Category: Tech

On Saturday ( 11th July ) I went to [Barcamp Auckland 2](http://bca.geek.nz/)
over at Botany Downs. Like [last year](http://bca.ludwignz.com/) ( which I
seem not to have blogged about) it was a 1 day “web technology” orientated
unconference organised by [Ludwig Wendzich](http://ludwignz.com/) and a group of
helpers.

Once again the venue ( Botany Downs Secondary College ) was great although
this time around the weather was nasty so things were a bit cold. I also
had a headache and queasy stomach so most of the time I felt like [this](http://flickr.com/photos/talios/2663111543)
( although at one point I [felt like this](http://flickr.com/photos/zakhenry/2660119763) , I think the pills had just kicked in ). So
my concentration skills weren’t on their best.

So here is a list of stuff I went to, the programme doesn’t seem to be online
anywhere so things are a little spares wrt names, titles and the like. Most of
the talks were fairly informal with a lot of audience participation. I
have an idea for a website so I went along to a couple of the more commercial talks.

**Productivity**

A talk from [Ben Young](http://blog.bwagy.com/give-users-what-they-want/) followed by a bit of a round table about productivity. The usual
stuff like only checking your email now and then and otherwise trying to
avoid interruptions plus a few other ideas about.

Suggested Tools:
[GoTo Meeting](https://www.gotomeeting.com/) , [Kayako](http://www.kayako.com/) , [OTRS](http://otrs.org/)

**Advertising**

A great overview by Regan from [throng](http://www.throng.co.nz) ( NZ TV website) about their experiences
with advertising and making money from their site. He discussed the various
text ads, textlink ads, Video Ads ( recommended [Unruly Media](http://www.unrulymedia.com/) ) and affiliate programmes.

Good discussion from others in the room including one guy who is getting 20% clickthoughs on google ads(!). There
was also some discussion about getting New Zealand ads onto smaller sites. It sounds like some people
are talking about an ad network for independent publishers.

**Frontend Performance, Yslow etc**

I organised a little session ( with a 5 minute’s notice) about the [Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Web Site](http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html)
stuff that has been big for the last year or so and experiences people had had. I can’t say it
was a very good session. I didn’t prepare or know the topic backwards so I was pretty disorganised. There was some round table discussion about people’s
expediences but I can’t say I was very happy with how it went.

**Windows, IE**

One of the guys from Microsoft talked about the problem of getting people off IE6
and up to the latest XP service packs. Some 25% of the population are still on IE6
( another 25% Firefox and around 50% IE7). The idea is to get these people
upgraded to secure systems and using standards compliant browsers.

There was also a bit of talk about IE8 and how a good percentage of of sites with “IE hacks”
didn’t render nicely anymore because IE8 was now more standards compliant.

**SEO**

Another session from [Ben Young](http://blog.bwagy.com/give-users-what-they-want/) with some general
advice of Search Engine optimisation. Lots of good general advice on setting goals, monitoring progress and different areas
plus some special sauce on building links in a non-spammy way.

**iphone seller**

A talk from a guy from [Mob](http://www.mob.co.nz) about how:

1. Fly to the US
2. Buy 15 iphones
3. Attending technical conference
4. Fly back to NZ
5. Unlock and sell iphones
6. Profit!
7. Goto 1

Turned into a real business.

**Careers**

A session of 20 people giving [Ludwig Wendzich](http://ludwignz.com/) ( 17 year old main organiser)
career advice. More interesting than it sounds.

**Other**

There was a bunch of other stuff:

* Ran into the usual suspects and couple of people from back at Telecom
* Saw [Rock Band](http://www.rockband.com/) game.
* Didn’t see the 5 minute coding competition due to crowd
* Lunch plus two breaks worth of food served
* Cute little online app to synchronise stuff, book rooms and see what was happening
* Around 40 people didn’t show up when others got turned away 🙁

**Other Write ups**

* [Official Bebrief](http://ludwignz.com/index.php/site/journal_entry/barcamp_auckland_2_debrief/) from Ludwig Wendzich
* [Simon Gianoutsos](http://gianouts.blogspot.com/2008/07/barcamp-auckland-2-synopsis.html)
* [Ben Young](http://blog.bwagy.com/give-users-what-they-want/)
* [Some guy without his name on his blog](http://www.devour.co.nz/2008/07/13/barcamp-auckland-2008/)

END

My current job involves a wider range of stuff than my previous position. So
while I didn’t really deal with hardware at all at Telecom my new job involves
everything from the server hardware on up.

As part of that I’m getting my head around some tools to help manage our installations
a little bit better with the goal of getting from bare-metal to a “in production”
server in around 15 minutes. Several people at the [LCA08 Sysadmin Miniconf](http://sysadmin.miniconf.org/programme08.html) were at that stage so it seems a good target especially since we have a pretty small team.

So today at home I was playing around with Kickstart a bit. It’s actually fairly easy
you just add a few lines of config to the dhcp.conf:

allow booting;
allow bootp;

group {
	next-server 10.1.1.22;
        host test4 {
	  hardware ethernet 00:0B:6A:33:B7:36;
          filename "pxelinux.0";
	  option host-name "test4";
	}
}

The IPs above is my DHCP/TFTPD server while I hardcoded the Mac address in the make sure other machines didn’t get in the way.

The TFTP Server was a simple install and I only ended up with a few files:

/memtest86
/pxelinux.0
/centos52
/pxelinux.cfg
/pxelinux.cfg/default
/centos52-initrd

I grabbed the pxelinux.cfg/default file from [here](http://egopoly.com/archives/2006/03/creating_a_kick_1.html)
while the pxelinux.0 came with the [SYSLINUX](http://syslinux.zytor.com/wiki/index.php/The_SYSLINUX_Project) download.

The memtest86 and centos52 files are just the standard ones that come with the distributions ( they are under /os/i386/images/ in centos ).

Those files enabled me to remote boot memtest86 no problems ( except for my
computer need a power cycle between boots in order to network boot correctly).

Next I grabbed a quick mirror of the centos 5.2 ( rsync://mirrors.kernel.org/centos/5.2/os/i386 to be exact )
and [this](http://fedoranews.org/tchung/minikick/ks.cfg) ks.cfg file and that was pretty much it.

I was actually surprised how easy it was. I’ve just done a test install and from
power on of an empty system to login prompt on the installed machine it takes just 8 minutes.

The whole process is:

1. Hardware Boot
2. Network Boot PXE Image
3. Boot Centos Kernel/initrd with Kickstart options
4. Kickstart Downloads packages and installs OS
5. Reboot
6. Normal Centos Boot.
7. Finished

Of course the system has a fairly minimal install since I just used a simple
kickstart config. My next stage will probably be to add a few lines
at the bottom of the kickstart config to install [puppet](http://reductivelabs.com/trac/puppet)
and from there install additional packages and configure everything.

I think 15 minutes seems a good goal, especially since the work network and machines are
faster than what I have at home.

Links:

* [Billo – Creating a kickstart install server for Fedora Core 4](http://egopoly.com/archives/2006/03/creating_a_kick_1.html)
* [The SYSLINUX Project](http://syslinux.zytor.com/wiki/index.php/The_SYSLINUX_Project)
* [Debian Docs – Preparing Files for TFTP Net Booting](http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/i386/ch04s06.html.en)
* [Centos Wiki – PXE Setup](http://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/PXE/PXE_Setup)
* [KickStart for Ubuntu](https://help.ubuntu.com/community/KickstartCompatibility)
END

[An article](http://www.stuff.co.nz/4560779a28.html) in the Dominion Post
has Southern Cross Cables claiming that a new cable doesn’t need to be built
since Southern Cross’ pricing is competitive.

They even say that they will sell a 155Mb/s circuit for just $US 500,000 per year down from
6 times that just 4 years ago. Of course half the problem is that their customers
are locked into multi-year contacts so some of them are still paying the old prices.

However even the new prices are still pretty high. The $500,000/year price works
out at around $US 268/Month per Mb/s ( 500000/155/12 = 268 ) or almost exactly $NZ1 per Gigabyte downloaded. In contrast
pricing to Hong Kong, China or Japan is perhaps a quarter of this ( less in bulk) and trans-Atlantic much less. Within the US
I can buy *retail* bandwidth from [Amazon](http://www.amazon.com/S3-AWS-home-page-Money/b/ref=sc_fe_l_2?ie=UTF8&node=16427261&no=3435361&me=A36L942TSJ2AJA) for a 3rd of the quoted price.

That sort of huge margin means that New Zealand is going to be stuck with 30GB/month
domestic quotas for a while yet. Even those who use less than that suffer because
ISPs have too keep circuits full to save money so download speeds drop during peak times. It costs so much to host locally that almost all sites are
overseas and thus slower for domestic users.

It also means that newer applications (especially those involving streaming video, audio or other data) are
too expensive for most NZ users ( especially those on mid-range DSL accounts) to
regularly use. Things like downloading TV-shows or Movies via pay-services might cost
more in bandwidth than subscription (not to mention take forever to download).

In reality $5/month per customer is all ISPs can really afford to pay in International Bandwidth prices for
something like a $30/month account. As bandwidth prices drop quotas will go up and perhaps (when bandwidth is cheap enough) go away.

Right now Southern Cross isn’t under a lot of pressure to drops it’s pricing and
it would like to keep things that way. The additional bandwidth going into Australia
and the proposed Kordia cable will put a downward pressure on prices. A casual drop of 20% in bandwidth prices will pay return the governments investment in a year.

In reality to match other country’s cost, bandwidth prices need to drop by at least 75% and then continue dropping. Allowing them
to remain high to protect Sounthern Cross’ profits hurts New Zealand.

I’ve come across 3 great articles this week on best practice for building
Internet based Services.

*First* up [Simon Wilson](http://simonwillison.net/) gives a good overview
of what web orientated developers should be doing these days. As he says
“I tried to pull together all of the things I wish I’d been told before I
started building things on the Web”:

The slides are a good overview of the main areas of web engineering that have
changed in the last few years and what the current best practices are. Worth
a skim though and a subsequent Google if you find gaps in your knowledge. Simon
is a [Django](http://www.djangoproject.com/) developer so he references that
project a bit.

*Next* [Greg Linden](http://glinden.blogspot.com/) has
[a post](http://glinden.blogspot.com/2008/03/designing-for-internet-scale.html) pointing
to and commenting on a [James Hamilton](http://research.microsoft.com/~jamesrh/)’s LISA
paper “On Designing and Deploying Internet-Scale Services” ( [PDF here](http://research.microsoft.com/~jamesrh/TalksAndPapers/JamesRH_Lisa.pdf) ).

I’d advise reading James’ paper first and then Greg’s comments, both are useful. I was
also looking at some other papers on [James’ site](http://research.microsoft.com/~jamesrh/) including
[this related presentation](http://research.microsoft.com/~jamesrh/TalksAndPapers/JamesRH_AmazonDev.pdf) and on Modular Data Center design. James’s
[Blog](http://perspectives.mvdirona.com) looks interesting as well.

*Finally* the Yahoo! [Exceptional Performance](http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/) people
have added another 20 rules to the existing 14 on how to speed up customer access
to you website:

NOTE: Slideshare seems to be allowing the document to be viewed but not
downloaded right now, I grabbed a copy previously ( 3 MB .ppt) if anyone wants a copy).

Currently I’m still looking at the original 14 rules for ideas, [CSS Sprites](http://www.alistapart.com/articles/sprites) look
especially interesting and a big potential win.

END