Three-Letter Acronyms & Four-Letter Words

I am packing up and soon we will be heading back to Austin.

We are going to swing by the 6th floor and see if anyone is still in the Sprocket office.

Then if traffic looks OK, we might swing by and say hello to Bobby.

I will post more when we get back to Austin.

Laterz

Not sure if it is going to come to that, yet.

I hope it won't.

I just got an email from our hosting/collocation, Sprocket Networks company that they were acquired recently, by AppServe Technologies.

The email states that the rates will stay the same and I am sure they will initially, my fear is that they may not stay that way.

I mean Jeremy and I lucked out for the most part because the rate @ Sprocket Networks is the best we could find in TX or NY.

When we first signed up with Sprocket, they gave me a great tour of the data center and as it turns out Jaduka's Dallas office is in the same building as Sprocket corporate office, small world. From what I remember about the tour Sprocket seemed to have a high population of servers like ours, so raising the rates might alienate a significant amount of the customer base.

I know that the rate we are paying is close to Amazon's EC2 price.

When I am in Dallas in a couple of weeks I will have to stop in and say hello to the Sprocket guys and if the AppServe guys aren't too far away, maybe I will pop in a pay a visit. Since Jeremy will be in Dallas at the same time, we might try to pop in on the data center.

Laterz

The server here was down for about 2 hours.

It wasn't related to the co-location company.

It wasn't related to a hardware failure.

It wasn't related to a software failure.

The root cause is known. The reason on why the cause occurred will never be properly known.

So what was it?

The server got stuck looking for a keyboard to be plugged into it when it rebooted.

But why did it reboot? It lost power.

Why did it lose power? No clue. Unfortunate accident I hope.

Anyway, the tech over at SprocketData was kind enough to modify the bios of the server to not look for a keyboard.

Well it scared me for a bit when I went to call them and their phone number wasn't working. Thinking I 'fat fingered' the number I dialed the local number directly. Same audio error message talking about how the number is not in service.

Ok, so my server becomes unresponsive. I can't get to the web pages, I can't ssh nor ping it. And then the phone number of the hosting company was not working. Fsck me!

Well, I got on the IM with my contact at Sprocket.

He got a hold of the techs for me. I notified him about the phone number, it appears to be a phone company problem.

In the end, the tech told me about the power cycle and the keyboard lock issue.

So in the end, a bit scary but oh well. Such is life.

Jeremy and I will be talking more about backup plans and strategies for disaster recovery. Particularly this becomes important when talking about uRevoo.

All for now.

laterz

Till this blog is running on the new server. I can't wait.

I was in Dallas today and met with Shawn Devlin of Sprocket Data, a Dallas hosting company. I had spoken with them previously for work, but the decision to host with them was made based upon their pricing and the look of their corporate culture on their website.

And I must say that their website didn't lie. They are very open and friendly. Last week Mr. Devlin gave me and Brent a tour of their data center. Quite the dog & pony for a simple colocation customer.

Today I stopped into their office, it turns out NetworkIP & SprocketData are officing in the same building, they are up on the 6th, NetIP is on the second floor. In talking with Mr. Devlin I learned a few new things about page ranking.

At the end of my visit I verified "visiting" hours for the data center, 5:30pm. We were having an afternoon meeting that was going to run longer than that. Which is why I brought an overnight bag, just in case I had to take care of the server Saturday morning. To my wife's delight Mr. Devlin offered to have the server taken down to the data center for me. Gina had been in Longview all week for training and was excited to see me, so staying away one more night wasn't acceptible.

I joked with Mr. Devlin that they "saved my marriage", playing along he said that "marriage counseling" is just one of their many services.

Well, my concerns about my inexperience in configuring ethernet card manually (after install) were correct.

I got a voicemail from their head data center system admnistrator, Shane, informing me that the server is powered up and plugged in but that they are unable to ping it. I had missed his call (T-Mobile service in Dallas isn't great.) and already shutdown my laptop, this means that I will have to get with the techs early in the morning to get the server online.

Especially since I am now back in Austin and don't want to drive up there.

Well, pretty tired from the early morning start. Time to sleep and dream of nerd stuff.

Laterz

I worked through lunch, so just a quick entry.

Today I learned that not I need more Linux hoodoo-voodoo knowledge.

I really want to use this RLIB report writer on a project at work. However, I can't get it to compile. I know it isn't the RLIB software, because lots of people are using it.

Which means it is Me, well not me personally but the stuff already installed on the server. In part, I think it is related to the MySQL 5.0 install on the box, which we had the hosting company do, and they used a RPM. I know that there are some folks out there that would SWEAR by RPMS, never want to install stuff from source. Yadda, yadda.

I have had to compile, apache, php, and mysql manually, because the RPM didn't have the options I wanted.

Now, it appears that I have a problem with a source install, because the libraries installed with the RPM aren't necessarily correct. The level of linux library, libgcc glibc and what not is definitely way above my head.

But the basic jist is, there are two functions defined in the libr-mysql.so (dynamic object I believe) that are not defined in the libgcc. I think this because all the stuff I can find when I google ' __pure_virtual ' and a variety of other things comes back with something being funked up with libgcc and the gcc compiler.

Again, stuff that is beyond me, and I am not sure I want to learn.

But fear not, I called in reinforcements. Gene Oden, more on him later. But frankly he is a one man linux army.

Time to go tour the Sprocket facility.

Laterz

One spare machine...
Four misplaced Fedora Core 3 install discs...
Another week on a $20/month VPS...
Priceless.

Some of you out there might think this blog runs slow because of your internet connection. Some of you might even think that it is slow because of something blocking the network of tubes that is the Internet.

No, the real reason it is slow is because Jeremy and I (and our buddy Patty) are all splitting a $20/month VPS account. \

What is a VPS you say?

Virtual Private Server.

A VPS is basically our own server. It has an independent apache, mysql, php engine. This means we can do whatever we want on it, except for the fact that it is on a shared server. The VPS software allows our hosting company (Spry) to host multiple "servers" on the same physical hardware. Usually this works out ok.

However, recently our "roommates" on the server have been pushing a considerable amount of load. This means that it has been degrading our service. We opened a ticket, but honestly there isn't a whole lot of bitching that we can do for $20/month.

So we hatched a plan. We need better hosting, except that the level of hosting we are looking for starts at $59.99. Well, we looked around and compared prices, in terms of VPS pricing, Spry is about as good as they get. But the issue of "roommates" still was a topic, if we are paying like $59.99 a month, but get stuck with folks that are pushing too much traffic (say big hits from digg).

So we looked around some more (I say we, but it was mostly Jeremy). We found some pricing for some colocation hosting. For those who aren't familiar with the term, it means Jeremy and I put a server into their location, they hook it up with Internet and power for a monhtly fee, or we co-locate our servers next to theirs.

The ones in Austin start @ about $100. A bit out of our price range.

Now, you might wonder about "Why does it have to be in TX?" Well, when you split the duties between the two of us, I basically have the skillz (and the brains enough) to maintain a server. History has shown that Jeremy and server administration is like mixing oil, water, and a match.

So he does the bulk of any coding, while I handle maintenance, administration, architecture, database design, and minor coding.

The other factor about co-locating vs a bigger VPS is the uRevoo project. It is likely that we can host uRevoo on our own server and be ok during alpha and beta, but on a VPS we might have some big issues.

Back to the search. Dallas was the next place to start looking, since I am there fairly regularly for work. (On avg every other week.)

We found a company, Sprocket Data that has co-location starting @ $59.

We talked about it, and it seems pretty decent. I mean yes it is $40 more than $20. But with the cost split between Jeremy, Patty and myself it gets to be considerably less. We will probably also do some serendipity Blog hosting for dirt cheap rates to subsidize the cost of the hosting.

The nice thing about the Sprocket Data is that they let you colo a mini-tower or a rackmount. This meant that the spare machine that I have could be turned into a server, negating the need for Jeremy and I to pony up $300 each for a new server to be built.

My mini-tower spare machine consists of:
AMD Athlon 2000+ (1.67Ghz)
1GB RAM
60GB Harddrive
DVD Drive
CDRW Drive
GeForce MX4000 (PCI)

Not a bad little web server. Especially since it will need to host MySQL for a while as well. (Eventually we are thinking we will need to seperate web server and database server functions to gain an increase in efficiency).

I have made web servers out of HP Brios:
P3-600Mhz
512MB Ram
20GB Drive
CD Drive
Onboard video

The brio web servers were running Redhat 7 & 9. Honestly, not too bad at all. Decen response speeds and could handle a fair amount of load. I wish I still had one, so I could run some apache benchmarks on it. Maybe I can dig one up at work.

But I digress.

I was supposed to finish configuring the AMD-2000 for install this week @ Sprocket. However, I couldn't find the install discs. I had installed Fedora Core 3 on it before, but I think I botched it, because MySQL wasn't working right.

Well, I took the box to work today, in the hopes of starting the install around lunch and click/hitting 'Next' until it was done (not too hard overall). Unfortunately, I couldn't find any install discs at work either.

So when I get back from Dallas, I will find the discs in my home office (easier said than done, I swore I saw them last week). And try to get it done so that the next time I am going to Dallas I can drop it off at the colo and get us off Spry.

Definitely starting Sept 1, we will be on a new hosting server.

I really do like Spry, but for the $$$ Jeremy and I need to look at colocation vs VPS. I do highly advocate VPS as a solution, because the environment can be put together quickly, it is cheap. But you do have to worry about the occasional "roommmate" problem, and well for $20/month you can't bitch too much.

I best hit the road.

Laterz.