• Bandwidth
• Size, 1U, 2U etc
• Additional IP addressing
• Physical Firewall
• **Power Consumption

The reason I have placed an asterisk next to power consumption is because this is a key area where you may get stung. Most hosting providers will have an introductory tarrif which will allow your server to consume 0.4a to 0.5a of power. If your server is pulling more than 0.4a when a measurement is taken, You will be charged extra for going over your allowance,

Seems fair at first glance, power & cooling is expensive after all. However , how many servers draw 0.5amps. You are hosting a server designed to serve hundreds of people, lots of ram and redundant power supplies and hard discs. Yet you have an allowance of 0.5amps. To put this in perspective, I have seen my little Fujitsu sub-note book draw 0.3amps when on charge.

Perhaps I should co-locate my sub-notebook.

The point of this posting is to let you be aware that the headline tarrifs you see for server hosting will not always be what you will pay. It is very important to know your hardware and how much power it use’s at idle, and also on full load. That £45 per month tarrif could end up costing you £75 per month because you did not do your homework.

Caveat emptor

A rather dangerous security flaw which can cause major havoc on the ability to deliver internet services has been discovered. A team of security researchers have discovered a security flaw in the protocol called TCP. TCP is the blood that flows through the internet. Without TCP the internet would not function as we know it.

To investigate this security flaw, an application called Sockstress has been created. This application has the ability to crash routers, Firewalls, Web Servers, Windows Servers and even Linux servers. This is a serious cross platform flaw which affects any internet device which offers internet based services. Even your small webserver sitting behind your broadband router is affected.

It works by causing what is known as a DOS (Denial of Service ) attack. This means the server will no longer be able to function or offer websites, Email or any internet based services.

It works by causing the internet server to consume large amounts of resources, and then it runs out of resources and stops working. Resources are things like Memory and Disc space. Every connection that is made to a internet servers requires resources. When a new connection is made , the servers will allocate resources for that connection. The more connections that are made, the more resources are allocated.

Sockstress creates connections to the internet server, then does nothing with them. The internet server then keeps asking “Can you use the connection now ?” and the answer is always no. And at the same time new connections are being made, and the process gets repeated. Eventually the server runs out of resources to offer to real customers, and it dies.

Think of it like this.

A few people telephone a restaurant and reserve a table. The restaurant reserves the table for that person. These people keep doing this over a period of time pretending to be different people. The restaurant reserves all it’s tables, calls in extra staff, cancels staff vacations and starts refusing real customers because all tables are reserved.

These trickster people who have made these reservations do not turn up and the restaurant tries to contact these people to see what’s happening. Some people can be contacted and they insist that they are coming, please do not unreserve my table.

During all this, the restaurant is no longer accepting reservations from real customers. The real customers have been denied service. Hence the term DOS “Denial Of Service” attack

This is a very simplistic view, but it conveys the principal of how the attack works.

I’m sure a workaround will be created soon, However at the moment we don’t have one, and the internet is as risk.

http://www.t2.fi/2008/08/27/jack-c-louis-and-robert-e-lee-to-talk-about-new-dos-attack-vectors/

• Speed
• Reliability
• Cost
• Flexibility

The Great Office War from Runawaybox on Vimeo.

The code and the user front end are separated from each other, this makes template development so much easier. Some of key areas still need development.

• Performance can be a problem, and a dedicated host with a PHP bytecode cache is ideal
• No support file based down-loadable products like software or music
• Poor support for bulk importing of products, if you have product set of several thousand products, It can take several hours to import data

I actually quite like the product and will be watching it mature. In fact when I get more time , I would like to contribute to it’s development. However as it is now, I would not recommended for a very busy or a site with a large product set.

http://www.magentocommerce.com/

Once booted into the Ubuntu Live CD, Open a terminal session, and enter the following commands
ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ sudo su -
This will give you root access
ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ modprobe dm-mod
Installs the LVM modules into the kernel so you can see your Volumes
root@ubuntu:/dev# apt-get install lvm2
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
The following NEW packages will be installed:
lvm2
0 upgraded, 1 newly installed, 0 to remove and 1 not upgraded.
Need to get 325kB of archives.
After this operation, 918kB of additional disk space will be used.
Get:1 http://archive.ubuntu.com hardy/main lvm2 2.02.26-1ubuntu9 [325kB]
Fetched 325kB in 0s (726kB/s)
Selecting previously deselected package lvm2.
(Reading database ... 98423 files and directories currently installed.)
Unpacking lvm2 (from .../lvm2_2.02.26-1ubuntu9_i386.deb) ...
Setting up lvm2 (2.02.26-1ubuntu9) ...
Backing up any LVM2 metadata that may exist...done.
update-initramfs is disabled since running on a live CD

root@ubuntu:/dev# lvs
LV VG Attr LSize Origin Snap% Move Log Copy%
san vol1 -wi--- 467.00G
root@ubuntu:/dev# lvchange -a y san
Volume group "san" not found
root@ubuntu:/dev# lvchange -a y vol1


The rest of this code activates the LVM Volume ( Mine is called VOL1 in this case). You now have access to your LVM volumes.

The complaints range from the fact that they perceive windows vista to be
slow, or certain hardware devices or programs have stopped working since
installing Vista. Some problems have been so hard to overcome some of my
associates have “downgraded” to Windows XP.

People often resent the fact they eventually have to migrate to the newest
Windows operating system if the current one meets their needs. Microsoft
provides a limited life cycle for windows versions. It will stop supporting
versions of Windows as technology evolves and as hardware performance and
capacity increases. They do quite a good job in maintaining all the
different applications and operating systems; however they have to draw the
line at some point. Therefore Windows versions will eventually become
obsolete. To have your computer supported, you should upgrade to a current
supported operating system.

With this in mind, the point of this article is to highlight the fact that
people do have viable alternatives to Windows. As windows has evolved, so
have the alternatives.

The two most popular alternatives to windows are OSX running on Macintosh
computers & Linux. Linux has the advantage that it runs on a wider range of
computers. Linux has improved vastly over the past few years. Linux is a
operating system which has its roots in an operating system called UNIX. It
was mostly used on servers rather than on desktops computers. Over the past
few year’s companies have invested large sums of money into making Linux
function within a desktop environment. Mark Shuttleworth a South African
billionaire who made his fortune because of technology he created using
Linux, has invested large sums of money into Ubuntu Linux. This investment
has created a very stable desktop environment.

So rather than feel forced into a particular direction, lift your head up
and look around. There are alternatives. Examine how you use your computer
and what is important to you, and look around; you will be surprised at
what you may find.

I’m getting quite worried about the amount of news items that I have seen recently which highlight security breaches due to laptop theft or missing CD’s in the post.

One of the most public is the HMRC data of 25 million records on non-encrypted media.

A number of security experts have mentioned the need for encryption and expensive software to limit what can be transferred via USB data storage.

I have a really simple solution; don’t store high risk data on mobile computers in the first place. There is no need to have this type of data stored on mobile computers.

Leave the data on a central server, where you have one central point to protect. Then provide an access window trough VPN and terminal services or Citrix, the data can be viewed.

This way if the laptop is stolen, no data is actually stored on the machine. The laptop is used to view documents rather than store documents. This would not have been possible until recently, Network bandwidth was limited and quite expense.

Now you can get up to 8mbps on a laptop with a 3G card for £15 per month. This is far cheaper than the expense of software solutions to protect stored data.

Don’t store sensitive data on laptop’s. View it instead.

However over the years CISCO’s competition has improved product offerings immensely, and provide very strong product offerings. In fact in some instances they make CISCO’s offerings look poor in comparison.

One such instance is the CISCO 800 series routers. These routers are often deployed in Teleworker locations, small home offices and branch offices. There is strong competition in this area from the likes of Draytek, Dlink, Alcatel & netgear to name a few. From the features list, the CISCO 800 router does look very good, however the problems occur in execution.

The most common placed 800 router is the 877 with a ADSL WAN port or the ADSL 877W with built in Wireless radio. As ADSL2 & ADSL2+ broadband connectivity is deployed, this router seems to struggle where other routers half the price just get on with it.

ADSL2+ allows upload speeds of 2.5mbs using ITU G.992.5 Annex M. You have just spent nearly £300 on your brand new 877 to find out that you can’t max out your upload speed. This is because you bought the wrong version of 877 router. Although you have the correct version of IOS, you should have spent even more money and bought a CISCO877-M-K9 that M is really important. Where as a £50 Alcatel Speedtouch router has this built in.

Ok ADSL2+ is fairly advanced, However even ADSL2 seems to be quite challenging for the CISCO 877. You have to be very particular about the version of IOS you are running you need at least 12.4XJ or you will have to upload separate firmware for the ADSL interface.

Other routers seem to get on with it with no fuss and drama, and they cost half the price of the 800 routers. These routers are feature rich, however you would expect that the basics have sorted on such a premium brand.

I use these routers not out of choice, but because my customers insist on them. Therefore I need to know what problems they will face. If I had a choice, I would be using an alternative more affordable and no fuss router.

Firmware updates for the 800 series router

ftp.cisco.com/pub/access/800

Microsoft Vista and Office 2007: full report

An interim report was released in January 2007 which came to the following conclusions:

• the new features of Microsoft’s Vista product added value but did not justify early deployment in the education sector. The deployment costs were seen as high and the benefits were far from clear
• office 2007 contained no ‘must have’ features and Microsoft should develop an underpinning business case to justify deployment in the education sector
• there were interoperability concerns regarding Office 2007; and Microsoft should urgently provide ‘native’ support for the OpenDocument format (ODF)
• educational ICT suppliers should ship computers for the educational marketplace with a choice of office productivity suites on the desktop. Ideally, this choice should include an open-source offering

One of the most encouraging things about this report is that they have stopped and thought about alternatives to meet ICT requirements rather than swallowing what is forced fed them. They have stood their ground and said no, we have a choice.

We note a number of recent developments aimed at enhancing choice in the field of office productivity software. These include further development of the online Google Apps product set, the incorporation of Star Office into the free download Google Pack and the release by IBM of a free version of Lotus Symphony.

In summary the report states that other options such as Linux, and Open Office for its Open Document format should be considered before deploying Vista and Office 2007. It also states that Microsoft will have to provide a more compelling business case before deployment can take place.

How refreshing !