– Les Laboratoires Phoenix welcomes a new managed client, at the same time as I got my two first contractual employee (with enough job to drive them for years).
– I’ll be giving a talk at ConFoo, March 12th, called ‘Massive Scalability’. Be there, its going to be a pretty good one.
– I’ve been mandated to write another article for the European edition of Linux+DVD. Deadline is in a couples days.
– I’ve started dancing classes. (No comments please ;-))
– With the wedding happening soon, we are totally swamped with stuff to do. From food tasting to getting whatever I will wear, going through hotel reservation, decoration choices… By themself, each task is quite easy to manage, but add to that the fact we are doing most of it remotely and that Catherine schedule is just crazy.

At least, this morning, I’ve got a 20 minutes break, waiting for the bus thats going to take me to Montreal – on yet another ‘business trip’.

But, beside everything that might be happening with my business (work log never been that full, started to get employees), I decided to take 2 minutes for a big fact of life (for sysadmin/management). Watch it, watch it: Nobody (especially YOU) care about backup. You care about successful restore. There! Now, I don’t want to hear about how great your backup are, if you don’t do regular restore (even as test), they’re not worth anything.

Reread those last sentences. Important point in a sysadmin life.

Anyway, in the top of the list, I’ll be going to a ‘wine & cheese‘, to Montreal to meet my family, to the church to meet the priest. But, as always, I also need to work. So Sphinx, Chef & Puppet, MySQL Multi-master replication, MySQL snapshot + recovery….

… not counting the fact that a new website is underway for my enterprise (Les Laboratoires Phoenix), that I’m dealing with a designer for new logo and business cards, that my accounting is being entirely re-done to ‘account’ for my migration to a corporation, that I need to finish 3 projects drafts by Monday morning (for the R&D papers), and that I need to complete my invoicing for November.

.Don’t know how others does it, but I guess they just do. Like I’ll be doing this week-end.

PHP version 5.3.1 was just released. This release contains a patch for a denial of service condition we’ve reported on 27 October 2009. The problem is related with PHP’s handling of RFC 1867 (Form-based File upload in HTML).

Source: http://www.securityfocus.com/archive/1/507982

Exploit already on PacketStorm…

The next few hours will see little sleep and lots of action ; More precisely I’ll be deploying lots of hardware (2 IBM SAN, 2 core servers, 2 switchs, 2 APC, 5 branchs servers – supporting up to 20 ‘leaf’/virtual servers), and then somes (3 couples of 2 systems in high redundancy (wackamole IP ‘fencing’, shared-storage through DRBD). All that will go in ‘my’ new 48U cage @Hypertec (old nortel building) to act as a demo for some clients.

Once that’s completed, the true fun start: A very big part of this infrastructure is going to be self-healing, failure resitant and high performance. We are speaking of :

This is going to be solid, scalable, fast : the holy grail of a lot of service provider that are aiming at automatization of their ‘hosting’ business. The result of a lot of planning and testing ; the cutting-edge of cloud-computing.

After a title like that, I’m going to let you down with a very bad news:

Apple cans the ZFS integration project.

I’m really not happy about that, but we can’t do much about it. This is very weird because, last week, I drafted a post about ZFS & XSAN2. It was about my expectation for the world of ‘integrated’ filesystem… guess they are a bit lower now.

Great hiking yesterday, went for a variation of the Wolf Trail near the Blanchet Beach (@Lac Meech). About 350m of elevation gain and 7.5km walk in the forest.

Should be able to post one or two pictures today.

Wolf Trail – 8.3km return, expert, 400m elevation gain – The trail starts at parking lot P13 at Blanchet Beach and continues to a fork where you should keep left. You will shortly pass a beaver pond on your right. Further on the trial intersects with #38 and you should keep right at this point. You’ll next encounter the intersection with trail #1, the Fire Tower Road. The trail at this point is no longer numbered but keep going and you’ll reach you’re objective in no time, the very short spur to the Tawadina Lookout and an excellent overview of the Ottawa Valley. A little further on the trail swings back towards the start passing three more lookouts along the way before the final steep descent to the parking lot. The trail takes about 4 hours to complete.
Source: http://www.out-there.com/gatineau.htm

1) what’s wrong with:
void f() {
char buf[2048];
gets(buf)
}

void main() {
f();
}

(note ; this is the modified version of this function. Read comment 1 on this blog post for more info)

2) With current systems, IPV6 is becoming standard feature. What security problems do you see with that statement and how would you go to secure an IPV4 network knowing those problems ?

3) There have been quite a few problems with SSL theory and OPENSSL implementation in the last few years – please, name a few and explain them.

4) What is entropy or prng ?

About Hypertec

As a rule, never visit somewhere without background info : Hypertec-BCDR (Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery) (they also use the name Hypertec-AS for the french version) is the hosting, datacenter & high availability services division of the Hypertec Group. The group look like an umbrella corporation which also hold the Hypertec Systems division (kind of a computer retail shop). The exact financial details are private (the group is private / NOT available in the stock market), but from what I’ve heard, the whole group have about 120+ employee and a sales figure of about 20M$/years. Those are very rough numbers, I could be totally off the track, and include all their activities (don’t know for the data center aspect only). There seems to be office in a couple locations (Montreal, Quebec, Ottawa, Toronto… ).

So, its quite strange that I haven’t heard about them… especially since they are located inside the old Nortel building in Saint-Laurent. I’ve also contact friends about them, and they were virtually unknown!

The visit

… and this is why I’m doing a blog post on them: because Jonathan Ahdoot, sales manager, walked me through their data center and I must say, he was able to impress me. The main surface is reserved for tier-4 dedicated cages to which you can add a small quantity of tier-2 rack (about 60) setup. As a reminder, in datacenter higher tier speak of better quality (scale from 1 to 4 – as defined by the uptime institute)(different from Internet peering tier).

The visit make clear quite fast why I hadn’t heard about them : they fish for the big ones and government (which can be considered a big one) contracts. They have rooms for rent that act as office away from office for couples of days, they have a 10 posts technical room, a cafeteria (which can become 24h) and … behold: a lounge. Yes ! a true lounge with satellite TV and couches. How many time would I have given everything (my clients own ;-)) for a nice couch while waiting for a file copy between the SAN and the server I’m restoring @ 2h AM. They also make their conference room available to clients (which is another nice feature, especially for office-less consultant (me!)).

I’m far from being a data center specialist: I build infrastructure and I rack them somewhere – this is mainly what I do. So I cannot go into big details about all the nice features the data center seemed to have or in the small point why it might not be as great as I think. However, there is one thing that did impress me: There is 5 flywheel energy storage system in the main engineering room, all being provided by electricity (Hydro) and hooked on a generator. This was also the first time I’ve heard about flywheel energy storage (FES), but I do find the idea quite neat. There must be a lot of energy lost through friction (even if they are in vaccum), but it does look like a system way more secure than batteries (UPS) for data center. Secure as in : I’ve already been screwed twice by “this was a planned maintenance and the ups didn’t turned on, or the tech turned off the wrong line”.

But the sky is not totally blue: Since they do seem to target tier-4 clients, they lack a bit of the standard facility we require in a tier-2: renting 48U racks rarely leave you the space for screen, mouse, keyboard, screwdriver… you expect them to be readily available on site. From what I’ve saw, they were either lacking or in bad shape (tier-2, again… the tier-4 look awesome). Anyway, if you got a cage (with multiple rack) and you don’t have space for tools, you have others problems.

Anyway, a couples contracts will require me to be in data center for the next few months (migrating 35U, deploying 20U, re-designing 24U…). So I guess I will be posting more reviews as time goes.