Back on-line

Did you miss me?

Over the last few days I've been upgrading the server kit I use to run my websites and API services on. The main server moved up from a dual 2.4GHz Xeon to dual 2.8Ghx Xeons, and from 2Gb of RAM tripled to 6Gb. I think that should cope with almost anything that gets thrown at it. (It is presently running around 50 websites and 3 million rows of MySQL data).

I also hived off my public NTP and DNS functions on to a separate box, and after reading some time back about how FreeBSD is a far better operating system for running the NTP daemon that is what the box running these services now is using. And I have to say the improvement in stability is amazing; something around a factor of 10⁴.

There are a few more tweaks to come, but glad to be back.

Are the EVE-Online servers moving to Iceland?

Yesterday I noted an interesting article on the BBC website about a firm setting up a 'green' server farm operation in Iceland to make use of the carbon-zero geothermal electricity alongside the lower ambient temperature to reduce the usually substantial overhead of cooling computer servers. The article went on to note that Iceland is about to substantially increase its presence on the internet backbones with the Farice , Cantat-3, and new Danice high-capacity fibre links now on stream, and that the company concerned — Verne Global — hoped to gain a substantial number of customers by the cost reductions available to clients who move their servers there. They also made great play of how stable the underlying bedrock is in that area, close by Keflavik airport†. Indeed, their website has lots of interesting information on it. Then I noticed a name I recognised; Vilhjálmur Thorsteinsson is Chairman of the Board of Verne Holdings. He is also Chairman of the Board of CCP Games, who created and operate EVE-Online. Given that the EVE universe is a "single shard" — every player world-wide uses the same physical group of servers and plays in the same 'space' — then, unlike other online games which have servers located in different continents, all of the EVE-Online servers are in one physical locations. Just outside London, UK, in Slough. The Verne website makes great play of their centre being only 18ms from London (as the internet flies) and 36 milliseconds from New York. So, given the CCP Chairman is now creating this 'cooler' server centre one can't help but wonder whether the CCP servers will now be moving to Iceland to save money, as well as the planet. † Keflavik — a former US Air Force base — also happens to be one of the rare airfields which is long enough and wide enough for the Space shuttle to land at in an emergency.

Going v6

As it happens, my car is a V6. but I'm wanting here to mention the 'upgrading' of Internet Protocol to permit wider access.

Back when Vint Cerf and Robert E. Kahn developed the 'new' "Internet Protocol" to enable machines to connect to each other (replacing the old point-to-point method) they came up with the idea of assigning an "Internet Address" to each one. It was a 32-bit number and is nowadays usually written as something like "123.45.67.89". It works pretty well and domain names — such as alisonw.com — get converted into one of these numbers, as does the machine you are reading this on.

Thing is, that design (actually ' IPv4' but the one which because widespread) created a limit on the numbers of machines which could be connected to the internet at one time. 4,294,967,296 of them — which is a whole lot of computers, clearly! And in 1980 it was thought (quite reasonably) that the idea there would be more than four and a quarter billion computers on the internet would have been considered completely crazy. But now, almost thirty years on, we are connecting mobile phones, netbooks, IP telephones, webcams, even toasters directly to the internet — and in many cases keeping them online 24 hours a day, not giving others an opportunity to use the same number — so that 4,294,967,296† just won't be enough anymore. Indeed, ARIN ( American Registry for Internet Numbers) reckon they'll run out next year!

So a few years back — ten, to be precise — a new numbering system was created. IPv6, as it became known, allows for massively more 'things' to be connected at the same time. In total it would be possible for just over 340,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 computers, phones, televisions, mobiles, whatever to be online at the same moment. That is 37 zeroes, by the way, or roughly 4,500,000,000,000,000 for every known star in the universe. So plenty of room for expansion without, one hopes, having to go through another redesign for an awfully long time.

But one of the issues about IPv6 from a server room or end-user viewpoint is that it is rather like the switch from analogue to digital television, or from VHS tape recording to DVD burning. Some of the kit can be made to work on both, but often software or hardware changes or additions are required to utilise the new IPv6 properly. And once you've moved on you can't then plug back into the old again. Most computers now will work on both, but most mobile phones. And the networking kit — the routers, modems, switches — quite probably won't unless they are very recent (or very expensive). So not only does the intermediate equipment all have to be upgraded (ie. replaced) but also how to get the new and the not-so-new-but-still-connected stuff to talk to each other needs to be sorted out. Disruption of the internet then is pretty much guaranteed. When? about three to five years, probably.

I recently upgraded the network kit in my server room and thought I had spec'd IPv6 capable kit throughout. It was only afterwards I discovered misleading marketing in that the ADSL router considered "IPv6 capable" as meaning "IPv6 on the internal can be converted to an IPv4 tunnel outside" which is, of course, pretty useless if you wanted native IPv6 on both sides.

One also has to consider the major rewrites of code (and database schemas) in moving from v4 to v6 nomenclature. And how many systems are embedded or non-upgradeable? How mission-critical are they? Is it more cost-effective to keep them - at the risk of degraded network performance overall - rather than replace them to take advantage of the IPv6 opportunities.

IPv6 was created ten years ago, and most of the internet backbone already supports it. Your ISP though is probably still working out how to provide it to you — and when. Yes, it will come, indeed it has to come, but "when" is a financial decision as much as a a technical one.

† Actually, not all of those are available for use as some are reserved for special uses, and every router in the chain between you and the site you want to use also requires an address.

Zimbra

Here at AlisonW towers I run an installation of Zimbra Collaboration Suite (Open Source Edition) on a stand-alone server to provide the email and calendaring services for all (but one) of my domains. And mostly I like it a lot. Yes, it could do with far better 'Alias' management (hell, even just sorting the list of an individual's alternative addresses would be a start; even better would be splitting them out by domain) but mostly "it just works". And that is good. So it is rather worrying that when I sign up to the Zimbra forums at http://www.zimbra.com/forums/ and it asks me to Please verify your email address in order to post a new thread or reply that when I ask it - repeatedly - to send the activation code one never arrives, even though I can test the email address at my end! Just sayin'