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”.

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?