Jeff Beard

I’ve had a transient issue with my Internet access randomly “going away”. It’s annoying but generally clears up within a minute or two. I came across a tool called Netalyzr by a group within UC Berkeley. Netalyzr is a Java application available as either an in-browser Applet or a command line utility. It runs a number of network connectivity tests and provides a detailed report hosted on their web site that uses a simple red/yellow/green motif to show problems and their relative importance.

While Netalyzr didn’t clearly show what was going on with my Internet connection it did raise a red flag about network buffers that might be the issue. Unfortunately, that’s a router configuration issue on the part of my ISP so I’m not hopeful for a resolution. But I can always gather data then open a trouble ticket with the vendor.

Regardless, Netalyzr looks like a great tool for troubleshooting connectivity issues.

Since I moved my personal web site from Roller to WordPress a couple of years ago, my web site had been a dog. After reading an article about a PHP-based web site configured to support 9 millions hits per day, and knowing through experience that my site should be significantly faster, I decided it was time to light a fire under WordPress.

(Note that I’ve included gists at the bottom of the article with the important configuration files.)
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It seems that Ubuntu, one of my favorite Linux distributions, is embracing Amazon EC2 styled cloud computing in an upcoming release.

Ubuntu has included the Eucapyptus project in the aptly named Karmic Koala release 9.10 project in order for mere mortals to be able to install and manage their own cloud. Considering that some important people recommend keeping your data on your own hardware to avoid vendor lock-in and privacy issues, this allows companies to avoid the issues while getting some of the advantages of the cloud. Of course, companies will still need a team, albeit much smaller, of crack infrastructure managers but they will have the advantages provided by the abstraction of hardware and it’s associated management tools.

Besides, what could possibly be cooler than having a compute cloud in your basement data center running on a bunch of cheap PC servers? I’m sure nothing can quite compare.