Where's cacheboy been hiding?

I've had a few people ask where Cacheboy has been hiding since late 2009.

In short - I had a lack of reliable traffic nodes and my bachelor's degree to finish off.

Now, the long version.

The university reason is easy - I've been working on and off on a Bachelor of Arts for a few years, and decided late 2009 that I should just buckle down and get it all done. So I spent 2010 and the first part of 2011 studying (and working!) full-time. It was pretty intense. I had to put a few things on hold, and working on cacheboy was one of them.

The traffic node problem is more difficult. I had plenty of interest in running edge nodes in places like Australia, Italy and South Africa - where local connectivity is great, but international transit is not. But in order to run any useful amount of traffic from those nodes, I'll have to serve a lot of content to the network as a whole. This means "US" and "Western Europe".

I found myself in a catch-22 situation. I'd like to serve content across local IXes, but in order to do so, I first need to serve a lot more content to the US/Europe.

In order to do this, I'll need a few reliable nodes pushing at least a gigabit each. The last time I ran the numbers, more than 70% of traffic was destined to the US, UK and Germany.

So to properly push proper CDN of open source content, I'm going to need some donated nodes in the US that can source at least a gigabit. If I can't get that, the amount of traffic served to other destinations which could benefit from local traffic is .. well, it's really quite small.

So far, noone's stepped up to help with that.

More issues with Lighttpd

So occasionally Lighttpd on FreeBSD-7.x+ZFS gets all upset. I -think- there's something weird going on where I hit mbuf exhaustion somehow when ZFS starts taking a long time to complete IO requests; then all socket IO fails in Lighttpd until it is restarted.

More investigation is required. Well, more statistics are needed so I can make better judgements. Well, actually, more functional backends are needed so I can take one out of production when something like this occurs, properly debug what is going on and try to fix it.

Cacheboy Update / October/November 2009

Howdy,

Just a few updates this time around!

• Cacheboy was pushing around 800-1200mbit during the Firefox 3.5.4 release cycle. I started to hit issues with the backend server not keeping up with revalidating requests and so I'll have to improve the edge caching logic a little more.
• Lusca seems quite happy serving up 300-400mbit from a single node though; which is a big plus.
  
• I've found some quite horrible memory leaks in Quagga on only one of the edge nodes. I'll have to find some time to login and debug this a little more.
  
• The second backend server is now offically toast. I need to acquire another 1ru server with 2 SATA slots to magically appear in downtown Manhattan, NY.
  

Cacheboy downtime - hardware failures

Howdy,

I've had both backend servers fail today. One is throwing undervolt errors on one PSU line and is having disk issues (most likely related to an undervoltage); the other is just crashed.

I'm waiting for remote hands to prod the other box into life.

This is why I'd like some more donated equipment and hosting - I can make things much more fault tolerant. Hint hint.

Lusca updates - September 2009

Just a few Lusca related updates!

• All of the Cacheboy CDN nodes are running Lusca-HEAD now and are nice and stable.
• I've deployed Lusca at a few customer sites and again, it is nice and stable.
• The rebuild logic changes are, for the most part, nice and stable. There seems to be some weirdness with 32 vs 64 bit compilation options which I need to suss out but everything "just works" if you compile Lusca with large file/large cache file support regardless of the platform you're using. I may make that the default option.
• I've got a couple of small coding projects to introduce a couple of small new features to Lusca - more on those when they're done!
• Finally, I'm going to be migrating some more of the internal code over to use the sqinet_t type in preparation for IPv4/IPv6 agnostic support.

Stay Tuned!

My current wishlist

I'm going to put this on the website at some point, but I'm currently chasing a few things for Cacheboy:

• More US nodes. I'll take anything from 50mbit to 5gbit at this point. I need more US nodes to be able to handle enough aggregate traffic to make optimising the CDN content selection methods worthwhile.
• Some donations to cover my upcoming APNIC membership for ASN and IPv4/IPv6 space. This will run to about AUD $3500 this year and then around AUD $2500 a year after that.
• Some 1ru/2ru server hardware in the San Francisco area
• Another site or two willing to run a relatively low bandwidth "master" mirror site. I have one site in New York but I'd prefer to run a couple of others spread around Europe and the United States.

I'm sure more will come to mind as I build things out a little more.

New project - sugar labs!

I've just put the finishing touches on the basic sugar labs software repository. I'll hopefully be serving part or all of their software downloads shortly.

Sugar is the software behind the OLPC environment. It works on normal intel based PCs as far as I can tell. More information can be found at http://www.sugarlabs.org/