Since Andy Ihnatko mentioned me on his blog, I do need to get his pics from Beijing up as well.

First Kevin Rose and his tea tour group and now Andy Ihnatko. Well it was a long day (especially with a not yet quite right broken ankle on the mend) but well worth it to be able to both meet Andy, give him the insiders tour and satisfy any man’s most basic, bestial and testosterone fuelled primal desires of the flesh………..look at rows of knock off iPhones (and ipones and ifawns) and help bargain them down to the lowest price!

Andy – hope you had fun – I knew that years of Chinese study at university here and IT entrepreneurship would prove to be useful one day.

So 2 out of 3 this week. Really wish we got Leo Laporte as well (not for lack of trying!) and it would have been a trifecta, a six, a home run or a converted try under the posts…….just pick your favourite sport.

Leo our hearts are broken – so please come back one day and let us mark you off the list?

I kept telling Kevin that I was trying hard not to blow smoke up his rear, but he really is a down to earth, friendly and an interesting guy. He has a real passion for tech (and tea) and the experiences that we could show him of our beloved Beijing. Of course with more time and more notice you can really roll out the red carpet.

On the way back to Kevin’s hotel for a drink before he turned in, the topic of food came up, he hadn’t eaten, and neither had I, since I went straight to the tweetup from work. As I ran through my mental list of places that would be open after midnight that were near where we were going and had good food, I met a total mental road block. Then I saw out the window a typical scene in China – a bunch of people with tables and chairs lined up outside many adjacent “holes in the wall”, eating, drinking beer and being merry. I told the taxi to stop right here…….. So we all sat down and had a real local Beijing meal and I introduced our guests to meat sticks or “Yang Rou Chuanr”. A lamb skewer made popular by the Xinjiang natives in China. For me it was a little poetic as I hadn’t planned on Chuanr, though it is what our Beijing Linux Users Group lives on!

Anyway I hope Kevin, Tim and Glenn enjoyed their culture lessons relating to alcohol and again wish to thank them for making themselves available to us fans and allowing us to show them a good time, it meant a lot to me and I am sure it did to the others as well.

Go read www.beijinglug.org for more.

Now if only IDG could put on a half decent Linux World instead of the token crap they excrete out like a constipated hippo.

Out the front I saw all these boxes being unloaded by the truckload. I asked what they were all for and was told that this is for the Wimax deployment. Wimax which is pronounce “Tian Xian” in Chinese or literally “Sky Line”, sky as in that sometimes blue thing above us and line as in cable. Our data centre has already been running trials for the past 2 years and I have peeked at their equipment with much excitement.

It turns out that the trials were a success and the stuff is being fully deployed now!

And yes, the mice were quite well behaved.

This week, via the trickle down effect in the echelons of the China network, we got informed that a couple of our clients are not compliant and they need to become so, or remove their website.

We have had to remove some clients sites before because they did not have the correct ICP. They could not get one because they did not have the correct business licences for the type of work they did.

Anyway, while having an ICP is a delicate balance between business licences, residential permits, correct content, correctly licenced IDC and what not, it is a good thing to get done and host in China. To be official, legit and free to get on with doing business.

For the most part getting an ICP, or the existence of an ICP is not a barrier to hosting or a problem to comply with. It sounds a whole lot more draconian than it really is. However it is a hassle. For you China hands, “mafan si le”!

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….

Anyway, thanks to Google, RedHat, Red Flag, Mozilla and OpenMoko. They paid up cold hard cash to make it all happen. The rest of us did it FOSS style and donated servers, bandwidth, time and eagerness. But at the end of the day, cold hard currency talks!

Click HERE for more info from my previous post.

This place had official Olympic logo’s all over the place! And nice toilets – a rudimentary western yard stick when measuring quality in China.

This IDC has some big name sites in it. In front of our servers are some SOHU.com servers, Baidu was in the next room – past the hand print scanner – and sina.com was a few rows over too.

Great cooling, but still no sign of people getting “Hot Aisle/Cool Aisle” design. This IDC used overhead conduits instead of a raised floor. I guess it is all down to preference on that one. They do offer as standard two power circuits per rack, but only 16A per circuit. So forget about putting 60 blades in 6 chassis in these racks. One rack we saw already had an official warning on it about being careful when adding another server due to power use. Yet this rack only had 8 Dell PE2950′s in it?? Seems a bit wasteful on space to me.

Overall, very impressive. Apart from the hand scanners, the quality is the same as CANDIS’ current facilities. With some extras and minus some others. The good news is that most of what you would want is standard and then only a few missing things need be added. Where as we had to build a lot of stuff to get to the standard we wanted.

Oh well, in a city with as many cars and people as Beijing……location, location, location. We are in the CBD, in the embassy district. This place is out with the cows…… and no camera’s were allowed and I needed my passport and caused much fanfare being a “Foreigner” and all.

But in the end, I must say VERY PROFESSIONAL, as if anyone is doubting China’s commitment to out do Sydney (as evidenced by all my compatriots here doing a double take for Beijing) as the “greatest Olympics ever”.

September 15th, 2007
Tsinghua University East Gate, FIT Building,
No. 1 Zhong Guan Cun Road, Beijing, China

SFD China Webpage in English and Chinese

We have been trying to get the FIRST fedora mirror in China up and it is nigh to impossible. Everyone in China complains of how hard it is to get fedora here. While the fedora folks over at the mirror list have been great, I do question at times Red Hat’s commitment. Why is it that their servers are so slow to access from China? Users are frustrated by this already, yet trying to pull in all that data to establish a local mirror is a pain too, in orders of magnitude.

So far our BLUG has been working internally with some private companies and some help on their own time from Red Hat employees here to get this all off the ground. I guess we will be done in the next 2 weeks (See my super speedy download stats below) – however, why should something so basic and so important be left ENTIRELY to the community to provide.

Yes it is open source and we all help. But mirrors COST MONEY, from opportunity cost of the admin’s time, the expensive power, cooling, server, storage and bandwidth all has to be paid by someone. Red Hat even asked me directly about why it was so bad in China in an effort to “understand” the issue. Yet after taking the time to give them a detailed response formed from my 5 years of tech work in China, I hear nothing further? Not even a thanks! Some people I feel have forgotten what Linux and community is all about.

I don’t want to sound like I am ragging on Red Hat too much. I know a few people who work for them in China and Australia. They are hard working and talented people. And Red Hat has done A LOT for Linux for which we should be thankful. – like certifying me a RHCE! However this bread and butter type stuff (getting the actual software into peoples hands) I would have thought deserves more attention and assistance.

While China doesn’t always have great net access, it is not that bad. And most other mirror sites and distro sites work great from here – be it Japan, Korea or the USA. Red Hat’s though, are not just slow, they are a statistical anomaly! Are these servers on the moon? Or are they just too busy for the demand?

24 hours and 3.2GB downloaded. Look out – I think there may be a Tsunami in the South China Sea soon due to seismic disturbances caused by those red hot fibre links…….stay tuned for daily download updates. Maybe I should just ask for an LTO2 tape to be FedEx’d?