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Our guest for February is Peter Bryant from RimuHosting, a VirtualPrivateServer company based in Cambridge, [New Zealand|NewZealand].
-Peter's talk will hopefully touch on:
+RimuHosting specialises in providing virtual private servers; they have 3 data centres in the USA and do about 10 terabytes of traffic per month.
-* the history of RimuHosting
-* using [virtualisation|VirtualPrivateServer] on [Linux]
-* his experience as an employer of [Linux]
staff
-* running an international business from NZ
+Currently have 4 tech support
staff (and looking for more), doing about 1300 support emails per month.
-(Please add other points if you would like Peter to touch on them; if you are Peter, please feel free to edit the list to reflect what you want to talk about
!)
+!!Brief notes of meeting
-As usual
, there will be
a Q&A session at
the end
, followed by refreshments
.
+!Short History
+Peter first used linux in 1999 (using RedHat 6)
, working for
a startup in Seattle - trying to get Oracle working on their cluster of 6 dual-p3 600MHz machines. Although
the "dot-com" crash hit hard
, their company survived due to having a stable business model. He eventually moved to Cambridge (NewZealand), and finding it difficult to get cheap host servers/shell access, he decided to set up RimuHosting
.
-Location is
[TW
.2.07|TW
] at
the University
of Waikato
. Meeting
will start at 7
:30pm
.
+!Technology
+Investigated
[UML] vs the commercial Virtuoso, and decided on UML
. In July 2005 they started using [Xen
].
+UML == a linux process running inside linux. Xen = "hypervisor" running on hardware. "ring " - about 50% more efficient; Xen can allocate "real" memory while UML uses virtual memory inside
the main linux OS.
+
+New chipsets supporting virtualisation - Intel VT and AMD Pacifica - so-called "ring -1" will allow unmodified OSes to run; ring 0 currently needs (slightly) modified kernel for some syscalls.
+
+Initially rented servers from co-lo; the CPU and disk were adequate but VPS needs lots
of RAM; many of their VPSes only have 96MB.
+
+2GB of RAM allows about 15 VPSes per machine. After encountering a bad batch of HDDs they now always use RAID. They now buy machines from "rackmounts" in San Diego from a guy called "Brian" - Duel Opteron 246 with 8GB RAM, 3x 200GB HDDs for RAID1+1spare. Peter's never met Brian, nor visited any of the data centres or seen any of his servers.
+Software raid makes it easier to move drives around, no bios access needed.
+
+About 50% of their hard drives in New York DC died when they lost power uncleanly (in the big power outage in August 2003)
.
+
+!Team/Support
+The support team use jabber internally; they generally do free suport tasks for customers if they think it
will take less than 15 minutes to complete; building up a repository of commonly requested tasks.
+
+Most exploits that they encounter are in poorly written web-apps, and dictionary passwords. Credit-card fraud is occasionally a problem.
+
+Marketing
:
+* tried direct approaches to web companies; not well received
.
+* google ad-words
+* content on the web - their howtos
+
+----
* About Rimu Hosting: http://rimuhosting.com/support/aboutrh.jsp
