Allowing the user to set their own caller ID must be allowed. My company has a PRI and half a dozen phone numbers depending on the business unit. We all want to be able to use that one PRI and each company wants their units phone number to appear on the caller ID. We must be allowed to set the caller ID to do this and we do. If we could not set it ourselves we would have to get 3 different PRI's or have some of our channels hard coded to one number and other channels to another. Each group would then only have the use of that limited number of channels/lines. Very inefficient. Also I have a VOIP phone and I want to make it the same number as the outgoing landline which everyone knows me by because that is where I want calls to come back to (they then get routed by the PBX to my IP phone or wherever I want).
Xen saved my former employer a bunch of money and gained then great flexibility and reliability. They use an AoE (ATA over ethernet) SAN so the compute nodes are totally diskless and all of the data and root filesystems are on the SAN. Now they have email, database, web serving, nearly all of their critical functions in a highly available xen-aoe cluster. I am working with them to release all of the codes and configs in production and we are setting up a website at xenaoe.org (not up yet, but soon) to host the project.
Here is something I wrote up about this architecture for the company when the project went live:
What is Xen?
Xen is a free virtualization system similar to VMware but different. It allows us to run multiple servers/operating systems all on one physical piece of hardware while providing isolation between them.
What is AoE?
AoE is a SAN technology. Similar to Fibrechannel (but far less expensive) or iSCSI (but far simpler and more efficient).
What are the advantages of Xen and AoE for our company?
Xen allows us to more efficiently utilize our hardware resources. The majority of cpu power on your average computer goes unused. Even on servers. They just sit there waiting for something to happen. Even if we get a web request every second the time between one request and the next is an eternity for a cpu running at 2 gigahertz. But powerful cpu's are needed for those short bursts of activity. By using Xen to run multiple servers in their own domains (areas of memory) completely isolated from each other on the same physical hardware we can squeeze more utilization out of our existing CPU's/servers. This means we can get by with fewer CPU's, less rackspace, use less power, and require less air conditioning. By encapsulating the servers into this sort of infrastructure it also allows enhanced management capabilities by allowing the administrator (such as myself) to be able to get console access on the server or restart the server while remote instead of having to drive to the datacenter (which in our case is a 30 minute drive down to Kearny Mesa).
AoE allows us to put a bunch of disk in relatively inexpensive and low CPU powered servers on the network and allow the rest of the servers to access it exactly as if the disk were locally installed in that server. This is advantageous because we can now aggregate all of our disk into one system and treat it like a pool of storage where we can dole out an appropriate amount of disk to each server (often only 10 or 20G is needed) instead of having to put in a dedicated 250G disk which is the minimum you can easily buy these days and waste a lot of disk and power to run it.
The combination of Xen and AoE allows us all of the above plus some interesting fault tolerance abilities. There are now two levels of redundancy in our disk systems and an extra level of redundancy in the cpu's also in that if one cpu fails (or the associated motherboard, RAM, or network card) we can easily switch the servers that were hosted on that machine over to another cpu on the network with either zero or very minimal downtime whereas previously that kind of failure would have required me to drive down to the datacenter and shuffle hardware around or buy new hardware to replace the failed system which all takes time and can result in prolonged downtime.
At the moment I am just using it to host my personal website/blog, backup MX, dns, etc. Great performance and at $70/mo for a xen virtual machine with 2G of RAM it is a great deal. Every now and then they open up some slots. I posted on the message board and someone (from Amazon IIRC) dropped me a line when they had some capacity opened up. They call it beta like google calls everything beta: It's pretty solid. I have been using it for around 5 months and had no problems. Just be aware that the data stored in EC2 is not persistant and you can't go wrong.
I use two things for backup. The first and simplest is that I use s3cmd and a shell script to backup my EC2 instance to S3. s3cmd is part of s3sync which is found at s3sync.net. My shell script is as follows:
export AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=myaccesskey export AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=mysecretaccesskey hostname=`hostname -s` cd/home/treed/s3sync./s3sync.rb -d --progress -r -v/mnt/tmp/ mybucket: # Sync up anything that didn't make it in the last attempt the previous night # Delete everything so we don't fill up the disk rm -rf/mnt/tmp/* # Make a new backup and upload it cd/mnt/tmp tar -zcvf amazon-`/bin/date +%y%m%d`.tar.gz --exclude/proc --exclude/sys --exc split -b 1073741824 amazon-`/bin/date +%y%m%d`.tar.gz amazon-`/bin/date +%y%m%d` cd/home/treed/s3sync./s3sync.rb -d --progress -r -v/mnt/tmp/ mybucket:
But that is just a kludge which I use since the EC2 instance has such a fast connection to S3. For my home machines I use bacula to do the backup to file storage volumes and then I use a python program which I hacked together using the BitBucket library to query the bacula mysql database for full volumes and then it looks into the directory where bacula dumps the volumes and if it finds them there it uploads them to S3. When the upload finishes it deletes the volume from the local disk. I cron this program to run every 5 minutes checking for stuff to upload. This turns out to be a pretty slick solution and is working really well so far. You can find the source code on my blog at http://tracyreed.org/
What the heck good is 500M of free storage when it still takes way too long to upload 500M of data? I seem to get around 70k/s upload speed on my Cox cablemodem (business cablemodem, I think I have 512k/s upstream) and it takes two hours to upload 500M. The average user will take even longer.
I currently use Amazon S3 for storage (mostly backups) and I have 100G of stuff on there for my 4 monthly full backups. It takes me 4 full days to upload a full backup. So I spend nearly a quarter of the month constantly uploading! Thank the FSM that I have a Linux box doing QoS using the fine Wondershaper script so I don't even notice the uploading.
Maybe Mike Rowe of "Dirty Jobs" on the Discovery Channel can spend a day working at MS. It might top the time he had to wade through 3 feet of bat shit. I understand Ballmer goes bat shit all the time over there at MS. Of course, they might not let a fellow named Mike Rowe into their facilities after someone pulled this cute little trick.
I thought it was worth noting. Julian Dibbell wrote "A Rape in Cyberspace" which brought a crushing amount of attention to Lambda Moo and some say effectively destroyed it leaving many old time Lambda users very bitter. The best way to stir up convo on Lambda to this day is to simply mention his name. Lambda still exists. I've been using it off and on for many years now. It's funny to see Julian pop up again after all this time.
Stricter? How is GPLv3 any stricter? As far as I am concerned it only clarifies language and makes certain things explicit instead of implicit. It does not limit any of the things I have ever done with GPL software and as a developer of GPL'd code and long-time Linux user (since 94) I welcome this change. I came to Linux because I was tired of MS after having used their stuff for only a few years. And I'm not going anywhere.
Could someone please tell us what orkut groups and messages in particular that they are upset about so that we may judge for ourselves? This may well be like the 09 f9 incident: If we let the whole world see those messages and judge for themselves as a result of this group bringing attention to the issue perhaps they will rethink their tactics and we will all gain a better understanding of exactly what sort of libel this group is upset about.
Cheap RAM makes it cheaper to do my Xen deployments. I love being able to have dual dual core cpu's (4 cpu's total) in a box with 32G of ECC RAM.:) Now that's a server. I have recovered many U's of rack space using Xen and this sort of virtualization.
The treasurer said she is now determined to try to write legislation that could prevent this kind of computer piracy.
This doesn't bode well. What they need are some secure computing practices. Legislation won't prevent this, especially when the person lives outside her jurisdiction which happens to be most of the world.
Oh, and allow me to add that AoE has FAR less protocol overhead than iSCSI (since iSCSI is basically application layer and AoE is network layer). The AoE specification is 8 pages compared with iSCSI's 257 pages.
My SAN is pretty much as the guy describes except I use AoE. I use the AoE driver which comes in the Linux kernel and the vblade daemon which I can download from sourceforge. Works great.
I have been using AoE (ATA over Ethernet) in heavy production use for 9 months and it ROCKS. Block device semantics over commodity gigabit ethernet is just so useful. I love being able to decouple my disk storage from my cpu power. Especially handy when using something like Xen so you can do live migration of domains. Linux really is getting a lot of high-end features that you used to only be able to find on mainframes.
He may have majored in economics but he never graduated. And from what we can tell he spent most of his time hacking computers instead of studying economics.
They launched a satellite? That is not my understanding. Launching a sub-orbital rocket is very different from launching a satellite. The rest of your post is equally suspect.
Yeah, I have considered that. Unfortunately for my application it would have to be a bit more automated/scripted which I don't think I could do using the renderer from a web browser. Thanks!
Prince is a commercial product. I have a minor need to produce PDF's from XHTML/CSS and I really don't want to deal with licensing. I would need to run it on a server where multiple people can access it which means I would have to pay $3800 for Prince. Ouch! I don't need to do this that bad. Is there any way to do this with Free/Open Source software?
Unfortunately this one remains closed source and showed no hope of changing. But I am hoping that something along these lines will come along and change the net.
How did Stallman go to Cuba without running afoul of the embargo? Did he get some sort of special permission from the State Department or is he just running the risk of being thrown in jail?
This sounds like a VERY good reason not to use Exchange. It results in extremely poorly designed systems that are completely unmaintainable. Being able to restore individual files from backups is a normal part of maintenance which can be performed on most any sanely designed system. The system in the parent post is clearly in sane.
Slashdot Mirror
Tell a lie! Tell a lie! Yes! Yes!
Allowing the user to set their own caller ID must be allowed. My company has a PRI and half a dozen phone numbers depending on the business unit. We all want to be able to use that one PRI and each company wants their units phone number to appear on the caller ID. We must be allowed to set the caller ID to do this and we do. If we could not set it ourselves we would have to get 3 different PRI's or have some of our channels hard coded to one number and other channels to another. Each group would then only have the use of that limited number of channels/lines. Very inefficient. Also I have a VOIP phone and I want to make it the same number as the outgoing landline which everyone knows me by because that is where I want calls to come back to (they then get routed by the PBX to my IP phone or wherever I want).
Xen saved my former employer a bunch of money and gained then great flexibility and reliability. They use an AoE (ATA over ethernet) SAN so the compute nodes are totally diskless and all of the data and root filesystems are on the SAN. Now they have email, database, web serving, nearly all of their critical functions in a highly available xen-aoe cluster. I am working with them to release all of the codes and configs in production and we are setting up a website at xenaoe.org (not up yet, but soon) to host the project.
Here is something I wrote up about this architecture for the company when the project went live:
What is Xen?
Xen is a free virtualization system similar to VMware but different. It allows us to run multiple servers/operating systems all on one physical piece of hardware while providing isolation between them.
What is AoE?
AoE is a SAN technology. Similar to Fibrechannel (but far less expensive) or iSCSI (but far simpler and more efficient).
What are the advantages of Xen and AoE for our company?
Xen allows us to more efficiently utilize our hardware resources. The majority of cpu power on your average computer goes unused. Even on servers. They just sit there waiting for something to happen. Even if we get a web request every second the time between one request and the next is an eternity for a cpu running at 2 gigahertz. But powerful cpu's are needed for those short bursts of activity. By using Xen to run multiple servers in their own domains (areas of memory) completely isolated from each other on the same physical hardware we can squeeze more utilization out of our existing CPU's/servers. This means we can get by with fewer CPU's, less rackspace, use less power, and require less air conditioning. By encapsulating the servers into this sort of infrastructure it also allows enhanced management capabilities by allowing the administrator (such as myself) to be able to get console access on the server or restart the server while remote instead of having to drive to the datacenter (which in our case is a 30 minute drive down to Kearny Mesa).
AoE allows us to put a bunch of disk in relatively inexpensive and low CPU powered servers on the network and allow the rest of the servers to access it exactly as if the disk were locally installed in that server. This is advantageous because we can now aggregate all of our disk into one system and treat it like a pool of storage where we can dole out an appropriate amount of disk to each server (often only 10 or 20G is needed) instead of having to put in a dedicated 250G disk which is the minimum you can easily buy these days and waste a lot of disk and power to run it.
The combination of Xen and AoE allows us all of the above plus some interesting fault tolerance abilities. There are now two levels of redundancy in our disk systems and an extra level of redundancy in the cpu's also in that if one cpu fails (or the associated motherboard, RAM, or network card) we can easily switch the servers that were hosted on that machine over to another cpu on the network with either zero or very minimal downtime whereas previously that kind of failure would have required me to drive down to the datacenter and shuffle hardware around or buy new hardware to replace the failed system which all takes time and can result in prolonged downtime.
At the moment I am just using it to host my personal website/blog, backup MX, dns, etc. Great performance and at $70/mo for a xen virtual machine with 2G of RAM it is a great deal. Every now and then they open up some slots. I posted on the message board and someone (from Amazon IIRC) dropped me a line when they had some capacity opened up. They call it beta like google calls everything beta: It's pretty solid. I have been using it for around 5 months and had no problems. Just be aware that the data stored in EC2 is not persistant and you can't go wrong.
I use two things for backup. The first and simplest is that I use s3cmd and a shell script to backup my EC2 instance to S3. s3cmd is part of s3sync which is found at s3sync.net. My shell script is as follows:
/home/treed/s3sync ./s3sync.rb -d --progress -r -v /mnt/tmp/ mybucket: /mnt/tmp/* /mnt/tmp /proc --exclude /sys --exc /home/treed/s3sync ./s3sync.rb -d --progress -r -v /mnt/tmp/ mybucket:
export AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=myaccesskey
export AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=mysecretaccesskey
hostname=`hostname -s`
cd
# Sync up anything that didn't make it in the last attempt the previous night
# Delete everything so we don't fill up the disk
rm -rf
# Make a new backup and upload it
cd
tar -zcvf amazon-`/bin/date +%y%m%d`.tar.gz --exclude
split -b 1073741824 amazon-`/bin/date +%y%m%d`.tar.gz amazon-`/bin/date +%y%m%d`
cd
But that is just a kludge which I use since the EC2 instance has such a fast connection to S3. For my home machines I use bacula to do the backup to file storage volumes and then I use a python program which I hacked together using the BitBucket library to query the bacula mysql database for full volumes and then it looks into the directory where bacula dumps the volumes and if it finds them there it uploads them to S3. When the upload finishes it deletes the volume from the local disk. I cron this program to run every 5 minutes checking for stuff to upload. This turns out to be a pretty slick solution and is working really well so far. You can find the source code on my blog at http://tracyreed.org/
What the heck good is 500M of free storage when it still takes way too long to upload 500M of data? I seem to get around 70k/s upload speed on my Cox cablemodem (business cablemodem, I think I have 512k/s upstream) and it takes two hours to upload 500M. The average user will take even longer.
I currently use Amazon S3 for storage (mostly backups) and I have 100G of stuff on there for my 4 monthly full backups. It takes me 4 full days to upload a full backup. So I spend nearly a quarter of the month constantly uploading! Thank the FSM that I have a Linux box doing QoS using the fine Wondershaper script so I don't even notice the uploading.
Maybe Mike Rowe of "Dirty Jobs" on the Discovery Channel can spend a day working at MS. It might top the time he had to wade through 3 feet of bat shit. I understand Ballmer goes bat shit all the time over there at MS. Of course, they might not let a fellow named Mike Rowe into their facilities after someone pulled this cute little trick.
I thought it was worth noting. Julian Dibbell wrote "A Rape in Cyberspace" which brought a crushing amount of attention to Lambda Moo and some say effectively destroyed it leaving many old time Lambda users very bitter. The best way to stir up convo on Lambda to this day is to simply mention his name. Lambda still exists. I've been using it off and on for many years now. It's funny to see Julian pop up again after all this time.
Stricter? How is GPLv3 any stricter? As far as I am concerned it only clarifies language and makes certain things explicit instead of implicit. It does not limit any of the things I have ever done with GPL software and as a developer of GPL'd code and long-time Linux user (since 94) I welcome this change. I came to Linux because I was tired of MS after having used their stuff for only a few years. And I'm not going anywhere.
Could someone please tell us what orkut groups and messages in particular that they are upset about so that we may judge for ourselves? This may well be like the 09 f9 incident: If we let the whole world see those messages and judge for themselves as a result of this group bringing attention to the issue perhaps they will rethink their tactics and we will all gain a better understanding of exactly what sort of libel this group is upset about.
Genesis?!?! Genesis allowed is not!
Cheap RAM makes it cheaper to do my Xen deployments. I love being able to have dual dual core cpu's (4 cpu's total) in a box with 32G of ECC RAM. :) Now that's a server. I have recovered many U's of rack space using Xen and this sort of virtualization.
This doesn't bode well. What they need are some secure computing practices. Legislation won't prevent this, especially when the person lives outside her jurisdiction which happens to be most of the world.
Oh, and allow me to add that AoE has FAR less protocol overhead than iSCSI (since iSCSI is basically application layer and AoE is network layer). The AoE specification is 8 pages compared with iSCSI's 257 pages.
My SAN is pretty much as the guy describes except I use AoE. I use the AoE driver which comes in the Linux kernel and the vblade daemon which I can download from sourceforge. Works great.
I have been using AoE (ATA over Ethernet) in heavy production use for 9 months and it ROCKS. Block device semantics over commodity gigabit ethernet is just so useful. I love being able to decouple my disk storage from my cpu power. Especially handy when using something like Xen so you can do live migration of domains. Linux really is getting a lot of high-end features that you used to only be able to find on mainframes.
He may have majored in economics but he never graduated. And from what we can tell he spent most of his time hacking computers instead of studying economics.
They launched a satellite? That is not my understanding. Launching a sub-orbital rocket is very different from launching a satellite. The rest of your post is equally suspect.
Yeah, I have considered that. Unfortunately for my application it would have to be a bit more automated/scripted which I don't think I could do using the renderer from a web browser. Thanks!
Prince is a commercial product. I have a minor need to produce PDF's from XHTML/CSS and I really don't want to deal with licensing. I would need to run it on a server where multiple people can access it which means I would have to pay $3800 for Prince. Ouch! I don't need to do this that bad. Is there any way to do this with Free/Open Source software?
I think you are right about P2P and decentralizing being the way to go. This is why I hold out great hope for projects like:
http://www.cs.cornell.edu/people/egs/beehive/
Unfortunately this one remains closed source and showed no hope of changing. But I am hoping that something along these lines will come along and change the net.
According to:
r /schroeder_html/index.html
http://www.usenix.org/events/fast07/tech/schroede
The chances of a double disk failure in a RAID 5 are significantly greater than we think. A friend of mine had a double failure just last week.
And since the governments are buying these machines (not you or the kids) they will indeed have complete control over them.
How did Stallman go to Cuba without running afoul of the embargo? Did he get some sort of special permission from the State Department or is he just running the risk of being thrown in jail?
This sounds like a VERY good reason not to use Exchange. It results in extremely poorly designed systems that are completely unmaintainable. Being able to restore individual files from backups is a normal part of maintenance which can be performed on most any sanely designed system. The system in the parent post is clearly in sane.
A lot of the support for Haskell *used* to be in Academia. But #haskell is full of people using it for every day real-world purposes it seems. I was especially impressed after talking to Cliff Beshers of Linspire who are doing all of their distro-specific coding such as the installer etc. in Haskell. I have now seen IRC bots in haskell, web servers and web application servers in haskell, and video games in haskell. Heck, the only existing implementation of Perl 6 is written in Haskell. It seems like it has escaped Academia and has been looking for a problem to solve for a few years now. And it looks like this multi-core business may well be it. Especially since haskell has a parallelizing compiler.