Robert Accettura's
Fun With Wordage

This server will be moving to a new data center tonight (Tuesday sometime between 1 - 7 AM EST). If your feed reader reports that I’m down… that’s why.

Edit: All done. Successfully moved to it’s new home.

This and other sites of mine will experience a few outages this weekend as the servers move to a new temporary data center.

Update: Server is snug in it’s new home. Will be moving again to a permanent new data center.

Here’s a great read on Wikipedia’s Infrastructure. Two excellent sets of slides. A lot can be done with a LAMP stack. The common theme: caching and careful optimization. There are some really impressive stats in there.

I said back in 2004 that Firefox needs built in support for BitTorrent. My idea was it would be integrated into the download manager so that it was “just another protocol” and would be transparent to a typical user. I still stand by that.

Fast forward to 2007: FoxTorrent is by RedSwoosh (now owned by Akamai).

I’d personally love to see something like this ship built in. It’s a great feature. BitTorrent is a great protocol for distributing large downloads without having to buy expensive infrastructure. Akamai’s interest is proof of that.

FoxTorrent has a blog if you want to keep an eye on it. FoxTorrent is MIT licensed as well. It seems like a very interesting product. I’ll have to dig into this and look at it a bit closer.

[Hat tip: TechCrunch]

Yahoo is going carbon neutral. I’m curious how much is offset, and how much is reduction. Yahoo has a fairly large infrastructure. I wonder if they are using alternative power sources, or if they are going to plant a million trees. They do mention:

These projects could include a wind farm in India or a small-scale run of the river hydroelectric project in Brazil. We’re also looking to invest in emerging clean technologies.

Interesting. I wonder if we will see things like carbon neutral VoIP, carbon neutral bandwidth, carbon neutral data centers / colocation / hosting?

Several weeks ago the root servers were attacked. CNet is running a story that says Anycast played a role in preventing larger problems.

It would be interesting to see if all the root servers switch to Anycast. Where would the new distributed servers go? Does Verisign etc. own that many data centers? Or would they be in data centers and colo’s all over the world?

There is an interesting slideshow (PDF link) that discusses the effects of switching k-root to Anycast. It doesn’t really go into foiling DoS attacks though.

The root servers were attacked this morning. My guess would be few (if any) really felt the effects. This just goes to show that the net, despite being a distributed mess of networks still has a few critical points in its infrastructure. They didn’t take them down, and didn’t even get them all. Here’s a creepy graph. For the record there are more than just the physical A-M servers. C,F, I-K, M are using anycast so they are distributed among many networks, making it even more redundant, and closer to most users. Because it was done by a botnet, and all but one of the targets were using anycast (according to Wikipedia), the load would be distributed across the servers, making it even harder for an attack to succeed.

I keep regular backups of everything on this server just in case something happens. Recently I switched to a more automated and secure (PGP encrypted) solution for this blog due to it’s fast-paced nature. Just the critical stuff (database, media, templates). I choose PGP (implemented using GPG) since it’s easy, and I only have to store the public key on the server, making it safer than most alternatives.

I’m strongly considering moving it all eventually over to Amazon’s S3 storage. At $0.15 per GB-Month of storage used and $0.20 per GB of data transferred it would be very affordable to keep backups in an even more secure fashion. I’d still use my own encryption on top of theirs for extra security. For things like media, I could even see myself hosting it solely at Amazon. It just seems like that may be a more practical and scalable approach.

Unfortunately until either FTTH or DOCSIS 3.0 comes to town, it doesn’t look like Amazon’s S3 will be practical for home backup purposes. This server has a beefy connection to a few large pipes to the internet (Level3, Global Crossing, and Cogent last I checked). They provides high speed connectivity so a backup would take only a few seconds. At home with a cable modem on a DOCSIS 1.1 network (such as Comcast) the bandwidth is just to slim to allow enough upload capacity. Comcast still only allows 384kbps up. Even the top plans in select areas don’t top 1Mbps. Of course these are Comcast’s numbers (the actual performance is often less). In areas that they currently serve, Verizon FiOS (FTTH) is available at 15 Mbps/2 Mbps. Much better suited for such purposes (though more would be welcome). As strange as it may seem pricing is quite competitive, giving cable a run for it’s money. Perhaps one day DOCSIS 3.0 will appear, though that seems to be a while away. Perhaps one day all homes will have 100Mbps full duplex connections with low latency.

The only real way to get around this limitation is to perhaps use rsync to perform backups. Initial backups would still suck, but after that it wouldn’t be too bad. Though that wouldn’t work with services such as Amazon’s S3, which are token based. There is an rsync-like clone, but it’s still not the real thing. Perhaps Google’s upcoming GDrive will be cool enough to allow the use of rsync over SSH (I could dream) in addition to WebDAV (which is what I expect to see). Last I checked rsync doesn’t support WebDAV because WebDAV is done over HTTP. If I understand it right, RFC 3229 would add Delta encoding support to HTTP, making something like rsync over WebDAV possible since it uses delta encoding.

Seems google.com is down. Who turned off the lights? I wonder what happened? Did Googlefox cause a power surge?

Update #1 [7:13 PM EST]: It’s DNS related as this still works.
Update #2 [7:15 PM EST]: Seems to be coming back now.
Update #3 [7:39 PM EST]: Engadget suggests a DNS Hack, perhaps poisoning, but that’s unlikely as the site they are talking about is likely www.google.com.net

Ok, I admitted to being a geek a long time ago, but here’s what I’m thinking:

Take Apple’s new Mac Mini, which is 2″ in height (slightly over 1U). Put several of them on a metal tray. Why? Because it can become a makeshift blade server. Granted your limited to Firewire, USB, and 10/100 Ethernet. Regardless, for rather low cost, you can get some decent power. All with 2U of rack space. IMHO that’s pretty cool. Looks like it’s a pretty simple way to get a cluster. You could even use it for some decent web hosting. 1 as a DB server, 1 or 2 as an Apache server, and perhaps a squid proxy. Mail, DNS. Each could have their own redundancy. All in 2U of rack space.

That’s amazingly low cost for having so many CPU’s, and being able to spread out your load on several physical systems.

If I had the cash, I’d give it a go.

Edit: You can help me get one by signing up and completing 1 offer. They are legitimate, I got a free ipod from them not to long ago.