Sales arguments, P2P, Cloud Stuff, OVH, Hetzner, Profit, MongoDB, CDMA, VPN / IPSec

Post date: Mar 8, 2015 5:51:11 AM

• Some old P2P stuff: You completely forgot eDonkey 2000 (ed2k) and eMule. When saying that Bittorrent replaced Gnutella. eMule got perfectly working DHT implementation including serverless file search. Technically it was much more advanced than Bittorrent, it didn't require .torrent files. It did fetch AICH data from other peers. Only thing it lacked was efficient coordination between download and upload. Overnet (from ED2K developers) tried to fix that with Horde mode, but it failed because everyone was already using eMule. Horde tried to pick 5 fast peers for mutual trading. Requirement for trackers and .torrent files felt really backwards stuff after using ed2k. The Gnutella with super hubs was called G2 protocol. Gnutella also utilized GWebCaches for retrieving bootstrap information of other active nodes.
• uWSGI is just incredibly versatile web server with tons of build-in features. uWSGI Python Decorators
• HTTP compressing using Nginx gzip module or using uWSGI Transformations.
  • Different: ASDS, RSM-56 Bulava
• More great stuff by Charles Leifer - Querying the top N objects per group with Peewee ORM and comparing SQLite and PostgreSQL performance
• Guys at major telco don't even know the difference between Megabits and GigaBytes. OMFG! I'm still laughing at them. Does 2 Mbit/s constant traffic total up to 168,75 GBytes/day as they claim? Hire someone who knows even basics of this stuff. Pretty please? - Thank you! I guess they don't even realize how ridiculous their offer looks with totally incorrectly calculated competitor comparison chart. They also presented different lies about routing and other stuff. They assume that buyers don't understand anything at all and they can openly lie to their clients. They're incompetent enough to provide facts and when you check the things your self, you'll find out that they've been lying all the time. Get the darn facts straight and stop lying and telling stories that are nice to hear. I think this policy also unfortunately clearly tells how bad purchasers many companies are, they just don't anybody who would understand what is being bought, they just believe all lies from sellers and then continue happily.
  • I also had meeting with one company, which offers private cloud services. They were competent and stuff was good, only problem is that I don't want to buy stuff which I don't need. There's no need for expensive private cloud solutions, because public cloud can provide same stuff cheaper. After the meeting I told them that if you really think you can make reasoned offer which clearly shows any benefits for us I'm interested to see it. But as I guessed, I didn't ever receive the offer.
• Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN) presents HSPA+ Multiflow new technology? If I don't remember absolutely wrong there's nothing new about this. All the original sales material from Qualcomm about CDMA mentioned that one of it's important benefits is soft handover which prevents dropped calls because handset can be connected to three base base stations simultaneously. And that was surely before any 3G time. Or has it really taken so long before it becomes reality? I would guess I did see this stuff around year 2000 or so.
• Modified my Bottle project so that it now works seamlessly with Apache2 as CGI (yak, but possible), uWSGI standalone application or using Bottle.py's own internal dev / testing HTTP server.
• Nice reminder from F-Secure - Internet of Things will realize all security nightmares especially hacking someones smart home can be really fun. Loud music, blinking lights, all night long!
• Got again several phishing emails trying to trick me to install malware in my computer using various system exploits. You've gotta be really careful nowadays. But I guess that's not enough. Persistent attacker will succeed at some point.
• Checked out Google Cloud Platform available Regions and Zones. US, Europe, Asia.
• Decided to launch server performance tests using OVH and Hetzner servers and comparing those against Amazon AWS, Google Compute Engine and Microsoft Azure. I think the bang for buck ratio will be a lot better using these awesome European competitors.
• Quickly checked out MongoDB 3.0, no I didn't install it. Just read the documentation.
  • kw: Pyramid Profit, Multi-Component Profit, Switchboard Profit, Blockbuster Profit, Profit-Multiplier Profit, Specialist Profit, Installed Base Profit, Specialty Product Profit, Local Leadership Profit, Relative Market Share Profit (Scale Profit).
• That's right! - "If you understand a problem better than anyone else, you'll be able to create better products, and customers will pay a premium to work with you."
  • Just once again reminding everyone about cloud service providers. It doesn't matter what their policy says. Policy is just some text, which is supposed to make customers feel comfortable. It doesn't practically mean anything all. They can still do what ever they wish with your data, even if it's against the policy. All crimes are ok, as long as you don't get caught. So saying that the policy blah blah what ever, is absolutely pointless. Many of the official documents and guidelines are exactly that, official papers to make things look good, nobody actually does things according the papers. Yet some people just don't get it that those papers do not matter in reality. Fact is that you can't ever delete anything from the cloud, it might be hidden from you but you don't know if it's deleted. Nor you can ever know where that data finally ends up.
• Laughed again about the Facebook privacy news. User was surprised that administrators were able to see their data. Of course they are. If you have something that's so secret you don't trust it to them, don't use Facebook to transmit data. At times it makes me really wonder how little people think about anything at all.
• Finally fixed one unreliable IPsec VPN. The key to fix things? Well, disabling the Dead Peer Detection (DPD). Some manufactures allow you to configure options for DPD like how many checks and how long to wait for response before disconnecting. But in this case the DPD didn't have configuration options and that was the source of the problems. When ever DPD was on, it caused VPN always to disconnect repeatedly when connection was under any load which caused latency to grow. Extremely annoying. Especially when you combine that with transfers which got resume chunk size up in gigabytes. When ever connection resets the transfer of 2 GB chunk just restarts from the beginning. Wonderful, just so wonderful. Well why was the DPD enabled in the first place? Well, that's because IPsec VPN state machine is what it is. When tunnel is open, it's open, even if other side is reset or disconnected or what ever. Causing often situations where other end thinks the tunnel is open and refuses to connect it and other end thinks the tunnel is down and tries continuously to reconnect. - Duh! Before dropping DPD option, it could cause VPN to get stuck and working again about 200 times / day, which was naturally extremely annoying for everyone.
• Removal of SD card software support and now with latest Galaxy Phones removal of whole SD card slot is typical marketing scam. They claimed that reason to remove SD card slot is that the internal memory is faster. Lol, what if that speed different doesn't matter at all. It's just like one server provider claimed that all cloud data archive servers need SSD disks because those are faster. Unfortunately the sales guys didn't understand the customers needs. I know what we need, and they don't. So don't even start arguing with me about it. You're going to fail, and just look really bad. - Thank you.
• Unfortunately it seems that most of sales guys don't actually know anything about the stuff they're selling. They're just using high level marketing hype stuff and hoping that customers are senile and believe what ever marketing lies is fed to them. It's almost fun to check how incompetent these guys are. To be honest, I don't have anything against their enterprise SSDs. The only problem is that they're asking too way much money. If they offer their storage space with same GB price as 6 TB archival drives, I love it. But I don't want to pay enterprise premium for stuff, I don't really need.
• As final words I have to say that there are also positive exceptions. I had a really nice meeting with EverCloud guys and I really liked them. They knew their stuff and didn't try to feed me non-relevant lies and arguments.
• It feels like they're trying sell Ferrari to the pizza delivery company. I'll buy it, when better than the el-cheapo Ford or what ever other city car. Trying to feed arguments about how good and great the Ferrari is, are going to just waste time of both parties. How about delivering realistic calculations about, initial cost, reliability, service cost, additional costs by potential vandalism and winter capabilities, fuel consumption and so on. It's almost guaranteed that the el-cheapo Ford is much better than the 'so great and awesome' Ferrari. The dumb sales pusher guys are trying to push using absolutely non-relevant silly arguments. It's red, it's cool, so darn what? Does it save me money, deliver pizzas during nasty winter storm and help my company to generate profits?
• I've heard that there are many very large companies doing exactly the kind of marketing. No real arguments, just high level values and other hype kind of crap. Did the tech guys who really get it, give approval for it and confirm the lies of the sellers? Or was it some kind of decision made on golf course by totally incompetent manager or boss? Yeah, this stuff is straight from Dilbert.
• PostgreSQL pgbench results from Postgres 7.4 to 9.4 - Really interesting charts. If someone tells you it doesn't matter what database is being used (like I do at times), it only tells that the performance requirements aren't usually very high. Differences can be actually quite drastic between different kind of solutions, query types and server configurations. Internal optimizations and how code are organized and how well it works internally with different locking stuff and so on, can make huge difference. - So when they claim database X is so much better than database Y. Don't believe it, try it out with your own work loads and hardware and see the actual results. If they don't let you to try it before buying, don't buy it.
• The previous statement actually sounded good. I would like to have brand new Ferrari delivered for me for free, so I'll test it for one year. I'll drive it and then I'll write a cost comparison report. I hope you'll provide me credit card which I can use to pay all the costs of the car. Because I assume it'll be more expensive than the small city car which I'm comparing it to. Luckily where I'm living, the winter road maintenance really sucks, so it's interesting to see how many days of year the car is totally unusable because it's stuck from bottom on ice bumps. 4 WD and studded tires are good option around here.