Posted by Matthew Bloch
Fri, 25 Jul 2008 00:35:00 GMT
We received some generous coverage from The Register, ZDNet, Hexus, Engadget and Pocket-lint about our super-value Atom server and a few takers as well. There was a definite note of scepticism concerning the Atom server’s horsepower but it’s equivalent to a 3-4 year low-end P4, and fast enough to host … well you’ll see over the next few weeks as our first Atom customers let us know. We’re also putting a couple of systems the way of some interesting open source projects so, hope we’ll be able to get even more in-depth with them.
The Bytemark annual visit to LUGRadio Live worked out as the best yet - our gaming rig got a hammering from tens of newly converted engineers, spys, pyros and soldiers. The computers didn’t need too much attention to keep running, but enemy number one were (I think) some cheap PS/2 extension leads which caused the systems to need a complete reboot once every few hours. I think only one person got interrupted by that problem, and a few stayed for a whole morning or afternoon without interruption. Personally I got shot up quite a lot, had to take many few breaks, but got on best as a sneaky spy. Additionally If anyone playing with us would like a copy of the Orange Box, almost fully Linux compatible (apart from being written for Windows and all) - Valve software were kind enough to send a few freebies but a bit late so we have a free copy! Sorry that’s as far as we got with prizes but I hadn’t really got the hang of administering a tournament and didn’t want to stop the game when we had a full house enjoying themselves.
Also at LUGRadio, Craig Smith at O’Reilly did a funny kind of interview for the O’Reilly/GMT blog where I got to talk about myself and my company for about ten minutes solid. Hey Craig, a few questions might have stopped my eyes from darting quite so wildy 
I sound posh on tape.
There was also karaoke, a (chinny) raccoon, and many many interesting people to meet and exchange gossip with. Here’s to another ‘last-ever’ LUGRadio Live again next year, and good luck with the next 12 months, Jono and the team, they sound like interesting times.
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Posted by Matthew Bloch
Thu, 17 Jul 2008 21:50:00 GMT
Here is version 1 of our Atom server, based around the Intel Atom board. It contains a fixed specification of 2GB RAM and 2x160 100GB drives (sorry correction there) for only £45 per month (+£50 setup), or £495 per year without a setup charge. This has chopped 25% off our previous lowest dedicated server price because it draws much lower power than our normal Athlon range: only 25 45 watts with drives, memory and power supply, so we burn a few less trees to keep it running.
No idea why, but I think we’re the first hosting company to be selling Atom servers, at least, says Google. I will bask in the glow of this fact for all of two minutes.
Anyway, who cares, the Atom 230 runs at 1.6GHz and hardware sites variously pitch it at the speed of a really fast Pentium 3 or low-end P4/Pentium M - while I can’t vouch for the figures in this chart, its positioning of the Atom 230 agrees with various hardware review sites’ opinion of its performance (at least the few I read). It might not do for your HDTV playback or gaming, but when it comes to pricing servers in the data centre, where electricity prices are still marching north, the Atom’s 6W board is king.
It becomes our lowest-cost dedicated server, and an easy upgrade from a virtual machine. You might want the Atom’s guaranteed performance, or just the generous memory allowance for running many different services (because memory is usually far more important a factor in server performance than CPU speed). You can still benefit from our easy upgrade policy - when you order any higher-powered sever as an upgrade, Bytemark move your system image, data and IP address to the new system as part of the installation (and here’s our value range from £60p.m.). Plus, you know, actual real telephone support from proper Linux geeks, free remote backup space, SMS alarms when anything goes bang, serial console, power cycling, all the usual fabulous benefits you get with Bytemark’s dedicated servers are now £15 cheaper.
If you’re already tempted, you can order one now subject to our usual delivery schedule - once the initial demand has passed, we’re intending to soon start stocking them for same day delivery. Will let you know when that happens of course.
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Posted by Matthew Bloch
Wed, 16 Jul 2008 19:00:00 GMT
If you missed my last post, Bytemark have built a dedicated Team Fortress 2 multiplayer gaming rack on wheels featuring a server, 16 diskless PCs and zero copies of Windows. It’s almost as convenient as a Playstation, only it needs about 5 square metres to deploy and weighs 200 kilos. Did I say it has wheels? And it’s ready for action, so we’ll be hard at work testing it in the office the next couple of days. Here’s the rig booted up with as many monitors as I could be bothered to unbox and plug in:
i.e. the systems go from a cold start to a Team Fortress 2’s 2fort game. Unfortunately it’s a a little on the slow side to boot due to Steam needing a little ‘thinking time’ before it lets you start the game proper. But it boots unattended, and you can just sit down and play. I will probably be tweaking things right up to the last minute to get better performance, faster booting and so on, but thanks to some slog from everyone in the office it works.
And here are another couple of shots from its genesis - the wheely rack just after delivery, and Alice’s handiwork:
The rig’s debut (and possibly last curtain call - we have nowhere to put the bloody thing afterwards) will be at LUGRadio Live in Wolverhampton this weekend, 18th-19th July, which Bytemark are sponsoring. Meet Alex, Nick and Matthew, talk about hosting, then set them on fire and shoot them in the head!
We will be running a rolling game throughout the day where anyone can just sit down and play. We’ll also be running 2 x 1 hour prize tournaments scheduled on both days where you can compete for fabulous (probably quite beer-centred) prizes for the winning teams. So if you’re coming to LUGRadio and fancy fragging for prizes, you could really help me out by emailing matthew [at] bytemark.co.uk. Let me know your name and email address in advance, as well as which days you’ll be there. Even better, if you have up to 7 friends and want to compete as a team, let me know their details too and I’ll try to get it scheduled in advance. Of course I’ll be taking registrations on the day but if I get a lot of advance interest, there might not be so many places left for the tournament.
If you already have Team Fortress 2 and laptop, you can also bring it along, plug in and join the fray (sorry no space for full size desktop PCs - one oversized rig is enough!). We’ll have 16 PCs but 24 game slots, so it would be awesome to have a full house.
More pictures tomorrow once we’ve done some, ahem, testing in the office.
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Posted by Matthew Bloch
Thu, 10 Jul 2008 10:00:00 GMT
So now that it’s roughly working, here’s what we’re doing for LUGRadio Live this year. When you’re exhibiting shows can get a bit dull, just jumping out and asking folk about hosting. With a community event like LUGRadio, a) this approach is pretty crass, and b) we probably know the answer from everyone there within about an hour. So this time I thought we’d try to contribute to the event and show our studly Linux skills with a super large mobile gaming rig!
Nobody was going to be impressed if we wheeled in a rack of web servers, but I thought it wouldn’t cost that much more to turn our regular value server range, of which we build loads every week, into games clients, and to bring an old fashioned LAN party, monitors and all, along to the show. And that’s pretty much what we’ve done - the plan looks a bit like this:
The plan is we would wheel in this rack, turn on the computers and they would instantly be ready to play the excellent Team Fortress 2 - a team-based shooter that is great to look at, and easy to pick up. The problems I had to work out were:
- the systems would be a pain to set up identically;
- like most games, Team Fortress 2 is a closed source commercial product written for Windows, not Linux;
- we have to run the whole thing, monitors and all, off one or two normal 13A mains feeds.
All of these problems pointed towards discless clients running the game under WINE - and it all seems to be working.
First I built the server - a dual-core Athlon BE-2400 with 4GB RAM, and a couple of extra network ports. It runs the recently-released Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy release. But it wasn’t quite a regular install - I made sure not to fill the whole hard drive because I wanted to make a second installation on the same machine which would be the client. That way I could build and test both images on the same single piece of hardware just by rebooting and picking another partition. Once I had the game working on the client image, and the server working on the server image, I got to the hard part - getting the game to boot and run from a discless system.
Our servers attempt to PXE boot themselves as a first boot option; in the data centre this lets our customers rescue their systems because they’re not reliant on the hard drive contents. In the context of our gaming rig, the network boot is the only option to save power on the clients and so I don’t have to worry about systems getting broken on the day. If somebody breaks a system, or it crashes, I just reboot it and there’s no harm done other than losing a seat for 3-4 minutes. It also means I can bring along spares and there’s no set up to do - just plug in a system, turn it on, and it’s ready to play.
PXE boots work like this:
- the client system turns on its network interface and starts issuing DHCP requests
- the server replies with an IP address, and the address which the client should boot from (which will also be the server)
- the client does a TFTP transfer of a program to help finish the process, and runs it
- the boot program (we’re using PXELinux) transfers its configuration over TFTP, then (from the configuration) starts to pull over the Linux kernel and an initrd (all still over TFTP)
- PXELinux runs the kernel, the kernel runs the initrd, and the initrd mounts the root filesystem over NFS on the server.
- the kernel starts the system as normal, with no local storage required, hoorah.
As I said, I’d installed a completely normal Ubuntu system, and it needs a few alterations to run remotely over NFS. A typicaly system needs to write to its PID files, log to log files and will complain or stop early if they can’t. You can take a scalpel to your target root filesystem and just hack out the bits that generate errors but don’t! That way you end up with a system where basic functions like apt stop working and debugging becomes harder - you want the system to remain as normal as possible so that you can boot it normally to upgrade software at a later point.
So there are two main tricks I’ve used: the first is the linstub initrd which is an idea I had a while ago to make initrds a bit less painful to use. Basically Linux initrds are usually built by a distribution to boot a single system in a single configuration. I wanted to be able to boot lots of different machines on the same kernel, which would normally involve building lots of different initrds. With linstub you can configure how the system setup works from the command line; so you can tell it where the root filesystem should live, what RAID arrays to expect and so on, and it tries to autodetect things where they’re not specified. This is different from a normal initrd where most of these things are hardwired, and any slight change will result in the system not booting. I am using it to NFS mount an otherwise regular Ubuntu root filesystem.
Next problem is that Ubuntu will start to complain very early on that it can’t write to the filesystem (which is what we want, remember, no writing to the disc means no broken clients), resulting in a broken X. Fixing it is quite easy but took me a couple of attempts - I wrote a couple of horrible scripts to copy chunks of the filesystem into tmpfs mounts, then rebind the copied bits back to the original mount point. Steam was a bit trickier as it has 7GB of game files, so my script needed to copy some of the files, but not the big game files - these were symlinked back to the read-only versions on the NFS share. Yucky, but it works.
Finally we just use Gnome’s auto login on the client, stick a link into .config/autostart to fire up the game and the client machines power on, starts X, start Steam, start Team Fortress and connect to the game server for instant play with no Windows and no tedious installations.
This post has been a bit rushed, so I’ll make another one in a couple of days when we’ve finished building the client machines and have tested it out a bit more thoroughly, and make a more thorough run-down of the configuration in case anyone fancies making a similar rig.
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Posted by Matthew Bloch
Wed, 02 Jul 2008 20:39:00 GMT
So we’re sponsoring the last ever LUGRadio Live event this year in Wolverhampton which, if previous years were anything to go by, will be riotous fun interspersed by some interesting talks. (my favourite last year was Gervase Markham’s introduction to logical fallacies, cheekily entitled How to win every argument) If you’re within a couple of hours of the Black Country, come along for a few hours or an evening and have a drink with Bytemark, listen to some talks from Microsoft, Redhat and Google about Linux and open-source development.
And here’s the mess that will become our little exhibit for the event - more when we’ve tested it :)
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Posted by Matthew Bloch
Wed, 02 Jul 2008 08:19:00 GMT
We often thought it was time to tell our customers the sorts of things we do inbetween orders and support calls. I’d not done anything about it until now!. When we started, I used to send emailed newsletters every few weeks to remind customers we existed, tell them about new deals, features, shows we were exhibiting at, and that kind of thing. Gradually the newsletters have become about once a year due to my split duties as MD, head of marketing, software architect and dog walker. And I could never quite justify emailing customers action shots of the office, or the dog, or cute articles that only family is going to be interested in (honest Mum, it’s a real business, I would have been terrible at law). Well no longer - blog.bytemark.co.uk has crash-landed in 2001 (only with Rails, and virtualisation, and new Doctor Who) and we have a lot of catching up to do.
To our customers, for now we’ll still be announcing any network problems formally through our usual forum location so look there for important information, not here. And as usual www.bytemark.co.uk/support is the place to look for technical support, please don’t place comments here if you want a definite reply.
To do before telling anyone about this: pretty skin from Julian, frothy articles to fill the front page, document 400-page tagging regime. If you find it before I’ve put the URL anywhere, sshhhh, don’t tell anyone!
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Posted by Matthew Bloch
Wed, 02 Jul 2008 08:11:00 GMT
This first post used to read ‘hello world’ – but I thought it should say Hello Nick, to welcome our newest member of staff. He talks sharp, moves fast, dances salsa, and is already speeding away on a piece of software to get us organised. Go Nick
We’ve always been slow to recruit but with internal software development and sales picking up pace over the last few months, I suspect we’ll be hiring again before the end of the year. So if you’re smart, know Linux, know Ruby, or are just a fast learner with a completely different specialty, drop your CV in to Matthew and you’ll be the first to know when we’re ready for you.
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