You need a load balancer, either the dedicated (pricey) hardware kind or a standard server converted over to load balancing service (which doesn't get you the greatest speed or scalability in the world).
No you don't, you need BIND (which is free) and multiple A records (which require a clueful network admin, but are otherwise free). We get within 0.2% of perfect load balance with this method on our server farm.
Cisco LocalDirector is for people with two-tier Windows NT setups who don't know any better.
I felt the need to point out for the masses over here in the USA - the above poster is a bigot. The context is Northern Ireland, and he is promoting the Loyalist / Protestant terrorist "cause" (the opposite side to the pIRA; there are plenty of Protestant terrorists too, they're just not quite so famous over here).
The "1690" in the signature refers to the Battle of the Boygne, a widely celebrated (by the Loaylists) victory during the British invasion of Ireland under the reign of William of Orange.
The slogan "FTP" has nothing to do with TCP/IP, it stands for "F*** the Pope".
It is charming people like this that made otherwise beautiful province of Northern Ireland into a warzone and economic wasteland, a situation from which it is only now emerging; rest assured however that they are in the vast minority, and the majority of people from NI are peaceful and civilized.
I'd suggest that the poster go and peddle his hatred somewhere else, because it isn't welcome either here or in his homeland.
....is a well established science. Surprisingly accurate.
Can't remember the fancy....iometry name, but there is proper apparatus to do this - you calibrate with stock solutions using a lightbox and coloured filters, then use it to measure test solutions.
1. ipchains -I output -d 0/0 80 -y -l -j ACCEPT # i.e. log the IP address of outbound web connections; this is for Linux 2.2, YMMV
2. Pull up a site which has round robin A records with multiple IP's (IIRC www.yahoo.com will do; if you want URL for one of ours, send me email - I don't want to Slashdot my customers:-)
3. Find out the IP address the browser is using in the logs. Observe that since the browser caches the result of gethostbyname() it keeps using the same one.
We use Exodus, and they provide us with two separate ethernet feeds, down separate cable runs, from two separate routers in different parts of the internal NOC. No need for any routers at all; we have separate endpoint hardware on each feed and just do a rough load balance across the feeds with round robin DNS.
The recommended (by Exodus) alternative is to have a pair of peered routers which actively load balance across the feeds at the IP level, and back up each other if one goes down. I didn't do this as we're a startup I didn't want to pay for an extra pair of routers.
Either of the above will ensure that there is no single point of failure on the front end. This is referred to as a dual-homed configuration. Exodus' WAN will ensure there is no SPF further out; making your own equipment cluster and software fault tolerant is your problem:-)
It sounds like Slashdot is running with a single-homed connection, and that the router which failed is their own kit in their own rack. $$ permitting, they could have either (a) done a proper dual-homed setup, as per one of the above, or (b) had a spare router sitting in the rack and lease Exodus' managed hardware monitoring service, which would have meant Exodus techs switching it out when it failed.
I don't know what Slashdot's budget for hosting is, but we are a much smaller company than Andover and dual-homed service is not exactly killing our budget. I would conservatively assume that bandwidth is Slashdot's biggest expense.
You cannot throw pies at the co-lo provider for your own failure to have a robust setup and make proper use of the facilities they offer.
This a cute gimmick but fundamentally no different form any other opaque firewall approach that stages email and does not offer general IP connectivity.
An air gap is an air gap, that passes data only by human intervention. This product is not an air gap.
MS-Office first? Far from it....there is more than one integrated office suite (WP, DB, spreadsheet) which predates Windows, never mind MS-Office. Two I have used:
There's about 30 mins of action in the middle, the rest is a soppy romance. There should be some standardisation of trailers to warn people of these things in advance.
Low sulphur diesel (so called "city diesel" in the UK) is now pretty universal. It's petroleum based diesel that has been treated, and while it is not as good as vegetable based fuels it beats petrol by a fair margin.
One of the big bitches of electric cars is (besides battery life) the poor power/weight ratio of the electric engine against the gas (petrol) engine.
Also, even more damning, is the relative reliability of the gas engine. What we really need are people putting alot more effort into making a better,
lightweight electric engine.
Actually, modern electric motors have a superior power to weight ratio, and it beats an internal combustion power plant by miles once you factor in a smaller or non-existent gearbox** and not having a water cooling system. The problem is the energy density of chemical batteries versus combustible fuels; the reason most electric cars are slow is because if you made them quick the batteries would last no time at all.
** an electric motor, if appropriately designed, can develop usable torque levels over a much wider range of speeds than an internal combustion engine. It can also start from rest against a load, eliminating the need for a clutch or torque converter.
The numbers I saw for GM's electric car prototype based on the flywheel batteries suggsted that the increased weight and volume of the batteries over a gas tank was close to being an even trade for the reduced weight of the motor and cooling system, and the performance and range was half decent - 0-60mph in around ten seconds IIRC and up to 500 miles on a charge.
....in many European countries. It was a hot subject in the mid nineties, and heralded as a low pollution fuel** but the taxation in many places has increased to the point where diesel is now more expensive than petrol and thus mitigating some of the savings; fuel consumption differentials still ensure there's a chunk left though.
When diesel was hot, there was a move to increasingly high performance and larger diesels in small cars, thus eliding much of the economy value excpept on long trips - the Citroen ZX TD Volcane is a classic example - 1.9 turbo diesel, around 135 bhp in a small hatchback, makes 50 mpg* or so on the morotway but below 25 mpg* in traffic.
* Imperial gallons - US deduct 20% from those figures
** Ah yes, pollution - diesel produces a lot of unsightly smoke, but there is very little in the way of chemical pollutants, NOx etc in modern diesel exhaust. Diesel smoke is just that, smoke - it is much more environmentally friendly than the stuff you can't see that comes out of a petrol engine, cat or not - catalytic converters just don't work on short journeys. Ever smelled the (catalysed) car in front fart? That's hydrogen sulphide, and it isn't good for you.
Someone designed a wonderful system for dealing with the particulates from a diesel, which would involve placing a cotton wadding filter canister on the tailpipe - these would be washable and exchangeable at fuel stations, once per tank of fuel for a couple of dollars.
Another great thing is lean burn technology for petrol engines - great technology, no political will. There was so much political momentum behind the cat solution (not least because it came from America so must be cool) that superior alternatives got squashed.
I live in the aforesaid land of the free (Austin, TX to be exact) and yes, there is a long way to go in addressing pollution. OK, so they have cats here and people in Texas typically drive far enough for them to have an effect, but there's no emissions check whatsoever in what passes for an annual vehicle inspection in the lone star state. You can quite legally drive a 17 year old petrol Suburban (river barge disguised as a 4x4) that has the energy consumption of a small third world nation, blows more smoke than a badly tuned diesel under full load, and who knows what invisible noxious gases besides, and get away with it until the thing literally rusts apart.
The low fuel prices (petrol is literally half the price of bottled water, currently $1.35 to $1.70 per **gallon** depending on octane) and the local prediliction for having a huge-ass pickup truck as personal transportation don't exactly help - to set context for European readers, over here a Land Rover Discovery literally is a small, economical family car (and that's the 3.9 V8 petrol model, they don't even sell the diesel models).
Europeans just wouldn't understand - Texans really, truly do drive pickup trucks instead of cars, even if they rarely have a passenger and never haul a bigger load in them than a bag of grocery shopping; roughly half the *software dvelopers* in our company drive one (empty of course) to work every day. There is some concession to economy - almost none are 4 wheel drive, and a 3.8 V6 with a manual gearbox is more typical than the traditional 5.x V8 slush-o-matic, but moving a brick shape throuhg the air isn't cheap; 17 mpg US (21 mpg Imp) is considered *good*.
One of the problems is, no matter how much redundancy there is, if a significant amount of traffic falls on a backup route, then it can overload. This results in turn in traffic being failed over to a third route, etc. and you have a cascade failure.
Most ISP's backbones are sufficiently saturated that this is hard to avoid. Add in misconfigured routers causing looping, and one link can take you out.
As for the "last mile" issue, any half serious internet service will have full redundancy on this, down to the cable and switch level.
This is the now generation, and for most/. readers, this is the USA, the home of consumerism. Save up? Get real, dude.
As for the economy, consumer spending generally helps things along; the only problems arise if there's a lot of bad debt generated. I think most countries have bad debt from consumers under control.
Under European law you cannot buy alcohol on credit.
This is just plain wrong.
Like millions of Europeans, I have bought alochol many times on plastic in many countries in Europe, including the Republic of Ireland, including using Access (nka MasterCard).
Which country in Europe disallows alcohol sales on plastic?
Slashdot Mirror
A quick eye scan spotted 4 or 5 people from internet voting startups, one venture capitalist, and couple of reps from big software companies.
Yep, nice and unbiased.
Outlook's so-called "workgroup" features are a thin pastiche of what is possible with Lotus Notes. And no, I don't like either of them.
Ahh, you missed the point - like most people, I'm on NEITHER side of the fence.
You need a load balancer, either the dedicated (pricey) hardware kind or a standard server converted over to load balancing service (which doesn't get you the greatest speed or scalability in the world).
No you don't, you need BIND (which is free) and multiple A records (which require a clueful network admin, but are otherwise free). We get within 0.2% of perfect load balance with this method on our server farm.
Cisco LocalDirector is for people with two-tier Windows NT setups who don't know any better.
(Btw absinthe + red bull glows flourescent green under ultraviolet light - nice!)
But then so does plain old lager
I felt the need to point out for the masses over here in the USA - the above poster is a bigot. The context is Northern Ireland, and he is promoting the Loyalist / Protestant terrorist "cause" (the opposite side to the pIRA; there are plenty of Protestant terrorists too, they're just not quite so famous over here).
The "1690" in the signature refers to the Battle of the Boygne, a widely celebrated (by the Loaylists) victory during the British invasion of Ireland under the reign of William of Orange.
The slogan "FTP" has nothing to do with TCP/IP, it stands for "F*** the Pope".
It is charming people like this that made otherwise beautiful province of Northern Ireland into a warzone and economic wasteland, a situation from which it is only now emerging; rest assured however that they are in the vast minority, and the majority of people from NI are peaceful and civilized.
I'd suggest that the poster go and peddle his hatred somewhere else, because it isn't welcome either here or in his homeland.
....is a well established science. Surprisingly accurate.
....iometry name, but there is proper apparatus to do this - you calibrate with stock solutions using a lightbox and coloured filters, then use it to measure test solutions.
Can't remember the fancy
Ironically, this is the worst PITA problem with the IE on Windows HTMLAREA inout widget.
Try this:
:-)
1. ipchains -I output -d 0/0 80 -y -l -j ACCEPT # i.e. log the IP address of outbound web connections; this is for Linux 2.2, YMMV
2. Pull up a site which has round robin A records with multiple IP's (IIRC www.yahoo.com will do; if you want URL for one of ours, send me email - I don't want to Slashdot my customers
3. Find out the IP address the browser is using in the logs. Observe that since the browser caches the result of gethostbyname() it keeps using the same one.
4. ipchains -I output -d xxxx -j REJECT
5. Hit another link and see what happens
You are talking out of your rear.
:-)
We use Exodus, and they provide us with two separate ethernet feeds, down separate cable runs, from two separate routers in different parts of the internal NOC. No need for any routers at all; we have separate endpoint hardware on each feed and just do a rough load balance across the feeds with round robin DNS.
The recommended (by Exodus) alternative is to have a pair of peered routers which actively load balance across the feeds at the IP level, and back up each other if one goes down. I didn't do this as we're a startup I didn't want to pay for an extra pair of routers.
Either of the above will ensure that there is no single point of failure on the front end. This is referred to as a dual-homed configuration. Exodus' WAN will ensure there is no SPF further out; making your own equipment cluster and software fault tolerant is your problem
It sounds like Slashdot is running with a single-homed connection, and that the router which failed is their own kit in their own rack. $$ permitting, they could have either (a) done a proper dual-homed setup, as per one of the above, or (b) had a spare router sitting in the rack and lease Exodus' managed hardware monitoring service, which would have meant Exodus techs switching it out when it failed.
I don't know what Slashdot's budget for hosting is, but we are a much smaller company than Andover and dual-homed service is not exactly killing our budget. I would conservatively assume that bandwidth is Slashdot's biggest expense.
You cannot throw pies at the co-lo provider for your own failure to have a robust setup and make proper use of the facilities they offer.
This a cute gimmick but fundamentally no different form any other opaque firewall approach that stages email and does not offer general IP connectivity.
An air gap is an air gap, that passes data only by human intervention. This product is not an air gap.
MS-Office first? Far from it....there is more than one integrated office suite (WP, DB, spreadsheet) which predates Windows, never mind MS-Office. Two I have used:
//e)
All-in-One (DEC VAX)
AppleWorks (Apple
..the free (as in beer) RealPlayer 8 for Linux installs very cleanly, comes with an rpm file, etc. etc. Very nicely done.
@echo off
ipconfig net0 10.0.1.1
spoofmanypackets.exe
ipconfig net0 back.to.normal
OK, a little crude, but it'll work - or do these script kiddies really not write scripts anymore
Yes, they showed the LOTR trailer last night too, and it looks damn good.
There's about 30 mins of action in the middle, the rest is a soppy romance. There should be some standardisation of trailers to warn people of these things in advance.
Furthermore, your colourful language and inventive gammar lends wonderfully to your stereotype. Are you sure it isn't a Camaro?
But are you also sobbing about developer salaries that average $120k? :-)
Low sulphur diesel (so called "city diesel" in the UK) is now pretty universal. It's petroleum based diesel that has been treated, and while it is not as good as vegetable based fuels it beats petrol by a fair margin.
One of the big bitches of electric cars is (besides battery life) the poor power/weight ratio of the electric engine against the gas (petrol) engine.
Also, even more damning, is the relative reliability of the gas engine. What we really need are people putting alot more effort into making a better,
lightweight electric engine.
Actually, modern electric motors have a superior power to weight ratio, and it beats an internal combustion power plant by miles once you factor in a smaller or non-existent gearbox** and not having a water cooling system. The problem is the energy density of chemical batteries versus combustible fuels; the reason most electric cars are slow is because if you made them quick the batteries would last no time at all.
** an electric motor, if appropriately designed, can develop usable torque levels over a much wider range of speeds than an internal combustion engine. It can also start from rest against a load, eliminating the need for a clutch or torque converter.
The numbers I saw for GM's electric car prototype based on the flywheel batteries suggsted that the increased weight and volume of the batteries over a gas tank was close to being an even trade for the reduced weight of the motor and cooling system, and the performance and range was half decent - 0-60mph in around ten seconds IIRC and up to 500 miles on a charge.
....in many European countries. It was a hot subject in the mid nineties, and heralded as a low pollution fuel** but the taxation in many places has increased to the point where diesel is now more expensive than petrol and thus mitigating some of the savings; fuel consumption differentials still ensure there's a chunk left though.
When diesel was hot, there was a move to increasingly high performance and larger diesels in small cars, thus eliding much of the economy value excpept on long trips - the Citroen ZX TD Volcane is a classic example - 1.9 turbo diesel, around 135 bhp in a small hatchback, makes 50 mpg* or so on the morotway but below 25 mpg* in traffic.
* Imperial gallons - US deduct 20% from those figures
** Ah yes, pollution - diesel produces a lot of unsightly smoke, but there is very little in the way of chemical pollutants, NOx etc in modern diesel exhaust. Diesel smoke is just that, smoke - it is much more environmentally friendly than the stuff you can't see that comes out of a petrol engine, cat or not - catalytic converters just don't work on short journeys. Ever smelled the (catalysed) car in front fart? That's hydrogen sulphide, and it isn't good for you.
Someone designed a wonderful system for dealing with the particulates from a diesel, which would involve placing a cotton wadding filter canister on the tailpipe - these would be washable and exchangeable at fuel stations, once per tank of fuel for a couple of dollars.
Another great thing is lean burn technology for petrol engines - great technology, no political will. There was so much political momentum behind the cat solution (not least because it came from America so must be cool) that superior alternatives got squashed.
I live in the aforesaid land of the free (Austin, TX to be exact) and yes, there is a long way to go in addressing pollution. OK, so they have cats here and people in Texas typically drive far enough for them to have an effect, but there's no emissions check whatsoever in what passes for an annual vehicle inspection in the lone star state. You can quite legally drive a 17 year old petrol Suburban (river barge disguised as a 4x4) that has the energy consumption of a small third world nation, blows more smoke than a badly tuned diesel under full load, and who knows what invisible noxious gases besides, and get away with it until the thing literally rusts apart.
The low fuel prices (petrol is literally half the price of bottled water, currently $1.35 to $1.70 per **gallon** depending on octane) and the local prediliction for having a huge-ass pickup truck as personal transportation don't exactly help - to set context for European readers, over here a Land Rover Discovery literally is a small, economical family car (and that's the 3.9 V8 petrol model, they don't even sell the diesel models).
Europeans just wouldn't understand - Texans really, truly do drive pickup trucks instead of cars, even if they rarely have a passenger and never haul a bigger load in them than a bag of grocery shopping; roughly half the *software dvelopers* in our company drive one (empty of course) to work every day. There is some concession to economy - almost none are 4 wheel drive, and a 3.8 V6 with a manual gearbox is more typical than the traditional 5.x V8 slush-o-matic, but moving a brick shape throuhg the air isn't cheap; 17 mpg US (21 mpg Imp) is considered *good*.
Win98 appears to do this by default in some cases when you install ethernet drivers, hence the issue with a cable modem.
One of the problems is, no matter how much redundancy there is, if a significant amount of traffic falls on a backup route, then it can overload. This results in turn in traffic being failed over to a third route, etc. and you have a cascade failure.
Most ISP's backbones are sufficiently saturated that this is hard to avoid. Add in misconfigured routers causing looping, and one link can take you out.
As for the "last mile" issue, any half serious internet service will have full redundancy on this, down to the cable and switch level.
This is the now generation, and for most /. readers, this is the USA, the home of consumerism. Save up? Get real, dude.
As for the economy, consumer spending generally helps things along; the only problems arise if there's a lot of bad debt generated. I think most countries have bad debt from consumers under control.
Under European law you cannot buy alcohol on credit.
This is just plain wrong.
Like millions of Europeans, I have bought alochol many times on plastic in many countries in Europe, including the Republic of Ireland, including using Access (nka MasterCard).
Which country in Europe disallows alcohol sales on plastic?