Tiernan's Comms Closet

So, a few days ago, i was talking with some colleagues about printers and DIY printing of your photos, and the consensus was pretty much Don’t DIY, outsource. and it started making me think about my current in-house systems, hosting, etc. so, this is the basis of what this post it about.

Current setup in house

i wont list everything i have in house at the moment, as i did this a few weeks back in the “Whats your setup” post, but i will say what my machines are doing…

I have 4 dedicated servers and my workstation. 3 of those machines (the Proliant, MacPro and the GodBox) are running Windows Server 2008 with Hyper-V. between them there are 11 Virtual machines running. of those, there are 2 web servers (one Ubuntu hosting this and some other blogs) and 1 Windows Server 2008 (running some other stuff). there is another 2k8 box running Subversion for my source code, one running System Centre (and Virtual Machine Manager) for managing the machines, and one running Forefront Threat Management Gateway. Of the non virtual machines, i have 2 DNS, 2 Active Directory and 1 DHPC server. there is a Windows Deployment Server floating around somewhere (could be on a virtual or non Virtual Box) and also a Windows Server Update Services install…

and i am not going to even think how many machines have copies of SQL server (Express and Full), IIS, ASP.NET apps, etc… Its all a bit overkill…

Hows it working out?

I am going to give the setup a C+… it works. last month i had about 99% uptime (maybe even more). but there are problems… if the power in the house goes down, i am wiped off the face of the internet… if the internet goes down, the same happens… lots of things worry me about this setup… it could be a lot better…

looking at the Pingdom reports for the site are quite scary… i realize that it could be upto a second to get any response from the site, and sometimes even more… this could be because i am running the sites on a broadband connection as apposed to a proper dedicated connection… it could also be load on the line, or speed of machines in house… not 100% sure, but i am sure it could be better…

So, what’s to be done?

I am starting to think about moving the major web sites out of the house, and only have development projects hosted in house… but then i start thinking what do i need to host these sites out site on? then there is cost… i wont be saving anything by moving sites out of hose, as i will still have the machines in house… they will still need power, internet connectivity, etc… so, what ever i get will need to be cheap enough…

looking around, i have found somewhere offering a core i7 920 machines (Quad core, Hyper Threaded 2.66Gz) with 12Gb DDR3 ram, 4 1Tb drives on a 100mb/s unlimited* link (over 3Tb your link is dropped to 10mb/s…) for EUR69.99 basic a month… with the extras i would be interested in (proper hardware firewall, RAID5 controller for the drives, Hyper-V R2 install) it works out at about EUR130… then you start asking: “Do you need all that power?”… They have a Core 2 Quad for 39EUR a month with 4Gb RAM…

So, i will leave you with a question…

If you where in the market for a dedicated server, where would you go? would i be better hosting my blogs on somewhere like Wordpress.com? any places i should stay away from?

Popularity: 1% [?]

So, today at the Mobile World Congress, Microsoft unvailed the Windows Phone Series 7. This is the next generation of Windows Phone devices. So, some quick links and some screen shots from around the web:

• There is a hands on Demo over at Channel 9 of the Windows Phone 7 Series.  the OS is VERY SWEET! check it out.
• the main website is at http://www.windowsphone7series.com/. videos with demos and info also available there
• Another video on YouTube, with demos of some of the features.

Quick Blurb from the Press Release:

Windows Phone 7 Series creates an unrivaled set of integrated experiences on a phone through Windows Phone hubs. Hubs bring together related content from the Web, applications and services into a single view to simplify common tasks. Windows Phone 7 Series includes six hubs built on specific themes reflecting activities that matter most to people:

People. This hub delivers an engaging social experience by bringing together relevant content based on the person, including his or her live feeds from social networks and photos. It also provides a central place from which to post updates to Facebook and Windows Live in one step.

Pictures. This hub makes it easy to share pictures and video to a social network in one step. Windows Phone 7 Series also brings together a user’s photos by integrating with the Web and PC, making the phone the ideal place to view a person’s entire picture and video collection.

Games. This hub delivers the first and only official Xbox LIVE experience on a phone, including Xbox LIVE games, Spotlight feed and the ability to see a gamer’s avatar, Achievements and gamer profile. With more than 23 million active members around the world, Xbox LIVE unlocks a world of friends, games and entertainment on Xbox 360, and now also on Windows Phone 7 Series.

Music + Video. This hub creates an incredible media experience that brings the best of Zune, including content from a user’s PC, online music services and even a built-in FM radio into one simple place that is all about music and video. Users can turn their media experience into a social one with Zune Social on a PC and share their media recommendations with like-minded music lovers. The playback experience is rich and easy to navigate, and immerses the listener in the content.

Marketplace. This hub allows the user to easily discover and load the phone with certified applications and games.

Office. This hub brings the familiar experience of the world’s leading productivity software to the Windows Phone. With access to Office, OneNote and SharePoint Workspace all in one place, users can easily read, edit and share documents. With the additional power of Outlook Mobile, users stay productive and up to date while on the go.

Availability

Partners from around the world have committed to include Windows Phone 7 Series in their portfolio plans. They include mobile operators AT&T, Deutsche Telekom AG, Orange, SFR, Sprint, Telecom Italia, Telefónica, Telstra, T-Mobile USA, Verizon Wireless and Vodafone, and manufacturers Dell, Garmin-Asus, HTC Corp., HP, LG, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, Toshiba and Qualcomm Inc. The first phones will be available by holiday 2010. Customers who would like to receive additional information about Windows Phone 7 Series and be notified when it is available can register at http://www.windowsphone7series.com.

I am now really wanting one of these!!!

Popularity: 5% [?]

So, we are 2 weeks into the new year (give or take a few hours as of writing this) and i am already starting to think about upgrades… some are more likely than others… but here are my thoughts for the new year and upgrades…

• Phones: So, i have had my G1 for a while now (Got it on in the first 2 weeks of July, meaning i have had it nearly 6 months!) and i think it is time to upgrade soon. There are a few phones on the market that are interesting me. here is my current short list in no particular order:
• Apple iPhone 3GS (or newer). O2 Ireland loose the Exclusive contract on this soon, and Vodafone are to also get their hands on it. Since i am a Vodafone Customer, and have a contract with them, i only have to resign some paper and pick one up… Rumours are that the next Gen (which will be the 4 Gen iPhone, but not necessarily 4G network support) will be out in April, but my money is on next gen coming around June or July, around the WWDC…
• Nokia N900. Very cool looking device. Vodafone Ireland are to get their hands on this soon (maybe this month). looks very cool, fast and well, that keyboard is handy.
• HTC HD2. Windows Mobile 6.5, 1Gz Processor, 800×480 display. What more can i say? Very nice device. O2 Ireland might get their hands on this, and if not, Expansys have it…
• Google Nexus one. Not sure if this should be on the list, since Android has kind of annoyed me on the G1, but it does look nice. I got to play with out of these over the Christmas, and it was very nice and responsive. 1Gz processor makes it nearly 2x the speed of the G1. Using a phone for a quick demo is all well and good, but the real test is using it as your main phone. Lower Priority than the rest…
• Likeliness of happening: Highly. Last year i changed phones 4 or 5 times… This is practically inevitable…
• Hardware: After the build of the V.Next Workstation, and the MacPro becoming a HyperV server, there are very few things needed… but improvement can still happen…
• The Proliant: This still only has 5Gb of ram and a Dual Core Processor. Not sure if i should go an upgrade this to a Quad core and 8Gb ram, or just build a new box with that kind of spec. Either way, the machine will get upgraded to Windows Server 2008 R2. Likelihood: 60% chance.
• Mac Pro: No changes needed for this. 12Gb ram, Dual Dual core processors, 10k RPM hdds… Very nice. might just tweek its network connections… Likelihood: 100% chance.
• God Box (AKA the V.Next): Thinking of adding a second graphics card. Maybe some more internal storage. and depending on how things go, maybe more memory. 12Gb is quite a lot at the moment, but we see how things go. If the Graphics card gets upgraded, more monitors might be on the cards also… Likelihood: 70% chance.
• Opteron and Power Edge: these machines are now pretty much maxed out and out of upgrade options (Think i have a 2Gb or 4Gb upgrade for the Power Edge which never got installed… Might do that if i can find the memory). This year, i think these machines will loose their server status and might be officially deprecated… Likelihood: 65% chance
• Media Centre: Over the last few years, i have had a few machines that i have called Media Centres… Now i think it is time to build a new one. Probably be a Quad Core box, few gigs of RAM, PCI-Express DVB-S2 tuners and a nice graphics card… We see how things go over the year. Likelihood: 55% chance
• SAN: I have been wanting to build a SAN for a while now, mainly to store photos, videos, Ripped DVDs, Recorded TV shows, Software and VMs. With the move to Hyper-V i think getting this build sooner rather than later would come in handy. this way i can use the Failover support in Hyper-V. I am also now running at about 110Gb of photos stored on my machine, and have a lot of Music, Video, etc. If the Media Centre gets built, It will consume 2Gb per hour of SD video recorded and more for HD stuff… You can never have enough storage! Likelihood: 75% chance in one for or another…
• House: Big purchase in Life. the rest are nice to haves, this would be epic! As the lads in work have started to call it “The Gadget Platform”. The place i can turn into a Gadget Haven… At this point in the year, i cant see this happening, unless i win the lotto or accidently become rich some how, but its on the list as a possibility… Likelihood: 7% chance
• New Car: My current car, my BMW 523i, is now 10 years old… It is still a nice car, don’t get me wrong, but it is a bit expensive to run: it drinks fuel like there is no tomorrow and the Road Tax is about a grand a year… I would love to get a newer car, another 5 series, but this time it would be a Diesel. the 520D, 525D, 530D or 535D are all beautiful cars, the 535D (3L, Twin Turbo) being the one, money no object, i would buy tomorrow. the 520d makes the most financial sense, being class B for road tax (less than 200EUR a year) and drinking very little fuel (probably about 2x the MPG mine does currently). Likelihood: <5% chance. house would be more important…

Think thats it for the moment… Lets see what the year brings us! Ohhh, and a belated Happy New Year!

Popularity: 12% [?]

So, i have been looking at Data De-Duplication, and have built a little demo app in C# for this idea… The code is on GitHub and if you have better ideas around the code, please leave comments or update the block.

This code is not intended for Production use. it is purely experimental!

One idea i would like to look into though is using a proper backing store for this data: MSSQL DB, Amazon S3, RackSpace Cloud Storage, Azure Blob Storage, etc. the theory would go as follows:

• user points de-dupe tool to a folder
• folder is processed – each file is broken into 512byte blocks (could be more or less, configurable in code) and check-summed (currently using SHA512, but been told its over kill!) an Index file is created for every “real” file on the system. they contain the block IDs in order for the given real file.
• after each block is check-summed, it is checked against the backing store. If the checksum exists in the backing store, the id is written to the index file. if not, a new block is added to the backing store and that ID is added to the index.
• When a user wants the file, the index file is checked, all the blocks are pulled from the correct locations, and built up for the user to work with. Any changes go though the same process. if the user only changes a couple of sections at the end of a file, only those couple of sections should be changed…

You get some problems with changes, in that you dont really want to change all instances of that particular block, incase you break something else… you also need to have something cleaning blocks also, just to remove dead or orphaned blocks…

Running this on some XML files on my drive (about 3200 XMP files from Adobe Lightroom) the code finds 43k blocks duplicated, with an estimated 21mb duplicated. it does no de-duplication at the moment…

Ideally, this should be built as a FileSystem (showing as a hard drive, backed to, say, SQL server or a single large file) or as a SMB share, which can be mounted in Windows… Now to figure out if its possible…

Popularity: 17% [?]

Right. so OSNews has a post asking users to post their setup they are currently using… I was going to post a comment with mine, but though it would take up too much space… so, here is mine. Leave a comment if you wish with your setup…

Main workstation: There was a series of posts about this machine, and the v.next has now become the v.current. This machine currently acts as Dev Workstation, Hyper-V Server, and anything else i need a big fast machine for (Photo processing, Video Editing and conversion, etc) Specs are as follows:

Dual Xeon (Nehamam) 2.26Gz (Quad core, Hyper Threaded)
12Gb DDR 3 Memory
2 300Gb Western Digital Velociraptors (Raid 0 for boot and system drives)
2 1Tb Western Digital Caviar Black Drives (Raid 1 for Data)
NVidia GeForce 275 Graphics with 896mb ram
Running Windows Server 2008 R2.

Proliant Server (Hyper-V, Active Directory Domain Controller (secondary), DNS (Secondary), DHCP)
Intel Xeon 2.6Gz, Dual core
5 Gb Ram (DDR2 IIRC)
Currently got a 250Gb boot drive, and 2 500 Gb data drives, but this will change when the SAN gets built…
Windows 2008 Server (upgrading to R2 soon)

Mac Pro (Hyper-V Server, Remote Desktop Gateway)
Dual proc, Dual Core Xeon 2.66Gz
12Gb RAM
2 74Gb Western Digital Raptors
ATI Radion 9600GT Graphics (512mb ram)
Windows Server 2008 R2

Opteron Box (IIS, SQL Active Directory! only found out its setup for this now!)
Dual Opteron processor (old style, no Virtualization Technology, not even Dual core!)
2GB RAM (maxed out!) this is a SFF Box…
80Gb HDD
Windows Server 2008
Very basic box… Does the job, and nothing else…

Poweredge (Active Directory (Primary), DNS (Primary))
2.4Gz P4 Xeon (Hyper threaded, 64 bit and nothing else)
768Mb RAM…
80Gb HDD
Windows Server 2003 (Yup… its old!)
This used to act as the main webserver, SQL, ISA and Exchange box in the house, but it got old and needed to be replaced. now its just a nice little Active Directory box… Eventually planning on paving, upgrading the RAM and keeping just for AD and DNS. Maybe even a bit of file sharing…

Laptop (main working laptop, college notes, messing around when im board box…)
MacBook Pro
2.4Gz Core 2 Duo processor
4Gb RAM
250Gb (i think) HDD
Dual boot Win 7 X64 Ultimate and OSX 10.6 (Mostly Win7)
Its a Late 2008 UniBody MacBook Pro… More specs if yo go looking for it… Too lazy to look now…

NetBook (Messing with the MacBook is too big)
MSI Wind
Atom 1.6Gz Processor
2Gb RAM
160Gb HDD
Windows 7

So, thats about it… What have you got?

Popularity: 14% [?]

In yesterday’s Budget, the Irish government added a EUR15 per tonn of CO2 tax to companies… Some quick maths!

burning a Liter of Petrol produces 2.39KG of CO2 Per Liter burned. diesel = 2.62KG / L

that means for Petrol, you would need to burn 418.4 L to produce a Tonn of CO2 (381.6 for Diesel).

so, EUR15 / 418 = 3.5c (Diesel = EUR15 / 381 = 3.93).

Now, thats based on Metric toness and the the government are obviously screwing us a little more…

This maths can also be used to figure out your CO2 emissions from your car…

If your car does 25 MPG (on average) this works out at 11.3L per 100km. this works out that for every 100k you would create 27Kg of CO2. divide that by 100 and you get 270g of CO2 / KM… that’s a LOT!

the opposite is also possible to work out.. My car produces 245g of CO2 per KM…

KG of co2 produces per 100k = (245 * 100) / 1000 = 24.5KG

24.5KG / 2.39 Kg = 10.25L per 100k.

which is about 27.5MPG… change 2.39 for 2.62 for diesel, where appropriate… your millage may vary (sorry, pun intended…)

Popularity: 16% [?]

So, i have been busy working on code for Torrent Helper (still looking for a proper name and URL) and one of the things i wanted to add was a version number footer… ust for the laugh, just cause i could… But how? So, this is how you do it…

First, you need to modify the AssemblyInfo.cs file in your project (I have 2 projects, my website and my backend service). In here i set the AssemblyVersion and AssemblyFileVersion to 0.1.*. The * tells the compiler to magically build the number…

Next, how do you get it back out programatically? (click to see the larger version)

As you can see, i have 2 functions here. one (PrintBuild()) is called by the web site where i want to put the data (I know this is not pretty, but its working… maybe some dat i will changed it… the second functions only job is to get the information about the assembly and work out the date and time it was built… Any questions, leave a comment.

Popularity: 19% [?]

Today i would like to announce the release of Torrent Helper, a website i started coding about 19 hours ago (as of time of writing this post at 6pm on Satrday). The coding of this project started at 11PM on Friday, and took a short break at 6am for some sleep… It was officially released (with a pop up on Twitter) at 5.29pm…

Anyway, what does it do? You give it a Torrent file (Legal of course), either the URL or an existing torrent you have somewhere, and it will find extra trackers for that given torrent, add them to the file and send it back to you… Thats pretty much it!

Any questions, drop me a mail (tierno [at] lotas-smartman [dot] net) or leave a comment.

Popularity: 20% [?]

A Few days ago on the Jungle Disk blog, it was announced they would be releasing a BETA of their new product: Jungle Disk Server. This sounded very interesting, and one of the more interesting features that was added was De-Duplication…. let me try explain with a bit of detail…

I am backing up my SVN server. I have 2 scheduled tasks: every 15 min, take the latest revesions that where not previously backed up and dump them to a file… then weekly, take a full backup. i ran this on a folder with 13 full backups (about 730mb a piece, totaling about 9Gb) and 31 smaller backups, averaging about a meg and a half… there is a LOT of duplicated data here: every full backup is the equivilant of the last weeks full backup and the smaller 15min backups… and it goes on. De-Duplication looks at all the blocks, and figures out of they have already been backed up… If so, it wont back it up again, put puts a pointer to that block in the backup db…

So, we say the last full backup is 750mb… that shold be all that is needed… Jungle Disks first backup of this server found 8.45Gb and uploaded 149mb! Thats it! there is compression going on there also, but that is pretty impressive! A Full backup has been run since then, and it brough the total file size to 9.17Gb, and the upload was 4.47mb! Very, VERY Cool!

So, at the moment, i have it backing up my SQL server, my Ubuntu server (where the blogs live, both the WordPress dirs and the MySQL server itself) and also my SVN Box. So far so good! Check if out.

Popularity: 51% [?]

So, it has been a couple of weeks since i last posted the status of the upgrade… In those weeks, i have finilized the parts list, started ordering stuff, and stuff has started arriving! But first, some news about the Mac Pro… you all though it was dead… I though it was dead… then i cleaned the graphics card, and, well, its working again…. but, and this is a big but, the graphics card is still over heating… pain in the arse… going to try replace the Graphics card and use it as a server… more on that later.

So, Final parts list:

1. Mobo and Chips – Went with the Intel S5520SC and E5520 processors. Ordered them and they arrived a few weeks ago. Unboxing photos here.
2. Coolers: Went with non Watercooling… kind of chickened out at the idea of water flowing around a couple of grands worth of computer… Went with the Noctua NH-U12 DX. Photos and Unboxing here.
3. Case: Antec P193
4. HDDs: Boot: 2 x WD Velociraptor 300Gbs Data: Currently 2 1Tb WD Black Editions
5. Graphics: Asus GeForce 275 with 896Mb Ram
6. Powe Supply: Corsair HX-1000w
7. Memory: 12Gb Kingston (Still waiting on this…)

Photos of the first part of the build are up here, Once the memory arrives, i will fill in the HDDs, grab a DVDR from somewhere and stick that in and hook up some monitors. We can then start testing this bad boy!

Popularity: 52% [?]