Slashdot Mirror

Check out Simpli.biz in San Jose. We host several servers with them and reliability is top-notch. Also, I know that they will offer you free physical access to the datacenter as necessary. Sounds like they might be a good alternative to more expensive colocation providers.

I own a web hosting company, and we've been going through major hiring woes lately. It's not that we can't find people to hire. Oh, there are plenty of people out there. It's just that we can't find qualified people.

It's unbelievable how little Linux system administration experience some candidates have. We're paying a low-to-mid-level salary, so I don't expect to hire a UNIX guru. But these people are failing even the most basic tests. One claimed "Senior UNIX systems administrator" on his resume, but when asked to SSH into a server from a Linux workstation, typed "telnet [server] 25".

Some of the questions we ask in an interview: "Why would you use SSH instead of telnet?" "What is port 25?" "How do you reset the root password on a server when you don't know the current root password?" These are really basic questions, and yet the majority of candidates have no clue how to answer them.

I have a feeling this is only going to get worse as fewer and fewer people enter the IT field. There seems to be a large gap between the entry level, where candidates know little or nothing (or they only know point-and-drool generic PC troubleshooting skills), and the upper end, which demands (but probably deserves) outrageous salaries for knowing how to set up routers and SANs. We're looking for the people fiddling around with Linux servers and setting them up in their spare time who want some on-the-job experience administering and maintaining Linux servers. However, even here in Silicon Valley, that's proven remarkably hard to find. We also keep having to increase our workers' salaries to find even moderately qualified people, which means our costs go up and we can't hire as many people as we need to.

My advice to college students: Go out there and get yourself some experience. There are plenty of jobs out there that you can get right out of college in IT. Sure, they may not pay 6 figures a year, but if you enjoy computers, they're fun jobs. As far as recruiting students into IT, it will probably take a few years before it becomes a popular field again, due to the fact that so many people entered it expecting high salaries several years back. My advice: Set realistic expectations of those entering IT (6 figures right out of college? No. A job right out of college? Probably), and convince those not in a CS/IT major to take elective computer classes in case they want to be in a computer-related field later.

I offered them a free Dual Xeon 2.8GHz server, 1GB RAM, 1x80GB hard drive with 500GB transfer a month, hosted at Simpli (my hosting company). We host several Drupal sites and I'd be happy to have them on board. I asked for a text link back to Simpli. I haven't heard back from them, so I guess they'd rather beg their users for money than take a free dedicated server. I have to say I'm a bit disappointed, but it's their money and their choice.

You may also consider supporting the peeps on /. and going with http://www.simpli.biz/. Owned and operated by slashchick. I've never used them, but have heard only good things about them.

Owned and operated by /.'s very own SlashChick, simpli.biz does both hosting and co-location.

I've heard great things about the tech support and they are fanatical about helping their customers.

I can answer your question, as I've just built one as a giant backup solution for our hosting company.

I went with Serial ATA for a couple reasons:
1) It's cheaper and has more capacity than SCSI;
2) Cabling is not a mess as it is with regular IDE (if you've never seen serial ATA cables, the first thing you will notice is that they are small!);
3) It can hotswap, unlike regular IDE;
4) It's not that much more expensive than regular IDE.

I custom-built a 3U server from InterProMicro. They are a small (local if you are in the Bay Area) SuperMicro reseller that does great work. (If you need something, call and ask for Andy. Tell him Erica from Simpli sent you!)

The machine I specced out was as follows:
* 3U case with 8 hot-swap SATA drive bays;
* 8-port 3Ware 8506-8 SATA RAID controller;
* 5x250GB SATA drives in a RAID-5 array;
* Dual Xeon processors.

The 5 drives give you 1TB of storage, and expanding up to 8 gives you 1.75TB. I would also recommend a separate mirrored SATA 10KRPM array for the OS if you want really fast speeds. :)

This whole solution (Xeons; 5 drives; 3U case) cost just over $3000... which is pretty reasonable for 1TB of network-accessible storage. Interpro has solutions that go up to 24 SATA drives, which at 250GB each gives you an ungodly amount of space (5.75TB, if my calculations are correct.)

My suggestion is to go with a niche server builder like InterproMicro over Dell or Compaq or any of those guys. You can get the same high quality from a custom manufacturer without paying the steep brand name price from a larger manufacturer. As for the drives, any time the goal is "as much space as possible", SATA should be your first choice.

Good luck!

If you're abandoning these guys, SlashChick runs a hosting company called simpli.biz, which other Fans of hers have said is pretty good.

I wonder what my hosting provider plans to do about this. I should ask them.

Their Basic Personal package is $8.95/month quarterly and they provide PostgreSQL and Python support. Lots of Slashdotters host with them since the owner has a journal here.

I used to work at Cobalt -- we basically saw the writing on the wall two years ago when Sun decided to let go of pretty much everyone working in their "Server Appliance Business Unit".

We currently have 12 Cobalt RaQ servers. We haven't bought any new ones recently; we leased out the ones we had and moved on to cPanel, Ensim, and DirectAdmin.

Of the three control panels we've used, I'd recommend Ensim. They have a RaQ migration script that lets you migrate as many domains as you want painlessly. The script costs around $150 one-time, but it's worth it if you have more than 10 domains or so on your RaQ. Ensim also has virtual users, so two users can have the same name.

I wouldn't recommend cPanel at all. DirectAdmin is a nice control panel, but you'll have to do the RaQ migration by hand, which could be painful.

Build out a nice 1U box with a P4 processor in it. Stick Ensim on it, run the RaQ migration script, and fix any issues you have. You should be fine from here on out, and Ensim is a large enough control panel that they are unlikely to bite the dust any time soon.

Good luck with your transition! If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me through our website at www.simpli.biz.

Thanks!

I used to work at Cobalt -- we basically saw the writing on the wall two years ago when Sun decided to let go of pretty much everyone working in their "Server Appliance Business Unit".

We currently have 12 Cobalt RaQ servers. We haven't bought any new ones recently; we leased out the ones we had and moved on to cPanel, Ensim, and DirectAdmin.

Of the three control panels we've used, I'd recommend Ensim. They have a RaQ migration script that lets you migrate as many domains as you want painlessly. The script costs around $150 one-time, but it's worth it if you have more than 10 domains or so on your RaQ. Ensim also has virtual users, so two users can have the same name.

I wouldn't recommend cPanel at all. DirectAdmin is a nice control panel, but you'll have to do the RaQ migration by hand, which could be painful.

Build out a nice 1U box with a P4 processor in it. Stick Ensim on it, run the RaQ migration script, and fix any issues you have. You should be fine from here on out, and Ensim is a large enough control panel that they are unlikely to bite the dust any time soon.

Good luck with your transition! If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me through our website at www.simpli.biz.

Thanks!

The next contest should be a "Redesign Slashdot's Website" contest... or even a "Redo Slashdot's HTML" contest. We obviously have some really creative designers in the audience (including me)... I'd love to see some web design ideas!

"How can I raise funds to help continue the project?"

One word: sponsorships.

No, I'm not talking about T-shirts with your project's name on them... although if you think that will help, go for it. I'm talking about finding companies that will actively sponsor your development.

For instance, my company has been in talks with both the PHP project and the PostgreSQL project about sponsorship. (We haven't officially contacted the Postgres team, but we will for our August advertising budget.) We're happy to sponsor open-source projects for two reasons: one, we use these projects to make money, and two, because people who are interested in a particular project are often looking for a company that offers support for that particular project.

There are lots of open-source projects out there that have referral links or sponsorships from companies that use that project to make money. For us, sponsorship is huge, since we want to become well-known in "niche" markets like PostgreSQL web hosting, as opposed to the generic and overblown "virtual web hosting" category.

So approach companies that make products that depend on your project and ask them to sponsor it. You may find a company that uses your project to make money is more than a little happy to kick back $50/month for a banner ad or text link on your project's website. Don't be afraid to ask!

I'm pretty sure this is a troll (I mean, .NET support?), but since it's had a large amount of "Insightful" mods, I figured I would point out at least one misconception.

The parent poster complains about "consistant (sp) database integration" as one of the main problems with PHP. This is usually a problem noted only by those who haven't used PHP in serious development. Sure, if you're writing a 20-line script that you know is only going to use MySQL, then who cares what database connection statements you're using. However, if you're writing anything that needs to be more serious and portable, check out one of PHP's database abstraction libraries: ADOdb or Pear DB. Both of these libraries will let you abstract out database functions so that they aren't tied to one specific database.

Personally, I prefer ADOdb. Not only is it faster than Pear DB, but there's also a C port to speed it up even more. ADOdb also has more capabilities, and its author hangs out in their forums and is extremely helpful with user questions.

You have to change your mindset a bit to code with ADOdb or Pear DB, but it's worth the bit of extra learning curve to gain portability. Since ADOdb can generate insert/update SQL and also generate HTML tables, I find that I'm faster coding with it than I ever was with mysql_query()... and I can switch to Postgres or Microsoft SQL Server at any time without really thinking about my database code.

I hope this helps those of you who are still stuck with mysql_query() or similar. <plug>Also, we're a web hosting company that supports PHP 4.3.x, ADOdb and Pear DB, and we will answer your PHP questions as part of your web hosting package.</plug>

The actual document specification for PDF is open. Adobe just happened to not only create the format, but also make the most popular PDF reader and writer (the Acrobat series.) There are, however, free alternatives such as Ghostscript that generate great PDFs from a Postscript file (which you can generate from any program in Windows just by checking the "Print to File" box on a Postscript printer.)

If you're interested in generating PDFs from PHP, there are a myriad of options available by searching Google. Some web hosting companies also support generating PDFs from PHP, which makes generating PDFs a cinch.

HTH!

• Search images/newsgroups with one click. With IE, I type in a search term and click the image button and voila, I'm searching images.google.com. This might have been fixed recently in Mozdev, but it wasn't the last time I checked.
• Of critical importance is the search word and highlight feature. Often I'll search for something like "Linux sendmail configuration." What comes up? Newsgroup posts, and often several LONG pages of them. I search via the toolbar and then click the "sendmail" button on the right, and IE scrolls down to the first occurrence of that word. Put simply, this rocks. It nearly eliminates the need for Ctrl-F and makes my searches at least 10 times as fast (since I don't have to scroll down manually or Ctrl-F and type in the word again.)
  
• Highlight/PageRank. I don't use these as often as the find word feature, but they're still a consideration. I don't want to switch browsers and lose functionality.

It has been updated.

New About Page

I'll have to flesh it out once we get the rest of the website operational. The only thing that is up there right now is the hosting section.

--SlashChick

Particularly the '...etc' bit at the end.

Maybe you could add some more like

'and we do um, stuff, a lot, and we're very good at it, cos we r00l'.

I happened to be bored, so I grabbed all 6 pages and posted them here:

http://pages.simpli.biz/casemod

The "Next" and "Previous" links have been changed to point to my server, but everything else remains identical.

I am collecting browser statistics on this page. I'll post them in my journal within 24 hours. I'm donating my bandwidth because I'm really interested in what browsers Slashdot users use. If you don't want your statistics collected, don't click on the link.