Time to build out
My poor colo server is taking quite a beating. I serve a bit from my colo, which is located in downtown SF at United Layer via NetPublishing. The box is an old Pentium III 1Ghz with 512MB of memory, but it is leased and the cost is pretty low for what I get.
I have a few more wiki’s and blogs I want to launch in the coming months, and even with the small amount of traffic I get the machine crawls during peak times (noon and 6pm) as everyone goes online to edit the wiki, comment on blogs or view photos. I typically have a memory use of 786MB, so I’m swapping like crazy, and the system load is almost always 3 (that is, three processes are waiting for 1 CPU to become available).
I’m now in the market for a new colo box. I talked to Greg, the colo provider, and he says he can spec out a new machine for me, which means I might get to finally run FreeBSD 6 (horray!). Moving to a new machine is going to be a pain, as I have had this machine for almost 2 years, and in 2 years I’ve collected a lot of databases, shell scripts, and odd configuration files to get everything working well. It is sort of like moving to a new house, you find all this broken stuff, and stuff that makes you wonder why you had such stuff to begin with!
August 15th, 2006 at 6:46 am
I’ve been reading investment magazines and there was a quote in Forbes from a techie that says they are not replacing Oracle databases for the California Universities. But it also sounds some smaller database co. guys are hot on their heels. Do you fallow any of these big database businesses? I’m almost afraid to ask.
August 15th, 2006 at 8:42 am
I don’t know what they run at the other UC sites, but we mainly have IBM’s DB2 database software here, and it is running on the mainframe. We’ve been slowly moving new projects over to DB2 on commodity systems such as Linux, but it is slow going and the mainframe people are really uncomfortable with Linux. It’s too bad too, because IBM’s service contracts run into the millions here.
We do have some outside contractors, and I can only assume that the other UC’s hire them in to do migrations to more modern systems. At least at my site, we have a mainframe and database dating back to the early 80’s. It prints the paychecks, so no one really wants to mess with it!