Help Slashdot Test Our New Data Center

After many years of living in California, Slashdot is preparing to move to a new data center in Chicago, and we need your help. We have our new site running a dump of our database from a few days ago. You can hit it at beta.slashdot.org. Please go there, post comments, submit stories, and do whatever you do normally. Or maybe abnormally — run crawlers, write poll spamming robots or something. If you find any crazy issues, please submit them to our sourceforge tracker. If you're curious, the new system features 18 2x quad-core 2.3 GHz webservers each with 8 gigs of RAM, and 4 quad-core 2.3 GHz databases with 16 gigs of RAM.

Comments

new account

[altair1230]

I couldn't create a new account on beta.slashdot.org

Re:Abnormally?

[FooAtWFU]

Apache benchmarker. If you have the right packages installed (e.g. 'apache2-utils' on Debian) it certainly exists on any Linux distro worth its salt.

Re:More info about the hardware?

[Precision]

On the Web servers, the specs are

Dual Quad Core Intel E5345 with RAID 1 of 2xSATA drives

On the Database boxes

Single Quad Core Intel E5345 with RAID 5 of 7xSAS drives w/ a hot spare

All machines are 2xGigE connected to cabinet switches which are 10G connected to our cores and our Dual 10G uplinks

Re:Power consumption?

[AKAImBatman]

What's the power consumption on this set up?

Probably less than you'd expect. Intel's latest line of Quad-core Xeon processors use 45nm fab technology. If these are 2.33GHz "Harpertown" chips, then each chip (not core!) uses only ~50 watts. That means these machines could be running in as little as 150 watts for the dual processor machines, and 250 watts for the quad processor machines. (Though the quad core machines are most likely drawing a lot more power than that for a full RAID array.) Which really isn't too shabby.

Re:Ah, the Data Center robbery center of America!

[hakr89]

They're not being hosted out of CI Host, they're being hosted out of Savvis.

Re:Obligitory

[Hatta]

iblis% sudo nmap -A -T4 beta.slashdot.org

Starting Nmap 4.53 ( http://insecure.org/ ) at 2008-05-23 15:00 CDT
SCRIPT ENGINE: rpcinfo.nse is not a file.
SCRIPT ENGINE: Aborting script scan.
Interesting ports on beta.slashdot.org (216.34.181.45):
Not shown: 1704 closed ports
PORT STATE SERVICE VERSION
21/tcp open tcpwrapped
25/tcp filtered smtp
80/tcp open http Apache httpd 1.3.41 ((Unix) mod_perl/1.31-rc4)
135/tcp filtered msrpc
136/tcp filtered profile
137/tcp filtered netbios-ns
138/tcp filtered netbios-dgm
139/tcp filtered netbios-ssn
443/tcp open ssl/http Apache httpd 1.3.41 ((Unix) mod_perl/1.31-rc4)
445/tcp filtered microsoft-ds
Device type: general purpose
Running (JUST GUESSING) : OpenBSD 4.X (91%)
Aggressive OS guesses: OpenBSD 4.1 (x86) (91%), OpenBSD 4.0 - 4.2 (90%), OpenBSD 4.0 (88%), OpenBSD 4.0 (x86) (86%)
No exact OS matches for host (test conditions non-ideal).
Network Distance: 10 hops

TRACEROUTE (using port 21/tcp)
HOP RTT ADDRESS
1 0.25 beta.slashdot.org (216.34.181.45)

OS and Service detection performed. Please report any incorrect results at http://insecure.org/nmap/submit/ .
Nmap done: 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 32.605 seconds

Looks like they're running OpenBSD of some sort.

Re:Obligitory

[livingdeadline]

Netcraft thinks it's an F5 BIG-IP device, which probably means that they've got a big, fancy load balancer. If my memory doesn't fail me, F5's appliance OS is BSD based.