| |
|
|
Wednesday, August 30, 2006 
Good luck Mr. W! |
(posted at 10:55PM BST)
I was very pleased to hear from my ex-boss today that a former colleague of ours is now doing extremely well for himself since leaving our 'former employer'.
I guess that makes three of us now!
The best thing about this news is that I also found out that the one thing which we used to disagree about constantly is now something which we both agree on - in celebration, the word 'fickwit' will now become a regular part of my sysadmin vocabulary and I will be happy to contribute a few quid to the beer fund if you ever find yourself in this neck of the woods again. |
|
Monday, August 28, 2006
The Holy Grail of Redundancy |
(posted at 11:25PM BST)
I'm currently in the process of writing the management scripts for my new virtual server platform (based on something which is not VMware, Xen or Microsoft).
The preliminary tests are showing up some rather amazing results:
With my new DNS infrastructure, I was able to automate the move of 150 virtual servers from arkanoid.spilsby.net (in London) to solstice.spilsby.net (in Texas) and update the DNS associated with 500 subdomains (dummy ones used for testing) within five minutes.
This means that the average transfer of a virtual servers' data files and current state takes two seconds.
Coupled with high-availability IP-over-IP tunneling on the London end, no connections to any of the servers were disrupted - migration was completely seamless - a few pings were dropped but that is hardly earth-shattering!
This more than exceeds my expectations of the technology and my own implementation is technically complete enough to start offering to the select few of my customer base that seem to enjoy fiddling with and trying to break my beloved creations ;-)
Although the implementation is nearly finished, I'm waiting for some new servers (a couple of dual Intel Xeon 3.2GHz boxes with 4Gb RAM each, approx. 300Gb disk space as RAID-5 and dual power supplies) - this should handle well over 256+ virtual servers and should scale very nicely.
Why two boxes though ?
I intend to run DRBD along with UCARP to ensure an extremely high level of uptime - because, unlike my previous employer, I actually plan for hardware to fail! |
|
Tuesday, August 22, 2006
spilsby.net v2.0 |
(posted at 10:55PM BST)
I'm currently in the process of evaluating both new and existing IP transit providers for my 'network presence' in Redbus Interhouse.
As it currently stands, my connectivity is multi-homed albeit not at the borders of my network but rather that of my upstream provider; also, they are not exactly the cheapest for IP transit but that said it is very high-quality transit - all of my UK customers say that they have never seen pings higher than 15ms from any of my co-located kit.
Due to the fact that I have two Sun Netra T1s in my possession with quad-Ethernet cards and enough memory in them to act as routers, I'll be installing OpenBSD and Quagga so they can be used as *proper* border routers - BGP is great fun!
(while I advocate Linux for a lot of tasks, OpenBSD has the best IPv4/IPv6 stack/security record that I have seen in the last four years or so plus SPARC hardware is also unlikely to be vulnerable to router exploits common to Cisco kit)
I am toying with the idea of purchasing a large amount of average-quality transit and using that for traffic to/from non-UK users and reserving the high-quality transit for the UK users - majority of customers are based in the UK but the bulk of their e-mail/website traffic comes from overseas.
Some preliminary tests from the States indicate that the average-quality transit only adds around 10-15ms to the roundtrip time but when you are over 100ms anyway, another 10-15ms really doesn't matter.
The next logical step will then be to get this all cleared with RIPE... wish me luck! |
|
Monday, August 21, 2006
Yes... a new website! |
(posted at 10:07PM BST)
Yes, I admit it.
The Spilsby Internet Solutions website is shit and has been extremely dated for at least the last five years but I now have a working design that I'm reasonably happy with.
I do plan to get a professional designer to run over it with a steamroller and then I'll go live with it... promise!
As always, I have lots of things on the go at the moment; one in particular which will elevate the business into the upper echelons of hosting/connectivity suppliers in this country.
... and no, I don't plan on joining ISPA but all I will say on the matter is that once I have everything in place, Spilsby Internet Solutions will certainly meet the criteria for joining.
The next six months will be interesting ;-) |
|
Friday, August 18, 2006
American Megatrends finally get their finger out... |
(posted at 01:16PM BST)
I now have source for the MegaRAC G3 firmware.
Of course, I have yet to confirm that what I have in possession is actually buildable but as they didn't let me down with the MegaRAC G2 source, I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.
800Mb of compressed source is taking the piss a bit though, methinks :-) |
|
Wednesday, August 9, 2006
DNS update work completed! |
(posted at 06:26AM BST)
I finished up the implementation of the new DNS platform last night with ns1.spilsby.net going back online at approximately 11:32pm.
Administrative DNS updates are now taking less than a second to propogate across the entire nameserver platform, plus, the average time to answer a query is now taking less than half the time which it used to take before the update.
.... and no, I haven't switched to Microsoft DNS Server - for one thing, I've never heard of a Microsoft DNS Server deployment that could comfortably handle 500 domains, let alone 25,000 ;-) |
|
Sunday, August 6, 2006
25,000th domain served by spilsby.net nameservers.... |
(posted at 05:31PM BST)
I'm really chuffed to announce that at 1:35pm today, an existing customer of Spilsby Internet Solutions registered the .co.uk version of their domain name and chose to host it with us as well.
On a related note, I have successfully finished stress-testing Apache 2.2.2, PHP 5.1.4 and MySQL 5.0.24.
This means that I will be shortly notifying all web-hosting customers of a planned upgrade to the above software; I had initially intended to wait until PHP 6 was formally released and roll that out but as PHP 6 removes support for so much legacy PHP crap (stuff which encourages insecure coding practices), I thought it better to roll out a version which defaults to those bits being disabled but can have them re-activated on a per-site basis.
A policy change will also mean that any future requests from customers requesting PHP's register_globals() functionality to be enabled will be refused - any customers who already have this functionality enable will continue to retain this behaviour until PHP 6 is deployed to the web-hosting platform.
As PHP 6 is intended to be a major upgrade, I will be giving all customers at least three months notice prior to the intended implementation date.
I am also planning an upgrade to the DNS platform in order to further improve resiliency and the average time to answer DNS queries... more details soon! |
|
Wednesday, August 2, 2006
It lives!! |
(posted at 09:42AM BST)
My first attempt at building the MegaRAC G2 firmware worked like a charm - flashed to my test card and all works as expected!
I'm going to concentrate on fixing some of the existing bugs before I add any new functionality (updating the Linux kernel, updating GoAhead Web Server, integrating dropbear to allow SSH access akin to the MegaRAC G3, building with IPv6 support and chucking iptables on there for good measure). |
|
Tuesday, August 1, 2006
Which came first... the compiler or the cross-compiler ? |
(posted at 08:33PM BST)
I have spent much of today reconfiguring and rebuilding binutils, gcc and uClibc in order to get a build environment working for American Megatrends' MegaRAC G2/ G3 cards now that I actually have some time to dedicate to fixing some of the more annoying bugs currently present in their respective firmwares.
The Freescale ColdFire architecture which the cards are based on is really quite elegant and it is amazing how much performance you can get out of a simple embedded microprocessor.
Once I've got that built, I'll be doing an ARM toolchain as well because it should come in handy for playing about with the firmware of my Amstrad E3; bought for just £29.99, a consumer-grade videophone designed to be used with an analogue line can be made into something far greater by using the onboard USB port (meant for using with a printer) with a USB Ethernet adapter instead and using it as a proper videophone.
This is what self-employment is all about; I can dedicate some of serious time to work that I enjoy :-) |
|
|
|
|
|
