Phantom Labs

Hey hoo,

well its no news anymore but WOOHOOOOO after 12 years StarCraft 2 arrived. I didnt had the luck to get into beta but since release i play a few matches every night now.

I remember when i first played starcraft (also at release), internet was horrible expensive and i stil was going to school. Hell that was fun, now i gan rock again as terra... ;)

However besides my main machine at home im stuck with some damnit old machine when on the go, a thinkpad R500 with just a dualcore 2 Ghz Celeron and a Intel "ouch" Integrated X4500MHD on win xp with 2gb ram.

The game looks ugly as hell in all low, but if you set the graphic card settings in the intel tool full to "power" instead of medium and also run in window mode sc2 is playable without lag in 1v1, even at big battles. Maybe i post a video later how it looks, but i need to capture with a digicam because on that limited hardware running fraps now too would kill it total ;)

I just post this because tons of guys asking about x4500 and sc2.

After the completion of Version 1.0 - Galactic North of my Smooth Streaming Server (www.smoothstreamingserver.com) im already working on making my next idea a reality. This time it is a linux based settop box that receives dvb channels and VOD wireless from a central server unit which does encoding on the fly without the need for hardware encoders per channel, yeah wireless IPTV. This is made possible by ciscos new videostream technology on the enterprise class access points which basicaly convert multicast streams to unicast for wireless clients that request a certain multicast stream, spiced with priority management etc.

OSD looks already pretty nice i think, now working on the server backend and web-based management interface to add dvb-adapter cards, setup streams and so on ;)

It doesnt happen often that i am some sort of a fanboy of some company or service, it is especially rare when it is a hosting company.

However for VPS.NET this happened to me 4 months ago when i started to move all my stuff to this provider and instead of using dedicated servers and co-location to XEN instances. In total i paid now over 1400 $ in 4 months to them, hell i even said on twitter that it was worth every cent... was it really?

I was suprised how well that works and how easy it was to scale installations, i also enjoyed it to setup nodes just to test some stuff instead of installing a new server somewhere, hell i even posted a "they are so cool try it out" post here in my blog. But mainly i moved because they promised me a self-healing and scalable infrastructure that even if something fails or burns down will stil work. SAN Storage instead of normal harddisk was the other movement key for me.

Til today i supported this company like some apple fanboys that even would buy steve jobs piss in yoghurt  cups. But now they failed me miserable and im not sure if it was a intelligent move from me to get all my stuff to this provider.

But back to what happened...

Yesterday on 6th July 2010 around 3 or 4pm the London Cloud B and C went down. A power-outage killed all servers in the UK2 Datacenter.

Well thats no big trouble, i guess even if it should not happen (UPS, Redundant Power Supply and so on) if you had a dedicated server now or a co-lo you would have your servers back in notime and maybe if at all 30-60 minutes downtime.

But what happens if you run virtual servers like tons of other users in this datacenter and depend on SAN Storage exactly like VPS.NET ?

Well makes around 10-20 Hours downtime. That was the total time that my machines were down or unusable. And now over 24 hours later i stil have one machine in a unusable state and that one and my experience with the support is what makes me really angry and where i lost my fate in this company.

It is not even the fact that vps.net promises self-healing and stable storage facilitys and all this stuff that makes me this angry, it is that they tried to talk me into spending extra money to make up for there failures... but continue reading...

The story of the crashed disk

After most of my vps came back online in the night, one remained unusable. The filesystem was broken and it was read-only but running besides the fact that it claimed to have used 64 ZetaByte of storage ;)

I didnt think of a big deal here but i was unable to fsck the disk, and vps.net said on twitter people with this problem should open a ticket.

Well i did this, and i could bite me in the ass that i didnt download the data when the vps was read-only but stil running. Because now it was lost...

The Support guys later then told me that they tried to repair the disk and said that it was probably the "bootloader"

Hi

I ran a disk check on your VPS but it looks like the bootloader may be corrupt. I would suggest restoring from a backup.

No Problem i thought, that would mean the partitions may be intact and just need to reinstall grub or whatever. But what got my attention here was this part: "I would suggest restoring from a backup."

If you do not know vps.net, it is not like in many dedicated server environments where you get like X gb of ftp backup space that you have to pay for it per month. Pay for rsync backups, pay for disk images.

I have no problem with paying for backups, some of my vps have this feature enabled on vps.net , the really important ones. The Problem here is... the disk did not crash because it was my fault, the disk crashed because they miserable failed in there business.

I did not install backups of this server, whats running on that machine is in my source repository and can be restored, but what bothers me is that i need to reinstall all the stuff on the machine and im used todo highly customized installs from source instead of packages from the distribution. And they suggest me i should pay for backups because they are unstable... thats awesome and that was exactly the point where i lost my fate... I did go to vps.net because they make the impression on there website and from the architecture that a failure like this cannot happen.

Once i asked why storage is so expensive and there counter was because of the expensive SAN systems, obivously this expensive uber systems failed yesterday and are responsible that im left with a corrupt disk that i cannot repair myself.

I asked for a disk image and they offered me to transfer it to a server, i was happy and thought "whooho cool i can restore the fs myself and just reinstall the machine and copy back my stuff" but then suddenly another technican said thats not possible, even if the former one said he will upload that to my server...

But wait... thats not all

I gave now up on this and just decided to re-install the server and copy back my files from the source repository and to redo the work on some stuff that i was missing and that i hopped was in the disk image.

But no... i cannot reinstall the server, just nothing happens. Only ways todo this now? open a ticket and then maybe get this answer or do it right away: delete the vps, create a new vps.

Awesome but i cannot do that, that means i would lose the IP adress on this vps, but i do not want to change this again, means also extra work.

Conclusion?

I think i should now add 5 $ a month to all of my vps todo backups in the vps.net way so that i can restore them easily. But not to protect me from my own faults but to protect me from incompetent service at the hosting company itself. Because there is no such thing as self-healing and this SAN storage they utilize are far away from being save and stable. At least in this london clouds as it seems.

Trust? There is no such thing from me at this moment, they lost it terrible, VPS.NET have to regain that trust and need to make me a fanboy again. I dont care about free hostbill shit, or free ssl certs or whatever if they cannot provide a stable basic service that i expect.

Do it better...

The part is i think i was doing something better when moving to a cloud based hosting service for my machines.

I got my first back in this time very expensive Dedicated Server in the year 2000 when most users were still surfing with modems and ISDN in germany and 100mbit connection with 5gb traffic included and prices of up to 16 DM per additional GB traffic was just awesome and all you needed to serve then-thousands of this users.

This evolved later to more and more dedicated machines, then to cheap tower housing up to my own cages of expensive hardware in datacenters in frankfurt also including virtual enviroments based on xen and vmware.

For my new company i wanted to just didnt want to do that again myself and just off-load this to vps.net, instead of getting some nice reward i was punched in my own face by nothing else then myself for doing this adventure and faced a major downtime of my company store and demonstration websites for products that we sell.

I stil belive that nick, ditlev and all the other involed guys at uk2 do a great job, but i also hope they understand that they now have to regain trust to many customers.

I will stay at vps.net but i do not think i will grow my environment there as i planned todo and just go back to good old colocation or dedicated servers for larger projects, i can buy that at uk2 too, and i will. But that cloud experiment failed. Not because the cloud failed, because my disk in the cloud failed and i had much work todo to restore because i refused to stuck more money in the cloud to protect me from itself.

Thanks for reading and sorry for the spelling mistakes.

After hacking abit around today i released streamdrops.com as a show-case site for our streaming server.

It uses Adaptive Multi-Bitrate streaming and delivers videos from one source to Silverlight, Flash 10.1, Apple HTTP Streaming (iphone etc.) and Android Smart-Phones.

Check it out on your pc and aswell on your iPhone.

The Website is build around 3 vps.net nodes (varnish, www-origin-db, streaming) and can sustain a few thousand concurrent requests on this few resources allocated.

Have fun

Before i go in to details, what is a adaptive stream?

An Adaptive Stream is a videostream where the video dynamically adapts to network conditions. Usualy for adaptive streaming a video is streamed in multiple bitrates, lets say 200,400 and 800kbit/s.

If a user with a 1Mbit line starts watching the stream, the 800kbit/s version is delivered. Now lets say another user on the same line starts a download while user a is still watching the movie so that the available downstream decreases to 200kbit/s. The stream will now automatical pick the 200kbit/s version without stopping the video, its seamless in most cases. If a higher bandwith is available again it switches back to the higher bitrate stream.

There are multiple solutions todo this, as example Microsoft SmoothStreaming , available for IIS7. Or Adobes Adaptive HTTP Streaming, coming with Flash 10.1, or Apples HTTP Streaming Architecture as used in the iPhone OS.

This Month my new company Clavain Technologies Ltd. will release the SmoothStreaming Server for Linux. This solutions combines all three of the above, plus support for Android and traditional Progressive Streaming (both for VOD) in a easy to use and install software distribution controlled by a clean web interface.

With CSSS you can encode or stream one source and it is available as Smooth Stream, Adobe Flash Stream and as Apples HTTP Stream without the need for encoding or packaging 3 times, only 1 stream = 3 output formats.

The last days we just finished the proof of concept gui and backends for livestreaming. Streaming to all 3 supported devices is a matter of a few clicks in the CSSS User Interface. Create a livestream, download the streaming gui, and rock :)

A Streaming tutorial and a free livedemo account is available @ www.smoothstreamingserver.com/streaming_tutorial.php

The only reason why i purchased multiple Playstation 2 consoles in the past aswell as one PS3 was Gran Turismo. Im not a huge fan on consoles but that game is the only reason to have one, it is by far the best looking racing game with the best realistic behavior of the cars.

However i have no access to my playstation at the moment and felt the urge to play GT again i decided to give pcsx2 a shoot again, and wohoo GT4 works great now on this emu.

Here is what you need todo in order to play GT4 on a PC:

1. You need a modern CPU, a Dual-Core with at least 3.4Ghz per core is neccessary to archive near fullspeed fps in the emu
2. A NTSC Version of Gran Turismo 4, dont even try to get the PAL version running, it will not work
3. PCSX2 Beta r1888 or later (it works with 0.9.6 well but much better in r1888)

Do the following PCSX2 Settings (click picture for large version):

The settings in the menu for above 4 screenshots are:

config/graphics

config/cpu

config/advanced

config/speedhacks

also activate misc/enable patches

GT4 is fully playable on PC with that settings, even on my Phenom with only 3Ghz per core, however i had to activate frame skip and have only 50 instead of 60fps, but it is still fast and playable.

Also remember every time you launch gt4 with pcsx2 you have to go to the Gran Turismo 4 Settings (in the race window or located in your home) and change screen settings to "Brightness 0" and "screenmode to 480p progressive" or GT4 will crash during some races.

Here is a replay video (i love gt4 replays) of a race i did , recorded in pcsx2 aswell.

Wohoo just read that, great news:

Hi Jason,

if we are using x264 in a datacenter cloud services environment. How the license will cost ?

and where I can pay for this ?

thanks

On Fri, Mar 26, 2010 at 12:04 PM, Jason Garrett-Glaser <darkshikari@gmail.com> wrote:

On Fri, Mar 26, 2010 at 12:01 PM, Dusty Leary <dleary@imvu.com> wrote:
> What is the licensing status for using x264 in a DLL in an otherwise
> closed-source program?
>
> The FSF opines that DLL linking "counts", and this would be a licensing
> violation.
>
> I don't suppose the x264 devs feel otherwise?

Linking is a violation; there's nobody who disagrees with that.  The
FSF is all kinds of crazy, but when the SFLC agrees with them, you
know they're right.

Fortunately, we are almost done with our plan to dual-license x264.
We just received tentative approval from our biggest corporate rights
holder and have the rights from ~95% of contributors (just a few more
left).  It'll be something on the order of $1 per unit sold with a 10k
minimum.  Ideally we'll be ready within 1-3 months.  This will allow
you to purchase a license to use x264 under a less restrictive,
non-viral license, for use in commercial programs.

Jason
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