I live in Canada, and I want to move out of online web hosting and host stuff on my own server. The problem is, my website caters to a huge amount of US traffic, about 90 percent of traffic is US.
Are there huge disadvantages of having my server in Canada?
Please note, speed is very important d...
It didn't help that I shot myself in the foot by traveling in the right-hand lane, that mysteriously and suddenly turned into an offramp, dumping me in some of the worst traffic evah
@Holocryptic I feel your pain. I spent a whole half hour getting home this afternoon, it sucked. Hopefully the kid won't be so reluctant to leave school tomorrow.
Why is there even a canada tag? Isn't that a bit too localized? I did a quick look, and there's no usa or great-britain or australia, so why on $DEITY'S green Earth is there a canada tag?
There's 5 questions there, of which at least a couple I feel could be closed as too localized. I just wan...
You know what's really sneaky? See a question, answer it with just a word or two to get around the minimum character limit, and then delete it. Then, edit the deleted answer to be good and when it's ready undelete it. It will have the oldest timestamp and trump any questions that people post after you, but won't get downvoted for being incomplete while you work on it.
Mr. Lojik is supposedly the founder of Veepiz. How can one have such a relatively active site and not know diddly squat about what he's using to run it?
@voretaq7 Plenty of questions deserve burying. I'm fairly sure I've never seen a questioned bombed with downvotes that didn't royally deserve it (and more than a few that stayed alive despite fatal flaws)
@WesleyDavid It's a full-time job, and I'm not working in IT at the moment. However, I just today put in my train-driving resignation and will be taking up a job in IT again -- very different to what I was doing before, though.
@womble Wow, fascinating. IT to train driver doesn't at first seem like a common path, but then again, no one in IT seems to have a common path in how they either got there or where they left to.
There are definitely times when I question if I can do this or not. Doesn't seem to be panning out well sometimes.
@WesleyDavid Meh, just get the SE job and head up to NYC ;)
Kinda surprised this question sat out there as long as it did. Thought someone was saying there weren't good easy ones earlier, heh serverfault.com/questions/302499/…
@ShaneMadden @ShaneMadden shrug Maybe, I dunno. I've knocked around with so much in the way of small business systems that I don't know if I'd be of much use at SE.
@WesleyDavid I've been surprised at the number of people who've come from, or wanted to go into, food service (specifically being a chef). It's probably selection bias, but I can think of 4 people off the top of my head I know in that circumstance.
@womble Both. As far as technically, well, I have trouble reading and concentrating, so information assimilation is hard some days. Today was atrocious. Caffeine seems to help focus me, oddly. and psychologically, well, I tend to get discouraged easily which is likely not a good trait. I'm working on improving it, and have succeeded, but some days / weeks are not easy to weather.
I wonder if I had a more tactile job if it would be better. Shuffling packages around, learning streets, traffic patterns... I watch bike messenger videos on YouTube like it was porn. =)
@WesleyDavid If I can lay a bit of my recent experience on you, if you're not enjoying it, get out and do something else for a while. On the other hand, if you kinda enjoy it but sometimes it gives you the shits (especially if you can look back and go "hmm, my over-reaction there doesn't make a lot of sense"), consider talking to someone. Depression and anxiety are massive problems in IT, and it'd be a shame to throw away a good career when you just need a brain-tune.
@womble That's really interesting. I can't say that I've ever seen anyone in IT that had a food services past or hoped-for future. If there was one common trait among IT people that I've met it's usually photography. Even my own .NET Systems Analyst stepfather is working his way out of that industry and into his own media company that he formed recently.
And, if you are suffering from depression, changing careers isn't likely to make as much of a positive impact as you might hope.
@WesleyDavid Yeah, photography nerds are everywhere -- the combination of lots of expensive gadgets and not needing any actual talent is irresistable. ducksandruns
@womble The trouble is that I love this field. There were years where I couldn't stop thinking about it. It's great. The problem is circumstances that seem to cloud my steps. I haven't had much success in getting away from the micro-mini environments and into larger systems that fascinate me. Right as I left one place that I had a volunteer position at to move to a better area in America, I got a job offer to be a Jr DBA, which would have been fun, but... it was bad timing.
So now I'm in a lurch. Tried to start my own consultancy to contract. Hoped to get some interesting jobs. Everyone that knew me told me I'd be awesome and snatched up. I've networked and sent out some feelers and have so far got nothing but writing gigs and some small office work. So, I'm at least making some money, but it's doing things like reformatting Windows 7 PCs and managing SBS 2008 and maybe, if I'm lucky, looking at some interesting PowerShell and Exchange issues.
It's just a lurch though. It's all circumstantial. If things would turn around as far as work, I think it would clear the confusion up. I've had job leads recently, but it annoys me a bit that they came after I started my LLC. So now I think I'll wait until the end of the year to see how things pan out, but if they don't, I'll have to look for a salaried position that won't drag me down or move on to a new field for a while maybe. I dunno.
@WesleyDavid Yeah, contracting is tough. Too tough for my fragile ego (and I'm massively risk-averse). Building your career (whichever way you go) is the most important, and one of the most difficult, things you'll do in life.
Building a good network, and keeping in touch with people, is so important. I've been lucky that I've landed at random in most of my jobs (they just happened to drift past when I needed them), and so my network is poor, but it's something I'm really looking to improve to keep my options open.
I do have three interesting possibilities in the near future that could help. 1) Friend in Australia is making a project that might need help. It's currently trying to get VC money. The trouble, it's in the web sphere which is not a strength for me... yet. 2) CIO of a attraction in America that is scheduled to be built might be able to contract me when the ground gets broken. Maybe. 3) Friend's site needs investment and if I can come up with a few grand, I could get in on the ground floor.
But if nothing happens by 2012, then I know it's pretty much a wash and I should become an employee somewhere.
Or get a bike. =)
@womble The networking thing is tough since I've funneled all money into things other than transportation. No car yet. Leases are hard to get when you don't have consistent income above a certain level. Bus system here is nice though.
@WesleyDavid Your phone (and even e-mail, in a pinch) can do a good job for you. I've found manager tools to be a good resource for a lot of career-related things; their list of networking-related podcasts might have some good stuff for you.
@WesleyDavid I'll rack up exactly 18 months and 15 days at the end of my notice period.
And what's wrong with a bit of a therapy session now and then?
@WesleyDavid It's the bosses that have driven me away -- the driving itself is easy, if a bit boring (listening to podcasts helps), but every time I deal with management I get a headache from clenching my jaw so hard to stop myself from screaming "FUCK YOU BUNCH OF VINDICTIVE COCKSMOKERS"
Well, sometimes it's the co-workers (that's what drove me away from a previous job), but yeah, management is the most common cause of employee frustration. As a friend once remarked, "People join companies, but leave bosses".
The ones I'm running away from now aren't aggro, so much as incompetent, bureaucratic, and uncaring. And there's just so many of them...
I'm pretty easy going and can get along with anyone. I've been described as a chameleon - which is a good and bad thing. But I do have a tendency to tell people things plainly and not relaize how plain I'm saying it. So... I hope bosses and contractees don't take too much offense.
Unfortunately contractors tend to get ran a bit harder
So I hope the new gig works out for you. Makes you learn new things.
Have you ever had a job opportunity that came up, was outside of your comfort zone, and you were wondering if it was honest to take the job - even if the other person knew you weren't an expert? Okay, maybe that's a bit speciated of a scenario. =)
I like to get outside my comfort zone, but just feel weird taking payment for it. Example, a friend wants to make a website service and is a pure Java developer. No knowledge of the ops side. I asked him a few innocent questions about backups, and scaling and database things... he was totally (and I mean totally clueless). I said "Don'tcha want to look into that a bit at least?"
So, anyway, if he gets the VC he might use me to build the ops side of things. But I know nothing of Tomcat or building tiered web applications. I mean, I know the concepts and understand that, it's just the nuts and bolts of "This is how you manage tomcat." "This is how you replicate a MySQL Server"
Sooo... I'd love to do it from a selfish perspective, and my friend knows my limits I think, but still... kinda hemming and hawing about taking it.
@WesleyDavid I don't tend to have that sort of a self-confidence problem -- I think I'm smart enough to learn anything I need to and have an interest in.
I know I can learn, it's just the time between when I start, when I fuck up a dozen times, and when I finally know better... all the while servicing customers and trying not to run out of VC funding. That's what bothers me. =)
Learning is awesome. It's hosing things so bad because you're a noob and bit off more than you should have... that's what worries me. I see so many stories about that, even on ServeRfault... people running stuff they have no business doing.
Look at that one go, running a biggish social network in Africa and doesn't even know Postfix enough to close his open relay. But I'm in the same bot with the topic of Tomcat and Varnish and CDNs and etc.
@WesleyDavid Do I need to tell you the story of the time I took out a few hundred production VMs through hubris my first week on the job? Don't sweat mistakes -- don't try and make them, but when you do, learn from them and move on.
@WesleyDavid I'd be more inclined to look at "The Practice of System and Network Administration" by Limoncelli, if you haven't already. That's where the gold is.
I remember once at that place the Sr Dev let a script go that mashed the test CRM database. Only it wasn't the test DB, it was the production one. 15 years or so of people and their financial interactions with the organization gone. Wrecked. Toast. And the SysAdmin checked the backups to find that the log files were circular. So that was fun.
Got to see long time pros react in the face of immediate impending termination. =)
Fortunately I haven't done anything that bad. Yet.
I'm so confused about all this. A local area networking company is offering a domain for $25.00 a year. If I bought that would it be the same as having a web page of my own?
See, I told you I was stupid. I just don't understand any of this..
Please help, make it simple PLEASE
it's about..150m x 200m per floor I guess, that floor just does the 'backend' stuff and holds the 'origin' copies of the video - we don't stream from there, that's done from 72 different places around the country
and it's cost about the same as a couple of F-22's :)
the problem with EVAs is that although they're really easy to use/configure they can only take 27 shelves of 12 disks so they're very easy to fill - so you need lots of them
I don't see it but yes, especially when there's another floor that's just the same (not mine though)
I love our EVA4000, it was my first "real" SAN. Had a MSA1500 which couldn't I/O for shit. Too bad mgmt got friendly with IBM -- we've moved to XIVs for [at least] the next 5-8 years.
And once you were seeing delayed write errors increasing everywhere, you knew you only had a few minutes before it would cascade into a spectacular crash. Nothing like seeing every disk's LED and the front panel blinking, helpfully, at you.
but we have a grid of temp gauges in every rack talking back to a fearsomely expensive thermodynamics package that lets us do what-if's plus monitors everything, that's why we have less kit in the middle of the room than the outsides
Our in rack cooler discharges ~15ºC air. Room temperature is 17º in there. The rest of the office varies (lotsa people have thermostats in their office)
@Chopper3 I remember reading (sometime in the past) that servers and disks live longer at ~21C
no idea if thats a fact or not
first hit on google: "General recommendations suggest that you should not go below 10°C (50°F) or above 28°C (82°F). Although this seems a wide range these are the extremes and it is far more common to keep the ambient temperature around 20-21°C (68-71°F)."
When I was working in our server room, I noticed that it was very cold.
I know that the server room has to be cold to offset the heat of the servers, but perhaps it is TOO cold.
What is an appropriate temperature to keep our server room at?
Our rack varies from 60ºF at the cooler discharge to 95º at the cooler return. The rack's got somewhat poor circulation; it was undersized when they got it (don't know if they were being cheap or if they thought it would be sufficient at the time)
@BartSilverstrim "Intel recently conducted a 10-month test to evaluate the impact of using only outside air to cool a high-density data center in New Mexico, where the temperature ranged from 64 degrees to as high as 92 degrees. Intel said it found “no consistent increase” in failure rates due to the greater variation in temperature and humidity. “This suggests that existing assumptions about the need to closely regulate these factors bear further scrutiny,” Intel concluded."
Yeah; One of our newer systems in iLO show: 7 fans, 31 temperature, and the power status. More info than I really needed... I just look at the green checkmark.
Seriously; Q #1 of the System Administrator's Test should be "How do you diagnose a Windows Crash?"
@pauska Not until just now. Two thoughs 1. Yet Another File System? 2. "Speed - SDFS can perform deduplication/redup at line speed 1 GB/S+" I'm officially calling bullshit.
ChriS: Bah! I installed DragonFlyBSD to check out HAMMER, but it craps out with the onboard NIC. Now I have FreeBSD 9.0-BETA installed (to test ZFS), but there isnt a multipath iscsi initiator
and without multipathing I can forget about using ZFS with all the mirroring done at the SAN level
@KyleBrandt Haha, nope :) The problem is that our main (in house built) BI application uses SQL for just about everything. I need to figure out how to put it on the new SAN.
@KyleBrandt: What's more critical? Separating data from log+temp, separating log from temp etc..
@KyleBrandt Why don't you lock VGV8 down there, his bull shit should keep SE running for ever.... AND HE AIN"T SCARED OF NO CATS HE'S a (fake,really bad) SYSADMIN
I can't find the comic where it's a guy looking over someone's shoulder that has no idea how the internet works, and keeps mistyping things, searching for google instead of just going to google, clicking in the wrong places, and all the while the onlooker's rage is increasing
I live in Canada, and I want to move out of online web hosting and host stuff on my own server. The problem is, my website caters to a huge amount of US traffic, about 90 percent of traffic is US.
Are there huge disadvantages of having my server in Canada?
Please note, speed is very important d...
Why is there even a canada tag? Isn't that a bit too localized? I did a quick look, and there's no usa or great-britain or australia, so why on $DEITY'S green Earth is there a canada tag?
There's 5 questions there, of which at least a couple I feel could be closed as too localized. I just wan...
I'm so confused about all this. A local area networking company is offering a domain for $25.00 a year. If I bought that would it be the same as having a web page of my own?
See, I told you I was stupid. I just don't understand any of this..
Please help, make it simple PLEASE
When I was working in our server room, I noticed that it was very cold.
I know that the server room has to be cold to offset the heat of the servers, but perhaps it is TOO cold.
What is an appropriate temperature to keep our server room at?
