and, it seems like a good idea in theory, if I understand how it works... no wasting of IPs if you need to assign someone a single one - no wasting an ip for broadcast/gateway
Pinax 1.0 has a social-network-project. That's good news for people who want a social network. However, the actual site is a glorified one-page stub, complete with repeated lorem ipsum. That's rather empty, stubby news.
Pinax 0.7 and 0.5 both had social projects, and both of them were fairly str...
I have iptables running on a host (acting as a firewall) in a Linux namespace with only one network interface: h2-eth1 (has an IP and MAC address)
I have set up my switch to forward all packets to the firewall, and the packets returned from the firewall to the internal network. Now, I proceed to...
@dyelawn Pick a place. There's hundreds of cloud providers out there now, large and small, or you could do your own private cloud with something like OpenStack
All of the above are going to be cheaper than Amazon, which aside from Xen was my other reason for leaving.
I have multiple openflow switches which I configure to make sure that the packet reaches the firewall before the internal host. I have confirmed that the packet is going to the firewall. It is just not coming back from it.
@dyelawn securedservers.com/585.html I have a VM here and clients on their cloud offering. It's been solid and much faster than AWS, with comparable pricing. Based on VMware.
@Bruce Right, but even if it's sent to the firewall in layer 2, it doesn't matter at all if the layer 3 (ip) destination isn't set to the firewall's address. It'll ignore the packet if the destination is wrong. Can you run tcpdump on the firewall to see what's going on?
@MichaelHampton Yeah, I use Secured Servers and am also an affiliate there. I like their hardware and prices. They seem legit so far. Not really a "cloud provider" so I'm not sure what you want @dyelawn - just a shell on a reliable system? Secured Servers is good (plus they're down the road from me)
alright, will look into it and rackspace and some others. looks like my question was bad. just gonna make a single cookbooks repo and push the whole thing, then gonna beer. thanks
My streaming radio client, when they hit a few thousand simultaneous listeners, will probably ask about going into the cloud to auto-scale instead of looking at dedicated bandwidth contracts and rackspace that will only be used for very spikey times.
So I was looking at doing some kind of cloudy, scaly, thingy in EC2 or GoGrid
But I don't know how bandwidth-bound services would work in the cloud. Really, I don't have a ton of experience in the whole scale-out cloud infrastructure thing.
The packet that reaches the firewall carries the MAC and IP address of the destination host. The network layout is as follows: 3 hosts - h1,h2,h3. 2 switches- s1,s2. Connections: h1-s1, h2-s2, h3-s2, s1-s2. Rules on s1: forward packet from port 1(h1) to port 2(s2), and from 2 to 1. Rules on s2: forward packet from port 3(s1) to port 1(h2), and from 1 to 2(h3), and from 2 to 3. firewall running on h2.
Right now, on playoff nights (it's high school prep sports, with a few Division III / II colleges here and there) they can have about 1,000 to maybe 1,400 listeners at 48Kbps.
Well each stream isn't very high bandwidth in itself, but if you have a 64Kbit/sec stream and 1000 listeners, you are using ~ 64 Mbits/sec. That could get expensive fast.
March is winding down so it's quiet until late August when high school football ramps up, then November can be a madhouse with an expected 2,000 to 3,000 listeners on big Fridays and Saturdays.
@MichaelHampton Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights, typically for about two to three hours, is the bandwidth pattern.
So the bad thing is that they've had some special arrangements with two previous hosting providers. One, based out of the SwitchNAP in Vegas, basically said "You know, since it's in the evenings, and only for a few hours, we'll just let you do whatever with bandwidth and not charge you anything extra above the virtual server hosting cost"
@WesleyDavid The cost of the bandwidth is what gets you. My talk radio show client moved their high bandwidth streams to a hosted Shoutcast provider, and now I only host the low bandwidth streams.
And the hosting provider had about 7Gb of total available bandwidth for their whole hosting service, so a few hundred Mbps sustained on bigger nights didn't even phase them.
@MichaelHampton So now this streaming client moved to PhoenixNAP, and the SecuredServers EULA said "no hosting providers" but we talked to an account manager and they cleared it with the abuse team. So we're on their network now, but we have yet to have a big night to really test their promise to not kick this client to the curb.
I recommended the move to PhoenixNAP, they have two E3-1230s, 8GB RAM, etc. Really, streaming is very light on the boxes. There's no transcoding or anything.
This spring and summer, the streaming host will try and get all their clients to move to the new platform I worked on for them (reaches all devices all the time) and they expect to go to about 100,000 unique listeners per month in big months, which represents about a potential 2,000 to 3,000 simultaneous listener night here and there during the playoff season.
Sooo... I think Secured Servers will probably have some issues with that and I'm not sure if they'll just say "Pay a few hundred more and we're cool" or try and push the guy to a half cab and bandwidth contract.
And yes, the streaming "provider" is just one guy. One non-technical guy. It's... kinda strange, but hey.
@ShaneMadden: The firewall need not be stateful. It need not have a public IP. It just silently drops packets if they match some criterion, else it lets them pass. The direction of packet does not matter.
@MichaelHampton Yeah, the business model of this place is all messed up too, IMO, so it's hard to attempt to get him to whitelabel another company's services.
@MichaelHampton Raw bandwidth usage I guess? I mean, 2500 listeners if barely above 100Mbps, and the guy pays for a 1Gbps shared line.
By then he hopes to have made some big ad contracts and be actually in the black by about half a million a year and he can finally 1) Pay my full hourly rate, and 2) Get his own stuff in his own rack. Preferably a rack that I sublease to him. =)
@MichaelHampton I dunno if I'd do that to you man, you seem nice. I don't want to make you an enemy. =|
PhoenixNAP quoted me $4 per Mb. If I get a full cab, it comes with 50Mb and 30amps usable for I think $1k a month. So $2k per month to get a full rack plus 300Mbps, which should be enough for this place.
Plus, I've used IceCast so much, I see lots of room for improvement and would love to build my own front end for it and that would attract the potential to be a full-on hosting provider, which could be neat.
There's a stats package out there for IceCast that has an absolutely obscene cost to it. I'd love to eat their lunch using a reasonable pricing model for a better product that doesn't have to be installed on a Windows machine
That's actually one of the reasons I'm really pining to get into Python in April sometime. Want to see if I can get some of these ideas to fruition.
Tired of being a plumber. I want to actually make things.
@Bruce I'm just trying to understand how this is supposed to work. There's no layer 2 bridge in place, and the destination of the packet (both the dest MAC and the dest IP) is h3, though the switch is delivering the packet to h2. There's no reason for h2 to be interested in the packet at all as far as I can tell.
@MichaelHampton I was looking at what AWStats can do for IceCast. Also, Sawmill has an IceCast module too
@MichaelHampton Also CentovaCast is cool, but the guy that makes it is this strange recluse or something. Lives on an island in British Columbia and has been known to go missing for lengths of time.
@Bruce I guess two interfaces and a forwarding bridge would work, but then you'd potentially broadcast storm without working spanning-tree. Generally with a firewall, you want for it to either be physically in-between the protected and non-protected devices (then they can be on the same layer 2 network), or logically in-between (where it's acting as a router and there are different subnets outside and inside)
@MichaelHampton I wish Soma.fm exposed more of their stats. They've been around forever and I look to them for inspiration a lot of times when trying to figure out what to do.
Them and RadioParadise.
Soma is always, always running on a knife edge of funds.
"There are 6743 people listening to SomaFM right now."
@MichaelHampton I actually had an idea to make an all Creative Commons online station, so I wouldn't have to worry about paying royalites and all that legality BS.
@MichaelHampton Yeah, I searched out sources of CC music as well as spoken word performances, poetry and writing. There was a lot out there. The thing is, it would have to be purely donor driven, and really, I couldn't find a business reason to do it other than it would be fun.
@MichaelHampton I also think that if there was a platform for distribution of CC work, one that actually benefited artists and performers with exposure and gave them some power, it would create its own momentum to a certain extent.
@MichaelHampton But then it came back to "How do I make money? When it gets bigger than just me, how does the whole organization make money?" and that didn't have very promising answers.
@JourneymanGeek My first priority would be to get the streaming provider part of the organization paid for, which quickly gets expensive unless I can find some way of only paying for what I'm using. As for the artists, okay fine I guess they should have a way of getting paid too. =P
@MichaelHampton Right but "non-profit" doesn't mean "makes-no-money" =P
And I couldn't figure out how to keep the lights going blinky-blinky.
But I'd rather get IceCast whipped into shape, get some better front-facing control over it, get some better statistics, and then that would parlay right into being a service provider for it, and I'd have something that no-one else has.
Streaming providers are a dime a dozen. No differentiation except for logos.
Plus, I prefer only charging people for what they use, ala cloud providers, but that freaks people out that if they have an unexpectedly big night they could have a big bill
So you have to play the game of "I'll charge you $X for up to 10 128K listeners" and then average out that most places peak at 7, not 10, so you work your average and knife-edge your margins
@MichaelHampton Yeah, that's always a good idea.
I need to look at cloud bandwidth pricing and compare with what a $4 megabit would get me.
$4 gets me about what, 35 Gigabytes of transfer on a service like Amazon?
@MichaelHampton Yeahhh... it's just the capex is hard to come by
Total speed in mbps: 1
Translates to... (bits)
...megabits per hour: 3600
...megabits per day: 86400
...megabits per month: 2592000
...gigabits per hour: 3.515625
...gigabits per day: 10800
...gigabits per month: 324000
...terabits per day: 316.40625
...terabits per month: 9492.1875
Translates to... (bytes)
...megabytes per hour: 450
...megabytes per day: 10800
...megabytes per month: 324000
...gigabytes per hour: 0.439453125
...gigabytes per day: 10.546875
...gigabytes per month: 316.40625
...terabytes per day: 0.010299682617188
Well, when you're small you can do the pay as you go thing on a public cloud. If you actually start seeing some success and need to scale things out/up, then you need to get the hell off the public cloud and find the capital somewhere.
Total speed in mbps: 100
Translates to... (bits)
...megabits per hour: 360000
...megabits per day: 8640000
...megabits per month: 259200000
...gigabits per hour: 351.5625
...gigabits per day: 1080000
...gigabits per month: 32400000
...terabits per day: 31640.625
...terabits per month: 949218.75
Translates to... (bytes)
...megabytes per hour: 45000
...megabytes per day: 1080000
...megabytes per month: 32400000
...gigabytes per hour: 43.9453125
...gigabytes per day: 1054.6875
...gigabytes per month: 31640.625
So $400 a month for bandwidth and $400 a month for cabinet space means the above could be had for $800 per month. I suppose that could make a streaming business that covers costs and a little more.
But streaming is a hard business and needs differentiation, and a lot of the ideas I've collected I think could make a product like that, but... I dunno.
With 100Mbps line, I could sustain 1600 64Kbps clients simultaneously.
I'd need to really crunch numbers to see what I'd have to charge and how you'd bracket clients. I really don't like how the streaming industry has pretty much gone the way of charging based on a fixed numbers of listeners at a fixed bandwidth rate.
@jscott But I can't live in my cabinet. =( I might be able to live in the office space at the datacenter though...
Autoscale the billing? Say you have X listeners and bill $YY, and X2 listeners costs $ZZ. But you measure the number of listeners by the hour. So if you have 100 listeners during 7pm-8pm you pay $ and if you have 200 listeners during 8pm-9pm you pay $$$.
@MichaelHampton Yeah, possible. I've heard that scaled billing of any kind scares people away unless they're significantly technical, and hobbycasters spook easily.
I do hate going into hobbycasting forums because they're just technical enough to use big words, but not technical enough to know what they mean or how to string them together into real sentences.
@MichaelHampton No shame. I'm a layman MBA - it's what you need to know to actually sell what you can do.
I handed my business card to a developer acquaintance of mine the other day. My card lists "cloud services" as a competency. He lit up at that immediately. "OH CLOUD!"
I winced, but I have to list that kind of thing.
The reality is, "cloud services" means I can have a conversation to steer someone towards or away from a cloud provider like Amazon or Rackspace, no different than the conversation we had above.
But I have to put it in a way that people will connect with.
So of all the things on the business card, the one thing that people light up at is "cloud services"
sigh
I guided the streaming client of mine to use jPlayer as a web-based audio client, so perhaps I could roll some kind of fancy player into the offering. "Stream with me and get the best control panel and player on the webs!"
The great thing about IceCast and streaming in general is that it's so light on the hardware. A $1000 supermicro could handle tens of thousands of simultaneous listeners and multiple Gbits of traffic.
@WesleyDavid driving me bonkers, just tried retesting at home and I can't get it to work :/ ... If I ask, I'll just look stupid... going to try and look a lot more in to this!
@WesleyDavid I'm not saying that -- but I am admitting that Unix in 1987 had a way more advanced command-line interface than 1987 Microsoft technology... BUT... Windows has come a LONG way.
@Jacob Not only would I have never known wtf a 42u rack was or what to do with when I was your age, but my parents would have been like "gtfo if you think you're putting that in OUR house"
Yeah... I've always been a little crazier than the people around me in terms of having extreme hardware going on even in the room I sleep in... but 32 1U servers in my bedroom is beyond me
Buy the model without a built-in router. And for the love of gawd don't use "the defaults" for your internal RFC1918 addresses. — Michael Hampton2 mins ago
It wouldn't even do SSL termination until the most recent dev version.
And that hasn't hit stable yet.
This guy clearly wants to proxy outgoing connections, like a corporate web proxy. So you're looking for something like squid, Forefront whatever they named it this week, etc.
