The Full Enchilada

At CES 2010 Intel unveiled the x86 Moorestown Smartphone running Linux based Moblin OS and sporting two cameras, one in front for video conferencing and one in the back.

DELL is aso introducing their own pda/smartphone with a 5-inch WVGA 800 x 480 touchscreen, 3G, Bluetooth, a 5 megapixel camera with LED flash, a microSD slot and a 1,300mAh battery, powered by Android 2.0.

Some of the new features in Firefox 3.6:

Improved browser startup time, overall more robust, JavaScript performance increase.
Can run scripts asynchronously speeding up page loads.
Support for new DOM, CSS, and HTML5 ,File API support etc.
Quick one click browser skin/style changes.
Native video supporting full screen and poster frames.
WOOF font format support.

These days the web is all abuzz with the new “Cloud Computing” jargon. Seems everyone’s got their head stuck up in the Clouds! And me thinks a Reality Check is in order…

Cloud Computing I claim is pretty useless unless your Cloud technology provider is offering you some kind of heavy-duty worthy CDN close to Limelight and Akamai standards. Otherwise, for the majority of people, resisting the marketing hype may provide more ‘bang’ for the buck.

In a sense, Cloud Computing is quite similar to the lowly Shared Hosting. You might experience a very cheap price entry point if your website does not use a lot of CPU, memory, or bandwidth. But as soon as your site actually has some traffic you will likely find that you’re spending considerably more to stay up in the clouds than you would have if you had purchased basically the same thing but under the “Xen VPS” label. Sure there are other VPS solutions that don’t isolate the virtual machines as much as Xen and VMware virtualzation and the like do (such as Parallels VPS and some others…), but if you purchase a real Virtual machine, either Xen or VMware or Hypre-V you would be getting a good part of what a Cloud usually offers and likely at a better bang for the buck!

In fact, I propose that unless you get some sweet CDN as part of the Cloud package, that you stay away and just get your own Dedicated Server that you can install and run your own little clouds on! You can run your own VMware or Xen setup.

I am an experienced consultant who has dealt with various hosting companies so here’s a secret for you that will save you much money. Whenever you look at a hosting provider, look at their prices for Dedicated Servers and bandwidth. This is the golden key to understand if their other offerings are overpriced or not. If they can not afford to give you a well priced Dedicated Server, you can be SURE you are not getting the most for your buck on any of their other deals, its as simple as that!

Now don’t get me wrong, the packaging of all the available Virtualization technologies into these Cloud or Grid networks is a beneficial thing in many ways if done right. Unfortunately, it’s really only done right at the highest levels, ie its not cheap to have an Akamai quality CDN and several virtual servers on separate dedicated boxes with redundant fiber optic connections etc…so why pay “Cloud Computing” prices for in effect what might be a simple Xen, VMware, or worse (traditional more shared resource VPS), when you can get fully dedicated hardware and build your own little cloud for less.

So if you’re a big company with LOTS of traffic and much $$$, then “Cloud Computing” might be the best for you, just check to see exactly what you’re getting for the money, its sometimes a little harder to predict overall cost.

If you’d like more details, drop me a note/comment.

Yea, ok, seriously, I didn’t think I’d ever be (continue reading…)

Well I didn’t have a good time getting the NXSERVER from NoMachine to work right after downloading the .deb debian package files from their website, the client, the node, and the server module.

(Windows NX client dies/exits with this error:)
NX> 200 Connected to address: xx.xx.xx.xx on port: 22
NX> 202 Authenticating user: nx
NX> 208 Using auth method: publickey
NX> 204 Authentication failed.

Apparently NX server installs the ssh keys in the wrong place, when you try to login with the NX client it looks in some /usr/NX/share/ instead of /usr/NX/etc/keys and the easy fix is to simply run /usr/NX/bin/nxserver –keygen and it will recreate keys in the right place, then just go and recopy the key from inside the client .key file in the shared keys directory and paste it in your NX CLIENT and the connection will then complete successfully. If you don’t know where nxserver is just try to do a whereis nxserver or which nxserver or use locate or do a find / -name nxserver

Well, I hope this helps someone get their FreeNX remote control software working because I sure don’t want anyone suffering through the pitiful performance of VNC!

Might I add that I find Mint to be a wonderful Ubuntu/Debian based distribution, highly recommended especially for those who don’t just need it as a server but also as their primary DESKTOP operating system. This Mint OS has it all, plays all your music, movies, DVDs out of the box. You can still install Automatix or any other Debian .deb packages or use the built-in excellent Synaptic package manager or the unique MintInstall to install popular software with one click of a button off an ever-growing list on the website.

I run Mint 4.0 as a VM (VMWARE Virtual Machine) under 64-bit CentOS x86_64 4.2 and its nice to know FreeNX supports file/printer sharing and multimedia for rerouting AUDIO from the server to the client.

Software Developers will LOVE the one click install of the ECLIPSE IDE and Mono .Net platform. If you thought Ubuntu was great, think of this as a special MINT version!