I am posting this to my blog, because I know that you will get it from the planet aggregator!

I am sure that you are all scratching your heads right about now and thinking, “that big oafish Australian male that yaps on about mundane technology or sport all the time, has an artistic streak..?”. Truth be told, it has been a passion of mine since my years were measured in single digits and this most recent and inaugural Richard exhibition comes courtesy mostly of a 65 year old German medium format folding camera purchased in Beijing second hand for 600 RMB, with film developed myself in my bathroom.

The location is a jazz bar called “Song Bar” which is located at “The Place” - which is just south of Sanlitun - it is the place (yes, the name is dumb) that has the whole outdoor roof made up of one giant plasma display with beer gardens underneath. And as unlikely as it may seem of me, I am extremely shy, nervous and anxious to see as many familiar faces as possible arrive!

So please mark 7:30PM this Thursday the 10 July for a chance to see my photographic portrayals and stories of Beijing life.

Cheers,
Richard Ford.

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Well the Olympics are coming and life is already getting hard. Here are some of the current restrictions that are going on.

- No new broadband lines can be pulled and connected from now until September

- No new servers allowed into data centres from the 15th of July until September

- No imported products that contain a “CD” or “DVD” in the box because “they might contain a virus”

So since most of the software sold here is packaged overseas - you can’t run any projects now that require new software purchases for the next 10 weeks - unless of course you can get it electronically from the vendor. That is assuming that you could even deploy a new server into an IDC. Which given by the hassles we had last Sunday while our rack vendor tried to enter Beijing to deliver some new racks to our IDC….. you wouldn’t have a rack for the server or a server for the software.

Who knows - maybe the internet may go as well.

Talk about paranoia!

We may very well have to claim “Force Majeure” soon for some clients. God knows we are not going to take the commercial liability for the disruptions this will cause.

Again just like the internet changes a few months back.

WHERE IS THE ADVANCED WARNING AND PLANNING???

Can’t wait for these friggin games to be over and life to return to normal…. watch out for those CD’s guys… they might blow up or pass on SARS!

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Well apart from some systems using GiB and others GB and then some manufacturers using base10 and not base3 and saying that 1GB is 1000MB and not 1024 - I have found another one.

When making a file system that is not your root file system (/) or var (/var) or root (/root), etc - say a second drive or partition used for something else, try to format with the “-m 0″ command so that 5% is not reserved for the root user.

On a 1024GB array - say 1TB - that is a whopping ~52GB!!

Also if you will have many files in said system, also throw in the “-O dir_index” flag too, to enable hash tree’s for directory look ups - =big= speed increase.

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http://www.melcherruwart.com/

He is a past client and a very insightful person to talk to in person - and his blog has some excellent articles on it. He actually writes long articles! I shunned writing everyday crap on this blog as I wanted to keep it researched, of high quality and a source for information on China with respect to my focus.

So I don’t write up short stuff and my list of “Topics” and “Outlines” that I never seem to get written grows ever longer. So while not writing junk is a good thing IMHO, to then not write anything - is also bad.

I must sit down this weekend and brain dump.

PS: Go read Tom’s blog…

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BAD Behaviour Count: 2K+

The spam is getting worse - but also kinda of better…. see below.

Sample 1
———-
Eat a third and drink a third and leave the remaining third of your stomach empty. Then, when you get angry, there will be sufficient room for your rage.

Sample 2
———–
Listen. Do not have an opinion while you listen because frankly, your opinion doesn?t hold much water outside of Your Universe. Just listen. Listen until their brain has been twisted like a dripping towel and what they have to say is all over the floor.

Sample 3
———–
A good man would prefer to be defeated than to defeat injustice by evil means.

Sample 4
———–
Assuming either the Left Wing or the Right Wing gained control of the country, it would probably fly around in circles.

Sample 5
———–
While we have the gift of life, it seems to me that only tragedy is to allow part of us to die - whether it is our spirit, our creativity, or our glorious uniqueness.

So what is this? MOTD daemon source code has been hacked into a spam bot?

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I am feeling a bit guilty today looking over all my shots. I take so many of the people here. And all about the city (Beijing) people have setup donation area’s, people are lining up in all weather to donate blood and communities (we mostly live in gated residential compounds in the big cities) have started home drives to raise funds.

I am not Chinese myself (Bloody Aussie!) however for those of you that have an affinity with another country or culture you will know that it all hits home the same.

Not sure what the footage is like in the west - but there are some pretty horrific shots floating about here in the local press. And seems to get worse by the day. The govt has just confirmed that 3 whole towns have been entombed - “Pompei Style” by whole mountains that cleaved off in half. Those residents will be found by archaeologists and not rescuers.

Anyway if there is enough interest I would like to sell some prints and send them with 100% of the “donation” going to Rotary China.

Printing on Kodak (by Kodak) on A3 (choice of papers) is a flat USD $3 and to post a tube overseas about USD $10. If anyone is interested, please drop me an email rford AT utilitycomputing.com.cn and a link to the photo in question and a donation offer and I can sort out the rest.

www.flickr.com/photos/sinoperture/sets/72157604759616415/

Cheers,
Richard.

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I always try to get the best prices within the scope of common sense for clients. Mainly because as a integrated stack vendor, the pricing on one component can blow out the total price of the whole stack. And hardware is the first place to start (given an understanding of the management systems and risk credentials of the project at hand already).

One thorn in my side is mandated “Installation and Configuration” charges. Which are basically extortion attempts.

On the one hand no tech from SUN or IBM from their mainframe/mini computer division is going to know or be able to setup all variables in our system as we need - and as we will do over a long period of time - IE: the process of “Configuration” is Iterative and not finite to one small window of time. :-\

And going back to that whole vertical stack business. Why should a client pay a hardware vendor for support and then pay the integrator for support? These built in service charges make it harder for us to win business and sell anything as we have to protect ourselves as we will be doing the support - and that usually means that the client pays twice!

As much as these hardware firms like to chase the integrators and system builders as a great “Channel” to their products buyers in the market place. Mandatory setup and Configuration fees (Yes they apparently are mutually exclusive in charging if not in the vernacular of the Queen’s English!) are a great way of say “Up Yours” to said channel partners/integrators.

It is not yet clear who will get the Gold Medal - but the race is very competitive!

:-\

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It reminded me of a similar situation that happened in our company, when one sales consultant got really angry when he noticed that under “Country” in the drop down box for entering in client data to our CRM, it showed Taiwan.

No end of discussions from us about how this was for “Geographic” purposes and mailing purposes - with examples given of air travel and the like would calm him down.  In the end we asked the developer to remove the name Taiwan from the Country list.  Even though such “Countries” like Christmas Island, Norfolk Island and Hawaii survive.

While we may have been quite content to keep the country list as given and as issued by the UN as a list purely for logistics purposes without any comment or affirmation of status or not as a country, it seemed in our situation, just like the one on Facebook that the simplist thing to do was rectify the perceived result.

For Facebook it makes no difference, it is just a label.  For us it makes no difference either because we are not a global company anyhow.  The lesson is in that the digital borders are starting to mimic the real ones.  Conflicts and debates and all.

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This somewhat minor and small technical change (wholesale IP pool reassignment, routing changes and backbone back channel re-routes - please note sarcasm) that was only announced to us, via our provider (and about a billion conspicuously missing TCP packets….) when they were informed by way of them having to contact China Telecom once it became apparent that China Telecom had made a dogs breakfast out of it all around 4PM today - until well past 4:45.

My inference is that there was no official statement or warning before hand - as is par the course for large carriers around the world when they do major infrastructure upgrades/changes.

Maybe China Telecom and Pakistan Telecom should start a joint venture? Their sales pitch could be something along the lines of: “We’re crap at our jobs, suffer from technical and managerial incompetence and don’t mind how many innocent businesses that we screw over!”

There is light at the end of the tunnel though, there are some excellent telco’s in China, like China Net Com, China Comm and some HK based outfits. Too bad they don’t get the luxury of govt protection as well (I am thinking of Telstra/Telecom in Australia right about now) - seems market forces don’t mean crap for China Telecom - but they mean everything for the China Steel industry when dealing with BHP and Rio Tinto.

I digress - but the hypocrisy is glaring.

Advice to China Telecom.

- Plan

- Plan some more

- Review

- Review the plan

- Practice plan

- Practice Exit Strategy

- Review Results of all practices

- Solicit feedback from large customers and Tier 2 ISP’s

- Augment and refine plan based on feedback

- Inform all customers and allow tier 2 ISP’s to inform their customers…. maybe with a few weeks of notice?

- Execute

Not hard really. Not hard at all. So are we just incompetent or stupid? I see no other alternatives apart from “both”. No wonder their share price is tanking and 3G is not operational in 2008 either!

Time for bed - but I am just receiving emails that other servers have been trying to deliver since 4PM today……

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I have two days to complete a thorough colonoscopy of all my little tomcats. Who I can now safely assume will be connecting with upwrads of 100 million Chinese web surfers each day now.

:-s

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Go read www.beijinglug.org for more.

Now if only IDG could put on a half decent Linux World instead of the token crap they excrete out like a constipated hippo.

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Old Japanese Man in Beijing

Originally uploaded by sinoperture

Wearing a cool Fedora and sitting outside his Hutong and resting on his cane…..sorry not about Linux - but I had you all fooled didn’t I ?

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No, I am more worn out by the indiscretions that are going on in the interwebs and just how bad it can be here in China in itself and then when compounded by the knowledge gap amongst local IT staffers.

Basically, one large cluster that we manage was impregnable to the hackers - Linux and JAVA of course. So what did they do? Suss out a Windoze box on the same subnet and hack that. Then the hack was so tailored, that the system that was now faking it’s MAC address (ARP Attack) and responding instead of the cluster - had a HTML code fragment that perfectly matched the advertising fragments that are sent out by the real cluster being imitated.

As such the damage could only be seen by the dodgy ads raising attention and then looking at the status bar in one’s browser to see a weird domain name pop up. Fortunately the damage was limited because one hacked server can’t sustain the loads of a 14 server cluster very well, umm.. and it was also Windows..

So in the end, we enabled port security and MAC address checking on all the edge switches - hey I knew there was a reason for purchasing managed switches apart from bandwidth monitoring and remote port suspension. So now each port has a paired MAC address. If that changes for whatever reason (cable unplugged and switched, or a MAC hack) then the port will shut down until someone manually activates it again. Also the switches ARP cache is set to a much shorter expire time.

Also because our core switches are layer 4 routing CISCO 3560’s that cost a pretty penny, we setup the MAC/ARP equivalent of an ARP BIND server there - to also watch the mappings for any funny business. And also using the fancy CISCO, we have a nice little sniffer running on a dual quad core server with 8GB of RAM and SNORT with BASE and ntop installed.

We also have DENYHOSTS installed already on all systems and they log a good few hundred IP’s a day that are attempting dictionary attacks to login. So with DENYHOSTS logs and the SNORT alerts, we will actively add to our routers ACL and block all the pricks that we can.

Dangerous world out there people. At least enterprise have a new way to save on the cost of deploying a Honey Pot - just put a server in China!

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Sorry if I talked too much.  Sorry if the other Aussies did like wise.  It is very Australian to just tell it how it is and not filter for PC or sensitivities.

Anyway, here is an excellent read from Cory Doctorow that I recently read.  No wonder none of his books are on audible!

Corey Doctorow’s speach at Microsoft

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