You say it’s your birthday?

It’s our birthday too!

Google turns 7 today, we turn 8!

Too bad we didn’t think of making yet another search engine back in 1997. Oh well, we’re not complaining toooo loudly.

To celebrate we’ve made a bunch of changes:

* Unlimited domains and sub-domains on all hosting plans!
* Domain registrations are now $9.95/year (33% off!)
* If you have multiple plans with us the disk/bandwidth is now shared among all domains (no more breaking it down by plan)!
* The panel’s been re-organized a fair bit, integrating a lot of disjointed tabs into what we hope is a much easier to use format!
* For the first 888 new signups, you can get 80% off the first year of any 1-2 year plan by using the promo code “888″ when signing up!

Back to pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey!

Something Dumb

We use a lot of IPs. Over 14,000 currently, with more and more every day.

Fortunately, there are a lot out there (over 4 billion, even before IPv6), so we really aren’t in any great danger of running out.

Except we are!

You see, even though there theoretically are 4 billion IP addresses, it isn’t just a big pool of digits for any web host to dive in and scoop up whatever they want, whenever they want, however they want, whomever they want.

Instead, you have to apply to your Regional Internet Registry when you want more, in a process somewhat similar to that of registering domain names. However, because IPs are in relatively short supply (only 4 billion, as opposed to the almost one GOOGOL possible .com domain names) you can’t just buy as many you want! You actually have to apply and prove that you’re deserving of more IPs.

That’s a good thing though… the Internet would be in big trouble if say Microsoft decded to buy up all the remaining IPs in the world! IPs aren’t nearly as expensive as domains (you can get a “/14″ (262,144 IPs) for $18,000/year .. just 7 cents each!)… so in theory, Microsoft could buy ALL existing IPs for about $250M/year. For a $40B company, I think that might be worth it to basically OWN THE INTERNET!

To I guess prevent this from happening, and to keep people from being careless and wasteful with such a limited resource, ARIN will only let you get more IPs if you’ve already used 80% of the ones they’ve assigned to you. To prove it, you have to send them a report of the IPs in your last allocation and how they’re being used, which they even then check!

That seems fine and dandy, except for just one problem. The threshold isn’t 80% of your total IPs, it’s just 80% of the last allocation you received.

Which is why we’re in trouble!

We’re well over 80% utilization for ALL our IPs, and because of the exponential nature of our growth, and the sometimes slow process of getting more IPs from ARIN, we feel now is the time to get more IPs so we don’t run out (which would be… very bad).

The last time we applied for some IPs, we asked for a “/19″ (8192 IPs), but they only gave us a “/20″ (4096). This means that they won’t approve our application for more IPs until we have only 819 left. Which therefore means, we really can’t get more IPs until we’re 95% full… cutting it a little close, ですね?!

And, 819 IPs may sound like plenty, but really it’s not, because for ease of administration we allocate chunks of our own IPs among our various services. So there are chunks of IPs that are reserved for web servers, chunks reserved for https and anonymous ftp, chunks reserved for mail servers, chunks reserved for database servers, and so on and so on.. and if ANY of these chunks run out we start to have problems and have to allocate them another chunk (which is generally 256 or 128 IPs all at once).

What to do?

Well, there’s only one thing to do, which is pretty silly, and is what we’ve done.

We’ve used a lot of our newest allocation of IPs on things that already had IPs assigned from our original allocations! We then freed up the old IPs and are going to keep available a huge chunk of emergency IPs from that. We’ll only use those IPs if we ever run out of IPs in our newest allocation before ARIN assigns us some more.

By moving IPs from our original allocations to our most recent one, we were just able to get our usage up to 80.1%! So we’ve submitted our application, which will hopefully go through with plenty of time before we have to start delving back into our old IP space. We’ll probably be fine.

It’s just annoying to have to do such a meaningless re-ordering of our network, just because ARIN goes by 80% utilization of your last allocation, instead of your entire allocation.

Funk dat!

C’mon ARIN, change dat!

EVDO Cards Rock!

EVDO laptops do not.

Yesterday Verizon announced that Lenovo (aka IBM Thinkpads), HP, and I believe it was Dell, are going to make laptops with built-in connectivity to Verizon’s EVDO 3G network (1.5Mbs wherever there’s cell phone coverage in major cities)! Sony also has a laptop out right now with Cingular’s EDGE network built-in… which is way slower than EVDO! What were they thinking?

This is awesome news, because as you may know, I LOVE EVDO!

Except, no wait, this is stupid news. Well, the news itself isn’t stupid, just the laptop manufacturers are.

Don’t they know there’s already tons of EVDO PCMCIA cards that work just fine? I guess they don’t.

Well, probably they do. But right now they’re thinking:

“People used to need WI-FI cards and now it’s just built-in! Same thing’s going to happen with EVDO!”

Well, they’re partly right. The same thing will most likely happen with EVDO.. but this is not the same thing!

When you buy a laptop with built-in 802.11g, does it only work at Starbucks on the T-Mobile hot spots? When you get a laptop with a built-in modem, does it only dial AOL? When you get a laptop with an integrated DVD drive, does it only play Disney movies?

If your answer is “yes”, my condolences. You sir, are a sucker!

As much as T-Mobile, AOL, and Disney would love for that to be the case, the world just doesn’t work like that. When people buy a piece of hardware, they expect to be able to use it how they’d like, without a lot of weird exclusive tie-ins to some kind of provider.

So although a laptop with a built-in EVDO modem would be cool, a laptop with a built-in Verizon-only EVDO modem is not.

But people get cell phones that only work with one provider!

That is true.. and hopefully these laptops will be FREE with a 2-year contract! If so, I take it back, this is awesome news!

But, if it somehow turns out this is not the case, let me enumerate the pros and cons of getting one of these new EVDO-enabled laptops vs. a plain-old EVDO PCMCIA card like the one I’m touching right now. (There, I just touched it for real.)

EVDO LAPTOP PROS:

* I assume there will be better integration with the laptop. I.E., no ghastly EVDO card sticking out the side, no software to install, perhaps better power management. You don’t use up your PCMCIA slot too.. but really, what uses those anymore besides EVDO cards?

EVDO PCMCIA CARD PROS:

* They can work on all laptops (including OS X and Linux), not just a few Windows machines made by three manufacturers.

* Later, if you decide to switch to Sprint’s future EVDO network, or go overseas, you can just ebay your card and buy another, rather than having to replace your whole laptop.

* Ditto if an even BETTER wireless technology than EVDO comes out someday.

* If you have a company (like us) with a lot of people remotely on call (like us), you can just buy a few EVDO cards and share them for whomever’s on call (like we do), rather than buy everybody a brand new (Dell/HP/Lenovo) laptop they probably don’t even want.

What I guess I’m saying is, I wouldn’t pay for one of these laptops just for the (still theoretically) better integration.

And I’m rich!

Post Mortem

Okay, this isn’t the REAL post-mortem.

But we thought we’d post a few sort of interesting tidbits from Monday:

Video immediately after being evacuated. (13.7MB avi)
(Just kidding around… please don’t be offended!)

Video of our servers without power. (1.2MB mov)

(Boring) Video of powering our servers back on! (417KB mov)

One particularly tasty voicemail. (53KB wav)

Also, we just sent off a $30,000 check to the Red Cross today for Katrina! I think it’s sort of funny that DreamHost plus DreamHost Customers donated more than the entire country of Sri Lanka ($25,000 I heard)!

More Power to the People..

Right now outside our window they’re unloading an “aggreko diesel rent-a-generator”.

This is to get the generators up to N+1 again while they repair the last one that’s still being cranky.

Dun dun dun…

The OTHER Disaster

Just a reminder… we’ll be sending in our matching-your-donation thing for Katrina soon. So far we’ve received $11,612.09 from 198 contributors, meaning we’ll be donating at least $23,124.18 to the Red Cross.

So, if you’re a DreamHost customer, time is running out to contribute (double) to a real disaster via our “Home > Charity” area.

Also, if your billing address in our system was in a zip code affected by Katrina (according to a list at ups.com) we gave you a free year of web hosting to hopefully give you one less thing to worry about right now.

Something Not About Power!

Thought we’d break up the monotony and throw up a little post about something positive!

We’ve just added a “One-Click Install” of the new Gallery 2.0, the MOST popular open-source website photo gallery software THERE IS!

Give it a try at our “Goodies > One-Click Installs” area right now!

(Keep in mind it’s a big install so it’ll probably take close to the full 10 minutes before you receive your confirmation email!)

Router Issues Fixed!

Oker doke, things are back to normal!

An obscure config option on the router was set (it was showing up when you’d, say, “sh ru”) but apparently wasn’t doing anything and it was causing lots of work to be sent to the CPU instead of just being handled in hardware. It was obscure enough to stump Cisco support for 24 hours, but it’s fixed now!

That appears to tie up the last of the systemwide issues left over from Monday’s brief vacation from electricity.

Thanks to everyone for being supportive. Our team here is a pretty awesome bunch, and we all appreciate what nice customers we have!

Router Progress!

The router is happier, Cisco support is helping.

Ironically, it seems that netflow (a protocol for traffic analysis, which we’ve been using to help figure out what might be going wrong) might be part of the problem.

And I think I mentioned this in a comment on another article, but amidst all the other stuff that went wonky after the power was restored, the router that’s being problematic now lost its active supervisor card (which is basically a router’s CPU) early yesterday. The hot spare supervisor kicked in just like it should have, but just another fun little heartstopper!

More word when we have it!

Router still mad.

Just an update.. we’re still working on the router, we’ve even brought in an outside network consultant and have been on with Cisco support and it’s still mysterious.

Just keeping people updated.. there won’t be any more updates about the packet loss until we’ve fixed it (at which point, we’ll update)..