>> You know, the US used to be a lot more isolationist.
Was that back when immigrants were greeted with :
Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breath free. The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me. I lift my lamp beside the golden door!
I think this was more a dns-zoo-and-google-knew thing. They're launching some rather huge ventures soon and don't want to slam the door on a couple billion people who will be using their new auctions, adsense, etc.
Of course I do not know this for sure, its only speculation, but it really looks like Google got wind of this and made some last minute concessions.. or went into it knowing they'd be conceeding in the end anyway.
Either way, we can't Blame google for this, or for taking measures needed to keep themselves afloat. Yes they may have a competitive edge by being the only US commercial presence to reach China.
You can, and can't fault politics also. 95% of my brute force spam attacks come from China. I never get a reply from an abuse department. I (think) I have a good 1/3 of the country blocked from port 25 anyway. I had no choice.
What I can say is I've been around a while, and contributing quite a bit to the effort that made the internet. I go back to the dial up days (insert dinosaur IT guy ramblings here).
This isn't the internet I helped to build. Its truly become a little too much like real life now.
I am hearing Led Zepplin in my head.. communication breakdown:)
You really need to look at the need at hand. What is possible verses what gets the job done are two completely different things. My point is only the "best" solution is relative to the need and interests of the person implementing it.
I work in several industries and all of them (now) want to do more with less. Xen (now) allows me to put 2 completely isolated networks (one of them a cluster) on the same 10 servers completely independent of eachother, with no significant performance degradation. I'm not speaking from theory I'm speaking from what we've actually done.
However I'm weird and I love doing what I do. Someone else may lose their hair doing it.
There are more people really hacking away at xen who have not yet published anything. VMWare wants to wave a hundred grand at them to slow down. I think the misleading is on their part:) I understand their need to do it, I however resent how they did it.
I did something a little more drastic than you're talking about I ended up open sourcing 99% of (what was ) my primary company. However we leaned heavily in the same direction you are.
I opened everything for a few reasons :
1 - There is too much commercial competition and the market for (everything) IT is saturated to the point where significant capital is required to enter it. You must be prepared to spend a million bucks on a sustained marketing blitz in order to gain any significant market share.
2 - The problem with media shares and reverse engineers.
3 - We took too long getting a product ready to sell.
4 - There are just too many other companies doing exactly what you're doing. Open / crippled pay / primo. We actually surveyed a few hundred programmers, and found they felt such arrangements were unfair. "Why should we make what they sell even better?".
5 - You need to market, AND have money in the bank for uh-oh's. This is tough for smaller companies (like me).
Then I factored in a bunch of what-ifs.. like what if I have a security problem, what if I miss something and sell a solution and it fails.. and I get sued, etc.
I really recommend making it totally open, reducing it of course.. and monetizing yourself from customizations. You still benefit from being paid to improve your product, you're not alienating developers who would shy away otherwise, and you increase youselves as an authority in your industry.
You also are providing an as-is solution that you can warranty at your discretion if you tailor it. This is harder to do, but not impossible with programming toolboxes.
In summary, if your gonna do it, do it. $10k went into the research behind my decision to open my company completely. Its $10k worth of free advice. Take it or leave it.
And dumdum, put a link to your site in the submission next time. Actually, please go shoot yourself in the head with a squirt gun until it really really bruises for not doing so in the first place. Front and center, right on the forehead. Then tell everyone why you did it. Ugh..
Seriously, hope my experience helps. I lost a good chunk of cash in this rat race, if someone can avoid doing the same then its money a (bit) better spent. If I had it to do all over again I would have opened it from the start, had a better product and more money left in the bank by now:)
I think we have different ideas of "favor".. I'm factoring cost of ownership, free support, and ease of integration as well as performance.
Xen is not an out of the box virtualization solution. You have to spend an hour setting up key pairing and writing a few scripts, and be comfortable with that.
However, the people most likely to need that kind of technology, are comfortable with that.
Open source is rallying around Xen, and I think you'll see its usability increase drastically in the not too distant future.
Please take a moment and read the Beowulf definition for a class 1 cluster :
Xen tips the scales for many things that I like to do. But maybe not someone else. I think "better" at this point remains relative to the intended use, and ability to craft a means of managing it for that use.
Actually I virtualize any server I sell for free (Xen).. so do many other providers. We have to in order to make co-located solutions more attractive to the end user.
You *can* get Windows running well under Xen in that type of setting. The biggest issue with Xen / Windows is "xen aware" video. Since any co-located server running Win32 is going to be managed via KVM over IP or RDP5, this is not going to be an issue. In fact, its less resource used on a server. Not many are offering it because nobody has charted it and proven it yet. That doesn't mean we're not in the process of doing so.:)
Usefulness with something like this has to be judged for the end user (who sits in front of the virtualized PC), and the person who opts to lease something already racked.
Folks I make my living off of the internet. I work directly with the data centers leasing these and all of them are really taking notice of Xen. We're stupid not to, Windows VPS servers without any licensing costs on our end, but Windows itself are a dream come true for many people.
This also allows you to slice 10 servers into 10 windows desktops, 10 Open SSI nodes, and 10 HPC (parallel) cluster nodes to field requests from SSI. Its an OS geek wet dream come true, and its very very possible and has already been done.
I think that's what "sparked" this whole VMW contest.
Please, please please start developing as much for us as you do for Xen. We spent heaps of money developing what we have and we aren't making enough back.
Xen 3 really took a chunk out of our market and is gaining more and more support. We don't care about Xen's market share as much as we care that open source developers aren't building more things around us.
So we're gonna blow mostly everything on a big fat first prize in a vanity contest and alienate Xen folks even more, rather than spending 200k on rallying you guys to help educators make our projects part of their curriculum and put our technology to work for those who could most benefit from its use.
While we really do want to do something useful and fun, we can't break with the current commercial idiocy model and our owner would get really teased to death playing golf if we did. We hope you understand."
Hogwash, Baloney and hossenfefer. It takes more than 100k to lure me away from Xen. Adjust your contest to include me and I might get excited.
.. I may also add, the only two places links to my site appear are slashdot and some strange IT directory in Egypt. Wonder where these patent hounds are getting my email.... just something to think about;)
That logic would say we could go sue Coleman for making camp stoves that use fire. I'm surprised nobody has tried to patent fire retro-actively.
You can't produce research in an attempt to pronounce yourself as an authority on the subject then get pissed when other people take your research in other directions, which seems to be the case here. Once you contribute it, you contribute it. Especially if you show yourself as an authority on whatever it is you are writing about.
You know, I get.. ~ 2 or 3 emails a week from "internet law firms" who see my site and tell me how I should be patenting stuff or protecting my "ideas". Its almost like a new cottage industry. You had Ambulance chasers who drove around looking for car wrecks.. now you have them surfing around looking for intellectual property to cash in on and make rotten.
All this is going to do is stop smart people from sharing things. That doesn't benefit anyone.
Well, so this story and discussion doesn't go *completly* meaningless lol, I'm glad someone said clusters:)
If anyone has a few older boxes that can boot from cd (or can make your own boot disks) which *ahem* **SHOULD** be the majority of people reading this, take a look at Parallel Knoppix:
It's not just another knoppix hack. It really is a 5 minute deploy HPC cluster, and comes with all kinds of goodies to help you play with (and understand) how parallel processing works. You need 2 computers and a cross-over cable (or more.. and a switch).
It won't break any nose bleed records on those Pentium 2's you have collecting cat urine in your garage, but if you work really hard you can burn the urnie off like anti freeze on your car exhaust.
Fun way to spend some time (and old hardware) if such things interest you. If you just want to click links and chuckle check out the author and his cluster.
Some of us appreciate the old stuff as much as the new stuff:) But yeah, this isn't "news" guys.. did people stop submitting or something?
When you talk about E-Bay/Paypal and their competition you're acually mentioning a couple industries.
Google's Adsense is most likely the most highly abused PPC ad network that exists, bar none. Every script-kiddie-and-his-uncles-ape has tried to write an autosurf to foil the adsense brain and make free money.
Thusfar very few have succeeded, success being measured as walking away undetected with more than a couple hundred bucks from fake clicks.
I also see their new AJAX interfaces and the security built into them.
Google has (must have) some of the best fraud fighting systems ever engineered at work here. I really, really hope they get into the business of aggregating money because its going to (hopefully) allow us all to do business where Paypal refuses to do so and cut down on frauds and chargebacks that plauge anyone doing business on the Internet.
Or, it could be, Google is so SICK of fraud from adsense, that they won't touch becoming a flat out payment processor with a 10 foot pole.
Ebay has a lock on 2 industries.. auctions and aggregating money. I'm curious to see if Google moves in on both:)
Actually you sparked an idea, well sort of an observation and sort of speculation.
You don't *have* to use your ISP's nameservers. Try 4.2.2.2 or other public ones relatively easy to find on the internet. You could also just toss the domain -> ip of activity you'd rather not have logged in/etc/hosts.
If you are still that paranoid why not just spend the 50 - 60 bucks it costs to bring up a co-located Celeron , toss VNC on it and surf from there if you have any concerns. A quick search on google for "dedicated server" brings up cheap listings including Win2k3 termservs.
While I agree its a crappy law it shouldn't deter even your halfway knowledgeable power user from doing whatever it is they do in complete privacy.
Personally I use These guys. I'd rather deal with their AUP than ever changing polictical influences over the internet.
So I surf on my desktop somewhere in texas. It rocks on my crappy cable at 1024x768 / 15 bit graphics. And it keeps my e-mail centralized, and I can "work" anywhere with a connection.
If my ISP wants to go through the trouble of breaking RDP5 or VNC (could even just use ssh forwarding).. they're *more* than welcome to see what I'm surfing as I feel at that point they've earned it.
Most of us have a nix box somewhere (or even a celeron running windows) that could easily be setup for such purposes.
If *any* isp started blocking RDP or VNC well (duh) we'd change ports, and if they persisted we'd take our business to one who did not.
It's not like the heavy iron hand just came bounding down. Law makers have at least 10 more years of random stupidity and ego strifes before they could actually become (really) annoying when it comes to netlaws.
Why would it be bogus? I'm a nerd, and I understood the article. I also found it interesting and worthy of mentioning.
I'm a little miffed that they leaked the advancement and no real supporting documentation, but folks have a look at the picture on the right of the article.
I'm looking at what appears to be #3 or #4 AWG feedrs (one red, one black) yet look at the size of the solder connections / lug on the motor. I can't say for sure that's also not #12 high voltage (like you'd use for a neon sign) but it looks like THHN.. strange.
While they did not give tourque specifications, payback, heat or (really) anything else I can say it looks a little odd and kind of interesting. I'd also be very curious to see what that motor pulled with a locked rotor.
I'm also kinda miffed that "Perpetual motion" snuck in there. Sure in theory if the thing spun with no load iand nothing ever touched it.
Then in came "renewable energy source" umm , no... how'd you figure on renewable energy? If it was renewable you'd be able to have what was conserved and produced do other things than spin the motor.
Over hyped yeah. Bogus, nah. But just my opinion:)
What, pray tell did you expect? It looks as though you blundered into a pot of gold and kept going despite the fact that you're not large enough yet to carry it away.
Of course they'd demand third party review. I hope *my* bank would! What I also don't see mentioned is any mention of a three inch NDA that would be signed.
Established companies like Microsoft can sell stuff with some (or all) of the hood welded shut. They are an authority. They dictate who our browsers trust. They're huge and they could afford to pay for resulting damages (good luck pinning any on them.. )
If you really want to use this as a spring board I'd let them have at the code. Unless you're in the middle of an "Oh SHIT we gotta re-code all that GPL stuff we used... "
Why would you worry if there wasn't anything to worry about? And why risk your "life's blood" on one single venture?
Sadly I find it harder and harder to walk into a Radio Shack and find any real selection of electronic parts.
I remember when I could walk in with a list of everything I needed and walk out in an hour spending about $20.. including a small blank PCB to etch and even some etching solution if I needed it.
Now all the "good" stuff is huddled way back in a corner, often not priced and reminds me more of lima beans segragated on my dinner plate than a hobbyist resource.
Hopefully the new guy makes Radio Shack "Radio Shack" again, and not just a re-seller for crap Compaq desktops and cellular phones.
Even the scanner selection has gone down hill.
I think it all started when they asked for your name, address and telephone at checkout. Ever since then the've degenerated into just another clone of circuit city, imho:)
Open SSI configured to make one (or more) services highly available. Though I and those I work for sometimes have two broadly different defintions of "high availability" heheh I'm told thats the word for it.
SSI stands for single system image, consists of init (commonly later known as director) nodes and processing nodes. Its not truly a Beowulf class 1 cluster, but close.
If you like Debian, you'd like Debian + OpenSSI:) PHP really lends well to the scripts that help to tune these (and keep them running smoothly). My grand evil genius plan is to eventually port all of these nifty little tools I make over to low level (portable) C to be more efficient and smaller.
I lean heavily on PHP because most of the people I work with know it, or they know enough C/Perl to get through it. Lots of admins getting hired that get lost in bash scripts. I'm sick of getting out of bed to fix things just because someone can't muddle through sed. PHP lets me sleep more. Between the baby in the crib and the one's working the help desk I'm getting a bit puffy eyed..
I'm often tasked with taking php/mysql applications and modifying them as needed to work more efficiently on a SSI HA setup. I'm using sqlite to keep tabs on my node loads and other stuff so the scripts can be more empathetic to the cluster. Sure its kind of the better mousetrap but it works well. PHP's going to make it easier for me to make things everyone can work on.:)
Using PHP/Sqlite I can better track sessions, how many times a given ip block/range/address has requested something, and all kinds of other stuff. I like having sql but I don't like taxing services that are supposed to be for visitors to accomplish back end tasks.
>> Sqlite is public domain, and has a nice little community around it.
I know, and I'm honestly having fun with it and making bosses happy. Its got a fantastic community. I really, really hope it keeps it because its getting more and more attention. And that's when notoriously things kind of go downhill. And also when they get purchased or otherwise mangled.
I guess you could say that was a sort of selfish sigh. If it was just php adding support, or just sqlite getting more attention I wouldn't be worried. Both , well , I hope it continues the way it has been.
That was a real "oh, no!".. not a jab at zend or sqlite.:) I probably worry too much. Lots of time invested in the stuff I do and last year was a big year for a few of my favorite up and comings. I guess in the same breath I could say I hope the Xen community stays coherent too:)
Off my soapbox, sowwy.
Re:Suckage
on
DOM Scripting
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Suck is a harsh word for such a massive (and broadly useful) language. I think where you could imply suckage (and where I pinned my JS leaning frustrations) is the quality of code you were studying to learn. Snippets.. I learn best from examples.
I'm correct in saying for the majority of us, if we want to learn a language we go looking for snippets dissect them get an understanding then add it to working knowledge. I have had such a hard time finding any 2 JS authors who agree on anything that I kind of just stopped persuing it.
The advent of those "article wiki" search engine traps did not help bring any clarity. What I mostly found were groups of people fighting over the "right" way to do it with no apparent victor. It wasn't apathy that stopped me it was total confusion. I wanted to learn only once if possible.. so I waited.
Double suckage : Now my clients want inter-operable AJAX and I can't guess my way through it. I make server control panels and network monitoring applications. I *have* to learn this stuff.
It's not Javascript's fault for existing. It's my fault for not continuing to play with JS while waiting for w3c and others to glue everything together.
I look at the php executable much like I look at my kernel. How much crap is in there that I don't need.
Remember,
#!/bin/bash
can also be
#!/path/to/php -q
Given all of the ways you can build php you can achieve a really nice object oriented feature filled shell script (very useful to tear through logs with regex / etc) that has an executable about 1mb in size (that was php4 I haven't really ripped apart php5).
Build php like your going shopping for car parts. Hmm ok I need sockets, gd, zlib.. hmm better grab some curl.
I have 4 or 5 jobs running with 4 or 5 different versions of php. Perl was easier and is modular but the resulting footprint is much bigger.
This is very useful when you're trying to build something into a single board computer, or where you need to run something very often that parses a lot of text.. lots of good uses.
I (personally) don't use it yet for much else. My biggest hip hip horray about php5 is support for sqlite. But I plan to use that in php shell scripts anyway.
I dont eat breathe and live PHP.. so I have the luxury of enjoying what it does and not really missing what it doesn't. But it has some uses I didn't see mentioned, so I mentioned:)
I hit the freelance sites. I commute (ascending) approximately 10 stairs to reach my office. In the evening i (descend) approximately 10 stairs to reach my television.
I make twice as much as I did making other people rich.
So I guess I'd want the mother of all freelancer sites:)
Funny you should mention sqlite. Just a few posts above this someone was mentioning a possible purchase of zend.
PHP5 is (well was) exciting to me because it was taking advantage of sqlite. I write stuff to run on clusters and if I can avoid ANY database with a client / server overhead I try to, thats my job.
But now all of a sudden I see sqlite support, zend possible buyout.. waaaa lions and tigers and bears oh my! Now my beloved sqlite fail safe could also be in jeoprady? Or was php just catching up with the times?
I really, really hate open source politics like this. So how about bash. You know, the bourne (again) shell? Is that about to be bough slighted screwed or otherwise drawn and quartered? I'm about to just say bash-q-l here I come and assemble my content with echo.
I am happy to see the world being connected. So are all the Chinese kids who didn't have that luxury a few months ago.
Even if its censored its still growth toward globailzation. The fact that China even let it happen at all says that.
I am inclined to say build it as big as we can and iron out political kinks later. The point is keep building. If you keep connecting minds the politics will work themselves out.
No amount of censorship can stop that. I would think Buddhists would be more inclined to see the positives, this one does:)
If you won 900,000.00 would you complain that it wasn't a million? No...
I suspect the world now realizes everyone gets a voice on the internet if they scream loudly enough (thanks to sites like this one). I think people are beginning to say things because they have a new ability and feel they must use it.
You've basically just described what could happen to any processor (no matter how conjoined or how many) that could not return at or greater than the rate it was being fed, which is the point of using Xen in the first place:) I refer to it as 'meltdown' however.
You also have to keep in mind that most clusters are application specific.
With Xen and SSI you have two things that both do a very good job of:
1 - Replace "dumb" round robin load balanced racks (it makes a very good load balancer)
2 - Isolating applications (nevermind the os we're talking about a single image)
I'm not going to go into number one because its obvious (or is to who I'm replying to).
Lets look closer at #2. I'd like to (for demonstration) use as an example the vast number of people using an open source application on their website powered by Apache, PHP and MySQL.
I'd also like to call attention to the fact that commonly those aren't the only 3 malloc()'ing hogs running on any given single server. In fact you'll find most public services running in one place. This means a mailer (exim for this example), Spam Assassin, Clam AV (if they care about their mailbox), MySQL, SMTP bandwidth logging generally using MySQL, SSH, most likely POP and IMAP. Eh, almost forgot DNS but bind is pretty small. Now they're all figting for cache, while trivial system processes live happily in dentry and watch the public ones choke to death. Xen helps you stop this.
Imagine 300 http sessions (lets say some chat program mandated session keep alives), now someone rolls in with a brute force spam attack. There goes exim, spam assassin and clam AV.
Pretty soon things just stop forking and said server needs its diaper changed. So what you described is also what most people have existing.
Now take a look at any 20 places selling co-located servers , or leasing them. You've got about $200 - $300 a month you can spend. Your site was a hobby and now its a kick in your wallet. You'll find a nice Dual Xeon 3.2 (even a 2.8 would work) and you can get a few nics and 4 GB registered RAM.
You can, then with Xen and OpenSSI solve your problem, isolate your services, make some of them highly available and you (can) do it on a single platform and increase its capacity drastically. We have a few things at play:
1 - Xen's routing is very , very fast. That coupled with a sensible CVIP configuration can and will direct traffic as well as most medium line load balancers. I'm not talking about your $50k models that let you shape and direct down to the most miniscule trait of the session.. and I'm not talking about a cheapo. I'm also not calling out anything by brandname.. but I think you can relate for purposes of banter.
2 - You can't (and should not) run one of these from one physical ethernet device. While you don't need to give each node a seperate (real) nic, you really should split things up. By doing so you're freeing up kernel resources to do other things (like direct traffic avoiding I/O bottlenecks).
3 - You need to really play with your kernels. You really need to ensure you are taking advantage of your either (SATA) or preferably (SCSI) disks.
4 - You need to use sensible applications that interact nicely with your sql server, and (as you pointed out) have a very good understanding of Linux and its I/O. Be smart.. use flatfiles when you can (in other words plan your cluster).
5 - You can use xen in a more conventional setup too:) Just allocate 99% of any given server to your etherboot dom-u. iscsi / good gig-e nics and short copper runs to medium grade switches do this quite well.
So should Ebay fire one up today? No.. that would be as dumb as driving on your spare tire to look cool. Can your forum, e-commerce shop or php based game stay up and running? Sure:)
But what I just typed is several options available to site owners who 6 months ago only had much more expensive options.
Some of us are attempting to do something about it. While I have much to finish about the project you can read a little here. Check out OpenSDS.
Most of your phishing is originating from shared web hosting servers. This is because quite often they do not verify their accounts and offer instant account setup with unadulterated access to exim. Check your spam headers and see how much came from "nobody".
The other problem is insecure scripts, or scripts made insecure due to a lack of knowledge on the part of the host.
You're not going to teach john q hosting reseller the basics of securing Linux and PHP. You can, however write scripts and release them. Make them work on all popular hosting platforms. You can also design simple opt-in centralized mod_sec rules that can be implemented in scripts like phpbb, etc as opt-ins by the user.
Hosts hate centralized blacklists because it causes user complaints. So one is needed where their users have control over their vhost. It can be done its just a pain. Someone should make it easy so I figured I'd try.
Users are demanding full access to all popular features. Hosts are giving it. Until someone else makes them secure it (or makes it effortless) , enjoy your spam.. its just going to be a fact of life.
So yes, spam is here to stay unless people get off their duffs and do something about it:) If the end result is the problem reduces significantly then any effort is worth it, funded or otherwise.
Slashdot Mirror
>> You know, the US used to be a lot more isolationist.
Was that back when immigrants were greeted with :
Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breath free.
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me.
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!
And not a TSA agent?
I think this was more a dns-zoo-and-google-knew thing. They're launching some rather huge ventures soon and don't want to slam the door on a couple billion people who will be using their new auctions, adsense, etc.
Of course I do not know this for sure, its only speculation, but it really looks like Google got wind of this and made some last minute concessions.. or went into it knowing they'd be conceeding in the end anyway.
Either way, we can't Blame google for this, or for taking measures needed to keep themselves afloat. Yes they may have a competitive edge by being the only US commercial presence to reach China.
You can, and can't fault politics also. 95% of my brute force spam attacks come from China. I never get a reply from an abuse department. I (think) I have a good 1/3 of the country blocked from port 25 anyway. I had no choice.
What I can say is I've been around a while, and contributing quite a bit to the effort that made the internet. I go back to the dial up days (insert dinosaur IT guy ramblings here).
This isn't the internet I helped to build. Its truly become a little too much like real life now.
This really, really sucks.
I am hearing Led Zepplin in my head.. communication breakdown :)
:) I understand their need to do it, I however resent how they did it.
You really need to look at the need at hand. What is possible verses what gets the job done are two completely different things. My point is only the "best" solution is relative to the need and interests of the person implementing it.
I work in several industries and all of them (now) want to do more with less. Xen (now) allows me to put 2 completely isolated networks (one of them a cluster) on the same 10 servers completely independent of eachother, with no significant performance degradation. I'm not speaking from theory I'm speaking from what we've actually done.
However I'm weird and I love doing what I do. Someone else may lose their hair doing it.
There are more people really hacking away at xen who have not yet published anything. VMWare wants to wave a hundred grand at them to slow down. I think the misleading is on their part
I did something a little more drastic than you're talking about I ended up open sourcing 99% of (what was ) my primary company. However we leaned heavily in the same direction you are.
.. like what if I have a security problem, what if I miss something and sell a solution and it fails.. and I get sued, etc.
.. and monetizing yourself from customizations. You still benefit from being paid to improve your product, you're not alienating developers who would shy away otherwise, and you increase youselves as an authority in your industry.
..
:)
I opened everything for a few reasons :
1 - There is too much commercial competition and the market for (everything) IT is saturated to the point where significant capital is required to enter it. You must be prepared to spend a million bucks on a sustained marketing blitz in order to gain any significant market share.
2 - The problem with media shares and reverse engineers.
3 - We took too long getting a product ready to sell.
4 - There are just too many other companies doing exactly what you're doing. Open / crippled pay / primo. We actually surveyed a few hundred programmers, and found they felt such arrangements were unfair. "Why should we make what they sell even better?".
5 - You need to market, AND have money in the bank for uh-oh's. This is tough for smaller companies (like me).
Then I factored in a bunch of what-ifs
I really recommend making it totally open, reducing it of course
You also are providing an as-is solution that you can warranty at your discretion if you tailor it. This is harder to do, but not impossible with programming toolboxes.
In summary, if your gonna do it, do it. $10k went into the research behind my decision to open my company completely. Its $10k worth of free advice. Take it or leave it.
And dumdum, put a link to your site in the submission next time. Actually, please go shoot yourself in the head with a squirt gun until it really really bruises for not doing so in the first place. Front and center, right on the forehead. Then tell everyone why you did it. Ugh
Seriously, hope my experience helps. I lost a good chunk of cash in this rat race, if someone can avoid doing the same then its money a (bit) better spent. If I had it to do all over again I would have opened it from the start, had a better product and more money left in the bank by now
I think we have different ideas of "favor" .. I'm factoring cost of ownership, free support, and ease of integration as well as performance.
Xen is not an out of the box virtualization solution. You have to spend an hour setting up key pairing and writing a few scripts, and be comfortable with that.
However, the people most likely to need that kind of technology, are comfortable with that.
Open source is rallying around Xen, and I think you'll see its usability increase drastically in the not too distant future.
Please take a moment and read the Beowulf definition for a class 1 cluster :
Here
Xen tips the scales for many things that I like to do. But maybe not someone else. I think "better" at this point remains relative to the intended use, and ability to craft a means of managing it for that use.
Actually I virtualize any server I sell for free (Xen) .. so do many other providers. We have to in order to make co-located solutions more attractive to the end user.
:)
You *can* get Windows running well under Xen in that type of setting. The biggest issue with Xen / Windows is "xen aware" video. Since any co-located server running Win32 is going to be managed via KVM over IP or RDP5, this is not going to be an issue. In fact, its less resource used on a server. Not many are offering it because nobody has charted it and proven it yet. That doesn't mean we're not in the process of doing so.
Usefulness with something like this has to be judged for the end user (who sits in front of the virtualized PC), and the person who opts to lease something already racked.
Folks I make my living off of the internet. I work directly with the data centers leasing these and all of them are really taking notice of Xen. We're stupid not to, Windows VPS servers without any licensing costs on our end, but Windows itself are a dream come true for many people.
This also allows you to slice 10 servers into 10 windows desktops, 10 Open SSI nodes, and 10 HPC (parallel) cluster nodes to field requests from SSI. Its an OS geek wet dream come true, and its very very possible and has already been done.
I think that's what "sparked" this whole VMW contest.
My take :
Dear Open Source :
Please, please please start developing as much for us as you do for Xen. We spent heaps of money developing what we have and we aren't making enough back.
Xen 3 really took a chunk out of our market and is gaining more and more support. We don't care about Xen's market share as much as we care that open source developers aren't building more things around us.
So we're gonna blow mostly everything on a big fat first prize in a vanity contest and alienate Xen folks even more, rather than spending 200k on rallying you guys to help educators make our projects part of their curriculum and put our technology to work for those who could most benefit from its use.
While we really do want to do something useful and fun, we can't break with the current commercial idiocy model and our owner would get really teased to death playing golf if we did. We hope you understand."
Hogwash, Baloney and hossenfefer. It takes more than 100k to lure me away from Xen. Adjust your contest to include me and I might get excited.
Thanks for the blueballs, VMWare.
Off my soapbox.
.. I may also add, the only two places links to my site appear are slashdot and some strange IT directory in Egypt. Wonder where these patent hounds are getting my email .... just something to think about ;)
That logic would say we could go sue Coleman for making camp stoves that use fire. I'm surprised nobody has tried to patent fire retro-actively.
.. ~ 2 or 3 emails a week from "internet law firms" who see my site and tell me how I should be patenting stuff or protecting my "ideas". Its almost like a new cottage industry. You had Ambulance chasers who drove around looking for car wrecks .. now you have them surfing around looking for intellectual property to cash in on and make rotten.
You can't produce research in an attempt to pronounce yourself as an authority on the subject then get pissed when other people take your research in other directions, which seems to be the case here. Once you contribute it, you contribute it. Especially if you show yourself as an authority on whatever it is you are writing about.
You know, I get
All this is going to do is stop smart people from sharing things. That doesn't benefit anyone.
Off my soapbox.
Well, so this story and discussion doesn't go *completly* meaningless lol, I'm glad someone said clusters :)
.. and a switch).
:) But yeah, this isn't "news" guys .. did people stop submitting or something?
If anyone has a few older boxes that can boot from cd (or can make your own boot disks) which *ahem* **SHOULD** be the majority of people reading this, take a look at Parallel Knoppix:
Parallel Knoppix Project
It's not just another knoppix hack. It really is a 5 minute deploy HPC cluster, and comes with all kinds of goodies to help you play with (and understand) how parallel processing works. You need 2 computers and a cross-over cable (or more
It won't break any nose bleed records on those Pentium 2's you have collecting cat urine in your garage, but if you work really hard you can burn the urnie off like anti freeze on your car exhaust.
Fun way to spend some time (and old hardware) if such things interest you. If you just want to click links and chuckle check out the author and his cluster.
Some of us appreciate the old stuff as much as the new stuff
When you talk about E-Bay/Paypal and their competition you're acually mentioning a couple industries.
.. auctions and aggregating money. I'm curious to see if Google moves in on both :)
Google's Adsense is most likely the most highly abused PPC ad network that exists, bar none. Every script-kiddie-and-his-uncles-ape has tried to write an autosurf to foil the adsense brain and make free money.
Thusfar very few have succeeded, success being measured as walking away undetected with more than a couple hundred bucks from fake clicks.
I also see their new AJAX interfaces and the security built into them.
Google has (must have) some of the best fraud fighting systems ever engineered at work here. I really, really hope they get into the business of aggregating money because its going to (hopefully) allow us all to do business where Paypal refuses to do so and cut down on frauds and chargebacks that plauge anyone doing business on the Internet.
Or, it could be, Google is so SICK of fraud from adsense, that they won't touch becoming a flat out payment processor with a 10 foot pole.
Ebay has a lock on 2 industries
Actually you sparked an idea, well sort of an observation and sort of speculation.
/etc/hosts.
.. they're *more* than welcome to see what I'm surfing as I feel at that point they've earned it.
You don't *have* to use your ISP's nameservers. Try 4.2.2.2 or other public ones relatively easy to find on the internet. You could also just toss the domain -> ip of activity you'd rather not have logged in
If you are still that paranoid why not just spend the 50 - 60 bucks it costs to bring up a co-located Celeron , toss VNC on it and surf from there if you have any concerns. A quick search on google for "dedicated server" brings up cheap listings including Win2k3 termservs.
While I agree its a crappy law it shouldn't deter even your halfway knowledgeable power user from doing whatever it is they do in complete privacy.
Personally I use These guys. I'd rather deal with their AUP than ever changing polictical influences over the internet.
So I surf on my desktop somewhere in texas. It rocks on my crappy cable at 1024x768 / 15 bit graphics. And it keeps my e-mail centralized, and I can "work" anywhere with a connection.
If my ISP wants to go through the trouble of breaking RDP5 or VNC (could even just use ssh forwarding)
Most of us have a nix box somewhere (or even a celeron running windows) that could easily be setup for such purposes.
If *any* isp started blocking RDP or VNC well (duh) we'd change ports, and if they persisted we'd take our business to one who did not.
It's not like the heavy iron hand just came bounding down. Law makers have at least 10 more years of random stupidity and ego strifes before they could actually become (really) annoying when it comes to netlaws.
Off my soapbox
Why would it be bogus? I'm a nerd, and I understood the article. I also found it interesting and worthy of mentioning.
.. strange.
... how'd you figure on renewable energy? If it was renewable you'd be able to have what was conserved and produced do other things than spin the motor.
:)
I'm a little miffed that they leaked the advancement and no real supporting documentation, but folks have a look at the picture on the right of the article.
I'm looking at what appears to be #3 or #4 AWG feedrs (one red, one black) yet look at the size of the solder connections / lug on the motor. I can't say for sure that's also not #12 high voltage (like you'd use for a neon sign) but it looks like THHN
While they did not give tourque specifications, payback, heat or (really) anything else I can say it looks a little odd and kind of interesting. I'd also be very curious to see what that motor pulled with a locked rotor.
I'm also kinda miffed that "Perpetual motion" snuck in there. Sure in theory if the thing spun with no load iand nothing ever touched it.
Then in came "renewable energy source" umm , no
Over hyped yeah. Bogus, nah. But just my opinion
>> Order happy meal first. Big mac later.Good starting point for a haiku. Work on it.
:) So it fits.
Pointless Haiku
containing big mac
always ends with
toilet flushing.
I doubt that qualifies. But then I don't qualify for much either
I was almost sympathetic until I re-read:
.. )
... "
very large US bank
What, pray tell did you expect? It looks as though you blundered into a pot of gold and kept going despite the fact that you're not large enough yet to carry it away.
Of course they'd demand third party review. I hope *my* bank would! What I also don't see mentioned is any mention of a three inch NDA that would be signed.
Established companies like Microsoft can sell stuff with some (or all) of the hood welded shut. They are an authority. They dictate who our browsers trust. They're huge and they could afford to pay for resulting damages (good luck pinning any on them
If you really want to use this as a spring board I'd let them have at the code. Unless you're in the middle of an "Oh SHIT we gotta re-code all that GPL stuff we used
Why would you worry if there wasn't anything to worry about? And why risk your "life's blood" on one single venture?
Order happy meal first. Big mac later.
Off my soapbox.
Sadly I find it harder and harder to walk into a Radio Shack and find any real selection of electronic parts.
.. including a small blank PCB to etch and even some etching solution if I needed it.
:)
I remember when I could walk in with a list of everything I needed and walk out in an hour spending about $20
Now all the "good" stuff is huddled way back in a corner, often not priced and reminds me more of lima beans segragated on my dinner plate than a hobbyist resource.
Hopefully the new guy makes Radio Shack "Radio Shack" again, and not just a re-seller for crap Compaq desktops and cellular phones.
Even the scanner selection has gone down hill.
I think it all started when they asked for your name, address and telephone at checkout. Ever since then the've degenerated into just another clone of circuit city, imho
Open SSI configured to make one (or more) services highly available. Though I and those I work for sometimes have two broadly different defintions of "high availability" heheh I'm told thats the word for it.
:) PHP really lends well to the scripts that help to tune these (and keep them running smoothly). My grand evil genius plan is to eventually port all of these nifty little tools I make over to low level (portable) C to be more efficient and smaller.
:)
SSI stands for single system image, consists of init (commonly later known as director) nodes and processing nodes. Its not truly a Beowulf class 1 cluster, but close.
If you like Debian, you'd like Debian + OpenSSI
PHP lends well to that too
>> Just out of curiosity, why php?
:)
.. not a jab at zend or sqlite. :) I probably worry too much. Lots of time invested in the stuff I do and last year was a big year for a few of my favorite up and comings. I guess in the same breath I could say I hope the Xen community stays coherent too :)
2 reasons:
I lean heavily on PHP because most of the people I work with know it, or they know enough C/Perl to get through it. Lots of admins getting hired that get lost in bash scripts. I'm sick of getting out of bed to fix things just because someone can't muddle through sed. PHP lets me sleep more. Between the baby in the crib and the one's working the help desk I'm getting a bit puffy eyed..
I'm often tasked with taking php/mysql applications and modifying them as needed to work more efficiently on a SSI HA setup. I'm using sqlite to keep tabs on my node loads and other stuff so the scripts can be more empathetic to the cluster. Sure its kind of the better mousetrap but it works well. PHP's going to make it easier for me to make things everyone can work on.
Using PHP/Sqlite I can better track sessions, how many times a given ip block/range/address has requested something, and all kinds of other stuff. I like having sql but I don't like taxing services that are supposed to be for visitors to accomplish back end tasks.
>> Sqlite is public domain, and has a nice little community around it.
I know, and I'm honestly having fun with it and making bosses happy. Its got a fantastic community. I really, really hope it keeps it because its getting more and more attention. And that's when notoriously things kind of go downhill. And also when they get purchased or otherwise mangled.
I guess you could say that was a sort of selfish sigh. If it was just php adding support, or just sqlite getting more attention I wouldn't be worried. Both , well , I hope it continues the way it has been.
That was a real "oh, no!"
Off my soapbox, sowwy.
Suck is a harsh word for such a massive (and broadly useful) language. I think where you could imply suckage (and where I pinned my JS leaning frustrations) is the quality of code you were studying to learn. Snippets .. I learn best from examples.
.. so I waited.
I'm correct in saying for the majority of us, if we want to learn a language we go looking for snippets dissect them get an understanding then add it to working knowledge. I have had such a hard time finding any 2 JS authors who agree on anything that I kind of just stopped persuing it.
The advent of those "article wiki" search engine traps did not help bring any clarity. What I mostly found were groups of people fighting over the "right" way to do it with no apparent victor. It wasn't apathy that stopped me it was total confusion. I wanted to learn only once if possible
Double suckage : Now my clients want inter-operable AJAX and I can't guess my way through it. I make server control panels and network monitoring applications. I *have* to learn this stuff.
It's not Javascript's fault for existing. It's my fault for not continuing to play with JS while waiting for w3c and others to glue everything together.
Ugh this is going to hurt.
I look at the php executable much like I look at my kernel. How much crap is in there that I don't need.
.. hmm better grab some curl.
.. so I have the luxury of enjoying what it does and not really missing what it doesn't. But it has some uses I didn't see mentioned, so I mentioned :)
Remember,
#!/bin/bash
can also be
#!/path/to/php -q
Given all of the ways you can build php you can achieve a really nice object oriented feature filled shell script (very useful to tear through logs with regex / etc) that has an executable about 1mb in size (that was php4 I haven't really ripped apart php5).
Build php like your going shopping for car parts. Hmm ok I need sockets, gd, zlib
I have 4 or 5 jobs running with 4 or 5 different versions of php. Perl was easier and is modular but the resulting footprint is much bigger.
This is very useful when you're trying to build something into a single board computer, or where you need to run something very often that parses a lot of text.. lots of good uses.
I (personally) don't use it yet for much else. My biggest hip hip horray about php5 is support for sqlite. But I plan to use that in php shell scripts anyway.
I dont eat breathe and live PHP
I hit the freelance sites. I commute (ascending) approximately 10 stairs to reach my office. In the evening i (descend) approximately 10 stairs to reach my television.
:)
..
I make twice as much as I did making other people rich.
So I guess I'd want the mother of all freelancer sites
Well, you asked
Funny you should mention sqlite. Just a few posts above this someone was mentioning a possible purchase of zend.
.. waaaa lions and tigers and bears oh my! Now my beloved sqlite fail safe could also be in jeoprady? Or was php just catching up with the times?
.. same thing. Screw em both.
PHP5 is (well was) exciting to me because it was taking advantage of sqlite. I write stuff to run on clusters and if I can avoid ANY database with a client / server overhead I try to, thats my job.
But now all of a sudden I see sqlite support, zend possible buyout
I really, really hate open source politics like this. So how about bash. You know, the bourne (again) shell? Is that about to be bough slighted screwed or otherwise drawn and quartered? I'm about to just say bash-q-l here I come and assemble my content with echo.
sed, select
I am happy to see the world being connected. So are all the Chinese kids who didn't have that luxury a few months ago.
:)
Even if its censored its still growth toward globailzation. The fact that China even let it happen at all says that.
I am inclined to say build it as big as we can and iron out political kinks later. The point is keep building. If you keep connecting minds the politics will work themselves out.
No amount of censorship can stop that. I would think Buddhists would be more inclined to see the positives, this one does
If you won 900,000.00 would you complain that it wasn't a million? No...
I suspect the world now realizes everyone gets a voice on the internet if they scream loudly enough (thanks to sites like this one). I think people are beginning to say things because they have a new ability and feel they must use it.
Visa made a commercial about that , didn't they?
You've basically just described what could happen to any processor (no matter how conjoined or how many) that could not return at or greater than the rate it was being fed, which is the point of using Xen in the first place :) I refer to it as 'meltdown' however.
:
:
:) Just allocate 99% of any given server to your etherboot dom-u. iscsi / good gig-e nics and short copper runs to medium grade switches do this quite well.
.. that would be as dumb as driving on your spare tire to look cool. Can your forum, e-commerce shop or php based game stay up and running? Sure :)
You also have to keep in mind that most clusters are application specific.
With Xen and SSI you have two things that both do a very good job of
1 - Replace "dumb" round robin load balanced racks (it makes a very good load balancer)
2 - Isolating applications (nevermind the os we're talking about a single image)
I'm not going to go into number one because its obvious (or is to who I'm replying to).
Lets look closer at #2. I'd like to (for demonstration) use as an example the vast number of people using an open source application on their website powered by Apache, PHP and MySQL.
I'd also like to call attention to the fact that commonly those aren't the only 3 malloc()'ing hogs running on any given single server. In fact you'll find most public services running in one place. This means a mailer (exim for this example), Spam Assassin, Clam AV (if they care about their mailbox), MySQL, SMTP bandwidth logging generally using MySQL, SSH, most likely POP and IMAP. Eh, almost forgot DNS but bind is pretty small. Now they're all figting for cache, while trivial system processes live happily in dentry and watch the public ones choke to death. Xen helps you stop this.
Imagine 300 http sessions (lets say some chat program mandated session keep alives), now someone rolls in with a brute force spam attack. There goes exim, spam assassin and clam AV.
Pretty soon things just stop forking and said server needs its diaper changed. So what you described is also what most people have existing.
Now take a look at any 20 places selling co-located servers , or leasing them. You've got about $200 - $300 a month you can spend. Your site was a hobby and now its a kick in your wallet. You'll find a nice Dual Xeon 3.2 (even a 2.8 would work) and you can get a few nics and 4 GB registered RAM.
You can, then with Xen and OpenSSI solve your problem, isolate your services, make some of them highly available and you (can) do it on a single platform and increase its capacity drastically. We have a few things at play
1 - Xen's routing is very , very fast. That coupled with a sensible CVIP configuration can and will direct traffic as well as most medium line load balancers. I'm not talking about your $50k models that let you shape and direct down to the most miniscule trait of the session.. and I'm not talking about a cheapo. I'm also not calling out anything by brandname.. but I think you can relate for purposes of banter.
2 - You can't (and should not) run one of these from one physical ethernet device. While you don't need to give each node a seperate (real) nic, you really should split things up. By doing so you're freeing up kernel resources to do other things (like direct traffic avoiding I/O bottlenecks).
3 - You need to really play with your kernels. You really need to ensure you are taking advantage of your either (SATA) or preferably (SCSI) disks.
4 - You need to use sensible applications that interact nicely with your sql server, and (as you pointed out) have a very good understanding of Linux and its I/O. Be smart.. use flatfiles when you can (in other words plan your cluster).
5 - You can use xen in a more conventional setup too
So should Ebay fire one up today? No
But what I just typed is several options available to site owners who 6 months ago only had much more expensive options.
Some of us are attempting to do something about it. While I have much to finish about the project you can read a little here. Check out OpenSDS.
.. its just going to be a fact of life.
:) If the end result is the problem reduces significantly then any effort is worth it, funded or otherwise.
Most of your phishing is originating from shared web hosting servers. This is because quite often they do not verify their accounts and offer instant account setup with unadulterated access to exim. Check your spam headers and see how much came from "nobody".
The other problem is insecure scripts, or scripts made insecure due to a lack of knowledge on the part of the host.
You're not going to teach john q hosting reseller the basics of securing Linux and PHP. You can, however write scripts and release them. Make them work on all popular hosting platforms. You can also design simple opt-in centralized mod_sec rules that can be implemented in scripts like phpbb, etc as opt-ins by the user.
Hosts hate centralized blacklists because it causes user complaints. So one is needed where their users have control over their vhost. It can be done its just a pain. Someone should make it easy so I figured I'd try.
Users are demanding full access to all popular features. Hosts are giving it. Until someone else makes them secure it (or makes it effortless) , enjoy your spam
So yes, spam is here to stay unless people get off their duffs and do something about it
off the box.