There is this thing called Ceph. It’s an open source file system designed to manage exabytes of data across thousands of servers. Now do you remember?

A few years ago Ceph was but a glimmer in the eye of DreamHost co-founder Sage Weil, and today it has grown into an enormous open-source project with contributors spanning the globe. Ceph has been integrated into the Linux kernel and even plays nice with OpenStack – the massively scalable open source cloud operating system.

As a software project, Ceph has really grown up in recent months. So much so that this ol’ logo…

…wasn’t really doin’ it for us anymore. So, this week, we changed it.

There’s still the hint of a squid there, but I think you’ll agree that this is much cleaner!

We didn’t just stop there, though. As of this week, ceph.com is all new.

But wait – there’s more!

This week DreamHost did something we’ve never done before.

We launched a spinoff company.

We’re calling it Inktank.

Squids have ink! Get it?

As Ceph’s technology has matured over the past year or so, the Ceph team has found themselves fielding more and more inquiries from companies and researchers who want to deploy Ceph within their organizations – but either aren’t sure where to start or aren’t sure how best to use Ceph for their particular applications.

It became clear to our team that Ceph would have its best chance at success if it had some kind of support structure behind it. Ceph is free! It’ll always be free. And now it has a clear path for support, powered by many of the same engineers committing changes to its codebase every day.

Inktank is a completely separate company with its own budget and its own org chart. The only things that DreamHost and Inktank employees share are friendship, office space (for now,) and a love of open source software. Also, soap in the bathroom. Maybe some other things.

Inktank.com launched this week, and it more than likely answers most of the questions sitting in your brain right now!

We DreamHosters get on well with the Ceph team. But you don’t have to take my word for it…here’s a video that shows all of us working together in perfect harmony!

If you’ve got any questions about this new endeavor of ours, please don’t hesitate to post them in the comments! Inktankers are watching and waiting to get you the answers you need.

What’s our next great passion?

Apple sauce!  No wait, I meant open source.  Uhhg, I think I’ve had too much cheap love to drink.  Don’t judge.  DreamHost is very passionate about open source – in all different shapes, colors and sizes.  What can I say?  We’re easy.  Our devs have worked on nine different projects.  They’ve also logged in over 9,000 code commits.   That’s a lot of open source love for just one company!

One particularly exciting open source project is Ceph, the massively scalable, distributed file system.  DreamHost is the principal sponsor behind this storage technology that will one day, take the world by storm, and enable big data to become giant, or as the Spaniards say, “gigante”.

Our involvement doesn’t just stop at man-hours and code contributions.  We understand that community is the backbone of open source.  That’s why we’ve done our best to unite and foster user groups, participate in blueprint management and project leadership, and financially sponsor related conferences.

It’s no secret that we loves us some OpenStack™, the open source cloud operating system.  DreamHost has launched two OpenStack Meetups (LA & Atlanta), contributed code to several projects (e.g. Nova, Quantum, Horizon), participated in Design Summits, and sponsored OpenStack at OSCON and their Conferences in Boston and San Francisco.

Today, DreamHost joined seventeen other technology companies in announcing their membership of the OpenStack Foundation.  The Foundation is a formal arrangement and it’ll ensure that all OpenStack-y things that we hold dear – like community – are protected and empowered.

DreamHost strongly believes that OpenStack is the key to the next-generation of cloud services, and we want to do our part to ensure that this project has staying power for decades to come, continues progressing rapidly with unbridled innovation, and receives widespread adoption and global domination – muahahaha!

OK.  Global domination might be a bit much, so we’ll just settle for worldwide adoption and free beer.  Deal?

Written by: Brent Scotten

At the beginning of March we started our journey on the Reach Out & Touch You Tour.  The tour started in Los Angeles at a crazy, sexy, cool venue in Los Angeles called Saint Rocke.

We were able to get up close and personal with a great group of DreamHost customers!  They were not shy about sharing their thoughts on what they like about the DreamHost experience and where they’d like to see us focus more effort.

We want to be the are the best hosting provider out there, and getting this direct feedback is invaluable for us!

After Los Angeles it was time for us to make our way up north to Portlandia…a city that none of us were prepared for.

Our event was hosted at the historic Saucebox.  We had quite a crowd attend and stick with us through to the end of the night… literally the end of the night, not the end of the event.  Hey, what can we say?  We’re touchable.

Don’t worry, the tour doesn’t stop there! We still have 3 more cities to hit!  Last week we were in Chicago for a SOLD OUT event!

We will also be heading back up north to Seattle later this month and in May you can come touch us or let us touch you in New York and San Francisco.

We hope to see many more of you at the events!  It truly has been a great experience for us to meet the people who help keep DreamHost alive – our customers!

This is also a great opportunity for you to meet some of the Dream team and share your thoughts and ideas with us to help make DreamHost the best possible hosting company out there! What’s workin’ for you? What isn’t? Come let us know – right in our faces!

For more event details and links to registration please visit http://dreamhost.com/reachout/!

All DreamHost hosting customers can start using CloudFlare today in conjunction with their DreamHost accounts – FREE!

Not sure what, exactly, CloudFlare is? Well sit back, relax, grab a beverage, and get ready to learn!

When your site is protected by CloudFlare your web pages will be cached and optimized for speedy delivery so your visitors get some of the fastest page load times and best performance they have ever seen!

CloudFlare works behind the scenes to block known security threats.  Abusive bots and crawlers will be automatically limited from wasting your bandwidth and server resources.

In the end CloudFlare helps you, it helps us, and it helps your sites’ visitors.

DreamHost customers have two options for adding CloudFlare services to their sites:

“CloudFlare Free” is FREE and available to anyone with any domains hosted through DreamHost.

“CloudFlare Plus” is a package exclusive to DreamHost customers. This optional upgrade ($9.95 monthly) adds automatic image optimization and support for SSL.

To enable CloudFlare on any of your DreamHost-hosted domains, just visit the “Manage Domains” section of your account control panel:
https://panel.dreamhost.com/index.cgi?tree=domain.manage

Click the “edit” button for any of your Fully Hosted domains, then simply click the “Enable CloudFlare” checkbox. You will then be asked to choose between CloudFlare’s basic (FREE) plan and the DreamHost-exclusive CloudFlare Plus plan.

Make your choice and voila! It’s that simple! You don’t have to touch your website’s content at all. There is no code to embed and no software to configure!

To learn more about what’s included with CloudFlare, visit our website!

The CloudFlare team has put together a great 90 second video here:

We are so excited to bring CloudFlare to all DreamHost customers and hope you all take advantage of its free features!

Brian Schmeecrest here, coming to you live from the OpenStack LA premiere.  I’ll take you behind the scenes of this momentous event, give you the scoop on the presenters, highlight who said what, and get the lowdown on the worst dressed from the Fashion Polizei.

First up, let’s give the folks at home some background on this event.  It’s been billed as the very first OpenStack user group gathering in Los Angeles.  The Meetup was well attended by over 60 Stackers, many of who had traveled great distances across Southern California to be there.

This event was hosted and sponsored by DreamHost.  Sultan Chicken catered the Greek food and Buzz Wine & Beer supplied the Firestone DBA and Racer 5 IPA.

The men of the hour were Vish Ishaya and Jay Pipes.  Vish works for Rackspace Cloud Builders and is also the Nova Project Technical Lead for OpenStack Compute.   Jay is the Director of Engineering for HP’s Open Source Cloud Services team.  He also sits on the OpenStack Project Policy Board.

Vish presented first on OpenStack’s Compute history, talked about how devs could get their feet wet via DevStack.org, walked the audience through a demo of OpenStack, updated everyone on the upcoming Essex release, and hinted at what he’d like to see in the future Folsom release.

OH:  It’s difficult to quantify the level of contributions to the OpenStack project.  The primary takeaway is that there is a whole lot of “immeasurable awesomeness” flowing into OpenStack.

After traveling all the way from Ohio, Jay Pipes told the LA audience the story of TryStack.org and how it came to be.  He started with several uses of TryStack, how over 800 users have tried it, hardware specs and architecture, TryStack’s deployment and the resulting lessons learned.

After the presentations, the Stackers casually lingered while chatting jovially and sipping on their beers.  The air in the room was filled with OpenStack excitement and the smell of succulent kebabs.  It was truly a night to remember.

I’m going to close our show by opening a sealed envelope that was just given to me by none other than Herr Bogensberger from the Fashion Polizei.  Herr Bogensberger is the utmost authority on high fashion.  From what he told me, it was a major faux pas.  The perp stood out like Lady Gaga playing bingo at the Sleepy Willow Retirement Home.

Ladies and gentlemen, are you ready to hear who took the crown for the worst dressed?

*drum roll*

And his name … will be revealed right after this inaptly timed commercial break!

“We’re looking at you, leisure suit Larry…”

 
Written by: Brent Scotten

In our never-ending quest for zero downtime and an unbreakable network, we’ve recently made some huge investments in hardware and in personnel designed to strengthen our core. Like Bowflex.

There’s a lot of work to be done, and just not enough hours in the day to do it all.

That’s why, starting tomorrow, we’ll be instituting the DreamHost Hour Of Power.

For the next six months we’ll be taking down our entire network at 10am PST for one hour of intense reworking.

We’ll reboot every machine on our network, rewire whatever needs rewiring, install whatever needs installing, config whatever needs configging, and generally take 60 solid minutes to do whatever needs doing throughout our datacenter.

Why 10AM? Because that’s when our staff is well rested, in the office, and at their best.

We’ve already planned out every minute of every Hour of Power for the next three weeks and we’re fairly certain you’re going to like what you see in the weeks and months to come.

Please do not be alarmed if your sites become unreachable between 10AM and 11AM PDT over the next few months – it’s all part of the plan.

We’ll be using this blog to document each day’s planned work.

Also…

April Fools!

If you’ve been with us for a while then you know there are no sacred cows at DreamHost. We hope you had a few laughs at our expense.

Meanwhile, work continues behind the scenes on shoring up our network and improving performance system-wide to make the DreamHost experience the best that it can be.

See you next year!

People can get the itch to move on to a new organization for a number of reasons.  Lacking growth potential, working on boring projects, being underpaid, not having a femur bone to break into your computer and retrieve files, are all valid complaints.  Being stagnant is an easy response, because you don’t have to do anything you’re not already doing.  Some people fear change in their careers because of the uncertainty of where they’ll end up in relation to where they were. But exploring options never hurt anyone.

The hunt for a new career can be daunting.  Resume robots?  Worse than Skynet.  So we’re taking the bull by the horns.  We are offering a chance to cut through all the red tape, and go directly to the source of these tremendous opportunities.

On April 12th, in what will hopefully not be the last year of Earth, DreamHost will host (go figure) a job fair for IT professionals here in LA.  We’ve managed to get a handful of really awesome companies to join in on the event including AOL, Edgecast, Evite, Hulu and Oversee.net.  By banding together, active job seekers and passive water testers alike can interact with a number of different employers and see if there’s a better career waiting.  Worst-case scenario, you come to the realization that your job is better than the options we’re
providing, and throw us a “nanny-nanny-poo-poo” on your way out.

Because the event is during typical dinner hours, we’ll be providing some food that includes a vegetarian option for those who don’t like “turf and turf”.  And in addition to the normal water, soda, and tasty fruit juices, we’ll have wine and beer for those of age and sound judgment. Hydrate and consume responsibly.

The 5 Ws (and one P, sorry H)
Who: DreamHost, AOL, Edgecast, Evite, Hulu and Oversee.net
What: A job fair of the finest variety
Where: 707 Wilshire Blvd, Suite 5050, Los Angeles CA  90017 (aka DreamHost HQ)
When: April 12th, 2012, from 6:30PM to 8:45PM
Why: Because ignorance is only bliss in the Matrix
Parking: Wherever you can find some

If you’d like to attend, please RSVP here: http://itopenhousela.eventbrite.com

Password = itjobsgalore

We request that no one “crash” this event.  If you feel particularly compelled, just be aware that seasoned Open-House bouncer, and all around wild man Rage McFierceson will be in attendance, seeking you out by the scent of your fear.  Good times!

As a recruiter, I’ve seen the level of IT talent that we have here in LA.  Whether I’ve spoken to you or not, I’ve done my best Magnum PI impersonation for several years, and there’s no doubt that some of you could do better.  So, if you think your job is flatlining, come out and take a pulse check.

See you on the 12th.

Hi, it’s Josh.. some of you old timers may remember me as the guy who used to write the newsletters and most of blog posts around here.

You may have noticed that it was about a year ago (exactly), that I stopped.

The reason was that my wife and I had our first child, a baby boy we named Wren on that day. March 9th, 2010. He was 3 weeks early, 7 pounds, 20.5 inches, and delivered at 12:12pm. It was honestly the best day of my life. It was also the worst.

About 11 hours after his birth, Wren stopped breathing. We were at home by ourselves in Santa Monica (we’d had a home birth, and the midwives had left about 3 hours after the birth), so we called 911. They arrived within three minutes and rushed him off to the hospital just one mile from our house, but after about three hours of nothing working they had to pull the plug.

I won’t get into all the details here. You can see everything over at wrenjones.com or Group B Strep International or Hurt By Homebirth. Since then, it’s been a pretty shitty year for me and my wife, and our families and friends. There’s been a lot of crying. A lot of looking for answers. A lot of trying again (no luck so far).

When we got the autopsy back and found out for sure that Wren had died of a Group B Strep infection, it seemed like none of our friends or family members knew anything about it. I was like “people need to know about this!” But after doing a little bit of research I realized that although most parents and lay people have never heard of GBS, everybody in the medical world already have… and it’s basically been solved. Since the 90s there’s been a straightforward protocol on how to prevent GBS, that is over 99.8% effective.

What Then?

Which left me floundering. What happened? Why us? Were we really just that unlucky?

Finally, it dawned on me that the GBS infection was really just the symptom of the deeper “disease.” The home birth itself.

When we had decided to do a home birth, I was skeptical at first. It just intuitively seemed like a risky proposition.

But… after visiting a couple different home birth providers around LA, as well as our HMO-provided OBs, I developed an analogy I could accept. “Home births are to hospital births what Whole Foods is to Safeway.” (A rich people place that probably isn’t actually any better, but at least isn’t any worse.)

I’d long ago given in to shopping at Whole Foods even though I gag at the site of Nature’s Path Organic Love Crunch.

This epiphany struck me when I saw that home births were actually more expensive than hospital births… ours was $5,200 (and they don’t take insurance), compared to basically free with our HMO. The home birth specialists stated that as long as these three key components held true, home births were actually safer than hospitals:

1. You’re low risk. No complications of any kind; no medical conditions, no twins, no premature labor, no breech, no nada.

2. You have highly trained professional midwives assisting you.

3. You have pre-arranged a backup hospital that is very close by, just in case.

I didn’t buy that it was safeR, but it did seem somewhat reasonable that if you carefully followed these rules it could be as safe. And if the experience was nicer than the HMO (and the checkups definitely were), the $5,200 seemed worth it.

I now know the flaws in each of those three components:

1. You’re low risk.

Even if you’re low risk, that doesn’t mean you’re no risk.

The math basically works out like this.. let’s say a “high risk” person has an 80 in 10,000 chance of a life-threatening emergency during childbirth and a “low risk” person has an 8 in 10,000 chance. Let’s say the survival rate of such emergencies is 25% at home and 50% in a hospital.

If that’s the case, when you’re “high risk,” you’d be adding a 20 in 10,000 chance that your baby will die. And when you’re “low risk” you’d be adding a 2 in 10,000 chance! It’s better than if you’d been “high risk”, but why add any extra chance your baby will die?

Secondly, what is “low risk”? Early on, our OBs detected GBS in my wife’s urine. They dealt with it fine (although they could have told us about the higher risk of infecting your child during birth when you’re heavily colonized!).

To them, we were still low risk because GBS is so easy to treat… the mother just gets an antibiotic IV when she goes into labor… except they forgot we were planning a home birth. For our midwives we were also considered “low risk” … mostly because they held a certain complacency about GBS, I guess because they had never experienced it personally.

You never really know if you’re low risk (especially with your first pregnancy!) until after the fact, plus when you’ve decided to go the home birth route, there all of the sudden becomes this (typically) unspoken pressure to go through with it, even if “high risk” warning signs start to appear, because to deliver at the hospital would be some kind of a failure.

2. You have highly trained professional midwives assisting you.

In the U.S., there are basically two types of certified midwives: CPMs and CNMs. What you want is a CNM: Certified Nurse Midwife.

Everything else (CPM, LM, MPH, LLC, direct-entry, state licensed, etc..) is a Professional Midwife. The differences between the two are quite large.

A Nurse Midwife is required to graduate from nursing school, and works in the health care system with real medical doctors.

A Professional Midwife needs only a high school degree and to get certified by a midwifery association.

To go back to my analogy theme, a CPM is to a CNM as a real estate agent is to a district attorney.

It is currently illegal in 23 states for CPMs to deliver babies. Unfortunately it is legal in California.

In fact, there are some studies that show that births attended by CNMs have survival rates even slightly higher than those attended by MDs. However, almost no CNMs will do a home birth… they all deliver in hospitals.

I can only assume something they learned in medical school scared them.

3. You have a hospital very close by.

That almost all Certified Nurse Midwives will only deliver in a hospital says a lot.

Being close to a hospital is not the same as being in a hospital. Believe it or not, babies can die very suddenly during labor, delivery, or even the first few days afterwards. You’re never completely in the clear of course, but the most likely day for any human to die is the day they’re born.

Our story alone should prove that being close (we live literally one mile from the new UCLA medical center NICU, one of the best in the world) is not always good enough.

Clearly, being close to a hospital is better than being far from a hospital.

So it seems pretty logical that being in a hospital is even better than being close.

And again, why add any extra chance that your baby would die?

The Sad Thing

There seems to be a teensy bit of the beginning of a trend towards home births right now, maybe it goes with the green/local/organic/global warming craze. It may seem harmless, but the problem with the whole culture of home birth though is its intense focus on the process of childbirth rather than the result.

I wish I could somehow get everybody laser focused on the most important, nay, the only important thing in childbirth. Getting a healthy baby out of a healthy mommy. I wish I could impart this to people without them having to go through what we’ve been through.

I know it’s near impossible to change somebody’s mind once it’s been made up. I also know that the vast majority of home births are always going to go fine; the numbers we’re talking about are all pretty “small”.

The sad thing is, many people will still choose to have a home birth with a CPM even if they know that they are adding a 1 in 1000 chance that their baby will die.

(That’s the actual odds! For comparison, there are an estimated 85.5 million drunken drives a month and about 11,000 fatalities a year in the U.S. That implies that in America having a home birth with a CPM is 93 times more dangerous than driving drunk.)

I’m okay with that. I just want people to make their decision educated with the best possible information.

(Personally, my advice would be to not.)

Addendum

If you’re considering having a home birth, please… you owe it to yourself, your spouse, your friends, your family, and your unborn child to consider the “unthinkable.”

Before you decide, try checking out The Skeptical OB blog by Dr. Amy Tuteur. She’s been doing this way longer than me and is much more qualified than I am to talk about this stuff.

And if you do still decide to have a home birth, please, find a CNM! (And if you’re GBS positive, get the antibiotic IV for crying out loud!)

Finally, have you ever heard (or can you even imagine hearing) somebody say, “If only I’d had a home birth, my baby would be alive.”?

Because if only I hadn’t.

Many web apps’ installation tutorials state that you should never use these permission settings, however a few state that setting permissions to 777 is required to install the software in question. Insecure permissions are a serious threat on shared hosting servers and we have always taken steps to address this; we configure our web servers to run as your individual FTP/CGI user (and not a shared Apache web server user) and we also offer an “Enhanced Security” home directory lock-down which limits file access to only that specific user.

There are many alternatives present to address this as well – jailed environments are all the rage these days for locking down filesystem permissions. We have known and discussed this option for a while, however restricting user access in this way doesn’t fit well with our general preference to allow our customers the freedom to use their website in whatever way they see fit. The “Enhanced Security” option is our best solution for this. Although not a proper “jail” it will lock out all users from accessing your user’s home directory. If you do not share data between your users, this should be enabled for all of your FTP/SSH users.

Over the years this little permission setting has been ignored by many customers who were given the freedom to manage their sites however they pleased. And, coincidentally, not setting permissions to “777″ has been a security best practice ignored by some of the software packages that we’ve featured within our One-Click Installer as well.

We have historically locked down every server’s home directory (different than the “Enhanced Security” home directory lock down) which prevents one user from viewing other users’ home directory contents, and historically this has been good enough. Good enough is never translated as perfect though, we have started identifying a the new trend in attacks that specifically target insecure directory permissions, so now we have been compelled to step in and take action against this.

Automated security scans are going on right now checking for known backdoors and insecure code on every one of our customers’ sites. Keep an eye on your email inbox – we’ll be in touch if we find anything. We will identify insecure software, the bad permissions mentioned above and/or known malicious code on a customer sites, and we’ll then secure the directory permissions and send an email to let you know.

What you can do to help secure your sites’ files is make sure the “Enhanced Security” option for your individual FTP/SSH users is turned on. This will prevent any other FTP/SSH users (including your own account’s other FTP/SSH users) from accessing that user’s files. This is now on by default for all new users, and strongly recommended. Any customer with only one FTP/SSH user should have this option turned on.

If you can not setup the enhanced security option (possibly true if you share data between users) and you want to secure the permissions on your sites’ files yourself. Please feel free to run the following commands via SSH:

Warning: This is recommended for Advanced Users Only.

find $HOME -type d -perm 777 -exec chmod 755 {} \; -print
find $HOME -type f \( -perm 777 -o -perm 666 \) -exec chmod 644 {} \; -print

Thanks!

DreamHost is co-sponsoring the PyCon Development Sprints and is organizing a group that will focus exclusively on the OpenStack project.  Food and drink will be provided, so simply bring your laptop, your mad Python skills, and a lot of heart.

Queue the song, “Eye of the Tiger”.

[Photo Source: Rocky III, MGM]

 
Written by: Brent Scotten