Life and Times of an Infrastructure Architect

It's about that time I guess. By June 1st, all posts on my livejournal are going to be friends only. I'm trying to separate my personal-life from my private life a bit more. I'll be setting up a new blog on WordPress, which will be about the new directions I'm moving towards professionally.

What does this mean to you? Well, if you've been lurking and following this blog, but are not listed as my friend, this is a good time for you to do so. My livejournal will become solely what a livejournal is supposed to be, rants, bitches, drama, etc.

I'm adding authsmtp's mx servers to all of my spam filters. Given their unwillingness to deal with a clear spamming customer of their's, I'm advising everybody else I know to do the same. Note filgenius.com's claims that I signed up to their website and gave them permission to spam me.

Both authsmtp and filegenius have refused to show me proof of this. They refuse, because it does not exist. The email they spammed is one you'd find by a simple dictionary attack, an alias to my main email address. I've never actually handed this out to anybody, or used it for a website. Spammers are the scum and the filth of the internet.

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I was spammed this afternoon a company trying to get into the secure delivery webapp market. The spam was delivered through a commercial mail relay service, authsmtp.com. Looking at the spam, then looking at his site, I had to laugh and send this curt response.

"Why exactly do you think it's appropriate to use spam to try and get
people to use your "service"? You might want to consider DropSend.com
or drop.io. They don't spam."

His response to me was funny enough that it deserves to be reposted.

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Mr. Gauger (CEO of 1and1),

While it's certainly your prerogative to reject an email from a paying customer, I might advise you to reconsider the impact of this decision. As I'm sure you read my LinkedIn Mail before you declined it as "not appropriate", you are aware that I'm a paying customer of yours. You're also aware that I've been struggling for six months to retrieve a domain name held hostage from me by your company.

Perhap the appropriate response was to let me know that you would forward this to one of your underlings, perhaps Sebastian Moser who manages your US operations. Sebastian was good enough to be listed in the phonebook, and answered his home telephone when I called him this afternoon. He did not call me inappropriate, he gave me his email address, and told me he would take care of the issue.

As you find it inappropriate for your customers to contact you, I'd advise you to read The Cluetrain Manifesto. It's content describes the dialogs that businesses need to have with their customers in the internet era. 1and1 has deemed it necessary to extort an extra $38 from me on top of the $11 domain I long-since paid for, yet still will not transfer control of this domain to me. I can only assume you and your company have fallen on the hardest of times. In light of this situation, I have purchased a copy of this book on Amazon, and shipped it to your offices in M. You shall receive it next week.

it still will not transfer control of to me, I can only assume that 1and1, and perhaps you Mr Gauger, have fallen on very harsh financial times. Because of this, I just odered you a copy, it will arrive at your Mannheim office next week.


Then again, what do I know. I'm just a businessman myself, one who would never imagine treating his customers the way you have personally treated me.

Michael T. Halligan
Chief Technology Officer
BitPusher, LLC
206-508-2924

Just posted a recap of LinuxFest 2008 up at http://blog.bitpusher.com/2008/05/02/linuxfest-2008-recap/#more-59

I'm voting for Biggie.


"I'd rather go toe to toe with all of y'all
cuz runnin just ain't in my protocol"

'nuff said.

The rumor-mill is grinding out dirt that Rackspace might finally be going public! TechCrunch and DatacenterKnowledge
are reporting that the IPO mayb e nigh.

Rackspace provides a great service. What's better is that rackspace owns a couple of it's datacenters, and has all the economies of scale that would allow them to compete in the lower-end, dedicated server or shared hosting/cloud markets.. Given that they could, I'm impressed with the fact that they don't. RackSpace sold off their dedicated server business unit ServerBeach to Peer1 in 2006. ServerBeach was profitable, and going through hypergrowth, but didn't meet RackSpace's edict that every customer must hit their minimum true profit margin (http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fsb/fsb_archive/2006/11/01/8391420/index.htm)

Those of us who suffered through the Telco collapse in 2000, and got booted out of bankrupt datacenters like Abovenet (365main) have learned to be very cautious about telco choices. Telcos & Datacenters who choose profits over hypergrowth are a win in my book.
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I've got a good lead on 30 HP DL145 G3s for practically nothing. I know better. The dedicated server market sucks when you're less than 2,000 servers.. Yet I find myself running the numbers and trying to convince myself that I should do it.

Running them in public should convince me not to do it. These aren't actually the numbers I'm dealing with, no trade secrets here, but a very realistic approximation if somebody were going to consider going into this market at a small scale.

In this situation, assume you've already got a moderately sized colocation presence, and are looking to use up empty space, rather than undertake a large new endeavor

Hardware purchases:
- Qty 30 HP DL145 G3 servers, 2GB memory, dual 250gb hard drive, $27,000
- Qty 02 HP Procurve 2650 Switches, $ 2,000
- Qty 60 Ethernet cables, various lengths, average $72
- Qty 02 APCC AP7832 120v, 30-amp Remote and Metered PDUs $1,550
- Qty 04 Fiber Cables $50
- Qty 04 HP GBICS $200
- Qty 04 Cisco GBICS $150
- Qty 01 APC AR3100BLK Cabinet $1,500

Hardware Total $32,522


Installation services:
- Qty 40 Hours racking, stacking & low-level systems administration $1,600
- Qty 01 Cabinet Installation $450
- Qty 02 Power Circuit Installations $1,800
Installation Total $3,850

Total initial cash outlay: $36,372
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We've got a booth this weekend at LinuxFest NorthWest in Bellingham, WA. Is anyone else going? We've got enough people going that I'm on the fence on attending myself. Give me good reasons either way.

Kaylee is walking all over the place today :)

Seattle isn't a bad place. It's especially not a bad place to do business. Power is cheap, education level is high, there are no personal income taxes, and the cost of doing business is mostly lower than San Francisco in the important matters. Shouldn't that be enough?

Apparently not. Every month or so, some blogging loudmouth makes a comment about how the most relevant startups are in the Bay Area, or some statistic comes out showing which region has the biggest startups and Seattle isn't on it. Face it, it's true. That's where the money is.

Nobody is trying to make the argument that good businesses can't be started up successfully outside of the Bay Area. The only statement being made is that in the bay area VCs are more prevalent, and startups have been an integral part of the region's culture for 25 years. Seattle? It owes it's financial success to Boeing, UW, and the Port of Seattle probably as much, if not more than it does to tech companies.

The only even potentially relevant argument I can see is that the lack of hype means less potential investments? In that case, fly down to San Francisco and attend an SFBeta Event.

Hours, days, weeks could be spent detracting points against the bay area in favor of Seattle, or vice versa. In the end, does it really matter? I can't understand the victim complex that people seem to have around Seattle not getting Bay Area hype. Who cares? Not me, I'm too busy starting up companies.

My friends over at Reclaim Media just posted a great video about their media encoding service on YouTube.

William Dubois is pulling out all the stops to save Hans. In his closing statement, he called Hans a duck-billed platypus, holding up a stuffed toy platypus, and calling him "one of the least attractive people". This seems a lot like the Chewbacca Defense to me.. Well Hans, at least California never executes anybody.


SFGate has more detail.

Sadly my Datacenter manager had to move back to the bay area. My loss, your gain. I'm trying to help him find the right opportunity. If anyone's hiring for someone with a ridiculously straight-ahead work-ethic who loves working in datacenters, and is a decent junior Systems Administrator, please let me know and I'll hook you up with him.

From today's update on the Reiser trial at SFGate:


"I have about had it with you," Goodman said. "You are rude. You are arrogant. There's not enough words in the English language to describe the way you are. You have been trying to make a mockery of these proceedings."


.. So much for a fair and impartial Judge presiding over this trial.

Does anybody know a VAR/Reseller who can actually beat CDW's price? I hear mumblings on certain forums that CDW is expensive, but so far my experience is that nobody has been able to match them.

I'm in the process of buying :

Qty 10 HP DL360 servers (E5405, 1GB memory, dual 160gb disks) (CDW Part # 1400074, MFG Part # 481179-001 )
Qty 30 250GB WD Disks, CDW Part # 1237987, MFG Part # WD2500AAKS)
Qty 30 EDGE 2GB Kit MFG CDW Part #1036169 # PPE-PE20742702)

With freight to zip code 98168, their quote comes in just south of $16k, and they can have this all delivered by the end of next week. Switching memory or disk vendors would work if it got the price lower, but the server make/model isn't changeable.

I'm looking to buy as many working/used DL145 G2 servers you can sell. My ideal configuration is:

- Single or Dual Opteron 246
- No Memory
- No Disks
- *Must include rack rails*

$425 for a single proc in this configuration, $475 for a dual proc.

RIP Levanta, formerly LinuxCare

There she goes. I didn't even realize they were still alive. Makes me wonder how the others in that market are faring. Hrm, apparently OpenCountry went under too. Is anyone left from the great configuration management startup rush of late 2004?

As a poor-man's email backup, I'e been sending a copy of my email to a gmail account for a year now. I'm seriously considering deleting all of my IMAP folders, and just using gmail as my mail archive (with some appropriate backup measures, of course). I probably waste dozens of hours of my life every year on sorting through email, it's even worse when I get behind. Life's too short to be a slave to technology.

In order:

Kaylee got the stomach flu.
Our Nanny's daughter got the stomach flu
I got a sinus cold
Linda got a sinus cold
Our nanny got a sinus cold
Linda got the stomach flu
Our nanny got the stomach flu
I got the stomach flu

Everyone is almost better now, expect me. Now I've got strep throat.

It's that kind of month.