Month: April 2012

Categories
LAN Software

OpenVZ on a Softlayer managed server

A post to record list of changes that were made to the configuration to get networking to work within the VZ containers on a managed hardware node.

Softlayer provisions CentOS machines with two bonded network interfaces: bond0 connected to their private network and bond1 to the public. We got a “portable” private network subnet and got them converted to “routed to subnet” so that all IPs in that subnet are usable (instead of 3 of them getting reserved into a broadcast IP, gateway IP and broadcast IP).

OpenVZ sends ARP requests when it’s trying to initialise a container and the interface to which the requests are to be sent has to be explicitly specified in this multi-network case. So, fix the NEIGHBOUR_DEVS variable in /etc/vz/vz.conf before you pick IPs from your portable subnet pool and start assigning it to your containers.

With that, you should be able to ping these containers from other nodes in your primary private subnet and vice versa. But you won’t be able to ping public IPs from within the containers yet. This doesn’t require you to assign public IPs to the containers too. A NAT rule on the host node should fix this: iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -o bond1 -j MASQUERADE

Took me a while to recall/realise that the lack of ARP requests in SL’s network was necessary. The NAT rule was something I found later on on the internet.

Categories
Worldly Matters

On big-money acquisitions and ads

In the past few months, we’ve heard of Zynga acquire DrawSomething, and more recently, Facebook acquiring Instagram for huge sums of money. Both Zynga and Facebook might be doing it for the user base acquisition. Or they might simply be doing it to "nip it in the bud."

What attracts these huge businesses to the userbase? Sales in terms of ads? Probably. It’s still mind-boggling to think that the circle of folks I’ve known over the past 6 years (who have all been using those ad-blocking plugins on browsers and have probably clicked ads only by accident) are the minority. Most people are constantly being lied to (through marketing) over radios, televisions, and billboards (Sao Paulo is an exception) out in the streets while they’re stuck in traffic.

What differentiates these from the internet is that they lack ad-filters. And yet, internet-based businesses that serve ads make it big.

Sidebar: It should be noticeable by now how tech stocks have been underwritten in the past few years (with entities like certain powerful investment banks out there).

So, what we have today is a huge internet userbase made by businesses that offer questionably silly services that are later turned into yet another ad market. Why? Because a lot of people still click ads.

The NYTimes maybe operating for over a 100 years and may be valued well under a billion. Many may not even know what the Tesla corp does. Big dreaming tech companies are getting rarer by the day.