Bye bye, London!

My last project at the BBC is finished, as is the related contract. My worldly possessions are in boxes and being shipped. The lease on my London flat has ended. A goodbye party (how unlike me!) was had. I’m now at my parents, sleeping, reading, playing with the dogs, resting.

I don’t think I’ll miss London very much (too big and busy, too expensive, takes too long to get out of), but I will definitely miss all the people a lot. Those I worked with and those I partied with, but especially those I just plain hung out with. I think my fondest memories will be of having a beer in the park on a sunny afternoon, or having fancy lunch at a notting hill restaurant, or strolling along south bank amidst the tourists.

What’s next? I have my sights set on Amsterdam, to work and maybe to live. I’m looking at buying a car which I’ve actually never done before. I’m also looking for interesting work. Talking to a few interesting folks already, it seems like Amsterdam is filled with startups these days

Oracle starts at $198/year or $0.16/hour

I learned that spacewalk requires oracle the other day. To an open source weenie that sounds bad, but how much of a problem is it in practice?

Oracle XE is free, allowing up to 4GB of data, which seems like it would last you about 2 years of running spacewalk with a few thousand packages and a few hundred machines.

Oracle One costs $180 per user with a 5 user minimum, installable on one machine with two sockets (so up to 12 core for an AMD opteron). Including one year of support that adds up to about $1000.

But that’s a perpetual license. A 1-year oracle license is $36 per user, so adding in support, for one year or oracle on one machine you pay just shy of $200.

The next upgrade after oracle one is oracle standard, which costs $350 per user perpetual, or $70 per user per year.

So to get started with oracle you can use Oracle XE. When you run out of space you buy a decent database server machine and a $200 oracle license, allowing for 4 middleware nodes and one administrator. You have to pay that $200 once a year. Or you can run Oracle One in the cloud with Amazon RDS from $0.16 per hour.

When you need a resilient set up you will need oracle standard so you can cluster with Oracle RAC. You’ll need a license for each server (which can now have 4 sockets so up to 24 core), so your cost increases to 2 * 5 * 70 = $700/year.

You can also deploy oracle standard on Amazon RDS, where you’ll pay from $0.11 per hour per VM in addition to your license. Though it seems like at the moment, amazon RDS replication doesn’t work for oracle, so there’s probably no point in using that. Instead, you’ll have to switch to creating your own EBS-backed AMIs and installing oracle into them (or, perhaps, use an oracle-provided AMI).

I can find nothing that states there’s a limit to Oracle RAC scale with oracle standard. So you could potentially build big, BIG clusters this way.

$350/server/year is not exactly free of course, but this actually gets you really good clustering. That bit of capex gets you the ease of deployment and use of Oracle RAC. For some use cases, it’s probably easily the cheapest option if you take into account the opex of doing anything else. For example if Oracle Locator, the subset of Oracle Spatial that’s available in the standard edition, is good enough for you, this seems easier than figuring out your own clustered PostGIS setup. Postgres or mysql replication would’ve been just fine for spacewalk though.

Oracle Enterprise has additional features that aren’t really relevant for most scale-out (webby) stuff: using more than 4 sockets, some of the advanced administration/audit/backup tools, advanced security features, oracle spatial, compression, table partitioning, and some other bits. Enterprise still costs about a gazillion dollars.

We have to erase this idea that “oracle is ridiculously expensive” out of our brains. It just isn’t true anymore: there’s some very reasonable oracle database offerings for reasonable prices. Instead, the idea should now be “oracle enterprise is ridiculously expensive”. For things like spacewalk, where you don’t need the advanced stuff, it seems oracle is now almost always a very reasonable backend that probably can have a competitive TCO.

Creating a minimal Ubuntu Server VM

The other day I documented a kickstart process for creating base CentOS VM images. I tried but failed to get ubuntu installed using kickstart. Rather than learn the normal ubuntu process I figured I’d install manually. Beyond that, the approach is basically the same:

• Download ubuntu server, I chose the 64-bit LTS iso (10.04).
• create new empty VM called vanilla-ubuntu.
• Resize the disk image to 10GB.
• set RAM to 256MB.
• disable just about all options including audio support, usb support, printer support, file sharing, etc.
• set to NAT networking.
• attach ubuntu iso to cdrom drive.
• Accept all installer defaults, but select OpenSSH server as additional system to install
• Log in as created user
• run sudo passwd root to set the root password
• sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get -y dist-upgrade
• to work around this bug, sudo rm /etc/motd.tail
• sudo shutdown -h now.
• open the settings pane, open the hard disk panel, and select “clean up disk”.
• disconnect and remove the floppy drive. Disconnect the DVD drive.
• (optional), open the directory containing the VM location in the terminal and mv *.vmwarevm/* . && rm -r *.vmwarevm. When you next open the VM (you will need to use File > Open), select “I moved it”.
• Make a backup copy of the virtual machine files, this is your clean VMWare-independent base VM.
• Start the virtual machine.
• in the Fusion menu, select Virtual Machine > Install VMWare tools, and install the tools:

  mkdir /mnt/cdrom
  mount /dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom
  cd /tmp
  tar zxf /mnt/cdrom/VMwareTools*.tar.gz
  ./vmware-install.pl --default
  cd
  rm -Rf /tmp/vmware-tools-distrib
  

• Shut down the virtual machine
• Make a backup copy of the virtual machine files, this is your clean VMWare-ready base VM.

One thing that’s easy to notice is how lightning fast ubuntu starts up. The other thing to notice is just how old CentOS / RHEL 5 really is, and IMNSHO how overdue RHEL 6 was (and CentOS 6 is):

Ubuntu 10.04 LTS	CentOS 5.6
# uname -r 2.6.32-31-server # python -V Python 2.6.5 # perl -v This is perl, v5.10.1 ... # apt-cache show ruby1.9.1 | grep Version Version: 1.9.1.378-1	# uname -r 2.6.18-238.9.1.el5 # python -V Python 2.4.3 # perl -v This is perl, v5.8.8 ... # yum info ruby.x86_64 | grep Version Version : 1.8.5