I really hope Freud would say nothing. He's been dead for 72 years. I'm fairly sure that's beyond the period for him to be a viable zombie. Well, that and the fact that he was cremated. I would think being a pile of ash would make it hard for even a zombie to say "bbrrraaiiinnnsss....."
You should know, he's from the US Department of Defense, Social Disinformation Division. It's how the government misdirects you from important things like the fact that they have an on demand weapons deployment system still in orbit. An ICBM that they can launch any time, and drop anywhere within 90 minutes, with no possibility of traditional launch detection.
They start planting little seeds of doubt here and there, so you'll begin to accept the fact that everything our government does is perfectly harmless... and... hey, check out Adriana. What channel was that? Do I have time to run to McDonalds to get a extramegasupersize BigMac meal with a double side of carcinogens? Oh, I don't subscribe to that channel? Sign me up! Extra FCC fees? No problem.. I need my Adriana..
Wait.. what?... oh shit, they're in my mind... Vote Republican... Happily pay the tax man... Live the American dream of taxation with no representation.
I don't know, maybe I've gotten the wrong end of customer service way too many times. I've been told I'm not a customer, or that I'm using a different service. I've had to explain what a ping is. I seriously doubt most CS reps are trained enough to be able to analyze traffic. I know there are some that are good, but they go in knowing what to do.
Google works some black magic (anycast) to send you to the closest datacenter. You're then returned the appropriate results for the closest Google servers. They're reported to have datacenters in Europe in the following cities.
See who you're hitting. Ping google,com , and then nslookup to see where it is.. Right now, I am getting 72.14.204.101, which is iad04s01-in-f101.1e100.net . iad is the airport code for Washington Dulles International Airport. Not far from there is their Reston, VA datacenter. Funny, I know they have at least two datacenters closer to me physically, but probably not by network topology.
When I had servers on Level3's lines, in their datacenters, we frequently say under 10ms to peerings. From there, it was up to how saturated the network was.
Right now, i'm seeing 13ms to my friends servers.. We're both on the same provider, but we're about 50 miles (and 5 hops) apart. It's usually better not having to go through a peering. For you to go from Finland to Slashdot probably transits 3 or 4 providers.
150ms to Slashdot? Dear god, open a service ticket!:)
C:\Users\User>ping 8.8.8.8
Pinging 8.8.8.8 with 32 bytes of data: Reply from 8.8.8.8: bytes=32 time=60ms TTL=48 Reply from 8.8.8.8: bytes=32 time=61ms TTL=48 Reply from 8.8.8.8: bytes=32 time=64ms TTL=48 Reply from 8.8.8.8: bytes=32 time=61ms TTL=48
Ping statistics for 8.8.8.8:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss), Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 60ms, Maximum = 64ms, Average = 61ms
C:\Users\User>ping slashdot.org
Pinging slashdot.org [216.34.181.45] with 32 bytes of data: Reply from 216.34.181.45: bytes=32 time=79ms TTL=242 Reply from 216.34.181.45: bytes=32 time=78ms TTL=242 Reply from 216.34.181.45: bytes=32 time=75ms TTL=242 Reply from 216.34.181.45: bytes=32 time=77ms TTL=242
Ping statistics for 216.34.181.45:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss), Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 75ms, Maximum = 79ms, Average = 77ms
Shit, somehow I'm incurring 47ms before it leaves the house. Gotta go fix my network.:)
You shouldn't have posted AC, you're actually right on the money.
300ms could be that he has the line saturated with bittorrent traffic, or malware that he doesn't even know is there. It could be that his wireless connection is compromised, and the neighbor kid is downloading porn day and night. 300ms isn't acceptable, but likely isn't the provider's fault.
Why, oh why, don't more people monitor their bandwidth? Maybe I'm a statistical whore, but I always have some sort of bandwidth graphing up.
Really? Are they bad? I hadn't used them before, but the price was right. At least it's commodity equipment, I can go to the store and pick up a new PS and be back up quick. Well, more like I'd jack the PS out of my desktop to bring the server back up, and then go buy a new PS for my desktop.:)
Ya, I'm a huge fan of the Linux raids. I ended up going with Slackware64 for the host system, and running mdadm before the setup to get the arrays going. They've stood up better than all kinds of other RAID solutions. The nicer part has been, if the machine fails, I can just stick the drives in any other machine, and bring the array up. It hasn't happened to me, but it has happened to friends on "server" hardware. They were very thankful when I could just stick the drives in another server, and go right back to work.
I should be purchasing 2 more of these machines in the next month or so, personal funds permitting. I broke a tooth, and my work doesn't offer dental insurance any more, so fixing the one tooth will probably cost as much as the two servers. When they get here, I should have more time to experiment with other options. These first two had to be done quick. I ordered the line when my old server (on "server" hardware) started taking a dump. I ordered the hardware once they got the install done right, I got the hardware shipped. It took them a while to figure out how to provision more than one IP to me. {sigh}. The day the hardware arrived, my old hardware crashed 4 times during the install. well, not "crash". It just hung up requiring a hard reboot each time. It was well beyond EOL, so I just attribute it to being ancient. I'll have time to experiment with the next two, and migrate things over if I choose to use a different platform.
It got more complex as it grew. This is all from memory, so there may be some inconsistencies with what I'm saying.
The main site primarily used 3 subdomains. There were also 3 pay sites. For a while there were 6 machines for video streaming. The video streaming site went away, mostly due to cost vs income. We added free hosting, which was small to start, and picked up popularity and grew to dozens of servers. There were side projects launched on their own servers. Some worked. Some were dropped.
Masterstats.com was an example of that. In function, it was similar to Google Analytics. It started as 1 DB and 2 web servers. Because of the load thrown at it, it became 3 DB, 4 web, and 2 offline calculation servers. The offline machines were just to process stats that were too intensive to do live, and created an undue load on the web servers.
Another example was our backups. If you go digging through my journal posts, you'll find me talking about multi TB arrays, back when the largest drives on the market were 250GB. Back in the first iteration, it was fairly simple to keep backups. That grew as we kept throwing more into it.
These are the rough counts just for the main sites.
Before I took over, there were 3 subdomains (www, voy, and ww3.) Each was on one server. If one server failed, that part of the site stopped. Needless to say, that was bad if (and when) www. went down.
4 servers in one city. All 4 machines had all 3 subdomains.
8 servers in two cities. That's 4 machines in 2 cities. Each set could handle the full load, in the event we lost a city. That meant each city handled 50% of the traffic normally, or 100% in a city failure. We could operate on 2 per city, but the extra 2 provided for redundancy.
When we scaled out to 3 cities, we split the 3 subdomains between groups of servers in each city. We also divided up the load equally, so each city got 33% of the traffic. Having a city fail increased the traffic to the other cities by 17%. The sites data existed on all the servers, so in the event of a failure of one server, we could distribute that load. So now we had 3 to 5 servers per group, in 3 cities. Newer hardware was faster, so those would have combined duties. Clearly a dual 1.4Ghz machine could handle more than a single 350Mhz machine. At this point, we had retired almost all of the 350Mhz machines, except for a few that were recycled to do DNS and other low-load tasks.
When we got to 5 cities (New York, Los Angeles, San Diego, Tampa, and Frankfurt), the loads got divided up differently. Frankfurt had one 100Mb/s circuit. San Diego had one 100Mb/s circuit. New York had two GigE circuits. Los Angles had 2 GigE circuits, which grew to 3 when we retired San Diego. Tampa had 2 GigE circuits. Frankfurt was retired, and the traffic was just added to New York. That barely made a blip on the bandwidth graphs.
Members sites had a warm friendly map so they could pick their city to view from. We looked at other options, but it was simple to give them a map to choose where to serve from, and they could pick another city any time they wanted. Forums had people discussing which ones were "faster". It was very subjective. People in the West would pick Los Angeles or San Diego, with most preferring Los Angeles. People in the East picked Tampa or New York. People in Europe said Frankfurt was too slow, and they had better access via New York or Tampa.
Each city had different load characteristics. Free hosting servers were deployed in 3 cities. There were some special case servers too. For example, where someone had a very high load "free hosting" site that made a lot of money via the AVS, could get their own server or servers.
Ok, I skimmed it. I see the results going either way, depending on the benchmark tested. Are you still saying I was wrong for saving several hundred dollars?
It's too late in the evening for me to go chase down the Tom's Hardware link. I closed that tab a while ago.
As for the rest... It works. It works well. It's cheaper. I don't upgrade desktops or servers every day. No one does, unless you're filthy rich and don't know where to spend your money. If that's the cast, you can send me some of that via PayPal on my site.
This round of upgrades is replacing dual Opteron 1.4Ghz boxes, putting their responsibilities on VMs on these hosts. They're doing great. Not just great. Really great. Each VM is set to use 2 cores, and up to 90% of the CPU. That was an arbitrary limit I imposed on my expectation of growth on the servers, and my next planned server purchases.
Why should I spend extra money on marginally faster equipment? In what world does that make sense? The customers don't care. They only care that I offer fair pricing and reliable service. For my desktop, I want it to run, and keep running, where I don't have to worry about random crashes while I'm working. In that, it does it perfectly.
Next time around, I'll probably be looking at 16 cores and 6Ghz. The difference between a few Mhz that can be argued til you turn blue and are spitting at me, doesn't matter in the least. People argued the wonders of the 486/50 versus my 486/33. Other people argued that we'd never go higher because of radio and television interference. They swore we'd never get Ghz CPUs because microwave radiation would kill us all. Oh, how I miss FidoNet.
Spending extra money on the latest, greatest, bleeding edge, fast as I can get, is a game for the insanely rich and foolish. Which one are you?
Well, $604.94/ea. The memory came with an 8GB Class 4 micro SD, and we got a $10 newegg gift card each. I forget what that was bundled with. If you consider a gift card as cash, they were under $600/ea.
All of those are quantity 1, except the hard drives. They are 8 core 4Ghz (always running in Turbo mode), with 16GB ram, and RAID 1 on the drives. I opted to go more like Google's topless server. I used cable ties to mount up everything on wire racks from Home Depot. Ya, the same plastic/rubber coated ones you'd use in your closet. This is serving out of my house on a business FiOS line, so no one at a datacenter can complain.:) They're running amazingly cool. Because there's nothing interrupting normal convection air currents, all the heat sinks and drives are cool to the touch. They're a bit quieter than my desktop PC, because I don't require an extra fans to pull the hot air out of the case. My regular desktop has a 250cfm fan on it to keep it cool. Without it, and with the side on, it can overheat in a few minutes when gaming.
The room does have an air conditioning return in it, which helps keep the room cool. The only fan I added was a HEPA filter. It's oversized for the room, but it'll help keep dust off the machines. The room is the same temperature as the rest of the house, so I'm happy with it. It serves no purpose for cooling the machines, since it's not even pointed at them.:)
I have some pretty low load servers. Rather than buying a dozen of anything, I opted for using virtual machines. These two servers are hosting 4 VMs at this time, and there will be more. It's a young setup, and I have a lot of work to do on it. I opted to use VirtualBox. It works very well. I had intended trying VMWare ESXi or Citrix XenServer. unfortunately, neither would use the crappy software RAID that the boards provide, and I wasn't willing to drop money on real RAID controllers. I looked around a bit, and it seems that you can try to use some workarounds, but I didn't have the time or inclination to do it, where I could have VirtualBox going in less than an hour.
The VMs are redundant between servers. Further on, you can read more about how I did it in the past between physical boxes. So if a single VM crashes, who cares. If a VM host crashes, well, it's reduced redundancy, but I'm still operating. I'm going to put out more VM hosts, and increase the redundancy. 4 machines with 6 VMs each is like 24 physical boxes. That's a serious savings, especially where the VM host costs about $600.
Let me give you a little history.:)
Long before Google made the pictures of the way they do servers, the company I was at was using COTS parts. That was voyeurweb.com (NSFW). They were hosting with a company not to be named (as in, I can't remember), who sold them on a $50k investment of a Sun server. They promised it was more power than anyone could ever want. That lasted about 3 days. It was after this, I got involved with them. We dropped about $15k on 10 servers. They were fairly cheap machines. Asus gaming motherboards, AMD K6/2 300 CPU, 512MB RAM, 8GB and 20GB IDE drives. The most expensive part at the time was the cases. It was pretty much what you'd be using at home at the time.
We had the occasional failures, but they were usually due to load or CPU fan failures. At the time, they had under 1 million daily viewers, so we could handle that load on 4 of the 10 machines. Load balancing was done with DNS round robin. I know people say it's a poor system, but it worked well. There was typically a 3 second delay if you happened to hit a bad server, and then you'd roll off to the nex
Anyone who's programmed long enough has found unexplainable bugs that are eventually traced down to some bad hardware.:)
I've preferred AMD over Intel for years. Long ago, in a distant computer store, far away.... We sold 386s, 486s, and Pentiums (or their reasonable clone) from Intel, IBM, AMD, and Cyrix. At the time, I didn't really care who made the chip, they were just built out for the customer.
Over the years, I learned to prefer AMD for both the price and performance. Plenty of people will argue "but this Pentium is faster than that AMD". Well, it's all nice, but I don't *have* to stay bleeding edge. I never liquid cooled my CPU, video card, and memory. Friends did. I was always impressed with how much they wasted. I'd just wait 6 months or so, and get something better, faster, and cheaper.:) I do like having a high performance computer, so I upgrade every year or so.
For example, I just set up a couple servers from COTS parts. They used AMD FX-8120's (8 core, 4.0Ghz turbo) for $199.99/ea. It seems the comparable Intel is the i7-980 (6 core, 3.6Ghz), which is selling at $589.99. For the difference in price, I could build out a 3rd server, and still have money left over. Toms hardware suggests the i5-2500K (4 core, 3.7Ghz turbo) for $224.99 or i7-2600K (4 core 3.8Ghz turbo) for $324.99 as comparable. If I wanted to spend a little more, I could have gone with the AMD FX-8150 (8 core, 4.2Ghz turbo) for $249.99. Was $50 for.2Ghz worth it? Not really. Something bigger, better, and faster will be out next year, and the year after, and then I'll buy something new.
I used newegg.com for all the prices, so it would be fairly even.
The servers actually use as many cores as I can throw at them, so it's extremely beneficial to have more cores at high speeds.
My desktop/gaming machine still has a Phenom IIx6 1100T in it. All the games I play, I can leave all the settings turned all the way up. Maybe if I ran benchmarks, I'd see something else gets a slightly faster frame rate, but I can't see any difference. As we all know, various benchmarks show different things.
Well, if there were/ar intelligent lifeforms on another planet, that coincidentially happened to have started the same time we did, and they were to have focused on advancing their knowledge of all things, and were not obsessed with greed and mutual destruction, they could have probably been here thousands of years ago.
Thankfully, we invented television and radio broadcasts. If they happen to come anywhere near us, they'll have the luxury of seeing how vile humanity in general is. The signals will weaken with distance, but with a little luck, they'll be able to clean up a signal somewhere between 75 to 100 light years out. When they get to about 45 to 50 light years out, they'll see how we would treat prospective visitors. Kill them first, and steal their technology later. And that's only alien related science fiction. Factual war radio and television broadcasts will paint the rest of the picture for them.
We have set up our own warning beacons that no one should *ever* approach this desolate rock on the end of a lonely spiral arm of this galaxy.
Assuming they stop in the occasional system to look and listen, if they stopped around any of the 1,400 stars (133 like our sun) within 50 light years of Earth, they'd know to avoid us at all costs.
If we developed FTL travel, wouldn't we take such broadcasts as a warning?
You are an average male, with a size 10.5 shoe, and you have two feet.
Your yard is 1 acre, with no other objects obstructing it.
We are only considering a single plane for both your yard, and our solar system.
The size of your foot equals the size of the earth (cross section at the equator).
Then....
If your foot were the size of the earth, the soles of your shoes would have had contact with 0.205381533% of the area of the Earth's orbit around the sun.
I guess you're just about right then. We like to think we know what's in space around us. As has been proven by recent near misses with asteroids, we are not necessarily aware of rocks the size of a city before they are *very* close to us, or in some instances have just missed us.
There could be a small intelligent alien species in a small object say a spacecraft or natural body that we have passed off as "just a rock", somewhere between us and our sun, who do not meet the criteria for living on earth, and we wouldn't have ever known it existed.
We like to standardize "life" on the terms we know. Any advanced life will be roughly 1.5 meters tall, weighing roughly 72.5 kilograms, biped form, which breaths a nitrogen/oxygen mixture. That makes a lot of assumptions, including the idea that it would breathe.
It could be plausible that an alien species travels in a FTL space craft which is no larger than a mosquito. If it used Star Trek based warp technology, the resulting emissions if it slowed to "impulse" several planets away wouldn't even register as a change in background radiation.
But, we are humans, and we know everything.
I just hope that when we are visited, they do breathe oxygen, eat compatible foods, are tall enough so I can stand up in their ship, and they understand when I say "Thank goodness you've arrived, I've been waiting for years to get off this rock. Lets get out of here before the others try to kill you."
I do not see massacres, genocide, or mobs of henchmen going door to door looking for illegal computer operators. I see two groups who have been picking fights with the government, and the government has been viewing them as an irrelevant threat. Stepping that up to make themselves a relevant threat is a horrible idea. They are not prepared for the potential response. That is, real world violence, incarceration, and potentially death.
Hey, I take offense to that. My tinfoil hats are top quality headgear, specially tuned through our secret process to not only block mind control rays from the US Government, but all governments of the world, *AND* known and unknown extra terrestrials.
If you can provide clear documentation that your mind has been controlled by such entities due to any fault of our headgear, we will offer a "full moneyback guarantee".
(*) The full guarantee applies to the value(**) of the headgear.
(**) "value" is the original cost of materials before assembly, with deductions for use, manipulation, staining, or other incidental damages, as determined by our appraisers (***).
(***) Our appraisers are actually high school dropouts, who are authorized to refund up to 25% or $0.50, which ever is lower.
(****) Other conditions and restrictions may apply, which are available in our planning office (*****)
(*****) See the planning office in sub-basement 3, behind the door marked "Beware of the Leopard", in an unlit closet, in a locked file drawer, in a folder noted "File 13"
The CIA is primarily for international intelligence. The FBI is for domestic intelligence. The NSA can operate in either theater. DIA is for gathering intelligence for military actions. NGA and NRO watch anything that can be seen from space. TFI works anywhere where money is. I could go on with the alphabet soup, but there's probably a limit to the length of comments.:)
The CIA can, and has, been conducting presidential authorized domestic operations since the 1960's.
I love the title of the article though. A group of people who like to think that they are anonymous, and a group that like publishing documents gathered from dubious sources, think they can take on the intelligence community. Nerds with computers, versus the best trained people in the world, with the best intelligence possible, every weapon in any arsenal, and a blanket order from the POTUS giving them free reign to do as they please.
That's kinda like going into a biker bar on their busiest night, and insulting them, while holding a comb like a knife. Well except the intelligence community is better at hiding the bodies, and if they are found, a national security letter will stop any investigation to how it got there.
Without doubt, one or several intelligence agencies are already embedded in both Anonymous and Wikileaks. They already know everyone involved, where they live, where they work, what they drive, where they are at any given time, and the quietest way to permanently extract them from the human population.
Picking such a fight is suicide. Well, when the intelligence community finally decides that they have stepped up from being an annoyance to being a threat.
Yup. Execs from other offices and VIP guests are always likely people to get you in trouble.
In places where I wasn't executive management, I've quietly asked "do they belong here". The answer is usually yes. Most people ignore the stranger who looks like they may belong.
Slashdot Mirror
I really hope Freud would say nothing. He's been dead for 72 years. I'm fairly sure that's beyond the period for him to be a viable zombie. Well, that and the fact that he was cremated. I would think being a pile of ash would make it hard for even a zombie to say "bbrrraaiiinnnsss....."
You should know, he's from the US Department of Defense, Social Disinformation Division. It's how the government misdirects you from important things like the fact that they have an on demand weapons deployment system still in orbit. An ICBM that they can launch any time, and drop anywhere within 90 minutes, with no possibility of traditional launch detection.
They start planting little seeds of doubt here and there, so you'll begin to accept the fact that everything our government does is perfectly harmless ... and ... hey, check out Adriana. What channel was that? Do I have time to run to McDonalds to get a extramegasupersize BigMac meal with a double side of carcinogens? Oh, I don't subscribe to that channel? Sign me up! Extra FCC fees? No problem.. I need my Adriana..
Wait.. what? ... oh shit, they're in my mind ... Vote Republican ... Happily pay the tax man ... Live the American dream of taxation with no representation.
Hahahaha... :)
I don't know, maybe I've gotten the wrong end of customer service way too many times. I've been told I'm not a customer, or that I'm using a different service. I've had to explain what a ping is. I seriously doubt most CS reps are trained enough to be able to analyze traffic. I know there are some that are good, but they go in knowing what to do.
Can you provide that to me with 6 decimal places of precision? That number is too vague. :)
That sounds about right.
Google works some black magic (anycast) to send you to the closest datacenter. You're then returned the appropriate results for the closest Google servers. They're reported to have datacenters in Europe in the following cities.
Berlin, Germany
Frankfurt, Germany
Munich, Germany
Zurich, Switzerland
Groningen, Netherlands
Mons, Belgium
Eemshaven, Netherlands
Paris, France
London, England
Dublin, Ireland
Milan, Italy
See who you're hitting. Ping google,com , and then nslookup to see where it is.. Right now, I am getting 72.14.204.101, which is iad04s01-in-f101.1e100.net . iad is the airport code for Washington Dulles International Airport. Not far from there is their Reston, VA datacenter. Funny, I know they have at least two datacenters closer to me physically, but probably not by network topology.
When I had servers on Level3's lines, in their datacenters, we frequently say under 10ms to peerings. From there, it was up to how saturated the network was.
Right now, i'm seeing 13ms to my friends servers.. We're both on the same provider, but we're about 50 miles (and 5 hops) apart. It's usually better not having to go through a peering. For you to go from Finland to Slashdot probably transits 3 or 4 providers.
Shit. VPN gets me every time. 47ms to the other end of the pipe, and the remainder to the destinations.
150ms to Slashdot? Dear god, open a service ticket! :)
Shit, somehow I'm incurring 47ms before it leaves the house. Gotta go fix my network. :)
You shouldn't have posted AC, you're actually right on the money.
300ms could be that he has the line saturated with bittorrent traffic, or malware that he doesn't even know is there. It could be that his wireless connection is compromised, and the neighbor kid is downloading porn day and night. 300ms isn't acceptable, but likely isn't the provider's fault.
Why, oh why, don't more people monitor their bandwidth? Maybe I'm a statistical whore, but I always have some sort of bandwidth graphing up.
Really? Are they bad? I hadn't used them before, but the price was right. At least it's commodity equipment, I can go to the store and pick up a new PS and be back up quick. Well, more like I'd jack the PS out of my desktop to bring the server back up, and then go buy a new PS for my desktop. :)
Ya, I'm a huge fan of the Linux raids. I ended up going with Slackware64 for the host system, and running mdadm before the setup to get the arrays going. They've stood up better than all kinds of other RAID solutions. The nicer part has been, if the machine fails, I can just stick the drives in any other machine, and bring the array up. It hasn't happened to me, but it has happened to friends on "server" hardware. They were very thankful when I could just stick the drives in another server, and go right back to work.
I should be purchasing 2 more of these machines in the next month or so, personal funds permitting. I broke a tooth, and my work doesn't offer dental insurance any more, so fixing the one tooth will probably cost as much as the two servers. When they get here, I should have more time to experiment with other options. These first two had to be done quick. I ordered the line when my old server (on "server" hardware) started taking a dump. I ordered the hardware once they got the install done right, I got the hardware shipped. It took them a while to figure out how to provision more than one IP to me. {sigh}. The day the hardware arrived, my old hardware crashed 4 times during the install. well, not "crash". It just hung up requiring a hard reboot each time. It was well beyond EOL, so I just attribute it to being ancient. I'll have time to experiment with the next two, and migrate things over if I choose to use a different platform.
Actually, thinking about it, I was off on the spec.
512Mb RAM (I think).
one 8 GB drive for the OS, system logs, etc.
one 80 GB drive for the site data.
I can't be much more precise. It's been an awful long time. All those drives were destroyed long ago, and the parts given away or recycled.
It got more complex as it grew. This is all from memory, so there may be some inconsistencies with what I'm saying.
The main site primarily used 3 subdomains. There were also 3 pay sites. For a while there were 6 machines for video streaming. The video streaming site went away, mostly due to cost vs income. We added free hosting, which was small to start, and picked up popularity and grew to dozens of servers. There were side projects launched on their own servers. Some worked. Some were dropped.
Masterstats.com was an example of that. In function, it was similar to Google Analytics. It started as 1 DB and 2 web servers. Because of the load thrown at it, it became 3 DB, 4 web, and 2 offline calculation servers. The offline machines were just to process stats that were too intensive to do live, and created an undue load on the web servers.
Another example was our backups. If you go digging through my journal posts, you'll find me talking about multi TB arrays, back when the largest drives on the market were 250GB. Back in the first iteration, it was fairly simple to keep backups. That grew as we kept throwing more into it.
These are the rough counts just for the main sites.
Before I took over, there were 3 subdomains (www, voy, and ww3.) Each was on one server. If one server failed, that part of the site stopped. Needless to say, that was bad if (and when) www. went down.
4 servers in one city. All 4 machines had all 3 subdomains.
8 servers in two cities. That's 4 machines in 2 cities. Each set could handle the full load, in the event we lost a city. That meant each city handled 50% of the traffic normally, or 100% in a city failure. We could operate on 2 per city, but the extra 2 provided for redundancy.
When we scaled out to 3 cities, we split the 3 subdomains between groups of servers in each city. We also divided up the load equally, so each city got 33% of the traffic. Having a city fail increased the traffic to the other cities by 17%. The sites data existed on all the servers, so in the event of a failure of one server, we could distribute that load. So now we had 3 to 5 servers per group, in 3 cities. Newer hardware was faster, so those would have combined duties. Clearly a dual 1.4Ghz machine could handle more than a single 350Mhz machine. At this point, we had retired almost all of the 350Mhz machines, except for a few that were recycled to do DNS and other low-load tasks.
When we got to 5 cities (New York, Los Angeles, San Diego, Tampa, and Frankfurt), the loads got divided up differently. Frankfurt had one 100Mb/s circuit. San Diego had one 100Mb/s circuit. New York had two GigE circuits. Los Angles had 2 GigE circuits, which grew to 3 when we retired San Diego. Tampa had 2 GigE circuits. Frankfurt was retired, and the traffic was just added to New York. That barely made a blip on the bandwidth graphs.
Members sites had a warm friendly map so they could pick their city to view from. We looked at other options, but it was simple to give them a map to choose where to serve from, and they could pick another city any time they wanted. Forums had people discussing which ones were "faster". It was very subjective. People in the West would pick Los Angeles or San Diego, with most preferring Los Angeles. People in the East picked Tampa or New York. People in Europe said Frankfurt was too slow, and they had better access via New York or Tampa.
Each city had different load characteristics. Free hosting servers were deployed in 3 cities. There were some special case servers too. For example, where someone had a very high load "free hosting" site that made a lot of money via the AVS, could get their own server or servers.
Pet projects got their own servers as needed.
I
Ok, I skimmed it. I see the results going either way, depending on the benchmark tested. Are you still saying I was wrong for saving several hundred dollars?
It's too late in the evening for me to go chase down the Tom's Hardware link. I closed that tab a while ago.
As for the rest... It works. It works well. It's cheaper. I don't upgrade desktops or servers every day. No one does, unless you're filthy rich and don't know where to spend your money. If that's the cast, you can send me some of that via PayPal on my site.
This round of upgrades is replacing dual Opteron 1.4Ghz boxes, putting their responsibilities on VMs on these hosts. They're doing great. Not just great. Really great. Each VM is set to use 2 cores, and up to 90% of the CPU. That was an arbitrary limit I imposed on my expectation of growth on the servers, and my next planned server purchases.
Why should I spend extra money on marginally faster equipment? In what world does that make sense? The customers don't care. They only care that I offer fair pricing and reliable service. For my desktop, I want it to run, and keep running, where I don't have to worry about random crashes while I'm working. In that, it does it perfectly.
Next time around, I'll probably be looking at 16 cores and 6Ghz. The difference between a few Mhz that can be argued til you turn blue and are spitting at me, doesn't matter in the least. People argued the wonders of the 486/50 versus my 486/33. Other people argued that we'd never go higher because of radio and television interference. They swore we'd never get Ghz CPUs because microwave radiation would kill us all. Oh, how I miss FidoNet.
Spending extra money on the latest, greatest, bleeding edge, fast as I can get, is a game for the insanely rich and foolish. Which one are you?
Well, $604.94/ea. The memory came with an 8GB Class 4 micro SD, and we got a $10 newegg gift card each. I forget what that was bundled with. If you consider a gift card as cash, they were under $600/ea.
All of those are quantity 1, except the hard drives. They are 8 core 4Ghz (always running in Turbo mode), with 16GB ram, and RAID 1 on the drives. I opted to go more like Google's topless server. I used cable ties to mount up everything on wire racks from Home Depot. Ya, the same plastic/rubber coated ones you'd use in your closet. This is serving out of my house on a business FiOS line, so no one at a datacenter can complain. :) They're running amazingly cool. Because there's nothing interrupting normal convection air currents, all the heat sinks and drives are cool to the touch. They're a bit quieter than my desktop PC, because I don't require an extra fans to pull the hot air out of the case. My regular desktop has a 250cfm fan on it to keep it cool. Without it, and with the side on, it can overheat in a few minutes when gaming.
The room does have an air conditioning return in it, which helps keep the room cool. The only fan I added was a HEPA filter. It's oversized for the room, but it'll help keep dust off the machines. The room is the same temperature as the rest of the house, so I'm happy with it. It serves no purpose for cooling the machines, since it's not even pointed at them. :)
I have some pretty low load servers. Rather than buying a dozen of anything, I opted for using virtual machines. These two servers are hosting 4 VMs at this time, and there will be more. It's a young setup, and I have a lot of work to do on it. I opted to use VirtualBox. It works very well. I had intended trying VMWare ESXi or Citrix XenServer. unfortunately, neither would use the crappy software RAID that the boards provide, and I wasn't willing to drop money on real RAID controllers. I looked around a bit, and it seems that you can try to use some workarounds, but I didn't have the time or inclination to do it, where I could have VirtualBox going in less than an hour.
The VMs are redundant between servers. Further on, you can read more about how I did it in the past between physical boxes. So if a single VM crashes, who cares. If a VM host crashes, well, it's reduced redundancy, but I'm still operating. I'm going to put out more VM hosts, and increase the redundancy. 4 machines with 6 VMs each is like 24 physical boxes. That's a serious savings, especially where the VM host costs about $600.
Let me give you a little history. :)
Long before Google made the pictures of the way they do servers, the company I was at was using COTS parts. That was voyeurweb.com (NSFW). They were hosting with a company not to be named (as in, I can't remember), who sold them on a $50k investment of a Sun server. They promised it was more power than anyone could ever want. That lasted about 3 days. It was after this, I got involved with them. We dropped about $15k on 10 servers. They were fairly cheap machines. Asus gaming motherboards, AMD K6/2 300 CPU, 512MB RAM, 8GB and 20GB IDE drives. The most expensive part at the time was the cases. It was pretty much what you'd be using at home at the time.
We had the occasional failures, but they were usually due to load or CPU fan failures. At the time, they had under 1 million daily viewers, so we could handle that load on 4 of the 10 machines. Load balancing was done with DNS round robin. I know people say it's a poor system, but it worked well. There was typically a 3 second delay if you happened to hit a bad server, and then you'd roll off to the nex
Anyone who's programmed long enough has found unexplainable bugs that are eventually traced down to some bad hardware. :)
I've preferred AMD over Intel for years. Long ago, in a distant computer store, far away.... We sold 386s, 486s, and Pentiums (or their reasonable clone) from Intel, IBM, AMD, and Cyrix. At the time, I didn't really care who made the chip, they were just built out for the customer.
Over the years, I learned to prefer AMD for both the price and performance. Plenty of people will argue "but this Pentium is faster than that AMD". Well, it's all nice, but I don't *have* to stay bleeding edge. I never liquid cooled my CPU, video card, and memory. Friends did. I was always impressed with how much they wasted. I'd just wait 6 months or so, and get something better, faster, and cheaper. :) I do like having a high performance computer, so I upgrade every year or so.
For example, I just set up a couple servers from COTS parts. They used AMD FX-8120's (8 core, 4.0Ghz turbo) for $199.99/ea. It seems the comparable Intel is the i7-980 (6 core, 3.6Ghz), which is selling at $589.99. For the difference in price, I could build out a 3rd server, and still have money left over. Toms hardware suggests the i5-2500K (4 core, 3.7Ghz turbo) for $224.99 or i7-2600K (4 core 3.8Ghz turbo) for $324.99 as comparable. If I wanted to spend a little more, I could have gone with the AMD FX-8150 (8 core, 4.2Ghz turbo) for $249.99. Was $50 for .2Ghz worth it? Not really. Something bigger, better, and faster will be out next year, and the year after, and then I'll buy something new.
I used newegg.com for all the prices, so it would be fairly even.
The servers actually use as many cores as I can throw at them, so it's extremely beneficial to have more cores at high speeds.
My desktop/gaming machine still has a Phenom IIx6 1100T in it. All the games I play, I can leave all the settings turned all the way up. Maybe if I ran benchmarks, I'd see something else gets a slightly faster frame rate, but I can't see any difference. As we all know, various benchmarks show different things.
Well, if there were/ar intelligent lifeforms on another planet, that coincidentially happened to have started the same time we did, and they were to have focused on advancing their knowledge of all things, and were not obsessed with greed and mutual destruction, they could have probably been here thousands of years ago.
Thankfully, we invented television and radio broadcasts. If they happen to come anywhere near us, they'll have the luxury of seeing how vile humanity in general is. The signals will weaken with distance, but with a little luck, they'll be able to clean up a signal somewhere between 75 to 100 light years out. When they get to about 45 to 50 light years out, they'll see how we would treat prospective visitors. Kill them first, and steal their technology later. And that's only alien related science fiction. Factual war radio and television broadcasts will paint the rest of the picture for them.
We have set up our own warning beacons that no one should *ever* approach this desolate rock on the end of a lonely spiral arm of this galaxy.
Assuming they stop in the occasional system to look and listen, if they stopped around any of the 1,400 stars (133 like our sun) within 50 light years of Earth, they'd know to avoid us at all costs.
If we developed FTL travel, wouldn't we take such broadcasts as a warning?
Your scale is a bit off.
I'll make some assumptions for you. :)
You are an average male, with a size 10.5 shoe, and you have two feet.
Your yard is 1 acre, with no other objects obstructing it.
We are only considering a single plane for both your yard, and our solar system.
The size of your foot equals the size of the earth (cross section at the equator).
Then....
If your foot were the size of the earth, the soles of your shoes would have had contact with 0.205381533% of the area of the Earth's orbit around the sun.
I guess you're just about right then. We like to think we know what's in space around us. As has been proven by recent near misses with asteroids, we are not necessarily aware of rocks the size of a city before they are *very* close to us, or in some instances have just missed us.
There could be a small intelligent alien species in a small object say a spacecraft or natural body that we have passed off as "just a rock", somewhere between us and our sun, who do not meet the criteria for living on earth, and we wouldn't have ever known it existed.
We like to standardize "life" on the terms we know. Any advanced life will be roughly 1.5 meters tall, weighing roughly 72.5 kilograms, biped form, which breaths a nitrogen/oxygen mixture. That makes a lot of assumptions, including the idea that it would breathe.
It could be plausible that an alien species travels in a FTL space craft which is no larger than a mosquito. If it used Star Trek based warp technology, the resulting emissions if it slowed to "impulse" several planets away wouldn't even register as a change in background radiation.
But, we are humans, and we know everything.
I just hope that when we are visited, they do breathe oxygen, eat compatible foods, are tall enough so I can stand up in their ship, and they understand when I say "Thank goodness you've arrived, I've been waiting for years to get off this rock. Lets get out of here before the others try to kill you."
Oh, did I fail to mention that part?
You have to pick your fights well. They have ... chosen poorly.
I do not see massacres, genocide, or mobs of henchmen going door to door looking for illegal computer operators. I see two groups who have been picking fights with the government, and the government has been viewing them as an irrelevant threat. Stepping that up to make themselves a relevant threat is a horrible idea. They are not prepared for the potential response. That is, real world violence, incarceration, and potentially death.
For your convenience, sir, we'll have a team of salesmen come to your home to demonstrate them. Please do not resist. Resistance is futile.
I think it's more appropriately handled by the old school IRA.
Hey, I take offense to that. My tinfoil hats are top quality headgear, specially tuned through our secret process to not only block mind control rays from the US Government, but all governments of the world, *AND* known and unknown extra terrestrials.
If you can provide clear documentation that your mind has been controlled by such entities due to any fault of our headgear, we will offer a "full moneyback guarantee".
(*) The full guarantee applies to the value(**) of the headgear.
(**) "value" is the original cost of materials before assembly, with deductions for use, manipulation, staining, or other incidental damages, as determined by our appraisers (***).
(***) Our appraisers are actually high school dropouts, who are authorized to refund up to 25% or $0.50, which ever is lower.
(****) Other conditions and restrictions may apply, which are available in our planning office (*****)
(*****) See the planning office in sub-basement 3, behind the door marked "Beware of the Leopard", in an unlit closet, in a locked file drawer, in a folder noted "File 13"
Actually.....
The CIA is primarily for international intelligence. The FBI is for domestic intelligence. The NSA can operate in either theater. DIA is for gathering intelligence for military actions. NGA and NRO watch anything that can be seen from space. TFI works anywhere where money is. I could go on with the alphabet soup, but there's probably a limit to the length of comments. :)
The CIA can, and has, been conducting presidential authorized domestic operations since the 1960's.
I love the title of the article though. A group of people who like to think that they are anonymous, and a group that like publishing documents gathered from dubious sources, think they can take on the intelligence community. Nerds with computers, versus the best trained people in the world, with the best intelligence possible, every weapon in any arsenal, and a blanket order from the POTUS giving them free reign to do as they please.
That's kinda like going into a biker bar on their busiest night, and insulting them, while holding a comb like a knife. Well except the intelligence community is better at hiding the bodies, and if they are found, a national security letter will stop any investigation to how it got there.
Without doubt, one or several intelligence agencies are already embedded in both Anonymous and Wikileaks. They already know everyone involved, where they live, where they work, what they drive, where they are at any given time, and the quietest way to permanently extract them from the human population.
Picking such a fight is suicide. Well, when the intelligence community finally decides that they have stepped up from being an annoyance to being a threat.
Yup. Execs from other offices and VIP guests are always likely people to get you in trouble.
In places where I wasn't executive management, I've quietly asked "do they belong here". The answer is usually yes. Most people ignore the stranger who looks like they may belong.