Don’t get me wrong – Our business and infrastructure very rarely moves, However we have having a revolution.. Or maybe it’s an evolution.
Ausweb has very quietly (Apart from the occasional blog post) been preparing one of the most amazing platforms for the future growth of our business, and in preparation of the future growth of all of our customer’s (existing and future) businesses. We have designed and built an almost indestructible infrastructure based in Sydney, which is due to open to the public soon.
We have been testing and developing, and testing and developing some more, continuously for the past 6 months in preparation to launch this product and we are almost there. We’ve purchased a stack of equipment, and we are about to purchase the last piece in preparation for the announcement and launch.
Read more…
Rambles, Science & Tech, VMware
With this great little tool, now you can monitor your Linux based server easily on the go, right from your iPhone.
Bjango software’s iStat application provides a tool to monitor both your local iPhone performance stats, including the ability to free memory, as well as monitor your remote servers(Mac or Linux based) vital statistics. You can easily see memory usage, disk space, uptime & load averages and can also use the utility to ping servers and perform trace routes.
Read more…
Plugins, Science & Tech, Scripting & Coding, Software, cPanel, iPhone
Being in the hosting industry, one of the key elements of hosting is uptime and availability. Trust us when we say this is VERY important. We spend a lot of money on making sure that if problems occur, there is a fail over. If the fail over, fails over – There is a “Plan C”. In order for us to know the moment a server becomes unresponsive, or if part of the network is having issues – We use monitoring.
Having support staff available 24/7 is one thing – They can answer customers queries, keep the information flowing and resolve problems. However, Not always can support staff fix the problem sitting at their desk. Sometimes systems administrators and network engineers need to be dispatched to the data centre at 3am on a Sunday morning, And lets face it – we can’t all work 24 hours a day. So the best way for all of our staff to know when an issue arises is via Instant SMS alerts. To do this, we use a particular service called Pingdom.
Pingdom monitor our network/servers and their response times from multiple locations, and send us SMS alerts when something goes wrong. This allows all of our staff to be aware, the exact moment a server goes down, no matter where we are. Now, they have opened up a new type of account which allows you to monitor your website for free. Part of this package includes 20 Free SMS credits per month.
We recommend you give it a go, Especially if you want to sleep at night – knowing that someone is keeping an eye on your website.
Pingdom: www.pingdom.com
News, Science & Tech, Web Hosting News
Pingdom, Uptime, Website Monitoring
A fair few people know what DNS lookups are, Even without having to work in the IT industry. It basically converts the pretty, familliar and easy to understand (for us) “www.domain.com” into an IP Address, which computers can understand and direct traffic to.
The Image below is from Verisign, and to make the understanding a bit easier, it ignores the process of caching.
Image source: Verisign Domain Name Industry Brief, June 2007 (PDF), last page.
Read more…
Domains, PHP Applications, Science & Tech
DNS, Domain Name, Lookups
Recently we made a post about our new cloud computing infrastructure and the hardware we were using to build such a platform. Well, our servers have been delivered and we are in stage two of this set-up which is the install and configuration of the ‘cloud’.
As previously discussed, we have purchased a number of the new Dell PowerEdge R710 servers, and we have since configured these in the data centre and commenced the complex process of getting these servers working in unison. The reason why this stage is so important, is because this is the base building blocks of our cloud. These machines will be doing the hard work of computing the extreme amounts of data we intend on pushing through the cloud. They will also be configured so that in the case that one server (Server A) was to fail or go offline, there would be no downtime for the end user, The other servers (Server B, C & D) in the cloud would compensate and manage the tasks that server A was doing. The data would autonomously be mirrored across the active servers, in the case that another server was to fail. The way that the servers do this, is via a backbone gigabit network.
Read more…
News, Science & Tech, Web Hosting News
Ausweb, Cloud Computing, Dell
Well who would have thought? The humble old DVD seems to be getting a new kick of life due to some very clever thinking scientists at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne. Could the rumours be true? over 2000 movies on one DVD? Well Samsung seem to think so… Read more…
News, Rambles, Science & Tech
The Wolfram Alpha team has revealed on their blog, some of the impressive hardware behind their super-duper new “Computational Search Engine”. If you haven’t heard about Wolfram Alpha yet, it’s a recently launched “computational knowledge engine” with an interface similar to a search engine. Wolfram Alpha promises to approach to our search engine needs from a different perspective, with the lofty long-term ambition of “making all systematic knowledge immediately computable by anyone”.
By entering your question or calculation, Wolfram|Alpha uses it’s built-in algorithms and ever-growing collection of data to compute your response. Be it the distance in cm to Pluto, or the age old mystery of ‘how much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?’
Read more…
Off Topic, Science & Tech, Web Hosting News
Alpha, Search Engine, Wolfram
The Google network dropped off the radar for many Internet users last Thursday. Widespread outages were reported across several Google services including search, Google Docs, Gmail and YouTube, were the main services that left people scratching their heads and wondering what to do next – best catalogued here by the #GoogleFail Twitter stream.
Not all Internet users were affected, but those using larger American providers such as AT&T or Verizon, appeared to be disproportionately effected. A number of larger US based ISP’s “peer” with Google, or interconnect their networks with Google’s networks in order to improve speed and reduce bandwidth. Much like a large-scale highway accident shutting down a key section of road, the effects still ripple off and smaller ISP’s not interconnected with Google were able to route around the problem.
Read more…
Science & Tech, Web Hosting News
Google
So you probably think we’re all sitting back at our desks, day dreaming about the weekend or betting on this weekends football matches but that’s definitely NOT the case. (Go the Roosters!) We’ve been busy making purchases in preparation for our new cloud infrastructure! Gigabit switches, Brand new (and amazingly powerful) Dell Servers, brand new cabinets in the new area of Sydney’s Equinix Data centre, and it’s all coming together rather nicely.
We’ve been busy doing research and development so that we can hit the ground running and we may just be the first Australian host to provide cloud services to the public. And we’re VERY excited about it.
Here’s some specifications of the servers we have purchased, for you personalities out there that have geek or technology tendencies.
Dell PowerEdge R710 servers each with:
Dual Intel Xeon X5550 – 2.66Ghz, 8M Cache, 6.40 GT/s QPI, Turbo, HT (These are the new Intel CPUs with performance improvements which absolutely destroy any previous benchmarks)
72GB RAM – Check out the below photos to see how each set of DIMM slots are assigned to each CPU, which from what I’ve heard – doubles the speed.
6 x 300GB SAS (15,000 RPM) Drives in RAID0 configuration. – Due to the way our cloud infrastructure will work, storage will be raided on the cloud layer so we don’t need to worry about mirroring data at the hardware level.
4 x Gigabit Ethernet ports – At this stage we will be using 2 ports per server, but soon enough we will increasing this to 4 or maybe 6 ports per server for better throughput.
Dual PSU Units – These are awesome, allowing us to actually change power supplies whilst the server is running.
Read more…
Rambles, Science & Tech, Software, Web Hosting News
Ausweb, Cloud, Cloud Computing, Cloud Hosting, Dell, PowerEdge
If you don’t know who or what Google is, You’ve definitley been living under a rock for the past (almost) 10 years. So what i’ve discovered today, is a little site which is still in its prehistoric form.. Backrub.
Backrub was the initial name of Google, when it was a research project run out of Stanford University. Developed and designed by the now, two uncomprehensivley rich Sergey Brin and Larry Page. Since then it has come a long way, origionally running on a couple of machines on-site at Stanford, It now operates hundreds apon thousands of servers worldwide, constantly crawling the web and gathering and organising information ready for us to search.
I’ve found the origional backrub project page, which is still operational – Showing the old-school search pages, for the very young (at the time) search engine.
Check it out at: backrub.c63.be
Science & Tech
Backrub, Google
AMD Opteron
AMD is putting the spotlight on its upcoming six-core 45-nanometer AMD Opteron processor, code-named Istanbul, with live demonstrations on YouTube. The x86 six-core processor is designed for systems with two and four or more sockets, and is due in the second half of this year.
Istanbul is compatible with current AMD Opteron processor-based systems, and to prove this, Advanced Micro Devices Inc. demonstrated on YouTube a live upgrade of a system based on 45-nm quad-core AMD Opteron processors to the six-core Istanbul processors. According to the time-lapsed video, the upgrade took more than eight minutes.
AMD claims Istanbul provides better performance and efficiency than other Opteron chips, and a simple performance demonstration on YouTube shows four Istanbul processors operating and running virtual machines.
Source: techtarget.com
Feeds, Science & Tech
6 Core, AMD, New Tech, Opteron
After weeks of intense testing and feedback all the great new features and optimizations present in cPanel 11.24 EDGE and CURRENT are now in our RELEASE build. 11.24.4 includes many updates and enhancements that have been discussed in past posts. Now, those customers who prefer to use cPanel’s RELEASE build get to find out what all the buzz is about.
To find out more about all the optimizations and updates that 11.24.4 brings to the table please have a look here.
http://www.cpanel.net/products/cpwhm/cpanel11/new-features.htm
Feeds, Science & Tech, Scripting & Coding, Web Hosting News
Please ensure to read the following message carefully as there is important information about MySQL and Automated process killers in relation to the cPanel 11.24 upgrade.
MySQL Root Password
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With cPanel 11.24 now available, it is imperative to ensure that you have set your MySQL root password before upgrading to the latest version of cPanel. If you have previously skipped this step, you can set it now using the “MySQL Root Password” function in WebHost Manager. Failure to set a MySQL root password may cause database corruption on systems running MySQL 4.1 with InnoDB tables. Please set your MySQL root password as soon as possible to avoid any issues. Machines without a MySQL root password set allow access to any database by any user so it is imperative that a password is set as soon as possible.
If you have moved /root
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If you have set root’s home directory to something other than /root, you will need to copy .my.cnf from root’s home directory to /root/my.cnf. In the future, this process will be automated.
Automated process killers
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If you have a system in place that automatically kills processes taking up a lot of CPU time, you should disable them before running the cPanel update as the size of the update has triggered many of these systems. These process killers will kill updates or related process in the middle of the process and cause issues. If you have a failed update, you can force a re-update by running /scripts/upcp –force
Feeds, Science & Tech, Scripting & Coding, Web Hosting News
__________________________________
FreeBSD 4.x End of Support
cPanel support for FreeBSD 4.x will end August 1, 2008. cPanel will
not maintain binary compatibility for FreeBSD versions less than 5.x.
cPanel recommends that all affected users update to the latest
production release of FreeBSD to ensure future compatibility. If you
are unable to update to a more recent version of FreeBSD, then the
system’s update preferences (WHM >> Server Configuration >> Update
Config) must be set to “Never Update” prior to the deadline. Failure
to do so will result in complete loss of cPanel and WHM functionality.
After August 1 2008 and the end of our support for FreeBSD 4.x, you
will not receive any security updates or bug fixes. Binaries and other
files for FreeBSD 4.x will no longer be available from cPanel’s update
servers. We therefore urge everyone currently using FreeBSD 4.x begin
transitioning to updated versions in the FreeBSD 5+ tree.
__________________________________
Mbox & UW IMAP End of Support
In accordance with earlier deprecation announcements of the mbox mail
storage format, cPanel will no longer support mbox as of August 1,
2008. UW IMAP server and cPanel’s cppop server will no longer be
available in future builds. cPanel server owners are strongly urged to
convert any remaining mbox systems to maildir prior to August 1, 2008.
Failure to do so will result in loss of email client functionality.
As always, if you require assistance our technical team is standing by
to help.
Feeds, Science & Tech, Scripting & Coding, Web Hosting News
New cPanel builds have been published tonight to improve installation, speed, memory usage and upgrade experiences. Recently, installs and updates have been taking excessively long due to CPAN module tests during the Perl module updates. New EDGE, CURRENT and RELEASE builds 11.23.3 build 25946 (or later) have been released tonight to address this issue and to improve installer speed and add checks unrelated to Perl. If you have been experiencing update or install issues, we recommend re-downloading http://layer1.cpanel.net/latest for installs or re-running /scripts/upcp for updates.
Feeds, Science & Tech, Scripting & Coding, Web Hosting News
As of today, July 11, 2008, cPanel will no longer be offering One Time Licenses. These licenses are not currently inline with the way we deliver our products and do not allow us to provide the same high level of service to our customers that our other license models do. We apologize for the lack of notice however, providing notice would simply allow for more One Time Licenses to be sold which is the opposite intention of this action. Sorry for any inconvenience this may cause.
Feeds, Science & Tech, Scripting & Coding, Web Hosting News
cPanel and R1Soft are teaming up again to offer a great deal for cPanel server administrators and datacenters. R1Soft, maker of the industry leading CDP (Continuous Data Protection) backup software is running a special expressly for cPanel software users. For a limited time, cPack can be purchased for 25% off the normal price.
R1Soft’s CDP product is a great way to provide an extra level of data safety above and beyond cPanel’s built in backup facilities. Backups can be accessed directly from the cPanel interface by domain owners. Server owners can also take advantage of the bare-metal restore capabilities which bring servers back online quickly. “Data backup and the integrity of those backups are key to maintaining and growing enterprise level hosting operations and to that end, we suggest you have a look at the functionality that R1Soft can bring to the table,” says David Koston, cPanel’s Vice President of Operations. “We believe that R1’s cPack solution offers serious benefits for both web hosts and domain owners. This promotion is a good way for hosts to add backup services to their current offerings at a very reasonable price.”
To find out more about this promotion, please visit:
http://www.r1soft.com/products/special-offers/cpack/
Feeds, Science & Tech, Scripting & Coding, Web Hosting News
cPanel, announced this week the release of version 11.24 of their industry leading server management software. Version 11.24 introduces a new initiative to cPanel’s software, cPanel Accelerated. cPanel Accelerated brings new features designed to decrease system resource usage and increase speed and performance significantly from previous versions.
A substantial portion of the codebase of cPanel and the x3 interface itself has been streamlined and made to perform better and require less bandwidth. Also available as part of cPanel Accelerated are two alternatives for DNS and IMAP. The NSD nameserver can reduce memory usage for DNS functions by up to 40% over BIND. On busy nameservers that can add up to a huge resource savings. Also included in version 11.24 is Dovecot IMAP as an alternative to Courier IMAP. Dovecot provides up to a 25% reduction in disk I/O as well as using between 10% to 70% less memory then Courier. Security has also been enhanced with the reworking of cPanel’s process monitoring daemon to include service specific verification which helps to improve the security of running processes. Backups are faster too. Pkgacct 8 has been reworked to become significantly faster then previous versions. That means you can safely backup your data and restore it, both incrementally & non-incrementally much more quickly then previous versions. This all adds up to increased performance, reduced resource usage and ultimately a more efficient webhosting operation for cPanel customers.
As of Thursday, 10/30/2008, 11.24 and all its new enhancements will be available in the CURRENT build of cPanel. 11.24 will then make its way into the STABLE tree later in November. The best part of upgrading to 11.24 is that it’s very simple. Also, many of the improvements introduced require no user interaction, they just work.
For more information on the improvements introduced in cPanel 11.24 please the following URL for more information.
http://www.cpanel.net/products/cpwhm/cpanel11/new-features.htm
Feeds, Science & Tech, Scripting & Coding, Web Hosting News
One of the great things about the concept of cloud computing is the possiblities it creates for large, disruptive markets. We talk about compute capacity markets and the like all the time–that’s the commoditization of IT infrastructure. But, as Simon Wardley would be quick to point out, the commoditization of one technology almost always leads to the opportunity to innovate others. What are the new technologies that cloud infrastructure will enable?
An interesting discussion broke out in the “cloud-o-sphere” this week surrounding a related comment from our own Doug Gourlay at Cisco’s CScape analyst conference last week. In talking about the effects of cross-cloud workload mobility to Andreas Antonopoulos of Nemertes Research Group, Doug mentioned the concept of “Virtual-Routing” (a horrible term), the idea that one can move the compute loads to the best network location rather than rerouting the network to the workload.
Science & Tech
Cloud Computing, Virtual Routing
Pipe Networks has announced that its plan to lay a new undersea fibre-optic cable between Australia and Guam will proceed, despite some initial hurdles faced during preliminary financial talks. The current tight financial market status had put a cloud over the project, but the overall support for the project from the various parties concerned saw an agreement reached and the required boxes ticked to begin the development process.
The new cable will be a huge benefit to Australian businesses and consumers, who currently face relatively limited access to the international internet backbone compared to many other countries. Naturally we here at AUSWEB are very pleased to hear the news and hope to see further network improvement announcements in the coming months.
Science & Tech
