At about 6pm this evening I’d just finished loading up a car to take some more servers to the data centre and rescue a customer who’d broken their server. As I did so a person with a black hood pulled over their head opened the back door of my car, grabbed my laptop bag and made a run for it.

Unfortunately for the opportunist, I’m a passable distance runner and I happened to be wearing the new running shoes which I’m breaking in. So I chased him hoping my stamina would lead him to tire and eventually I’d catch him.

Despite his apparent age advantage and his head start, after 225m (I measured it afterwards) it was obvious I was going to catch him so he dropped my laptop and continued to run away. I took the bait and retrieved my laptop rather than catching him and beating him to a pulp which in many ways would have been more satisfying.

Reflecting on the experience I have to say that was a lousy performance on the thief’s part, it should have taken me at least a mile to catch him. Why would you go into the smash and grab robbery business without learning how to run quickly first? As a result I’ve made a small donation to the Cambridge Parkrun because it’s nice that someone is attempting to do something to improve youth fitness because it seems they bloody well need it.

Over the weekend of January the 7th and January the 8th we upgraded our core routers in Sovereign House and Harbour Exchange. Previously Sovereign House had a 2x1GE bonded uplink into each router, with each router having 1G of transit and 1G of peering (different peering exchange and transit provider on each router). Now we have a 10GE ring around the two routers and the core switches and lots of spare 1G and 10GE ports on the routers so we can bring additional transit and peers online easily in the future.

The router upgrade was completed almost without issue, there was a brief period in the early hours of Sunday morning with incorrect configuration for one /24 in Sovereign House and our IPv6 gateway in Sovereign House was offline for an extended period because we hadn’t configured it to advertise correctly. Aside from those issues we were able to replace each router in succession relying on the redundancy provided by the other router to seamlessly fail over between them as they were replaced.

We’re happy to report that Cambridge customers didn’t observe a 12 hour outage with our Cambridge to Sovereign House connection on Friday 6th, everything correct rerouted via Harbour Exchange resulting only in a momentary blip when the connection failed catastrophically mid afternoon. Normal redundancy was restored in the early hours of Saturday morning after a large section of fibre had been replaced.

We’ve now implemented IPv6 glue for .com / .net / .org domains through our control panel and other country codes that support glue records.

We’ve added a feature to our control panel so you can now configure the serial console server attached to your server, password, baud rate, terminal emulator and it even tells the username and hostname of the serial server to make it easier to find it.

http://status.mythic-beasts.com/

there’s now an RSS feed which will update with current and planned status updates. We suggest you subscribe to it.

We’ve implemented DNSSEC support and IPv6 glue fully for .uk domains through our control panel. We’re still working on our wholesale for .com/.net/.org.

We’ve installed R on sphinx so sphinx users can do statistical computing using R. Here’s a trivial example of it in use,

[pete@sphinx R]$ R

R version 2.13.1 (2011-07-08)
Copyright (C) 2011 The R Foundation for Statistical Computing
ISBN 3-900051-07-0
Platform: i686-pc-linux-gnu (32-bit)

R is free software and comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY.
You are welcome to redistribute it under certain conditions.
Type 'license()' or 'licence()' for distribution details.

> x <- c(1,2,3,4,5,6)
> y <- x^2
> print(y)
[1] 1 4 9 16 25 36
>


I was pointed at this performance comparison by Joyent regarding their SmartMachines compared to Amazon EC2 images and asked for a comment and how it compares to our machines.

The first obvious thing is the cheapest way to buy geekbench points from us is with a KVM virtual machine which offers much better price performance than any hardware platform. This means either we’re very stupid and we’re selling our virtual machines at a loss, or just like Joyent, our virtual machines will use as much CPU as is available on the host at the time – performance isn’t guaranteed and will slow down when other customers use it. On a fully loaded server with every VM being 256MB and running benchmarks at the same time I’d expect that performance figure to divide by about a factor of six for the worst case.

The second thing to notice is the performance comparison with Amazon doesn’t show a substantial increase with number of CPUs unlike the tests on Mythic Beasts servers. That suggests to me that Joyent have managed to run the benchmark in single threaded mode when testing their competitors but multi-threaded mode on their own hardware. I find it exceedingly hard to believe that an 8 core amazon virtual machine has the same CPU performance as a 4 year old introductory level mac mini and is blown away by my desktop mac with only two cores.

We’re happy to report that after nearly four years we’ve finally finished the migration of the very last Black Cat Networks related services into our network so everything is now hosted and managed by Mythic Beasts with no remaining dependencies on third party providers. The migration has taken quite a lot longer than we first predicted, in particular auditing and cleaning up the various special cases that had been implemented for specific customers took a very long time.

During the migration we’ve achieved the following,

• Upgraded hosting & shell account customers from Debian Etch to Lenny, including a major hardware upgrade providing them with a five or tenfold increase in disk allocation.
• Merged mail handling providing the superset of spam handling features offered by the Mythic and Black Cat setups to all customers.
• Provided domain registration and DNS management including secondary DNS and a management API to all customers.
• Merged our database services providing Mysql 5 & 5.1 to ex Black Cat customers.
• Reenabled IPv6 for management & DNS.
• Provided dedicated rebranded shell hosting servers for specific customers.

Our next ‘synergy’ is to merge the Mythic UML, Xen and Bluelinux Xen services into a single KVM based platform and to merge the remaining Bluelinux hosting services into our hosting platforms. We’ve already done their co-location, bandwidth and domain names.

Of course if anyone reading this happens to own a virtual server, colocation or shared hosting business with a customer base of technically competent users that they no longer want we’d be interested in talking to you.

We’ve now migrated ns2.mythic-beasts.com to it’s new home and our DNS is now available over IPv6 in time for customers to participate in World IPv6 day .