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The F Word has an informative post about men commenting on Feminist blogs [1]. Most of it applies to any situation where a member of a powerful group comments on an issue related to a minority group. Near the end they say: I’ll also paraphrase and flesh out the most useful piece of advice I ever read, when I made the effort to research white privilege: don’t expect the minority to trust you. Trust is earned, and you’re just another commenter who they can’t tell apart from any other commenter. You’re entering someone else’s space, where different rules apply. You get to have the rest of the world for people to assume you’re a wonderful person. Here, you’re just another one of ‘them’, and given the track record of ‘them’, it’s up to you to listen, learn and prove that you’re being thoughtful and honestly trying to examine your privilege.
Sociological Images has an interesting article on people’s perception of the sky colour – it seems that the “blue sky” meme is modern [2].
Charles Stross wrote an interesting article about the possible uses for future low power computers [3]. He gets a bit over-excited about the possibilities for sensing – making a tiny computer that can sense so many things isn’t going to be easy (DSLRs are big for a reason). But having lots of powerful computers everywhere does provide lots of interesting and potentially bad opportunities.
Martin Bekkelund has an interesting article about Amazon wiping DRM infected books that it had sold to a customer without giving a refund or an explanation [4]. If you want to buy ebooks it seems that the sensible thing to do would be to immediately crack them or download them from The Pirate Bay so Amazon can’t steal them back.
Rebecca Saxe gave an interesting talk about trying to develop methods for conflict resolution through neuroscience [5].
Barry Eisler has written an interesting article about the corruption of journalists [6]. It’s really worth reading, some of the methods of corruption apply to even the more casual bloggers.
Krebs on Security has an informative article about the Microsoft Tech Support phone scams [7]
I’ve just downloaded and installed the Debian AMD64 package of the Google Apache Pagespeed module [1].
To see if it worked I used the Google PageSpeed insights tool which gave my blog a rating of 93% (and 88% for mobile) [2].
After installing mod_pagespeed I received the same scores. So it appears that Pagespeed isn’t doing any good according to Google’s analysis!
etbe.coker.com.au 10.11.12.13 – – [13/Oct/2012:05:22:31 +0000] "GET /wp-content/plugins/openid/f/W.openid.css,qver=519.pagespeed.cf.Bbu1gxRjUE.css HTTP/1.0" 200 2165 "http://etbe.coker.com.au/" "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/21.0.1180.89 Safari/537.1" 0
etbe.coker.com.au 10.11.12.13 – – [13/Oct/2012:05:22:31 +0000] "GET /wp-content/themes/atahualpa/js/DD_roundies.js,qver=0.0.2a.pagespeed.jm.4gw5yluag0.js HTTP/1.0" 200 3679 "http://etbe.coker.com.au/" "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/21.0.1180.89 Safari/537.1" 0
etbe.coker.com.au 10.11.12.13 – – [13/Oct/2012:05:22:31 +0000] "GET /wp-includes/js/jquery/jquery.js,qver=1.7.2.pagespeed.jm.XZwfunyK-6.js HTTP/1.0" 200 33587 "http://etbe.coker.com.au/" "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/21.0.1180.89 Safari/537.1" 0
etbe.coker.com.au 10.11.12.13 – – [13/Oct/2012:05:22:33 +0000] "GET /wp-content/themes/atahualpa/images/xlogo.png.pagespeed.ic.ICWmaHBME5.png HTTP/1.0" 200 2267 "http://etbe.coker.com.au/" "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/21.0.1180.89 Safari/537.1" 0
The above sample of web logs shows that the string “pagespeed” is appended to some URLs with a hash of the file contents which apparently allows much longer cache times without making it difficult to change content. So Pagespeed is obviously doing something.
Is Google analysis expected to say that there is no change? Note that my speed scores are 93% and 88% so my site is was apparently quite good before mod_pagespeed was installed – maybe the analysis would report a difference on a site that didn’t perform so well. Now even if mod_pagespeed has given a benefit to real users but not Google tests it still means that I won’t get the SEO benefits that Google apparently gives to fast sites.
Also to make things even more exciting the W3.org HTML validator [3] now says that there’s an error in my blog. So not only has mod_pagespeed failed to improve performance in a way that Google notices but it has also broken something!
deb http://www.coker.com.au wheezy wordpress
I maintain Debian packages of a number of WordPress themes and plugins for my personal use which I am not planning to upload to Debian due to the maintenance and security issues. Generally the way things work with WordPress packages (and apparently most things in PHP) is that new versions are released whenever the author feels like it with little documentation and often now way of determining whether it’s a security issue. When there is a security issue it’s often fixed in a new version that includes new features giving no good option for someone who was happy with the old functionality and just wants a secure system. This isn’t the way we like to do things in Debian.
The result of this is that I maintain a number of packages for my personal use (and for the benefit of any interested people on the Internet) that often get new updates. I’ve written the below script to create a new version of a Debian package. It searches my repository for the most recent .debian.tar.gz file for the package, applies that, runs dch -i to update the changelog, and then builds the package. So far this has only been tested on one package, I expect that I’ll have to put a sed command in there to cover the case where the zip file name doesn’t match what I want as the package name and I’ll probably find other bugs in future, but I think it’s good enough to publish now.
#!/bin/bash
set -e
REPOSITORY=/home/whatever
unzip $1
FILE=$(basename $1)
PACKAGE=$(echo $FILE | sed -e "s/\..*$//")
LEN=$(($(echo $PACKAGE | wc -c)+1))
VER=$(echo $FILE | cut -c ${LEN}-200 | sed -e s/.zip//)
DIRNAME=wordpress-${PACKAGE}-${VER}
mv $PACKAGE $DIRNAME
tar czf wordpress-${PACKAGE}_${VER}.orig.tar.gz ${DIRNAME}
cd $DIRNAME
tar xzf $(ls -tr ${REPOSITORY}/wordpress-${PACKAGE}_*.debian.tar.gz | tail -1)
dch -i
dpkg-buildpackage
Any suggestions for improvement will be welcome, I don’t claim to be the world’s greatest shell scripter. But please note that I generally aim to write shell scripts that can be understood by people who aren’t experts. So if you can replace the program with a single line of Perl I will be impressed but I won’t implement your solution.
The Problem
Some of my clients need systems that store reasonable amounts of data. This is enough data that we can expect some data corruption on disk such that traditional RAID doesn’t work, that old fashioned filesystems like Ext3/4 will have unreasonable fsck fimes, and that the number of disks in a small server isn’t enough.
NetApp is a really good option for bulk reliable storage, but their products are very expensive. BTRFS has a lot of potential, but the currently released versions (as supported in distributions such as Debian/Wheezy) lack significant features. One significant lack in current BTRFS releases is something equivalent to the ZFS send/receive functionality for remote backups, this was a major factor when I analysed the options for hard drive based backup [1], and you should always think about backup before deploying a new system. Currently ZFS is the best choice for bulk storage which is reliable if you can’t afford NetApp. Any storage system needs a minimum level of reliability if only to protect it’s own metadata and a basic RAID array doesn’t protect against media corruption with current data volumes. The combination of performance, lack of fsck (which is a performance feature), large storage support, backup, and significant real-world use makes ZFS a really good option.
Now I need to get some servers for more than 8.1TiB of storage (the capacity of a RAID-Z array of 4*3TB disks). One of my clients needs significantly more, probably at least 10 disks in a RAID-Z array so none of the cheaper servers will do.
Basically the issue that some of my clients are dealing with (and which I have to solve) is how to provide a relatively cheap ZFS system for storing reasonable amounts of data. For some systems I need to start with about 10 disks and be able to scale to 24 disks or more without excessive expense. Also to make things a little easier and cheaper 24*7 operation is not required, so instead of paying for hot-swap disks we can just schedule down-time outside business hours.
The Problem with Dell
Dell is really good for small systems, the PowerEdge tower servers that support 2*3.5″ or 4*3.5″ disks and which have space for an SSD or two are really affordable and easy to order. But even in the mid-size Dell tower servers (which are small by server standards) you have problems with just getting a few disks operating outside a RAID array [2]. The Dell online store is really great for small servers, any time I’m buying a server for less than $2500 I check the Dell online store first and usually their price is good enough that there is no need to get a quote from another company. Unfortunately all the servers with bigger storage involve disks that are unreasonably expensive (it seems that Dell makes their profit on the parts) and prices are not available online. I gave my email address and phone number to the Dell web site on Wednesday and they haven’t cared to get back to me yet. This is the type of service that makes me avoid IBM and HP for any server deployment where the Dell online store sells something suitable!
BackBlaze
For some time BackBlaze have been getting interest by describing how they store lots of data in a small amount of space by tightly stacking SATA disks. They don’t think that ZFS on Linux is ready for production, but their hardware ideas are useful. They have recently described their latest architecture [3]. They describe it as 135TB for $7,384. Of course the 135TB number is based on the idea of getting the full 3TB capacity out of each disk which they can do as they have redundancy over multiple storage pods. But anyone who wants a single fileserver needs some internal redundancy to cover disk failure. One option might be to have three RAID-Z2 arrays of 15 disks which gives a usable capacity of 42*3TB==126TB==113TiB. Note that while the ZFS documentation recommends between 3 and 9 disks per zpool for performance I don’t expect performance problems, when you only have a gigabit Ethernet connection there shouldn’t be a problem with three ZFS zpools making the network the bottleneck.
For this option the way to go would be to start with an array of 15 disks and then buy a second set of 15 disks when the first storage pool becomes full. It seems likely that 4TB disks will become cheap before a 35TiB array is filled so we can get more efficiency by delaying purchases. The BackBlaze pod isn’t cheap, they are sold as a complete system without storage disks for $US5,395 by Protocase [4]. That gives a markup of $US3,411 over the BackBlaze cost which isn’t too bad given that BackBlaze are quoting the insane bulk discount hardware prices that I could never get. Protocase also offer the case on it’s own for anyone who wants to build a system around it. It seems like the better option is to buy the system from Protocase, but that would end up being over $6,000 when Australian import duty is added and probably close to $7,000 when shipping etc is included.
Norco
Norco offers a case that takes 24 hot-swap SATA/SAS disks and a regular PC motherboard for $US399 [5]. It’s similar to the BackBlaze pod but smaller, cheaper, and there’s no obvious option to buy a configured and tested system. 24 disks would allow two RAID-Z2 arrays of 12 disks, the first array could provide 27TiB and the second array could provide something bigger when new disks are released.
SuperMicro
SuperMicro has a range of storage servers that support from 12 to 36 disks [6]. They seem good, but I’d have to deal with a reseller to buy them which would involve pain at best and at worst they wouldn’t bother getting me a quote because I only want one server at a time.
Conclusion
Does anyone know of any other options for affordable systems suitable for running ZFS on SATA disks? Preferably ones that don’t involve dealing with resellers.
At the moment it seems that the best option is to get a Norco case and build my own system as I don’t think that any of my clients needs the capacity of a BackBlaze pod at the moment. Supermicro seems good but I’d have to deal with a reseller. In my experience the difference between the resellers of such computer systems and used car dealers is that used car dealers are happy to sell one car at a time and that every used car dealer at least knows how to drive.
Also if you are an Australian reader of my blog and you want to build such storage servers to sell to my clients in Melbourne then I’d be interested to see an offer. But please make sure that any such offer includes a reference to your contributions to the Linux community if you think I won’t recognise your name. If you don’t contribute then I probably don’t want to do business with you.
As an aside, I was recently at a camera store helping a client test a new DSLR when one of the store employees started telling me how good ZFS is for storing RAW images. I totally agree that ZFS is the best filesystem for storing large RAW files and this is what I am working on right now. But it’s not the sort of advice I expect to receive at a camera store, not even one that caters to professional photographers.
Is Asperger Syndrome a Disability?
Some people tell me that I’m disabled. Usually it’s an unstated implication such as referring to Asperger Syndrome as a disability with the assumption that I’ll agree. One time I had someone assume that I had never had a paid job because they knew I’m an Aspie, maybe I should boast more about my career successes.
One interesting take on this is represented by Maco’s bost about Disablism/Ablism where she says “Vocab note: A person has an impairment. Society’s treatment of that impairment is what disables the person” [1]. The same concept is presented by BRAINHE in their Social Model of Disability document [2].
The Wikipedia page on Ableism says “The ableist worldview holds that disability is an error, a mistake, or a failing, rather than a simple consequence of human diversity, akin to race, ethnicity, sexual orientation or gender” [3]. This is fairly close to the position that Neurodiversity [4] advocates take on Autism.
Jaarsma P and Welin S wrote an interesting paper titled “Autism as a Natural Human Variation: Reflections on the Claims of the Neurodiversity Movement” [5] which considers these issues in depth and comes to the conclusion that High Functioning Autism (for which Asperger Syndrome is generally regarded as a synonym) is a difference while Low Functioning Autism is a disability.
I think that generally we should accept the opinion of the person in question. Someone who is unable to communicate or is too young to make an informed decision could have their disability status determined by carers. But anyone who is capable of making an informed decision and communicating it should have their opinion respected. I am not going to argue with any of the people who claim that they are disabled due to an Autism Spectrum Disorder. But I don’t think that I am disabled and I think that people shouldn’t argue with me about this.
Over Pathologising
Lynne Soraya wrote an interesting article for Psychology Today about one aspect of the supposed over-diagnosis [6]. She responds to Paul Steinberg, a psychiatrist who made a number of claims about Asperger Syndrome which lack evidence. Paul’s main idea seems to be that anyone who has social problems but who seems to be successful regardless shouldn’t have an Autism Spectrum diagnosis and he claims that such people should be regarded as having a “social disability” instead. His main idea seems to be that having a diagnosis is a bad thing, but his idea of having a “social disability” diagnosis instead doesn’t seem so great.
In many other discussions I’ve seen people claim that a large number of diagnosis of anything is a problem. Their idea seems to be that the vast majority of the population shouldn’t have a diagnosis for anything and that whenever a significant number of people are diagnosed with a psychological condition (and 1% of the population seems to be a significant number) then it’s a problem. I don’t think that having a large portion of the population diagnosed is necessarily a problem, I think that it would be OK if the majority of the population was diagnosed with something. The issue is not whether people are diagnosed but what happens after the diagnosis.
When a child is diagnosed their parents can help them deal with whatever the issues are – this may or may not require further involvement with psychologists or special schools. For the milder cases (of Autism, ADHD, and other conditions) merely knowing what areas will cause difficulty and teaching kids how to deal with them will be enough to solve many problems. When someone is diagnosed as a child but doesn’t have obvious symptoms as an adult that is more likely to be an indication that they were taught good coping mechanisms and protected from bad situations as a child – not that the diagnosis was wrong. There are some serious issues with special schools and psychiatric drugs, but diagnosis doesn’t necessarily imply mistreatment and avoiding a diagnosis is not the correct way to avoid such mistreatment.
When someone is diagnosed as an adult they have to learn to deal with it. The general lack of psychologists (waiting times as long as 6 months are common) and the fact that most psychologists won’t do any good for someone on the Autism Spectrum is a real problem. But merely knowing the source of your problems is a major step towards alleviating or solving them.
One of the arguments that is commonly used against so-called over-diagnosis is that adults don’t show apparent symptoms. The issue here is that with some effort and planning adults on the spectrum can act like NTs. Acting like an NT doesn’t imply being an NT, it usually requires a lot of ongoing effort that could be applied to other things if society didn’t expect us to act like NTs all the time.
Conclusion
I wish people would stop telling me that I’m either disabled or too “high functioning” to be on the Autism Spectrum. I will never think like an NT and I don’t want to, so I’ll always be an Aspie. By most objective measures I’m at least as successful as the general population in all things that require social skills, so unless something like always losing at Poker is considered a disability I don’t think that it’s reasonable to consider me to be disabled.
It would be nice if I could lock the people who claim that Autism is always a disability in a room with the people who think it’s over-diagnosed and let them debate it, no matter which side lost the debate the result would be good!
Update: I removed a broken link to a Youtube video, I published this post from a 3G connection and didn’t test that the Youtube link still worked. For some reason the author had marked it private since the last time I visited it.
I’ve just read Diego’s response to an ill-informed NYT article about data-center power efficiency [1]. This makes me wonder, how much server use does each person have?
Google
Almost everyone uses Google, most of us use it a lot. The main Google product is also probably the most demanding, their search engine.
In a typical day I probably do about 50 to 100 Google searches, that sounds like a lot, but half of them would probably be for one topic that is difficult to find. I don’t think that I do that many Google searches because I generally know what I’m doing and when I find what I need I spend a lot of time reading it. I’m sure that many people do a lot more.
Each Google search takes a few seconds to complete (or maybe more if it’s an image search and I’m on a slow link), but I think it’s safe to assume that more than a few seconds of CPU time are involved. How much work would each Google search take if performed on a single system? Presumably Google uses the RAM of many systems as cache which gives a result more similar to a NUMA system than one regular server working for a longer time so there is no way of asking how long it would take to do a Google search with a single server. But I’m sure that Google has some ratio of servers to the rate of requests coming in, it’s almost certainly a great secret, but we can make some guesses. If the main Google user base comprises people who collectively do an average of 100 searches per day then we can probably guess at the amount of server use required for each search based on the number of servers Google would run. I think it’s safe to assume that Google doesn’t plan to buy one server for every person on the planet and that they want to have users significantly outnumbering servers. So even for core users they should be aiming to have each user only take a fraction of the resources that one server adds to the pool.
So 100 searches probably each take more than 1 second of server use. But they almost certainly take a lot less than 864 seconds (the server use if Google had one server for every 100 daily requests which would imply one server for each of the heavier users). Maybe it takes 10 seconds of server use (CPU, disk, or network – whichever is the bottleneck) to complete one search request. That would mean that if the Google network was at 50% utilisation on average then they would have 86400*.5/10/100 == 43 users per server for the core user base who average 100 daily requests. If there are 80M core users that would be about 2M servers, and then maybe something like another 4M servers for the rest of the world.
So I could be using 1000 seconds of server time per day on Google searches. I also have a Gmail account which probably uses a few seconds for storing email and giving it to Fetchmail, and I have a bunch of Android devices which use Google calendars, play store, etc. The total Google server use on my behalf for everything other than search is probably a rounding error.
But I could be out by an order of magnitude, if it only took 1 second of server use for a Google search then I would be at 100 server seconds per day and Google would only need one server for every 430 users like me.
Google also serves lots of adverts on web sites that I visit, I presume that serving the adverts doesn’t take much resources by Google standards. But accounting for it, paying the people who host content, and detecting fraud probably takes some significant resources.
Other Big Services
There are many people who spend hours per day using services such as Facebook. No matter how I try to estimate the server requirements it’s probably going to be fairly wrong. But I’ll make a guess at a minute of server time per hour. So someone who averages 3 hours of social networking per day (which probably isn’t that uncommon) would be using 180 seconds of server time.
Personal Servers
The server that hosts my blog is reasonably powerful and has two other people as core users. So that could count as 33% of a fairly powerful server in my name. But if we are counting server use per USER then most of the resources of my blog server would be divided among the readers. My blog has about 10,000 people casually reading it through Planet syndication, that could mean that each person who casually reads my blog has 1/30,000 of a server allocated to them for that. Another way of considering it is that 10% of a server (8640 seconds) is covered by me maintaining my blog and writing posts, 20% is for users who visit my blog directly, and 3% is for the users who just see a Planet feed. That would mean that a Planet reader gets 1/330,000 of a server (250ms per day) and someone who reads directly gets 1/50,000 of a server (1.72s per day) as I have about 10,000 people visiting my blog directly in a month.
My mail server which is also shared by a dozen or so people (maybe that counts as 5% of a server for me or 4320 seconds per day). Then there’s the server I use for SE Linux development (including my Play Machine) and a server I use as a DNS secondary and a shell server for various testing and proxying.
Other People’s Servers
If every reader of a Planet instance like Planet Debian and Planet Linux Australia counts as 1/330,000 of a server for their usage of my blog, then how would that count for my own use of blogs? I tend to read blogs written by the type of people who like to run things themselves, so there would be a lot of fairly under-utilised servers that run blogs. Through Planet Debian and Planet Linux Australia I could be reading 100 or more blogs which are run in the same manner as mine, and in a typical day I probably directly visit a dozen blogs that are run in such a manner. This could give me 50 seconds of server time for blog reading.
Home Servers
I have a file server at home which is also a desktop system for my wife. In terms of buying and running systems that doesn’t count as an extra server as she needs to have a desktop system anyway and using bigger disks doesn’t make much difference to the power use (7W is the difference between a RAID-1 server and a single disk desktop system). I also have a PC running as an Internet gateway and firewall.
Running servers at home isn’t making that much of an impact on my computer power use as there is only one dedicated 24*7 server and that is reasonably low power. But having two desktop systems on 24*7 is a significant factor.
Where Power is Used/Wasted
No matter how things are counted or what numbers we make up it seems clear that having a desktop system running 24*7 is the biggest use of power that will be assigned to one person. Making PCs more energy efficient through better hardware design and better OS support for suspending would be the best way of saving energy. Nothing that can be done at the server side can compare.
Running a server that is only really used by three people is a significant waste by the standards of the NYT article. Of course the thing is that Hetzner is really cheap (and I’m not contributing any money) so there isn’t a great incentive to be more efficient in this regard. Even if I allocate some portion of the server use to blog readers then there’s still a significant portion that has to be assigned to me for my choice to not use a managed service. Running a mail server for a small number of users and running a DNS server and a SE Linux development server are all ways of wasting more power. But the vast majority of the population don’t have the skills to run their own server directly, so this sort of use doesn’t affect the average power use for the population.
Nothing else really matters. No matter what Google does in terms of power use it just doesn’t matter when compared to all the desktop systems running 24*7. Small companies may be less efficient, but that will be due to issues of how to share servers among more people and the fact that below a certain limit you can’t save money by using less resources – particularly if you pay people to develop software.
Conclusion
I blame Intel for most of the power waste. Android phones and tablets can do some amazing things, which is hardly surprising as by almost every measure they are more powerful than the desktop systems we were all using 10 years ago and by many measures they beat desktop systems from 5 years ago. The same technology should be available in affordable desktop systems.
I’d like to have a desktop system running Debian based on a multi-core ARM CPU that can drive a monitor at better than FullHD resolution and which uses so little power that it is passively cooled almost all the time. A 64bit ARM system with 8G of RAM a GPU that can decode video (with full Linux driver support) and a fast SSD should compete well enough with typical desktop systems on performance while being quiet, reliable, and energy efficient.
Finally please note that most of this post relies on just making stuff up. I don’t think that this is wrong given the NYT article that started this. I also think that my estimates are good enough to draw some sensible conclusions.
I previously wrote about the changes to bundling prices by Virgin (which are similar to changes by other telcos) which make it uneconomical to take a bundled phone [1]. This makes it a little easier to compare telcos as there is no need to be concerned about which telcos offer phones you like. Now it’s just a matter of call costs and this is easier to assess when the cost of a phone isn’t adding to the confusion.
Comparing Australian Telcos
I’m currently with Virgin and I’ve found them to be OK in every way. They use the Optus network which isn’t as good as the Telstra network but which supports more phones. Virgin charge $19 per month for a SIM without a phone, that gives you $450 worth of calls at a rate of $0.99 per minute + $0.40 connection and $0.28 SMS – as well as free calls to other Virgin customers [2]. If the people you call most are on Virgin it’s going to be almost impossible to use the $450 at those rates. The $19 plan only includes 250MB of data per month, for an extra $5 you can get another 500MB or for $10 you can get 2GB. For my use $29 is probably the right plan, for my wife $19 would do.
Vodafone doesn’t offer free calls to other Vodafone customers unless you are on a $30 per month plan, but that plan only gives 500MB of data measured in 12KB increments so that’s going to be expensive. Also Vodafone have had some quality problems recently so I’m not going to link to them.
Optus has some interesting options, they start with a $14 per month plan that includes 50MB of data and 500SMS – that could be good value if you do lots of SMS [3]. Also all their plans give free 5 minute calls to other phones on the same account – this would be good if your SO is on the same phone account as you. Their plans offer small amounts of data and no apparent option for adding more which is a real problem for anyone who wants to use the Internet seriously.
Telstra are really expensive, their web site is poorly designed, and they tell me to use Windows or a Mac. Everyone who spends most of their time in urban areas shouldn’t consider them, the only reason for using Telstra is their coverage of rural areas.
Internode have a new mobile phone service based on the Optus network which offers good value for money [4]. They start with a $10 per month plan that includes $165 of calls and SMS. The call cost is $0.90 per minute plus $0.35 flagfall and the SMS cost is $0.25. It also includes 100MB of data charged at 1KB increments. The $20 per month plan from Internode includes $450 of calls $1000 of free calls to other Internode mobile phones, and 1.5G of data transfer. Internode also has a $15 charge for sale and delivery of the SIM. Internode also offer 150GB of free “social networking” traffic, I wonder whether it would be viable to tunnel some other protocol over Twitter or Facebook…
TPG also has some good offers, $18 per month gives you 1.5GB of data measured in 10KB increments and $550 of phone calls at a cost of $0.90 per minute with $0.35 flagfall and $0.253 SMS cost and unlimited calls and SMS to other TPG mobile and land-line phones [5]. The $10 plan from TPG offers $2000 of free calls to other TPG phones, so if you only need 250MB of data in 10KB increments (which is a lot less than 250MB in 1KB increments) and want lots of free calls to your SO then TPG could be really good. I’d rather pay an extra $2 to Internode and get data measured in 1KB increments.
Conclusion
My usage pattern includes a reasonably large number of calls to my wife and more than 500MB of data use every month. For this pattern the Internode plan is the cheapest for me and for my wife. It seems that a large portion of the phone using population who use the Internet a lot would find this to be an ideal plan.
TPG is another good option, particularly for people who use TPG ADSL as they get a discount on the call rates and free calls to their land-line.
It seems to me that anyone who uses a mobile phone enough that a pre-paid option isn’t cheaper and who doesn’t need the coverage that only Telstra can provide will be best served by Internode or TPG.
I plan to transition to Internode some time after my current Virgin contract ends. I will probably delay the transition until the contracts for some of my wife’s relatives expire. If we all migrate at the same time then we keep getting free calls to each other – my relatives don’t use mobile phones much so there’s no money to save on calling them for free.
18 months ago when I signed up with Virgin Mobile [1] the data transfer quotas were 200MB on the $29 per month plan and 1.5G on the $39 per month plan. About 4 months ago when I checked the prices the amounts of data had gone up on the same plans (2.25G for $39 per month from memory). Now $39 per month gets only 500MB! It seems that recently Virgin has significantly reduced their value for money.
Virgin does have an option to pay an exgtra $10 per month for 2GB of data which gets you 2GB per month if you sign up for 24 months. That is reasonably good value, when I first signed up with Virgin I paid $39 per month to get extra data transfer, now I could use the $29 plan for phone access and spend $10 per month on data with a Wifi gateway device.
On top of this the phone plans aren’t nearly as good value as they used to be. When I signed up with Virgin the Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 was “free” on a $29 plan, at the time that was a hell of a phone. I believe that the Samsung Galaxy S3 currently occupies a similar market position to the one that the Xperia X10 did 18 months ago – so it shouldn’t be much more expensive. But Virgin are offering the Galaxy S3 for $21 extra per month over 24 months on the $29 plan – a total cost of ($29+$21)*24==$1200 while offering the same amount of calls and data transfer for $19 per month ($19*24==$456) when you don’t get a phone – this makes the price of a Galaxy S3 $1200-$456==$744 while Kogan [2] sells the same phone for $519 + postage!
The cheapest phone that Virgin is offering is a Galaxy S2 for $5 per month on a $29 plan which when compared to $19 per month for the same plan without a phone makes the phone cost ($5+$10)*24==$360. Kogan sells the Galaxy S2 for $399 so there’s a possibility of a Virgin plan saving some money over buying a phone from Kogan. But given the choice of $360 for a Galaxy S2 from Virgin and the Kogan prices of $839 for a Galaxy Note 2, $349 for a Galaxy Nexus, $469 for a Galaxy Note, $529 for a Galaxy S3, and $219 for a HTC One V I find it difficult to imagine that anyone would think that the $360 Galaxy S2 is the best option.
I’ve previously investigated dual-sim phones for cheap calls and data [3] but they didn’t seem like good value at the time because the “free” phones offered by the telcos used to be a good deal. Now it seems that none of the telcos are offering good deals on phones so with my needs the way to go would be to buy a Samsung Galaxy S3 or Samsung Galaxy Note 2 from Kogan, and get the $19 plan from Virgin – probably with a $10 per month extra fee to get an extra 2GB of data. For my wife the best option would be to keep using the Xperia X10 on a $19 per month plan as she doesn’t seem to have any problem with the Xperia X10 that justifies spending hundreds of dollars.
I idly considered getting a portable Wifi-3G device to use a cheap pre-paid 3G data option ($10 per month) and a cheap phone plan without data (maybe $10 per month), but decided that it’s not worth the effort. The Virgin $19 plan gives me free calls to my wife and lots of calls to other numbers (more than I can use) and an extra $10 gives me all the data transfer I need. To use a Wifi-3G device would involve buying such a device and the hassle of carrying it and using it, that wouldn’t save money for at least a year and would be annoying.
The sudden decrease in data quotas is a real concern though. It’s an indication that the telco cartel in Australia is pushing prices up, that’s not a good sign. LTE is nice, but 3G with better quotas would be more generally useful to me.
I just had a conversation with someone who thinks that their office should have no servers.
The office in question has four servers, an Internet gateway/firewall system, the old file server (and also Xen server), the new file server, and the VOIP server.
The Internet gateway system could possibly be replaced by a suitably smart ADSL modem type device, but that would reduce the control over the network and wouldn’t provide much of a benefit.
The VOIP server has to be a separate system for low latency IMHO. In theory you could use a Xen DomU for running Asterisk or you could run Asterisk on the Dom0 of the file/Xen server. But that just makes things difficult. A VOIP server needs to be reliable and is something that you typically don’t want to touch once it’s working, in this case the Asterisk server has been a few more years without upgrades than the Xen server. An Asterisk system could be replaced by a dedicated telephony device which some people might consider to be removing a server, but really a dedicated VOIP server device is just as much of a server as a P4 running Asterisk but with greater expense. A major advantage of a P4 running Asterisk is that you can easily replace the system at no cost if there is a hardware problem.
Having two file servers is excessive for a relatively small office. But running two servers is the common practice when one server is being replaced. The alternative is to just immediately cut things over which has the potential for a lot of people to arrive at work on Monday and find multiple things not working as desired. Having two file servers is a temporary problem.
File Servers
The first real problem when trying to remove servers from an office is the file server.
ADSL links with Annex M can theoretically upload data at 3Mb/s which means almost 400KB/s. So if you have an office with a theoretically perfect ADSL2+ Annex M installation then you could save a 4MB file to a file server on the Internet in not much more than 10 seconds if no-one else is using the Internet connection. Note that 4MB isn’t THAT big by today’s standards, the organisation in question has many files which are considerably bigger than that. Large files include TIFF and RAW files used for high quality image processing, MS-Office documents, and data files for most accounting programs. Saving a 65MB quick-books file in 3 minutes (assuming that your Annex M connection is perfect and no-one else is using the Internet) would have to suck.
Then there’s the issue of reading files, video files (which are often used for training and promotion) are generally larger than 100MB which would be more than 30 seconds of download time at ADSL2+ speed – but if someone sends an email to everyone in the office saying “please watch this video” then the average time to load it would be a lot more. Through quickly examining my collection of Youtube downloads I found a video which averaged 590KB/s, if an office using a theoretically perfect ADSL2+ connection giving 24Mb/s (3MB/s) download speed had such a file on a remote file server then a maximum of five people could view it at one time if no-one else in the office was using the Internet.
Now when the NBN is connected (which won’t happen in areas like the Melbourne CBD for at least another 3 years) it will be possible to get speeds like 100Mb/s download and 25Mb/s upload. That would allow up to 20 people to view videos at once and a 65MB quick-books file could be saved in a mere 22 seconds if everyone else was idle. Of course that relies on the size of data files remaining the same for another 3 years which seems unlikely, currently no Youtube videos use resolutions higher than 1920*1080 (so they don’t take full advantage of a $400 Dell monitor) and there’s always potential for storing more financial data. I expect that by the time we all have 100Mb/25Mb speeds on the NBN it will be as useful to us as 24Mb/3Mb ADSL2+ Annex M speeds are today (great for home use but limited for an office full of people).
There are of course various ways of caching data, but all of them involve something which would be considered to be a “server” and I expect that all of them are more difficult to install and manage than just having a local file server.
Of course instead of crunching the numbers for ADSL speeds etc you could just think for a moment about the way that 100baseT networking to the desktop has been replaced by Gigabit networking. When people expect each workstation to have 1000Mb/s send and receive speed it seems quite obvious that one ADSL connection shared by an entire office isn’t going to work well if all the work that is done depends on it.
Management could dictate that there is to be no server in the office, but if that was to happen then the users would create file shares on their workstations so you would end up with ad-hoc servers which aren’t correctly managed or backed up. That wouldn’t be an improvement and technically wouldn’t achieve the goal of not having servers.
Home Networking Without Servers
It is becoming increasingly common to have various servers in a home network. Due to a lack of space and power and the low requirements a home file server will usually be a workstation with some big disks, but there are cheap NAS devices which some people are installing at home. I don’t recommend the cheap NAS devices, I’m merely noting that they are being used.
Home entertainment is also something that can benefit from a server. A MythTV system for recording TV and playing music has more features than a dedicated PVR box. But even the most basic PVR ($169 for a 1TB device in Aldi now) is still a fairly complex computer which would probably conflict with any aim to have a house free of servers.
The home network design of having a workstation run as a file and print server can work reasonably well as long as the desktop tasks aren’t particularly demanding (IE no games) and the system doesn’t change much (IE don’t track Debian/Testing or otherwise have new versions of software). But this is really something that only works if you only have a few workstations.
Running an office without servers seems rather silly as it seems that none of my friends are able to have a home without a server.
Running Internet Services
Hypothetically speaking if one was to run an office without servers then that would require running all the servers in question on the Internet somewhere. For some things this can work better than a local server, for example most of my clients who insist on running a mail server in their office would probably get a better result if they had a mail server running on Linode or Hetzner – or one of the “Hosted Exchange” offerings if they want a Windows mail sever. But for a file server if you were to get around the issue of bandwidth required to access the files in normal use there’s the issue of managing a server (which is going to take more effort and expense than for a server on the LAN).
Then there’s the issue of backups. In my previous post about Hard Drives for Backup [1] I considered some of the issues related to backing data up over the Internet. The big problem however is a complete restore, if you have even a few dozen gigs of data that you want to transfer to a remote server in a hurry it can be a difficult problem. If you have hundreds of gigs then it becomes a very difficult problem. I’m sure that I could find a Melbourne based Data Center (DC) that gives the option of bringing a USB attached SATA disk for a restore – but even that case would give a significant delay when compared to backing things up on a LAN. If a server on the office LAN breaks in the afternoon my client can make arrangements to let me work in their office in the evening to fix it, but sometimes DCs don’t allow 24*7 access and sometimes when they do allow access there are organisational problems that make it impossible when you want it (EG the people at the client company who are authorised become unavailable).
The Growth of Servers
Generally it’s a really bad idea to build a server that has exactly the hardware you need. The smart thing to do is to install more of every resource (disk, RAM, CPU, etc) than is needed and to allow expansion when possible (EG have some RAM slots and drive bays free). No matter how well you know your environment and it’s users you can get surprised by the way that requirements change. Buying a slightly bigger server at the start costs hardly any money but upgrading a server will cost a lot.
Once you have a server that’s somewhat over-specced you will always find other things to run on it. Many things could be run elsewhere at some cost, but if you have unused hardware then you may as well use it. Xen and other virtualisation systems are really good in this regard as they allow you to add more services without making upgrades difficult. This means that it’s quite common to have a server that is purchased for one task but which ends up being used for many tasks.
Anyone who would aspire to an office without servers would probably regard adding extra features in such a manner to be a problem. But really if you want to allow the workers to do their jobs then it’s best to be able to add new services as needed without going through a budget approval process for each one.
Conclusion
There probably are some offices where no-one does any serious file access and everyone’s work is based around a web browser or some client software that is suited to storing data on the Internet. But for an office where the workers use traditional “Office” software such as MS-Office or Libre-Office a file server is necessary.
Some sort of telephony server is necessary no matter how you do things. If you have a traditional telephone system then you might try not to call the PABX a “server”, but really that’s what it is. Then when the traditional phone service becomes too expensive you have to consider whether to use Asterisk or a proprietary system, in either case it’s really a server.
In almost every case the issue isn’t whether to have a server in the office, but how many servers to have and how to manage them.
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