] infestation that's destroying her livelihood, and her business. This site has never been proofed by anyone who knows bees.

There are a LOT of mistakes. The average worker bee makes 1 1/2 teaspoons of honey in its life? Nope. Try 1/12. Off by 1800%.. Totally unnoticeable typo to a layperson, but wouldn't someone who HARVESTS HONEY as a livelihood and business pick up on that kind of mistake instantly? Sure. I know. They're probably just typos... but there are SO MANY of them, that i simply can't believe the whole site wasn't whipped up in five minutes by some shill at Microsoft.

Then there's the real giveaway, which is that the site's URL is in the Trailer for Halo 2. Obviously Microsoft (who has done this before) has SOMETHING to do with this. So either A) M$ is behind the whole thing, ilovebees.com and all, or B) M$ has started targeting Red Hat / Apache servers to hack into, including little Auntie M's bee site, which I'd think would give her pretty decent grounds for a massive lawsuit, considering the company is publicizing the hack in theaters...

That said, This is obviously a markedly effective marketing technique. I mean.. we're all talking about it... right? And it's going straight to the core halo audience. Direct marketing at its phreakish phinest.

Yeah. Either way, if I were Auntie M. (and if Auntie M. existed), I'd be proofreading that site... and i'd think twice about heaping web design praise on little niece Dana. Then, if Dana is real, Then I do believe she HAS tried everything within her power to fix the broken site. I just believe that the extent of her troubleshooting ability consists of repeatedly clicking "reload" and hoping the problem goes away. Ok. That's unfair. Maybe she's tried deleting her cookies, too.