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Thursday, June 05, 2003

It is amazing how many sniping programs and services there are available for bidding on auctions at the very last second. Brent mentioned his friend Dave's called OmegaBid. I don't see why eBay and other auction sites don't put in measures to deal with type of bidding. Its pretty simple, just make the end time a bit fuzzy. That is, instead of ending the auction at a specific time have it end randomly say within a 15-20 minute period. I think it would make bidding and the use of all these online auctions much more enjoyable to the average user. Not to mention make these sniping programs and services useless. Sorry Dave.   4:01:19 PM     Joel has a good post and raves about VMWare. Here is a short snippet of what he wrote: Last Friday afternoon, you may have noticed that this site was down for 10 minutes or so while we rebooted the server a few dozen times to apply the latest Microsoft patches, flash the bios, reseat some memory, etc. It occurred to me: what if, instead of running a conventional server, you ran your server in a VM? So everything my server does would actually be running in a virtual machine on the server. That has five interesting implications: I could make a snapshot of the complete machine state. If anyone hacks into the machine, installing trapdoors or defacing the website, a single click gets us back to a known-good condition. The catch: you can't keep any frequently-changing state on the server. Easy fix: run another VM as a file server for your frequently-changing state (like web log files, mailboxes, etc.). You can split up functions among different VMs without buying more hardware. Isolate your mail server from your web server from your DNS server, all on one machine. When I need to install an OS patch or even an entirely new operating system, rather than rebooting, I would simply apply the patch to a new, identical copy of the virtual machine running on my desktop computer. I could copy the new VM up to the server, stop the old VM and start the new VM at the same time. Net effect: you can replace the whole operating system on a live server with only seconds of down time, zero risk that the new OS won't come up, and only one physical box. If anything goes wrong and you need to swap in different hardware, all you need is some kind of box that will run VMWare. Solutions like Ghost won't quite work because the ghosted image may not have the right device drivers for the replacement hardware. Everything runs emulated, so you're paying for all this convenience with a lot of CPU cycles. Since I've been running the current version of VMWare in a similar type of configuration for the last year or so I thought I would comment on these 5 items. I've been doing this with the current version of VMWare.  If you have enough disk space (which shouldn't be a problem these days with the cost of disk), you can make a copy of the VM image and keep it around for safe keeping as your own snapshot. This is one very good reason I started using VMWare years ago. A word of warning however if you are running a Windows network and domains. Make sure you have a domain controller outside the VM environment otherwise there are just too many headaches with the domain not being available when your playing around with the machine hosting your VM's. I haven't tried that and I suspect that you'd run into a bunch of things conflicting depending on what the boxes are doing etc. Instead what I've done in the past is change the virtual disk mode to "undoable" so that if the upgrade or whatever goes wrong you can just back out to the previous state. If all goes right then you can save the changes and continue on your way. This doesn't allow you to leave the original system up and operating and then make the 10 second switch but it does allow you to upgrade without worrying at all about frying the machine. Another reason I thought of VMWare originally although I haven't tried proving this just yet. I suspect it will work fine but still needs testing. Pretty easy to test though. Just load up another box with VMWare and copy a VM image over and boot up and see what happens. Most definitely. I've been able to seriously overload a box with 4-5 VM OS's running. Mind you things are slow but depending on what services they're serving up it doesn't matter much. VMWare is also great for any developer that needs to test their stuff on a number of different OS's with different setups. Its just way easier than doing the Ghost image restore every other minute.   12:56:37 AM     I can tell you by direct experience that there is absolutely no value in ValueClick clickthroughs. They are kings at sending absolutely NoValue clicks through to ones website. I'm pretty sure they were about a thousand times worse than banner ads when banner ads were practically useless in the good old days. ValueClick buys Web search marketer [CNET News.com]   12:13:50 AM

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