Comments on: Such Lovely People

By: Bryan

Bryan — Mon, 05 Oct 2015 17:33:55 +0000

It is one of those areas where if you need the capabilities you have to use them, whether you like or trust them or not. You trust what you have learned is trustworthy – earned, not automatic.

We have both been on the ‘bleeding edge’ of technology for too many years, and as we age we appreciate reliability over ‘whiz bang effect’. 😉

We always take care … to avoid catching something, if nothing else 😆

By: Kryten42

Kryten42 — Mon, 05 Oct 2015 03:31:46 +0000

Can’t say I disagree with either of you. 🙂

I dislike those *general* type cloud services (like Dropbox etc.) They are disaster’s waiting to happen I think (and they have had serious problems already). Non savvy people are conned by the ‘ease of use’ features and low prices (or free in some cases).

Prometius have worked very hard on security and reliability. Those are their primary focus. I’ve used several providers over the past 15 years, and this is the best service I’ve used! 🙂

I’ve decided to go with the previous ‘5th Gen’ system. The new ‘6th Gen’ is too new for my liking. Most of the new MoBo’s look like they were designed and shot out to retail too rapidly to take advantage of the ‘early adopters’. I’ll wait for the dust to settle in a year or so I think (and prices to drop! Prices are a high premium for the new gen.) Kinda sad, the new gen does hold a lot of promise, and features I’d like. 🙂 Still, for a biz system, I’ll settle for something that’s been around about 3 years and works. 😉 😀

Just have to wait for the funds now. because of age and situation, I’m eligible to withdraw up to 10% of my super funds. I can get all of it when I reach 65, but I plan to leave it until 70. The payout will be a lot better! 🙂

I hope all is well with you guys. 😀 Take care.

By: Bryan

Bryan — Tue, 29 Sep 2015 19:05:01 +0000

You have the core requirements for the capabilities, something I didn’t and don’t have. You have real=time requirements while my client base actually tends to be batch oriented. Different needs lead to different solutions. You need the capabilities of a cloud while I can almost get by with sending DVDs by snail mail.

My ‘problem’ with the cloud are clients who use it for back-up and expect me to do recover their data when the cloud rains on them.

By: Badtux

Badtux — Tue, 29 Sep 2015 06:18:01 +0000

The core issue is that the customers are “out there”, and hosting providers have way bigger pipes than we could ever afford. Plus Amazon AWS has much better security than we could ever have by attaching our boxes directly to the ‘Net, their firewall and monitoring capabilities are ridiculously awesome. I have data flowing to me that tells me more about what’s happening on my constellation than I could have ever instrumented myself, at least not in any timely fashion.

That said, we’re pretty meticulous about our data too. Not only do we back it up on a nightly basis to S3 (which in turn replicates it to at least three different places worldwide), we are also replicating our database in real time to two replicas in two different availability zones, either of which can take over if the master database dies. And BTW we are *not* using the Amazon database that died last weekend and took down a bunch of sites, we rolled our own database cluster that we can more easily tweak and monitor in real time. I’m not sanguine about Amazon’s reliability by any means, everything is redundant out the yazoo.

By: Bryan

Bryan — Mon, 28 Sep 2015 21:31:37 +0000

I understand why you guys need to work with those types of resources but it bothers me to leave my or my clients’ information out on the ‘Net. If you have to, you have to, but that doesn’t make me happy with it. I know I’m being obsessive about by data, but the military and law enforcement like it like that. It was reinforced by having clients who saw their data as ‘gold’, even if everyone else saw ‘iron pyrites’.

Good luck with your new box, Kryten.

By: Badtux

Badtux — Mon, 28 Sep 2015 16:24:47 +0000

I’m using Digital Ocean’s $5 plan for my backup DNS (512mb RAM/1 core/20GB SSD/1TB transfer) but of course that would not be useful for you because they are based in NYC (sigh). One thing that’s clear is that cloud computing based on KVM is getting really cheap now. Even Amazon has released new KVM-based instance types that are ludicrously cheap for a month, though they’re not useful for me because Amazon filters out ports that I need.

By: Kryten42

Kryten42 — Mon, 28 Sep 2015 05:01:46 +0000

LOL That is a great story in Le Reg Badtux! Made me smile also. 😀 Good to see that some Aussie kids can still think! 😉 😀 During the 90’s, I had my 2 nephews living with me for about 6 years. The youngest was always getting in trouble at school, and after some time gently probing I figured out he was bored to death. So I got him interested in electronics & chemistry… we bought some kits and I taught him the basics and we had a lot of fun. 🙂 He really got into it when I bought him an electronic Cricket kit. It was simple really (for someone with a Master’s in Electronics anyway), basically a photo sensor and a piezo buzzer. I redesigned it a bit (made the photo sensor cc’t more sensitive to light changes, added a variable or random time delay and changed the audio cc’t & tone to give a more realistic cricket chirping sound. 🙂 We even made a body and leg’s to make it look more like a large cricket (he did most of the work, I just gave advice etc.) The big test was to hide it under his Mom’s bed and wait for the night and the fun to start! It was a HUGE success (well, for my nephew and myself at least). LOL Drove my sister crazy! 😀 Ahhh… Nothing like having an excellent fun reason to learn! I also got him into a secondary school that understood kid’s like him and went against the pathetic education ‘status quo’ by challenging and making it fun. Over the next few years, he went from being an average student, to becoming the 1st in the State for year 10, and 2nd in Year 11 (to his horror, he was 2nd to a GIRL!!) 😉 LOL He won a full Scholarship to study Chemical Engineering @ Uni. The older boy did very well also. Very proud of them. 😀

Old timers Bryan! 😀 My first serious computer was a Sperry Univac 1100 (I forget which model, but they were the first Aussie company to upgrade to a new 1100/60 in ’79) that I was a junior programmer on during the late 70’s.Worked on many mainframes and mini’s after. 🙂 I left in ’78 to spend the next 3 years studying for a ‘Certificate of Technology’ (basically electronics/electrical/mechanical engineering) that was essentially a precursor to any of several engineering degrees that I could study for only 1 or 2 years, instead of 4, to earn my degree. It was also aimed more at practical skills rather than theory at about 60% practical/40% theory, essentially the reverse of Uni courses. Had to learn to use tools (including oxy/fuel & arc welders, lathes, etc.; how to make circuit boards from design to etched and drilled, and so on. 🙂 It all came in very handy over the years. Then I made possibly the biggest error of my life and joined the military. Oh well. *shrug*

Anyway, I think I’m close to finalizing what I want for my new Workstation. 🙂

I got an eMail from my hosting company Prometius that they have updated and created new Cloud & KVM systems they want me to test. *sigh* I’ve told them I can’t for now. They replied just new & said no problem, they aren’t going live until Jan 2016 so I have time to test. 🙂 They have some special pricing for me if I find them useful and want to use them. 🙂

SSD, 768 MB RAM, 1 vCPU, €0.003 / hour (€2.16 per month)
SSD, 1.5 GB RAM, 2 vCPU, €0.005 / hour (€3.60 per month)
SSD, 3 GB RAM, 2 vCPU, €0.010 / hour (€7.20 per month)
SSD, 6 GB RAM, 4 vCPU, €0.020 / hour (€14.4 per month)
SSD, 12 GB RAM, 8 vCPU, €0.040 / hour (€28.8 per month)

Not bad! 😀

By: Bryan

Bryan — Wed, 23 Sep 2015 19:03:45 +0000

Damn, I thought I caught that. The ‘Net connection was really flaky and I was having a hell of time getting things to post. ‘Cut & Paste’ is not always your friend 😉

Ah, yes, the good old days of using switches grouped in threes to enter octal load addresses and commands to create a driver for a paper tape reader, which contains a tape containing the driver for a 100K 8-inch floppy that allows you to load the driver for the disk pack that actually has the OS. Of course, the IBM 360 used rotary switches labeled 0 to F and a card reader to prepare for the 9-track tape that would load the ‘cake box’ disk pack that contains the working software for the hex version of the process. Dog, I love Boot ROMs!!! No one really appreciates them who hasn’t spent a day cold booting a mini or main frame.

By: Badtux

Badtux — Wed, 23 Sep 2015 06:49:38 +0000

Talking about embedded systems, this story about the Raspberry Pi made me smile.

The GUI for the PIC system was a 4 x 40 LCD display that was driven by a byte-serial interface. You put a byte on 8 pins of the PIC, strobed the clock bit, and there you go. I also had to bit-bang 9600 baud RS-232 to the main computer so the main computer could display things on the display (this is how you configured the initial IP address), as well as scan the 4-button keypad. All on a chip with no IRQ’s and no timers! That was fun because I understood immediately what had to be done, I had to create a state machine for each “process” (key scan, serial out, serial in, character display) where each state took a constant number of cycles, then carefully cycle count each state. Debouncing the keys was almost as much fun as bit-banging the RS232 :).

The whole purpose of this contraption was to allow configuring a $72,000 NAS system that had 48 drives in a 5U form factor. It was a headless unit that was configured by a web interface once you connected to it — but first you needed to configure an IP address! So I wrote both the PIC firmware that actually drove the front panel, and the little daemon inside the NAS that drew a menu and listened for button presses from the front panel, then let you navigate around and set the IP address, netmask, and gateway. Once you had those you could use the web interface to get in and actually configure the system.

Fun times, fun times…

By: Kryten42

Kryten42 — Wed, 23 Sep 2015 06:17:46 +0000

You stuttered Bryan! 😉 😀

I cut my programming teeth on machine code and ASM. 🙂 During my engineering career, I had to code a lot of PLC’s and RT CPU’s etc. Good times (seriously!) 🙂 I had some great tools to help me, such as a Tektronix DAS 9200 (kind of a super logic pattern generator/analyzer) and a DATA IO Unisite 40 PLD programmer (had several *personality* modules as new ones available when new PLD’s were released) with the ABEL (Advanced Boolean Expression Language), which made programming so much easier. 🙂 I still remember most of the Z80/8080 mnemonics. LOL

I was thinking after my previous comment about a graphics system I bought late 80’s that was an addon for the Mac II from a company in Scotland called Harlequin. The Harlequin graphics System was in a case about the size of a 1 or 2U rack unit, had 2 MB frame buffer (16 RAM boards) and RGB-Sync I/O. I got it for a bargain 40% discounted price of $2,600! A lot in the late 80’s! 😀 Now you can get a graphics card with over 2,600 compute unit’s & 8GB DDR5 RAM for around $650! LOL

My NAS is the Baffalo TeraStation 7200R Enterprise that I got wholesale about 2 years ago. Supports 12 HDD’s but I have 8 2TB in RAID 6. Has 16GB cache with a Xeon E3-1275 3.4 GHz Quad-Core. I just saw they have a F/W update to support the 8TB drives & RAID 60/61 (which my RAID card supports).

I’ve decided to get another UPS. Saw a good Eaton 1750VA UPS with good warranty (incl. batteries) for around $750. It’s also scalable up to 3kVA. Also greater than 94% efficiency. 🙂 My current UPS is an Eaton 1200VA and has been excellent over the 3 years I’ve had it.

One of the good things about the new DDR4 is that it allows for up to 16GB modules. So the new MB’s can support up to 64 GB RAM. Handy for a decent RAM disk! LOL It’s also only 1.2V.

OK. Time to go pay bill’s. yay. 😐

TTYL 😀