TPG Lies

October 16, 2009 | etbe

Shortly before 9AM this morning I discovered that the IP address for my mail server was not being routed, according to my logs the problem started shortly after midnight. It’s on a TPG ADSL connection, there is one IP address for the PPPOE link and 6 addresses in a /29 routed to it – one of the addresses in the /29 is for my mail server.

It wasn’t until 3PM that I was able to visit the server to sort the problem out. It turned out that the main IP address was working but the /29 wasn’t being routed to it. So TPG had somehow dropped the route from my routing table. I pinged all the addresses from a 3G broadband connection on my EeePC while running tcpdump on the server, and no packets for the /29 came through – but the IP address for the PPP link worked fine. I was even able to ssh in to the server once I knew the IP address of the ppp0 device – for future use I need to keep ALL IP addresses of all network gear on my EeePC not just the ones used for providing services.

So I phoned the helpdesk, and naturally they asked me inane questions. My patience extended to telling them the broadcast address etc that was being used on the Ethernet device (actually a bridge for Xen but I wasn’t going to confuse them). The system been power-cycled before I got there in the hope that it might fix the problem – so I could honestly answer the question “have you rebooted it” (usually I lie – rebooting systems to fix network problems is a Windows thing). But my patience started to run out when they asked me to check my DNS settings, I explained very clearly that my problem was that IP packets couldn’t get through and that I wasn’t using DNS and demanded that they fix it.

I didn’t get anyone technical to look at the problem until I firmly demanded that the help-desk operator test the routing by pinging my systems. The help-desk people don’t have Internet access so that actually testing the connection required escalating the issue. It seems that the algorithm used for help-desk people is to just repeatedly tell people to check various things on their own system, and that continues until the customer’s patience runs out. Either the customer goes away or makes requests firmly enough to get something done about it.

So their technician did some tests and proclaimed that there was no problem. While said tests were being done things started working, so obviously their procedure is to fix problems and then blame it on the customer. It is not plausible to believe that a problem in their network which had persisted for more than 15 hours would accidentally disappear during the 5 minute window that the technician was investigating the problem.

In the discussion that followed the help-desk operator tried to trick me into admitting that it was my fault. They claimed that because I had used multiple IP addresses I must have reconfigured my system and had therefore fixed a problem on my end, my response was “I HAVE A HEAP OF MACHINES HERE RUNNING ALL THE TIME, I USE WHICHEVER ONE I FEEL LIKE, I CHANGED NOTHING“. I didn’t mention that the machines in question are DomUs on the same Xen server, someone who doesn’t understand how ping works or what routing is wouldn’t have been able to cope with that.

I stated clearly several times that I don’t like being lied to. Either the help-desk operator was lying to me or their technician was lying to them. In either case they were not going to trick me – I know more about how the Internet works than they do.

TPG was unable to give me any assurance that such problems won’t happen again. The only thing I can be sure of is that when they lie they will stick to their story regardless of whether it works.

New Servers – a non-virtual Cloud

October 13, 2009 | etbe

NewServers.com [1] provides an interesting service. They have a cloud computing system that is roughly comparable to Amazon EC2, but for which all servers are physical machines (blade servers with real disks). This means that you get the option of changing between servers and starting more servers at will, but they are all physical systems so you know that your system is not going to go slow because someone else is running a batch job.

New Servers also has a bandwidth limit of 3GB per hour with $0.10 per GB if you transfer more than that. Most people should find that 3GB/hour is enough for a single server. This compares to EC2 where you pay $0.10 per GB to receive data and $0.17 to transmit it. If you actually need to transmit 2100GB per month then the data transfer fees from EC2 would be greater than the costs of renting a server from New Servers.

When running Linux the EC2 hourly charges are (where 1ECU is provides the equivalent CPU capacity of a 1.0-1.2 GHz 2007 Opteron or 2007 Xeon processor):

NAME	Cost	Desc
Small	$0.10	1.7G, 160G, 32bit, 1ECU, 1core
Large	$0.20	7.5G, 850G, 64bit, 4ECU, 2core
Extra Large	$0.40	15G, 1690G, 64bit, 8ECU, 4core
High CPU Medium	$0.20	1.7G, 350G, 32bit, 5ECU, 2core
High CPU Extra Large	$0.80	7G, 1690G, 64bit, 20ECU, 5core

The New Servers charges are:

NAME	Cost	Desc
Small	$0.11	1G, 36G, 32bit, Xeon 2.8GHz
Medium	$0.17	2G, 273G, 32bit, 2Xeon 3.2GHz
Large	$0.25	4G, 250G, 64bit, E5405 Quad Core 2Ghz
Jumbo	$0.38	8G, 2*500G, 64bit, 2 x E5405 Quad Core 2Ghz
Fast	$0.53	4G, 2*300G, 64bit, E5450 Quad Core 3Ghz

The New Servers prices seem quite competitive with the Amazon prices. One down-side to New Servers is that you have to manage your own RAID, the cheaper servers have only a single disk (bad luck if it fails). The better ones have two disks and you could setup your own RAID. Of course the upside of this is that if you want a fast server from New Servers and you don’t need redundancy then you have the option of RAID-0 for better performance.

Also I don’t think that there is anything stopping you from running Xen on a New Servers system. So you could have a bunch of Xen images and a varying pool of Dom0s to run them on. If you were to choose the “Jumbo” option with 8G of RAM and share it among some friends with everyone getting a 512M or 1G DomU then the cost per user would be a little better than Slicehost or Linode while giving better management options. One problem I sometimes have with virtual servers for my clients is that the disk IO performance is poorer than I expect. When running the server that hosts my blog (which is shared with some friends) I know the performance requirements of all DomUs and can diagnose problems quickly. I can deal with a limit on the hardware capacity, I can deal with trading off my needs with the needs of my friends. But having a server just go slow, not knowing why, and having the hosting company say “I can move you to a different physical server” (which may be better or worse) doesn’t make me happy.

I first heard about New Servers from Tom Fifield’s LUV talk about using EC2 as a cluster for high energy physics [2]. According to the detailed analysis Tom presented using EC2 systems on demand can compete well with the costs of buying Dell servers and managing them yourself, EC2 wins if you have to pay Japanese prices for electricity but if you get cheap electricity then Dell may win. Of course a major factor is the amount of time that the servers are used, a cluster that is used for short periods of time with long breaks in between will have a higher cost per used CPU hour and thus make EC2 a better option.

[1] http://www.newservers.com/
[2] http://luv.asn.au/2009/10/06

Links September 2009

September 14, 2009 | etbe

The NYT has an interesting article about research into treating insomnia over the internet [1]. I wonder how many other psychological issues can be effectively treated over the net.

From next year all Cadbury Dairy Milk Chocolate sold in Australia will be made from fair-trade cocoa [2]. Cadbury Dairy Milk Chocolate is the most popular type of chocolate sold in Australia so this is a significant market shift. For a long time Cadbury has sold fair trade chocolate under the name Green and Black. Of course we now have to wait for Cadbury to use fair trade cocoa in all their other chocolate varieties.

Mike Rowe gave an interesting TED talk about the value of manual labour [3]. He suggested that there should be a PR campaign for skilled manual labour jobs and noted that his observation (through his work on his “Dirty Jobs” TV series) was that the people who do some of the less popular jobs appear to be happier.

The GapMinder.org web site has some interesting analysis of statistical information on countries and regions [4]. It is based on the work of Hans Rosling who is well known for his high quality TED talks [5]. Unfortunately the web site requires Flash, I will probably try it out with Gnash some time.

Miru Kim gave a TED talk about her work photographing herself nude in abandoned buildings and industrial spaces [6]. Among other things she photographed herself lying naked on a pile of bones in the crypt underneath Paris which is fairly dangerous. I’ve visited the crypt, it’s an interesting experience but I was very careful to touch nothing – you never know which of the bones came from victims of smallpox and other nasty diseases. Strangely they have an ongoing problem of visitors stealing bones, when I visited there were several bones at the exit that had been confiscated from visitors – some of which had mummified flesh attached…

Steinar H. Gunderson wrote a good description of the basics of how the TCP protocol works [7]. He also links to a web page he wrote that will measure your potential TCP throughput and give you information on the link. This is really handy if you are behind some sort of firewall and want to know what is being done to your TCP stream when it’s in transit.

Apparently Christian couples tend to use a shared email account to reduce the risk of cheating [8]. It’s hardly a surprise that Christians have a much higher divorce rate than atheists and agnostics [9].

The NY Times has an interesting article about iPhones overloading the AT&T network [10]. Recently I’ve been having some problems sending MMS with my Three phone, some relatives who use Three have been having connection problems in certain areas with marginal signal quality, and the download speed of my Three data connection is significantly reduced (used to be ~70KB/s, now I’m lucky to get 20KB/s). I suspect that the new smart phones that are being sold are largely to blame. But the up-side is that when they engineer their network to work properly with the smart phones then my Internet use (ssh and basic web browsing) will work really well.

Michael Tieman wrote an interesting blog post about software patents which compares them to Land Mines [11]. Of course this analogy falls down badly while the US is still leading the world in manufacturing land mines.

Rebecca Saxe gave an interesting TED talk about how brains make moral judgeents [12]. In her research she did some tests with using magnetic pulses to decrease the function of the region of the brain that allows people to judge the others and she was able to significantly affect the results of judgement tests.

Brendan Scott analyses the netbook wars and concludes that it has been a significant loss for Microsoft [13]. ArsTechnica has an analysis of the real word-processing requirements [14], they suggest that in most cases MS-Word (and other word-processor) documents could be replaced with HTML or Wiki pages for a better end result.

Gnash and use of Free Software

September 7, 2009 | etbe

There is currently a discussion on a private mailing list about whether some money from a community organisation should be used to assist the development of Gnash (the free software Flash player) [1]. The main reason for this is that there are apparently some schools that depend on flash web sites to such a degree that they won’t consider using a free OS that lacks Flash support.

It has been shown that there are a number of issues related to contributing financially to free projects, the people who advocate financial contributions in this case assure us that such problems have been addressed but it will remain controversial to some extent. One thing that is not controversial is the fact that testing and debugging is universally a good thing. So I advocate doing such testing as a way to contribute to Flash development and therefore free software use in education.

The Debian-Edu project has a web page with a link to flash sites that can be used for testing [2]. So I plan to now install Gnash on all Linux desktop systems that I run and get bug reports to help development. I encourage others to do the same.

Also there is the Ming library for developing Flash files which could apparently do with some help in the development process [3].

While a non-free format such as Flash is not ideal, it’s certainly a lot better than Silverlight!

Note that I don’t have strong feelings about the issues of financial support for Gnash (which is why I didn’t contribute to the private discussion in question). But I am convinced that more people using and testing Gnash is a good thing.

Bad but Appealing Copyright Arguments

September 7, 2009 | etbe

Some people seem to believe that the problem with copyright law is the inability of people on the free culture side of the debate to compete with the large amounts of money that are being spent but the RIAA et al.

I think that a significant part of the problem is that many intelligent and well-meaning people are simply unaware of or unconvinced by the arguments. For example the Reid Report post titled “Paul Porter speaks truth to Black radio” [1] includes the quote “Only the United States, North Korea and Iran don’t pay royalties for performers on free AM/FM radio“. This point actually sounds quite reasonable and will convince many intelligent and well-meaning people who have an interest in politics – such as Ms Reid.

Cory Doctorow has written an interesting article titled “Internet ©rapshoot: How Internet Gatekeepers Stifle Progress”[2]. He describes how the big “entertainment” companies are failing to properly represent their customers or the artists who produce the content, and in the process creating monopolies out of companies such as Apple and Google.

Cory starts by raising the issue of cultural discourse, monopolies in the distribution of popular art will lead to control over the political process. Ironically the article that Ms Reid cited [3] mentions the issue of “pay for play” which led to “a steady diet of misogyny, violence and drug culture” on the airwaves.

Brendan Scott has written about a similar issue in Australia where the music copyright holders are trying to get massive increases in license fees from restaurants and other small businesses [4]. The expected result of this is greater use of classical music (which is out of copyright) and more interest in purchasing licenses from small musicians who aren’t affiliated with the music cartels. One of his main points is that playing music in public places (including public radio frequencies) is the major form of advertising for musicians.

Michael Tiemann writes about a Brazilian band that has been quite profitable by skipping the recording industry, providing the fans what they want, and selling CDs direct to fans [5]. This is one of many examples to illustrate the fact that the current music factory system is not required for musicians to make a profit.

Amanda Palmer has written an interesting blog post about how the Warner music group wasn’t getting as much money from Youtube as they wanted so they demanded that HER music videos be removed [6] (among many others). So we have a music studio that doesn’t even pay the artist (below a certain number of sales the artist gets no payment, selling 30,000 albums is not enough to get a cent) demanding that the music videos be made unavailable to fans when the artist wants them published. This is a travesty and if similar licensing schemes are implemented for radio stations then we can expect that some radio stations will be financially discouraged from playing music even when the artist would be happy to have it played for free!

In Australia we have an organisation that secretly taxes all viewing of material that they think is under copyright with a suitable license (they give no detailed information on how they determine the copyright and license status – they probably violate my license by taxing universities for copying posts from my blog). Educational institutions and other organisations that sign up get to pay them some money based on what they are deemed to have used. The money is then distributed to the creators in proportion to the amount of use their material received. The distribution rules state that any amount less than $50 per year for an Australian resident or $200 per year for a non-resident will be instead redistributed to other people [7]. Usually analysis of The Long Tail [8] comprises the majority of the sales if users are given enough opportunities to search for a product that is a good match for their requirements. This is the entire basis of businesses such as Amazon.com. The Australian Copyright Agency (Copyright Agency Limited – CAL) seems to have a business model of taking all the revenue that might be “earned” by the creative people in the “long tail” and give it all to the top performers. If a similar system was implemented for the US music industry then it would be great for Michael Jackson’s estate, but bad for the vast majority of musicians.

It seems likely to me that the current situation with the music industry is fairly optimal for making a few very popular musicians very rich. The proposed changes for the US will make things even better/worse (depending if you are among the rich few or the majority of the population). One thing we need to ask ourselves is whether we want laws that will make a few people rich or laws that will give many people an adequate income for work they enjoy and which also enriches our culture. This correct decision seems obvious to me.

Can anyone think of other good points that should be raised when discussing such issues with people who don’t consider copyright to be a big issue?

Free Books and T-Shirt Sales

September 6, 2009 | etbe

Cory Doctorow has written an interesting column for the Locus Magazine about his experience in giving away free copies of his books [1]. Mainly he rants about some of the criticism he has received, initially it was people claiming that giving away books for free only worked because he was not a well known author, now people claim that it only works because he is well known.

I’d like to see authors publish free work (as Cory does) and then sell print-on-demand t-shirts.

Cafepress.com has their cheapest t-shirt at $US16.99, Zazzle.com has a shirt for $US15.95, and SpreadShirt.com has shirts for as little as $US6.40 but their web site is difficult to navigate and gives me a lack of confidence in their operation. In spite of the difficult web site SpreadShirt.com seems to be the best offer at $6.40 for a basic shirt, that means either lower prices for the customer (and more sales) or a higher profit margin.

The sale of a t-shirt could give the same revenue to the author as a sale of a book while also costing less than the price of one book in a store. It would be more useful after the book has been read (something you can wear rather than something that takes up space on a shelf), and it would advertise the book. The amount of effort required to create a decent shirt is a small fraction of the effort required to write a book, in many cases the cover artwork could be used with only minor alterations. Cory Doctorow’s novels page has images that could make seven different great shirts with a small amount of effort [2].

I’m sure that there are also many people who want to buy the book and the shirt, so it should give a general increase in revenue.

Ownership of Laptops for Work

September 4, 2009 | etbe

Jetstar has announced some new changes to the way they manage their IT infrastructure [1]. Some parts of it are obvious things that people have been doing (or wanting to do) for a long time – such as using thin clients with no moving parts (not even cooling fans).

But the really interesting part is their plan for managing laptops. They are using a virtual machine image on a flash storage device that can run on any system. So deploying a new system will only require installing the virtual machine software and inserting a storage device. Moving a user’s environment to a different system (EG due to hardware failure) will merely require inserting the storage device in a new system.

That raises the issue of ownership of the device. It seems that Jetstar are considering using systems that are owned by employees, Stephen Tame said “In two years’ time a laptop should be a condition of employment, and this includes bringing your own laptop“. When introducing that I expect there would be some resistance by employees who don’t want to spend the money. However
I have previously estimated the costs of running a car [2] which works out to more than $1,650 per year for insurance, registration, basic maintenance, and the interest that would have been received if the car had not been purchased and the money had been invested. Laptops can be purchased for significantly less than $1000 (currently the EeePC 701 is on sale for $219) and can be expected to last for three years or more if you are careful to avoid damage and don’t run demanding software. So a job that demands ownership of a laptop is asking for a much smaller financial investment than one which demands ownership of a car. But I expect that many employees won’t see it that way.

The up-side for employees to bring their own laptops is that they can choose a model that suits their preference. Everyone has preferences regarding the size of keys on a keyboard, the distance that they travel and the pressure required to register a key-press. For desktop machines it’s easy to swap keyboards but for laptops there is no such option. Then there’s the issue of the trade-off between physical size and weight vs display resolution, personal preferences in this regard will depend to some extent on the body mass and strength of the employee.

Now there are a number of security issues related to personal laptop use. Obviously if the laptop has a Trojan-horse program installed then it could sniff any data that goes past on the network. The most trivial case of this could be addressed by running VPN software inside the emulated environment. This would force a Trojan to compromise the virtual environment (EG by modifying the address space) or to compromise the files on disk (insert a Trojan inside the filesystem for the virtual environment). The former would be tricky to get right while the latter would be trivial. Both attack methods have been used in the past and proven to work. This is why many companies prohibit their employees from connecting their own systems to the corporate network.

One example of a system that is based around running virtual machines for all desktop operations is the NSA NetTop project [3]. NetTop involves a SE Linux system that runs multiple instances of VMWare for different desktop environments. Each VMWare instance runs at a particular sensitivity level and uses a VPN connection to a back-end network running at the same level. The aim of NetTop is to prevent applications in the different VMWare instances from communicating with each other. The significant difference between a typical NetTop installation and what JetStar might be doing is that NetTop runs on a secure base – it’s hardware that has been purchased and installed by a military organisation and is run in a secure facility. While personal laptops that are owned by employees can be expected to be infected with viruses and Trojan-horse programs.

In the past I have suggested that an employment package for any skilled employee should include some budget for buying things that facilitate the work [4]. It seems to me that a company like JetStar could best achieve their goals by assigning a budget to each new employee to buy a machine for their use. The employee then gets to choose a machine up to that budget – which would only be for work purposes. Then when the employee leaves or the machine becomes due for replacement it could be sold at auction. When considering all the costs involved in hiring a new person, spending something less than $1,000 to buy a laptop is nothing.

Finally if buying machines for work purposes, you really don’t want employees using them for surfing porn. Porn sites tend to be particularly bad for malware distribution. To reduce the incidence of such problems I think that work machines should have their sound hardware disabled and laptops should not be purchased with overly large displays. There is no need to make work machines totally unsuitable for porn surfing (which would also make them less effective for work), but making them less suitable than a $500 budget PC should dramatically reduce the scope of the problem.

Healthcare and Free Software

September 2, 2009 | etbe

The Washington Monthly has an interesting article about healthcare and Free Software [1]. It seems that a free system named “VistA” from the US Veterans Affairs department (not to be confused with the unpopular OS “Vista” that Microsoft released a few years ago) is competing against a range of proprietary software for managing patient data.

VistA has apparently performed very well, it’s cheap and easy to install, the data can be shared with other programs, and it was largely written by doctors and nurses so it’s optimised to their needs. It has been proven that VistA has saved many lives through better management of medicines and through permitting statistical analysis of the results of various treatments. It has also allowed medical staff to work more quickly which reduces waiting times and medical expenses.

But as you would expect in the US, whenever there is a way of saving lives while also saving money there are companies lobbying for the opportunity to make money while allowing innocent people to die. Of course there are established medical companies who are doing this now and have been doing so for some time.

But the latest news is that Microsoft, Intel, Cisco, and Allscripts, are sponsoring the Electronic Health Record Stimulus Tour – an aggressive measure to railroad doctors into buying proprietary software now.

MS is known for totally ignoring the law when it gives them an opportunity to gain market share, but this is a new low. What will MS do next? Sell drugs to children?

[1] http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2009/0907.longman.html

The Streisand Effect and Chinese Barratry

September 1, 2009 | etbe

Bruce Everiss has received two threatening letters from a NSW law firm representing the Chinese game company Evony. Here is the latest where they whinge about his publication of their first letter [1] (NB if threaten to sue a blogger you have to expect your letter to be published, it’s not discourteous it’s just the way things work). Here is the first letter from the law firm [2] – Bruce has illustrated the post with one of the advertising pictures that Evony uses (apparently ripped from a lingerie catalog).

I’ve seen some of the Evony adverts on my blog, the ones with a provocatively dressed woman (lingerie advert?) and the title “Come Play, my Lord“.

Ken has an amusing and insightful post on the issue [3] – which also makes some amusing jokes about the Australian legal system.

Bruce’s blog has some good insights into the gaming industry and culture, I’ve added his blog to my feed.

It seems that Bruce will gain a lot of readers due to these legal threats, while Evony seems unlikely to gain anything other than bad PR.

Free K-12 Text Books

August 29, 2009 | etbe

The CK12 project is developing free (CC by SA) textbooks for the K-12 market (with a current focus on the early years of high school) [1]. Their primary aim seems to be flex-books – text books that can be localised and modified to better suit the needs of the students. But of course there are many other benefits, according to my best estimates storing text books on an ebook reader or one of the lighter NetBooks is necessary to avoid childhooh back injuries [2].

Another major benefit of flexible text books is the possibility of teaching a wider range of subjects. A subject does not need the level of interest that is required to get a publishing contract (which generally means acceptance by the education department of a state) to have a text book. Independent schools and home-schoolers can select subjects that are not in the mainstream curriculum.

The information for potential authors of text books is here (they didn’t make it particularly easy to find) [3].

One thing I would like to see is a text book about computer security. I really don’t think that this would be an overly difficult subject for an 11yo who is interested in computers. When I was 11 I read a text book on nuclear physics in the form of a comic book, I don’t think that computer security is inherently more difficult or harder to teach than nuclear physics. Naturally full coverage would require several texts aimed at different ages. But that’s possible too. It would probably be easiest to start with an age of ~16. Also as computer security is a subject that is both difficult at one end of the scale and essential at the other it would be necessary to have A and B streams (as is done with maths in the Australian education system).

Please leave a comment if you are interested in participating in the development of computer security related text books. Incidentally it would be good to get a contributor who has had experience in teaching teenagers even if they don’t have any knowledge of computer security – I don’t expect to find someone with good technical skills and teaching experience.

etbe – Russell Coker

Linux, politics, and other interesting things

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