DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

I attended a presentation by two of the lead systems geeks from Google last night. The content dipped below my threshhold of interest when it got into the minutiae of their net-booting protocols, and we nearly throttled one guy who kept asking questions that were way too detailed to be of general interest (especially when it became evident that the guy asking questions had no idea what he was talking about).

Google is hosted on 10,000 Linux servers, most of which are half-depth 1U devices from rackable.com (no link — I thereby spare you the pain you’d feel from rackable’s awful Flash-based website). Each host has 2 Maxtor 40- or 80-gb IDE (!) drives accessed primarily via DMA. They didn’t use SCSI because it’s too expensive, and they can get comparable performance with DMA/IDE. Surprising!

Their web index and cache is replicated across many servers, meaning that a single “database server” has only a tiny fraction of the entire index available within local hardware. This is fascinating, and I guess it’s the heart of their scaling technology — to be able to break down a single index across many servers and query this cluster quickly and effectively.

Many of these architectural details are contained in this article: Google Defies Dotcom Downturn

In a humorous twist, Google presented attendees with Google-branded boxer shorts emblazoned with their appropriate and familiar slogan “I’m Feeling Lucky.”

I am stunned by the speed with which the Code Red worm propagated across the web.

I do not run any Microsoft server products, so my systems are not vulnerable to this particular attack, and yet the worm hit all my sites repeatedly in an attempt to replicate itself.

debris.com was hit from 16 different infected hosts. monauraljerk.org was hit by 26. An unnamed, unpublished, empty website that I use only for testing purposes got hit 18 times.

This is a good reminder to everyone who runs a server to keep up-to-date with vendor patches and bug reports. Subscribe to CERT and BugTraq. That’s the minimum sane level of paranoia; you’d be much better off actually becoming well-versed at server security, or hiring someone who is, to make sure your servers are at least difficult to hack.

Dave Winer says, I bet Aladdin will sell a lot of these. I fear he’s right. Where do I sign to prevent it?!

This is pretty much the last thing in the world I need: “high-impact emails” with “vivid colors, eye-catching photos, and plenty of web links”.

The only question now is whether anyone has developed a qmail filter that refuses delivery of HTML email, the arterial plaque of electronic communications.

Serendipity! Today, CamWorld published a link to this: Configuring Mail Clients to Send Plain ASCII Text

Google taught the world that there’s always room for a better search engine. Now perhaps Wisenut is going to repeat the lesson.

The Wisenut technology overview is worth reading. Be sure to download their search engine white paper; it details why Wisenut’s WISErank technology is superior to Google’s PageRank in producing relevant results.

So now panhandlers are using the web to research how to beg more effectively. There is something really wrong with that, like panhandling is a viable career choice. What’s next, Begging for Dummies?

Here’s the site mentioned in the article: Market Research for Panhandlers.