Project Updates!

Here's a few updates concerning my current and upcoming projects at Xenion "Labs".

From the Squid consulting side of things:

• I'm putting together a proposal to implement generic Quota support in Squid-2 for an interested party. Hopefully they'll fund both the Squid-side (which will go back into Squid-2 and maybe Squid-3 in the future) and the proprietary code. This way they get their shiny features, the Squid community gets their shiny Quota support, and the company doesn't have to pay for ongoing maintenance of the Quota framework! Winners all around!
• I'm doing some installs of Squid for a company supplying internet access via Satellite. This means I'll have to tune Squid to cache a whole lot of popular stuff -and- do some tuning to optimise TCP/IP over satellite. I'll wrap up everything from this project and put it online.
• I've got an upcoming project to setup a small Squid cluster for a company providing services via a MediaWiki install. I'm going to leverage the excellent work done by the Wikimedia group and hopefully put all of that up online for others to leverage.

I've also been working on an NNRP proxy for a commercial USENET provider. Yes, people still pay for usenet services. Its quite scary actually! The first phase of that is near completion and I'll hopefully be able to leverage some of that in some open source projects. The NNRP proxy is currently handling almost a gigabit of reader traffic without any particularly scary issues; I'm quite impressed. Hopefully we can scale this software up to proxy around 5 to 10gbit of NNRP traffic and about 5000-15000 connected clients per server. This scales much, much better than the current software of choice in  the NNRP world - The diablo reader stuff, or "dreaderd".

I've been working on a few things on the hosting side - mostly relating to some content delivery ideas of mine. Nothing fantastically different there; I'll post some more details when there's something concrete and deliverable.

New Pricing Online!

I've just put the new pricing online - http://www.xenion.com.au/products/pricing.html .
This includes basic webhosting, domain services, traffic, colocation and virtual private servers.

New Customer: European-based media company CDN

I've recently acquired a small support contract to help build and troubleshoot issues for a European-based media company. They've built their own simple CDN with servers around Europe to deliver content. I've built and deployed two new Squid-2.7 servers for them which handle their current summer holiday load (20-30mbit at peak) with absolutely no trouble whatsoever.

Based on their existing servers which I'm apparently helping replace, they predict the servers will each peak above 150mbit/sec once the holiday period is over and everyone is back at work. I'm looking forward to it. I've got a few configuration tricks up my sleeve to optimise their setup to dramatically reduce the CPU consumed without any code or system changes. Stay tuned..

Pricing Updates!

I'm about to publish some updated bulk pricing rates for existing and new clients. I'll also take the oppertunity to tidy up the existing pricing pages so they make more sense.

Stay tuned!

Commercial Squid services - taking off!

I'm just signing up my newest support client - in Greece, no less. I've got clients in a variety of countries now - Spain, Brazil, Greece, UK, Australia, Switzerland. Shiny!

The client-side delay pools work and the per-connection shaping should shortly appear in a Squid-2.HEAD tree near you.

My work queue looks something like this:

• For commercial support clients: update Youtube and Microsoft Updates rules; grr to Youtube for changing their stuff again!


• Commercial contract: delaying request forwarding until a certain amount of the request body has been read in. Slightly overdue thanks to college commitments but it'll be done very shortly.


• Commercial contract: Sorting out some Squid related sub-contracted work for Yahoo!


• Commercial contract: Solaris + Samba + AD + Squid - why the hell is it so painful!


• Final testing of my Squid development/testing cluster hardware before I go and install it in the colocation rack. I can hear the Dell and Sun servers from the other side of the house; I think its time they moved into professional hosting space!


• More stuff which I can't yet talk about!

Starting August 1, I'm going to be doing a big push for Squid support and hosting services. I now want to grow this into something much, much bigger than just me and I believe I'm now in the position to do it.

Also, I hope to organise some meetings with vendors when I'm in the US in October. I -hope- this includes Sun and Google - specifically for hardware/performance work and video/youtube caching respectively. I'll post more when I have firmer plans.

Hosting environment updates

G'day,

I'm just finishing the final rollout of the DNS updates on the older servers. Everything checks out fine.

Hosting-4 is handling new clients well. I'll have users migrated off the initial hosting servers and retire the old hardware back into the testing lab by next week.

I'm about to post some updated VM and bandwidth pricing; stay tuned!

Updates - 20 June 2008

A few updates!

• Hosting-4 is online! I've migrated myself and one client over. Everything seems to be functioning normally. I'll be contacting clients over the next few days to migrate them off Hosting-1 in preparation to remove Hosting-1 (and replace it with more up to date hardware.)
• I've completed two pending Squid contracts and I'll be shortly beginning a third. The work is being folded into Squid-2.HEAD as we speak. Thanks to everyone who has signed up for support and development work, your business is helping strengthen the Squid open source project!
• Adrian needs sleep. Who can recommend some music?

Welcome!

Welcome to Xenion Live Updates! :)

I decided to create a blog here rather than run and maintain my own blogging software.