Most “IT Pro’s” in Australia actually have little to none creative or developmental capacity.

Looking over assets listings for a client I see countless line items for software, where tens of thousands of dollars have been spent on software that have better Open Source or SaaS alternatives available.

Discussions on LinkedIn boards talk about “What is best software for this?  Which vendor?”  Hardly a conversation about how “This is great” or “Or I used this library with this project and solved this problem while not spending $$ and adding to our own IP collection”.

It seems IT workers in this country are glorified order (procurement) takers and givers?  And those that actually can to the work and be creative are stuck at the bottom of the food chain and never listened too.

Is this how Silicon Alley or Valley works?  Or how Eastern Europe has surged forward? Or China, India and the Philippines?

Australia – you need to embrace INNOVATION and self driven productivity and not being glorified LEGO builders (NBN!!).  Otherwise I can’t see how Australia will have any IT industry left over?

And the next person that states that Australia or the way we do it has something to do with better “Quality” I am going to brain them for being so naive and self delusional.

And where is all the Open Source fun?  The JAVA and Python and Perl and what not?  Everything seems to be .Net and Microsoft.   I’m not silly enough to enquire about Ruby or Rails though.  :-s

The McDonalds of IDC’s?

I mean that in a good way.  I can see why they offer such a compelling IDC choice for many companies.  From being carrier neutral, easy cross connects, standardised security and operational procedures – heck even the free wifi is based on the same docket printing and login system.

While I give kudos to EQUINIX Sydney for providing a couch area with TV, ping pong, food and coffee.  I must say that charging people for a cup of machine coffee is a little on the tight side.  The showers are a nice touch – but LG DATACOM in Seoul still takes the cake as the best IDC that “Gets it” when it comes to poor nocturnal IT staff.  They provide a mini hotel/dormitory area where you can also catch some sleep in private while that massive rsync finishes or your team works in shifts to complete work within the downtime window.

Maybe a few “China Consultants” who are out busy trying to sell their expertise (cough) on Guanxi and gan bei?  But the rest of you I am sure will be dragging out the #conplete_shock hash tag right about now, right?

In any case, it is now not the case that a business can register a domain name.  Get this.  Businesses are NOT ALLOWED to own .CN domain names.  ONLY INDIVIDUALS.  I’ll let you all ponder why that may be the case.  It is about as hard as figuring out why BBQ’s attract flies.

So all that stuff I wrote about before about having to have a business licence and domains being redacted and the special application procedures and stopping domain name squatting like other country TLD’s is now yesterdays paper.

If you are asking “WHY?” right about now, you are obviously one of the afore mentioned “China Consultants”.  If you didn’t ask why, you must be an actual China Businessman.  And I will have more details in a day or two when they can be had and can be made to be static for the time needed to translate them.

Enjoy!

Anyway – this problem gets worse with the distributed IDC/Cloud.  So just add this little line to the advnced properties of any (read all) hosts.

keyboard.typematicMinDelay = 2000000

While one normally uses SSH or RDP to get to remote machines – when boot strapping, or post cloning and need to change a mac address binding or any other of small thing, this keyboard bug will drive you nuts.  Especially when a 30 second downtime blows out.  And all you want to do is edit 2 or 3 characters.

Breath…. please take this all and be happy as I am now. 

All the relevant information is summarised here. ICP like all regulations in China is an opaque topic and can’t be summarised into a bullet point list. So please read the links below to become fully educated.

• History of ICP
• New Regulations March 2010
• The Double ICP
• New Application Procedures August 2010

History of ICP

Double ICP Needed

ICP Application Procedure and Specifications

With new regulations enforced by MIIT, Internet Service Providers are obliged to conform to the current ICP application procedure.  Specifications are as follows:

1.    The procedure

For new record registration, please log on http://beian.95881.com and choose “ICP record management system”. Wait for the on-site verification email after the required record information is submitted.  The website administrator will then be asked to be at the hosting providers office with related documents and also for a photo shoot.

2.    For Beijing clients only

For businesses, materials include:

• Business Licence (photocopy) with business seal

• Contact people personal ID (photocopy)

• Domain certificate with business seal

• Original verification forms filled out on site

• Information security agreement with business seal

• Website Administrator’s ID and photo shoot on site

For individuals, materials include:

• Personal ID (photocopy)

• Domain certificate

• Original verification form filled out on site

• Information security agreement

• Website Administrator’s ID and photo shoot onsite

3.    Notes

• Website Administrator must bring original personal ID and have the photo shoot on site

• Institutions, governmental agencies and social organisations with no business license are to submit with Organisation Code Certificate

• Websites with contents to be verified must provide with the department’s approval

• The document required above can be submitted or emailed to beian@95881.com

Previously you would have to decide between a “normal” ICP as needed for all business online properties.  Or a “commercial” ICP for doing trades/shopping cart/ecommerce.

Well if you had the latter – get ready to go an apply for the former AS WELL and IN ADDITION to the latter.  Otherwise the nice men at 5PM on a Friday on the phone will be demanding that your site is taken down.  Even though you have a commercial ICP and put up the millions in RMB in registered capital required for it.

See also: http://www.utilitycomputing.com.cn/china/the-history-of-chinese-icp-and-cn-requirements

Well it turns out that for the past two months I had only been “Deactivated”!

Deleting is a whole new option (hidden – until Jason showed me) that also needs 14 days to complete.

Getting China residence is easier than canceling citizenship to Face Book! :-s

The following is a screen shot of a log from one client, who has a fairly large rack and a few servers for their thin client deployment. In this case the A/C failed and the servers shut down gracefully.

First noting the rising temperature and alerting CANDIS through our monitoring system and then when the failure threshold was met – issuing a shut down command to the OS and then powering off the server. All this happened on a long weekend and the final shut down was alerted to us as well.

Worked like clock work. Then again – I walk into many IDC’s in China and see flashing red failure LEDs and it seems they are forever on. Do SysAdmins in China not setup hardware monitoring? Do they not care? Why is this? Why would you want a failure to occur or interrupt your free time or your clients business?

I like their ratio of engineers to users… in China it is about the opposite.  We had 6 people come to change a light bulb last week.  Labour is a cheap commodity – but smart use of technology will be even cheaper!

FaceBook Infrastructure

All up it was 70 servers deployed with full remote management and power and network port control.

Images can be seen over at: Cross posted to the CANDIS Group Blog.