Nov15th2007
Published by richard November 15th, 2007
in Business Development and China.
For part one, go here: http://www.utilitycomputing.com.cn/?p=41
I hate to bitch. And I hate to appear as if I am drumming up business or trying to screw other businesses. I am just trying to call it as I see it as a public service.
We get maybe 3-4 clients a week transfer to us from a very prominent and large Chinese domain registrar and hoster, I won’t say the name. But your guess is probably correct.
Apart from the issues mentioned above, the latest fiasco involves again transferring domain names AND DNS.
Continue reading ‘Chinese Registrars Redux’
Published by richard November 14th, 2007
in The Cloud.
I had a nasty shock this week with ESX3.
I was going about expanding virtual disks and reallocating resources for one client. Now, I have done this MANY times, so I thought that “the 2 day old backup is sufficient” and did not wait 3-4 hours for a new backup, right before what will be a 10 min task.
I went to expand the virtual disks from the COS and noticed that there were some “Virtual-Disk-000001-delta.vmdk” and “Virtual-Disk-000001.vmdk” files present.
“Oh, a snapshot is here for some reason..?”, I pondered. I then went into the VI3 management console, drilled down to said VPS and went to the snapshot manager, expecting to find a snapshot and then simply commit it to the main disk so I could get back to expanding.
Continue reading ‘ESX: Recover from expanded disk with existing snapshot or corrupted snapshots’
Nov5th2007
Published by richard November 5th, 2007
in FOSS/GNU/Linux.
This hit me today.
The “gam_server” process. Set to identify when any file in the system is changed. A useful action that has benefits. But not when it does it 3-5 times per second and the sever is serving NFS and PostgreSQL!
To fix it, just ensure that somewhere in /etc/ (RedHat Base) or /etc/gamin/ (Debian Base) has a file called:
Continue reading ‘gam_server ruining your IO throughput? Context switches hitting 8,000 a second?’
Published by richard November 5th, 2007
in Tech Horizon and The Cloud.
I have been using VMWARE/BOCHS and UML for around 7 years now. And boy have things moved quickly! Most recently VMWARE announced their new products. ESX 3.5 is basically the same as ESX3, the main new feature that all people could use is the central patch management system. The feature that is really putting this product well into the “Enterprise” class is the SAN motion system. Think VMOTION for SAN’s. Well seeing as most SANS cost around 300,000 RMB, it must be nice to be able to have at least TWO of them, to then use this functionality.
What is a mixed bag in my mind is the new ESX3i. It will be first released in the new Dell VORSO servers, originally due to ship this month and as confirmed by my DELL Sales manager, is slipping into the new year. These servers will not need hard disks (So what about core dumps, logs and swap?) but will have embedded flash with the hypervisor installed.
Continue reading ‘The New Virtual Infrastructure’
Nov3rd2007
Published by richard November 3rd, 2007
in Business Development and China.
Well, the thing is, in China, you have to have a licence to have a website, called an ICP. It costs money if you are commercial, even more money if an e-commerce site, as well as a bank deposit with a certain amount of registered capital. For non commercial entities it is free and no capital is required. The whole idea is that it is there to keep things (sites and content) legal. The original intent of this system was that only sites with a ICP would work. Now any site will work and if audited and no ICP is found, you are taken down by order of the government if you don’t acquire one somewhat expediently.
Continue reading ‘ICP Certificates, Beijing Linux User Group Compliance’
Published by richard October 28th, 2007
in China.
OK, so I want to use Flickr for some photos. No sooner had I worked out a simple yet effective plan to allow me to actually use Flickr in China, then I am stone walled by Yahoo.
It seems that you need a Yahoo ID to use Flickr. And no matter how or where I click to sign up for Yahoo, be it .com.au or .com or .com.hk, I get redirected to the China site…. what Yaahoo?? Only Chinese speaking people live in China?
BTW, I could sign up with Yahoo in Australia, I have the technical ability to forge packets and spoof IP’s and make that happen. However that is not the point. Even google offers an “in English” link on their page for all other languages when you connect
Oct21st2007
Published by richard October 21st, 2007
in Business Development and China.
How long does a server last? Both in book value and real in world production? What about general technology and computers? What about cars? Or buildings?
I lived in an over 100 year old house in Sydney in Balmain that is no less modern than anything else anywhere….and while I also use a laptop that is coming up to 2 years old….which one would I expect to depreciate quicker and be obsolete quicker?
Continue reading ‘Come to China and increase (or is it decrease?) your capital assets costs…’
Published by richard October 9th, 2007
in Business Development and China.
OK – that time of the year again. CCPC meeting time, get ready for internet “issues”.
Seems to have been some already today…. had one major CNC outage to one of CANDIS’ data centres and it knocked out some services. Various parties claimed it was a DDOS attack – however that is the 10th one this year…this time, our monitors in Shanghai and Hong Kong also detected an anomaly separate to our Beijing links. Which are multi-homed so what gives? We all know what gives.. I was being rhetorical.
PS: If visual representation of data is a totally foriegn concept to you, look around 10:12 AM to 10:35 AM today on the RRD graph.
Oct8th2007
Published by richard October 8th, 2007
in China.
No wonder my page views dropped. Crikey! I was waiting for it to happen really. There are many things that I know are a bit “ahead” of China, that I know will break policies, so it is just a matter of time before mere mortals catch up with the geek crew who are on the edge.
Yup “the edge”, it means we uber geeks get all the chicks and leave no space for anyone else on ‘the edge’ – like F1 drivers or astronauts….
Anyway – special “Inside China” link added to the top right below the normal Feed Burner link. The Feed Burner link is more featured and will still work for anyone outside of China. Also if you use Google Reader, that is not in China so can still read a Feed Burner based RSS feed. I wonder how long till that (Google Reader) is blocked too?
Published by richard October 7th, 2007
in FOSS/GNU/Linux.
Thought I should write something tech for a change! 
It is golden week here and all are away on break. So instead of forcing a staff member to come back, I thought I would take care of some stuff myself.
My problems started when a client who has a large advertising cluster, was running their main statistics database (for click fraud detection) on a Dell 1950 with only 1 SAS 15K drive.
I had suggested that this node, not being redundant like the tomcat servers be individually redundant, so DRAC card, redundant power and RAID.
Anyway, some new blades, Dell 1955′s arrived for the cluster and I thought, well, lets save the client some money, image the old 1950 DB server and load it onto a new 1955 server?
I thought this would be simple with Acronis.
No it wasn’t.
It turns out that a 3.5 Inch 73GB SAS drive is not the same size as a 2.5 Inch 73GB SAS drive. So I could not write my system image to the blades raid 1 array of 2 x 15K 73GB SAS drives.
Continue reading ‘When 73GB is not 73GB! Enter LVM’
Sep16th2007
Published by richard September 16th, 2007
in China and FOSS/GNU/Linux.
Well, we came, we championed, we explained, we lobbied and we taught. We laughed, we gathered, we swapped tales and we helped clear up some misconceptions.
The sun was out, the sky was blue(ish – not bad by Beijing’s standards) and the students were happy and eager to learn what was going on and to quench their tech/FOSS thirsts. Tsing Hua got rained on by a heap of tech loving goodness!
Photo gallery after the jump….
Continue reading ‘Beijing Software Freedom Day: A fire breathing Dragon of a success!’
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