Linode VPS Hosting

0
October 31, 2011
by Michael McNamara in

I’m home sick today with a nasty sinus infection, so I thought I would make a quick post about Linode. Last week (maybe two weeks ago now) I decided to give Linode a test drive by signing up for a Linode VPS 512. The increase in traffic to this site and the discussion forums has been significant enough over the past 6 months that I’ve been trying to stay ahead of the curve rather than falling behind (I personally hate a slow site). I’ve been coming up against my 40GB/monthly transfer limits with RIMU hosting even after setting up a CDN so I went looking for alternatives and found Linode.

I ran some quick and dirty benchmarks using Unixbench (1 parallel test) and here’s what I found;

NoGuest Operating SystemArchitectureCPUDescriptionResults
1CentOS 5.7 x86 1 x Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5540 @ 2.53GHz VMware ESX 4.1 HP BL490c G61010
2CentOS 5.7 x642 x Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU 5160 @ 3.00GHzHP DL360 G5935
3CentOS 5.7 x644 x Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5540 @ 2.53GHz HP BL460c G61005
4CentOS 5.7x862 x  Intel(R) Xeon(TM) CPU @ 2.80GHz IBM x345 Series387
5CentOS 5.7 x86 1 x Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5506 @ 2.13GHz RIMU Hosting – XEN 1vCPU290
6CentOS 6.0 x86 4 x  Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU L5520 @ 2.27GHzLinode Hosting – XEN 4vCPU495

Note: I currently use the IBM x345 Series server as my test and development server so I don’t have to worry about destroying my live production server.

A number of the servers above are virtualized with either VMware or XEN and some are physical. I’ve provided some comparison data in servers 1-4, the two of interest are 5 and 6.

You can see from the numbers that the Linode server beat out the RIMU server by quite a margin. I also chose to have the Linode server placed in their Newark, NJ data center which is geographically closer to me in Pennsylvania than the Dallas, TX data center that my current VPS resides in. With that location change I noticed a big delta in the RTTs to/from the two locations. From my Verizon FiOS home broadband I get around 50ms to the Dallas, TX data center while I’m getting around 20ms to the Newark, NJ data center.

There are other pros and cons between RIMU and Linode which I won’t completely go into here but in my specific example it was the storage and transfer bandwidth that caused me to look elsewhere. I have nothing bad to say about RIMU, they’ve given me more than 18 months of great service.

Last week I moved the blog (that’s this site) to the Linode VPS and it seems to be running great. If everything continues to run smoothly I’ll migrate the discussion forums and remaining sites over to Linode and cancel my RIMU account over the next two weeks.

Have you noticed the speed increase or any other issues with this site?

Cheers!

It’s snowing here in Pennsylvania in October!

2
October 29, 2011
by Michael McNamara in

I woke up Saturday morning to the snow falling fast and furious here in Pennsylvania, just about 35 miles outside Philadelphia. It snowed and it snowed and it snowed all day long and the snow actually stuck the streets, the grass and the trees. The power went out and came back on multiple times throughout the day but eventually our luck ran out and it finally went out around 3:30PM and has yet to be restored. I would guess that we have about 3-4″ of the white stuff on the ground right now. The picture to the right was taken around 11:00AM this morning just as the storm was getting started. it was a great time to reconnect with the family and spend some quality time together. Unfortunately it’s currently 54 degrees F in the house (no electricity means no heat) so it’s pretty cold and the battery in my laptop is about to die.

I’ve never seen snow (in my lifetime) in the PA-NJ-NYC area prior to Halloween, I’m curious what that means for the rest of winter.

Is it snowing where you are?

Cheers!

Update: Sunday October 30, 2011 7:00AM – it’s 51 degrees F in the house this morning and the power was just restored and the heat is on!

Ethernet Routing Switch 8600 High-speed Fan Tray (8010CMHS)

11
October 18, 2011
by Michael McNamara in ,

I ran into an interesting oversight on my part today. We have a cluster of Avaya Ethernet Routing Switch 8600s which are running dual 8692SFs w/Mezz and a combination E and R cards on 5.1.3.1 software. We’re growing the network (when are we not) and we’ve outgrown the two 8630GBRs we have in each switch. So we purchased a 8648GBRS for each switch along with an 8648GTRS to replace the legacy 8648TXE card.

Upon inserting the 8648GBRS module in slot 9 we received the following alarm from the console;

CPU5 [10/18/11 12:48:29] SNMP INFO Chassis running on low fan cooling.Please change the fan. Note that if the switch is booted with fan check enabled, then to power up,
1. R module requires a fan (regular or high speed) in running state.
2. RS module requires a high speed fan in running state.
CPU5 [10/18/11 12:48:29] HW ERROR Card in Slot=9, Type=8648GBRS, not powered on due to fan requirements.
CPU5 [10/18/11 12:48:48] HW INFO Card removed: Slot=9 Type=8648GBRS

I immediately knew what the problem was, I had overlooked the high-speed fan tray requirement for any RS modules. We have legacy chassis’s at this location so I knew that slots 1 and 10 couldn’t be populated by an R/RS module, I also knew the power supplies had already been upgraded to 8005PS’s so there was adequate power. However, I overlooked the cooling requirement so today I had to order a bunch of 8010CMHS fan trays.

Cheers!

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