

IPad Colocation - jasongullickson
http://www.ipadcolo.net/

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petercooper
Very funny, but.. there are commercial offerings for Apple TV based hosting,
believe it or not: <http://www.beasts.org/appletvdedicated.html> (running
Linux, though)

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sadiq
That's pretty neat.

I'm wondering if there are places looking at hosting little boxes like:

<http://linitx.com/viewproduct.php?prodid=12678>

Power-wise, they must be on-par with the Mac Mini/AppleTV but seem to be a
fair bit cheaper.

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lsc
I've spent some time looking at it... the problem is mostly organizational.
getting atoms in rackmount form factors usually adds considerably to the price
(and often sticks you with a shitty power supply that means your tiny atom
eats 50watts, making it uneconomical) but without the rackmount form factor,
sticking a reasonable number of those in a rack quickly becomes a nightmare of
a ratsnest.

I'm not saying it's impossible, it just is going to take some work to build a
proper rack, and even then, you are probably going to want to take the 'if it
fails, cut power and leave it' approach which doesn't do as well with the
'send me your server, I host it' model.

or, maybe they are just really careful stacking it? I don't know. There is a
whole lot of demand for cheap co-lo on dedicated boxes.

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petercooper
I'd rather have a VPS on an extremely powerful box with redundant power, etc.
It's like being mayor in a rich country instead of being a third world
dictator (the dedicated low power box).

The problem is, there are no good standards on VPS provision of CPU time.
Memory and disk space are easy to count, but guarantees of CPU are harder to
come by and pin down.

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lsc
actually, the opposite is true. it's really easy for me to give you a certain
cpu 'weight' that guarantees a certain minimum and defines who is allowed to
burst when it's time to burst; see the free chapter of my book for more info
<http://nostarch.com/xen.htm> \- but disk usage, well, disk usage is much
harder to limit. I can use IONICE to kindof manage disk bandwidth, but really
it's seeks that are the problem, and figuring out who is using more than their
share of those is quite difficult.

(Disk space, as opposed to disk performance, sure, that's easy. But space,
without performance, is so cheap as to hardly matter at all.)

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petercooper
It's easy for you to give me "weight" or certain percentages, but that's not
as easy to decipher as a buyer as the memory, bandwidth, and disk space
limits.

Amazon attempt to define things with their "Compute Units" as being equivalent
to a single core 1.0GHz 2007 Opteron (or whatever it is), but most VPS
providers don't give good demonstrations or examples of the sort of power
you're guaranteed to get. Pure megahertz don't help, but even something like
"roughly equivalent to a 2 GHz Core 2 Duo" would be a massive help to buyers.

(Even Amazon's compute units can be hard to figure out. How does a 1 GHz
Opteron from 2007 compare to, say, a 2GHz Core 2 Duo? These are things buyers
are thinking about and looking up endless Tom's Hardware charts for :-))

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lsc
Hm. well, first, if you want to compare different cpu architectures, that's
really hard, because the effectiveness varies massively by what sort of tasks
are performed... so this is a task that requires so much fudge factor I'd call
it more marketing than engineering, and ignore it.

Hm. But what If I mentioned the minimum and maximum? I can do that... so, for
example, on a 256MiB VPS, you are probably on a server with 8 cores and 32GiB
ram. (now, personally, I steal 1 core and 1GiB ram for the dom0, but you could
squeeze that some, though I wouldn't recommend giving the dom0 less than one
core.)

so, uh, you have a total of 124 domains, right? and 7 cores, so each domain
gets, what, 5% or so of a core at minimum, and then 100% of the number of
vcpus given at maximum.

now, if the provider was simply up front about how much ram they put on a box,
the user can figure this all out for themselves (in a xen system /proc/cpuinfo
will give you information about the real cpu)

But yes, this could be made much more clear. But even so, it'd probably not
result in anything that is usefully comparable to a dedicated server, and
really, the performance bottleneck we usually see is disk; if you use 2 or 4
spindles for those 124 accounts, well, disk sucks pretty badly for everyone.
But this is the nature of small VPSs.

(so really, giving you specs about my disks might be better; or just making
public graphs of CPU and Disk usage on servers. But I have a hell of a time
convincing people that anything but the CPU matters, so that might be a waste
of time.)

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Tawheed
I love their solution for getting around the lack of multi-tasking.

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drawkbox
That and the server rack of iPads is hilarious.

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gfodor
The best pranks are the ones are just un-ridiculous enough that you consider
that they might be real.

In that sense, bravo.

~~~
froo
Agreed. As I skimmed through the text, it almost had me up until I saw the
robotic hand... followed by a slight smirk on my face.

~~~
GeoJawDguJin
( ≖‿≖)

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reeses
I created <http://nanocolo.com> a few April Fools' Days ago, and had an
amusing exchange with the macminicolo guys. Glad to see I was inspirational.
:-)

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BigZaphod
I know this is a joke, but...

I can kind of imagine a system where you setup a "service" per pad. You might
configure a database on an individual pad which is dedicated to that task
only, or a mail account, or whatever you need. Then plug the pad into the rack
slot for safe keeping and powering - actual communications are all wireless. I
imagine this not unlike how "crystals" and other such things are used on a lot
of scifi shows where they have to pull the crystal/pad thing and tap on them a
bit to reprogram them...

Granted, it's probably easier to just have a remote tool (ssh, web interface,
etc) to reconfigure services like we do now all in one place (and from any
physical location), but there's something very compelling about being able to
just pull the pad, tap a few things on it's custom UI, and put it back in the
slot to reconfigure something. :)

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csytan

       but there's something very compelling about being able to
       just pull the pad, tap a few things on it's custom UI,
       and put it back in the slot to reconfigure something. :)
    

Yes, like disabling the cognitive circuits of an AI gone bad..

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fizx
I feel like instead of opening up the bulkhead, pulling out crystals, and
rearranging, future sci-fi spaceship repairs should happen via ipad juggling.

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pyre
Damn it! I don't know how to juggle! There goes my dream of being a spaceship
engineer!

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dandelany
Um, you should probably mention it's a joke someplace other than on the "Sign
up" page. The way it is now, the only people who find out it's a joke are the
people stupid enough to want to use it and the people smart enough to know
that no one would ever, ever run a service like that.

There's a whole big chunk of your customers that will fall into a middle
range: they'll be smart enough to know that this is a terrible idea, but
gullible enough to believe that you would try it. They certainly won't click
on the "sign up" link, and therefore may not be let in on the joke. And you
really don't want your smarter customers thinking that you're actually selling
this service.

~~~
houseabsolute
Relax.

~~~
dandelany
Really? This was worth 4 downvotes? I'm not being offensive or stupid or
uptight, I'm just expressing my opinion. I _know_ it's a joke. My point is
that, when I first saw it, I didn't _immediately_ recognize the joke. If I
hadn't clicked the Sign Up page, I probably would have left the site without
fully getting the joke. If a potential customer didn't get the joke, it might
leave them with a bad opinion of the company. (edit: by company, I mean Mac
Mini Colocation, not this fake sub-business)

I know how we love our nerdy humor, but all I'm saying is that companies have
to be a little bit careful not to inadvertently let inside jokes hurt
business.

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Devilboy
Sorry but it looked like a troll to me. I didn't think you or anyone looking
for co-location would be dumb enough to think this was real.

~~~
houseabsolute
Well and even if they were, the only way to find its connection with the
actual company is to reach the page that told you it was a joke.

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statictype
I'm surprised that they are actually offering mac minis as a hosting service.
Is there any reason to use one instead of a linux box running the same
software on superior hardware for the same cost?

~~~
cmelbye
A Linux box running a hacked up version of Mac OS X would not be better than a
Mac mini natively running Mac OS X, in my opinion.

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jessedhillon
"A linux box running a hacked up version of Mac OS X" is a contradiction. It
runs either one or the other, I think the OP was noting that the same price
can get you much better hardware if you are willing to ditch the Mac, which is
true.

In this case though, they are offering to serve an OS X desktop environment,
not just web sites, so there's one thing that can't be done (well) on Linux.

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igrekel
Expect service interruption on new years eve, football games etc when they use
them as a giant screen... Or maybe they could just use them as decoration in a
night club, or as lighting on highways...

Oh and it is forbidden to send sexy emails on you iPad mail server, it could
be used to remove the software from the app store. That means you will have to
unregister from that viagra mailing list that keeps sending you offers.

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Tichy
The scary bit is that my web server is still an old 600MHz machine, whereas my
phone now has a 1 GHz CPU. There has to be a new way of of hosting in there.

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badave
Sheesh, April 1st isn't for a month and a week.

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dan_the_welder
Yeah, this is perfect for an April's fools gag. It's still pretty good.

It's weird they did not put in a more visible link to their real service.
<http://www.macminicolo.net>

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limmeau
While this is a joke, the idea of using the spare computational power of all
those phones and gadgets is worth thinking about (e.g. [1]).

[1] [http://oubiwann.blogspot.com/2009/04/after-cloud-to-
atomic-c...](http://oubiwann.blogspot.com/2009/04/after-cloud-to-atomic-
computation-and.html)

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hexley
I actually have a faulty iPhone 2G with a damaged LCD/digitiser. Fortunately
it has SSH and VNC enabled, so I wonder what server I could make out of an old
iPhone. Talk about stealth ;) 400MHz ARM, 128MB RAM - surely I can do
something with this?

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ashishbharthi
This gives a cool idea for side project. Port
<http://www.jibble.org/jibblewebserver.php> to Android and use Nexus One as
web server. I wonder if somebody has already done this.

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CrazedGeek
Wonder no more: <http://code.google.com/p/i-jetty/>

~~~
ashishbharthi
Thank you!!

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gojomo
Hmm, a tiny, slim, all-RAM-and-Flash A4-powered serving appliance might not be
such a bad idea...

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wmf
Like a SheevaPlug?

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nroach
Awesome. Would have been +1 if they'd rickrolled you after the signup click-
through.

Although ... you _could_ do this with a custom app. Wouldn't be too hard,
really.

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Sidnicious
Maybe, but it'd be a bitch considering the SDK doesn't allow fork()/exec().

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zitterbewegung
I think people are interested in ARM colocation since they are getting the
processor speeds high enough and low power enough for it to work.

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joezydeco
I'll wait for the TonidoPlug colocation service. Like a huge powerstrip that
runs the length of a warehouse or something.

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aheilbut
On a related topic... does anyone have recommendations for a more traditional
colocation provider in the Boston area?

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brk
I do... Contact me offline.

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bbsabelli
An ipad form factor without a screen running linux? That's actually not a bad
idea for colo, an I bet it'd be cheap!

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thehodge
Its linkbait... but very funny

~~~
jasongullickson
Perhaps, but I thought relevant based on the recent lively discussion of their
mac mini colocation service.

