I wrote MachDB for this exact purpose. Had a datacenter of a few hundred machines and needed to keep track of them in a better way than a wiki page. http://www.machdb.org./ It's automated on the back end and presents a web GUI.
Seriously? Why do they expect that line level workers shouldn't act like crooks when it's standard practice for executives? Step back from this article title and realize that crooked executives caused the recession and it makes perfect sense.
It cost us about $2500 for a refurbished 1.5 ton recirc unit in the ceiling adjacent to our 60 sqft server room (not above it). I had done some calculations to determine that it should be enough cooling to handle 3.5 racks of our 1U whiteboxes running a full tilt. You'd want to put it adjacent because they are full of water and past experiences of server-waterfalls have taught me not to have servers under AC units.:)
However, stop now. Don't do that. What we learned is that to do it right, you need a lot more than just some AC units. You need reliable power, internet, chillers, maintenance staff and building management. You need to be able to get an AC contractor that will be able to be on-call and respond to you within a few hours, even in the middle of the night or on the weekend. When it freezes up (they do it from time to time) and stops heating you have a situation to deal with and must implement emergency cooling measures until they arrive. Always a fun day. And that power and AC in an older (80's era) office building are not designed for mission critical support of high density servers. Room would get hot almost every weekend as the building owners conserved AC by turning off the chillers. Maintenance staff and building owners had no concepts of how to deal with our 'internet company' needs. Don't forget worrying about physical security too, don't want a rogue employee or maintenance staff getting into the server room and doing god knows what (plugging a vacuum/Flavia/heater into the wrong power outlet and blowing the circuit).
So we moved it all to a cage at a local datacenter and haven't looked back. Much better situation and a lot cheaper & easier.
You have a valid point, however, your data points are wrong. A T1 may cost $500 bucks, but not for the bandwidth. That's local loop, telco, equip rental, etc. Nobody buys multiple T1's to get big bandwidth. The market price to a regular joe of 1Mbit of bandwidth in a datacenter is $150. And it goes down quickly from there. You buy 1Gbit, you get substantial discounts. ISP's do it on a whole 'nother level. They have pipes to other major networks that they exchange traffic with at little to no cost (other than the overhead of the pipe and management). This is called 'peering'. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peering) Places like COX and other large home provides either have their own networks or have agreements with other providers that keep the costs low. The costs they incurr are when they have to send 'transit' out of their networks and onto their providers. For instance, if you do BT to 50 sites overseas, your ISP pays for that. If you are on COX and you do BT to other COX customers, the cost is substantially less for COX.
I grew up in Nashville, 3-4 hours from Oak Ridge. And my HS went to a few of the ORNL programs. At least back then (1990's) they had great programs. It's one of the reasons I went into computers, I thank them for that. Maybe it's not ORNL, maybe it's your high school/teachers. Get involved, go find out what is available and present it to the teachers!
I haven't seen this username on/. in a while. Guess it takes an MP3.com article to bring us geeks together. Good luck on your new company, it looks like a pretty neat thing. VoIP is the future (now) of long distance communication, glad to see you're on the forefront.
There will always be someone out there that doesn't like the popular distro's politics, design, users, developers, pretty much anything that could be picked on...and they'll go out and develop their own distro. I currently don't like any of the distro's and am planning out my own as soon as I can get a few other projects out of the way. I think this may simply be the spreading of FUD by the TurboLinux guys...
IBM's just getting press. Go out and download reiserfs...it truely rocks. I use it on my production servers, at home and on my mp3 player. Highly recommended.
I don't think that my old graph is updated anymore, but those machines were/are only 200MHz AMD's on old motherboards with 256M of RAM each with a NetApp F630 for back end storage. The spikes are webcrawlers, mostly Google nowdays. A little calculation will show that if we could have attracted "peak hour hits" all day, it'd be 3.3M hits between the 3 machines, so 1.1M per machine...and those machines hardly break a sweat! Those machines used to regularly handle around 30 hits/sec each. I recently spec'd out a system for a company that had a $20k price tag, is completely Linux and could do about 10 times that load. Course, we're talking mostly static stuff. If you factor CGI's into the equasion, ModPerl is far faster/better than ASP or whatever NT will have you use, so that raises the edge Linux/Apache/Perl has even further. Tell your Boss or whoever is questioning you that statistics are wrong and that you know best or he wouldn't have hired you. Apache/Linux is the way to go period. Ask him to justify 3 admins to keep up with NT's retarded problems and random reboots vs buying extra hardware and keeping 1 admin. Extra staff (esp. admins) is expensive, hardware is cheap.
That's a pretty good idea. Noboby is going to want to read a book on the computer ("oww my eyes") and if you put the book out there with a link to buy it easily from Amazon.com or whoever for a few bucks, you're going to sell copies. Maybe even have a discount if you've read it from the web or something. That'd get people to read the first chapter or so (maybe) and then, if they like it, buy the book. If your book is good, it's going to sell anyway so you don't have a lot to worry about.
Think beyond the box...make it free and sell banner adds. That's a no brainer. I think everybody that has ever heard of Stephen King and everybody that browses regularly heard of his book release. I went to the site. I clicked around but didn't buy it. Put a banner add up there and you're gonna make something.
If you buy the material, you should get it in whatever format you want. This is why record companies are evil. "Oh, you want it on tape too?...that'll be $14 please."
Slashdot Mirror
I wrote MachDB for this exact purpose. Had a datacenter of a few hundred machines and needed to keep track of them in a better way than a wiki page. http://www.machdb.org./ It's automated on the back end and presents a web GUI.
Seriously? Why do they expect that line level workers shouldn't act like crooks when it's standard practice for executives? Step back from this article title and realize that crooked executives caused the recession and it makes perfect sense.
It cost us about $2500 for a refurbished 1.5 ton recirc unit in the ceiling adjacent to our 60 sqft server room (not above it). I had done some calculations to determine that it should be enough cooling to handle 3.5 racks of our 1U whiteboxes running a full tilt. You'd want to put it adjacent because they are full of water and past experiences of server-waterfalls have taught me not to have servers under AC units. :)
However, stop now. Don't do that. What we learned is that to do it right, you need a lot more than just some AC units. You need reliable power, internet, chillers, maintenance staff and building management. You need to be able to get an AC contractor that will be able to be on-call and respond to you within a few hours, even in the middle of the night or on the weekend. When it freezes up (they do it from time to time) and stops heating you have a situation to deal with and must implement emergency cooling measures until they arrive. Always a fun day. And that power and AC in an older (80's era) office building are not designed for mission critical support of high density servers. Room would get hot almost every weekend as the building owners conserved AC by turning off the chillers. Maintenance staff and building owners had no concepts of how to deal with our 'internet company' needs. Don't forget worrying about physical security too, don't want a rogue employee or maintenance staff getting into the server room and doing god knows what (plugging a vacuum/Flavia/heater into the wrong power outlet and blowing the circuit).
So we moved it all to a cage at a local datacenter and haven't looked back. Much better situation and a lot cheaper & easier.
So I guess you think light is a particle? Or was that a wave? :)
That's funny, I was able to sign my dad up for gmail with no invite on December 25th. Hrm.
You have a valid point, however, your data points are wrong. A T1 may cost $500 bucks, but not for the bandwidth. That's local loop, telco, equip rental, etc. Nobody buys multiple T1's to get big bandwidth. The market price to a regular joe of 1Mbit of bandwidth in a datacenter is $150. And it goes down quickly from there. You buy 1Gbit, you get substantial discounts. ISP's do it on a whole 'nother level. They have pipes to other major networks that they exchange traffic with at little to no cost (other than the overhead of the pipe and management). This is called 'peering'. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peering) Places like COX and other large home provides either have their own networks or have agreements with other providers that keep the costs low. The costs they incurr are when they have to send 'transit' out of their networks and onto their providers. For instance, if you do BT to 50 sites overseas, your ISP pays for that. If you are on COX and you do BT to other COX customers, the cost is substantially less for COX.
I grew up in Nashville, 3-4 hours from Oak Ridge. And my HS went to a few of the ORNL programs. At least back then (1990's) they had great programs. It's one of the reasons I went into computers, I thank them for that. Maybe it's not ORNL, maybe it's your high school/teachers. Get involved, go find out what is available and present it to the teachers!
I haven't seen this username on /. in a while. Guess it takes an MP3.com article to bring us geeks together. Good luck on your new company, it looks like a pretty neat thing. VoIP is the future (now) of long distance communication, glad to see you're on the forefront.
;)
-N
P.S. My Slashdot UID is lower than yours.
Dude, come on now...wasn't Tang worth it?
Dude, we called it an 'iPod' in 3rd grade. You're an adult now. It's called a 'ho-ho-dilly'.
WTF is an 'Impressive UID'? :)
The "Kate Moss Project" would be more appropriate for a "truly flat" network. ;)
There will always be someone out there that doesn't like the popular distro's politics, design, users, developers, pretty much anything that could be picked on...and they'll go out and develop their own distro. I currently don't like any of the distro's and am planning out my own as soon as I can get a few other projects out of the way. I think this may simply be the spreading of FUD by the TurboLinux guys...
IBM's just getting press. Go out and download reiserfs...it truely rocks. I use it on my production servers, at home and on my mp3 player. Highly recommended.
All it takes is a little tuning. Check this out:
click here
I don't think that my old graph is updated anymore, but those machines were/are only 200MHz AMD's on old motherboards with 256M of RAM each with a NetApp F630 for back end storage. The spikes are webcrawlers, mostly Google nowdays. A little calculation will show that if we could have attracted "peak hour hits" all day, it'd be 3.3M hits between the 3 machines, so 1.1M per machine...and those machines hardly break a sweat! Those machines used to regularly handle around 30 hits/sec each. I recently spec'd out a system for a company that had a $20k price tag, is completely Linux and could do about 10 times that load. Course, we're talking mostly static stuff. If you factor CGI's into the equasion, ModPerl is far faster/better than ASP or whatever NT will have you use, so that raises the edge Linux/Apache/Perl has even further. Tell your Boss or whoever is questioning you that statistics are wrong and that you know best or he wouldn't have hired you. Apache/Linux is the way to go period. Ask him to justify 3 admins to keep up with NT's retarded problems and random reboots vs buying extra hardware and keeping 1 admin. Extra staff (esp. admins) is expensive, hardware is cheap.
That's a pretty good idea. Noboby is going to want to read a book on the computer ("oww my eyes") and if you put the book out there with a link to buy it easily from Amazon.com or whoever for a few bucks, you're going to sell copies. Maybe even have a discount if you've read it from the web or something. That'd get people to read the first chapter or so (maybe) and then, if they like it, buy the book. If your book is good, it's going to sell anyway so you don't have a lot to worry about.
Think beyond the box...make it free and sell banner adds. That's a no brainer. I think everybody that has ever heard of Stephen King and everybody that browses regularly heard of his book release. I went to the site. I clicked around but didn't buy it. Put a banner add up there and you're gonna make something.
If you buy the material, you should get it in whatever format you want. This is why record companies are evil. "Oh, you want it on tape too?...that'll be $14 please."