World IPv6 Launch

link January 18, 2012 in Uncategorized with 2 Comments

AWS Route53 vs Rackspace Cloud DNS

July 8, 2011 in Cloud computing, DNS with 9 Comments

Yesterday, Rackspace announced their new Cloud DNS service. This is clearly(?) a response to Amazon’s Route53 release a while back. With one big difference; Rackspace Cloud DNS is free (in combination with other Rackspace Cloud Products), whereas Route53 is not.

I’ll admit I haven’t tried the Rackspace service (yet), but here’s a quick comparison table anyway. Some questions (about branding and distribution) I couldn’t find answered on the Rackspace information page, so I used the support chat.

  Amazon Route53 Rackspace Cloud DNS
Management API* API*
Distribution Anycast** Anycast***
IPv6 - Yes
DNSSEC - -
Branding - -
RR Types A, AAAA, CNAME, MX, NS, PTR, SOA, SPF, SRV, TXT & “Alias”**** A, AAAA, CNAME, DKIM, MX, NS, SPF, SRV & TXT
Pricing Cheap Free

* Neither Amazon nor Rackspace has a management interface for the DNS services. DNS30 is however availible for Route53.
** 19 locations on 3 continents
*** 3 locations on 2 continents (see comment below)
**** Alias records are used to map resource record sets in your hosted zone to Elastic Load Balancing instances.

If the choice only stood between Route53 and Rackspace I think I’d go with Rackspace, just because of the IPv6 connectivity. But other providers should also be considered, Zerigo for example has an excellent DNS service.

Update: After the comment below by Daniel Morris at Rackspace I tried to contact the chat support again to get the information about the edge locations. Here’s the response:

Agent: I’m sorry but I am not positive I would recommend contacting the support team at 1-877-934-0407 or 0800 054 6345 | +44 20 8734 4345
Agent: I’m sorry for any inconvenience this has caused
Agent: have a great day

Not very impressed wit this fanatical support, to be honest.

Quick and dirty WordPress speed comparison

July 6, 2011 in Benchmarks, Web hosting with 0 Comments

This is just a quick benchmark of WordPress release 2.8.6, 2.9.2, 3.0.6, 3.1.4 and 3.2.

The test was done on a 512MB rackspace instance, running Ubuntu 10.10. With the following packages installed with default configuration: libapache2-mod-php5 mysql-server php5-mysql. Benchmark was done with ab, doing 10 000 requests to the front page, over 10 concurrent connections.

This is the result, in requests delivered per second:

Clearly, speed isn’t that much improved with the release of 3.2. However, this benchmark only tested the front page with the sample post.

GeoIP CSV to Bind ACL

June 1, 2011 in DNS, Scripting with 0 Comments

Simple perl script for converting a GeoIP CSV file (latest version) to Bind ACL definitions.

#!/usr/bin/perl
 
use strict;
use warnings;
 
use Net::CIDR::Lite;
 
# Get files
my $infile  = $ARGV[0];
my $outfile = $ARGV[1];
 
# Open infile for reading
open(FILE, '<', $infile);
 
# Define iplist array
my %iplist;
 
# Loop infile
while(<FILE>) {
        # Set start, end and country variables
        my @line = split(/\"/, $_);
        my $start_ip = $line[1];
        my $end_ip   = $line[3];
        my $country  = $line[9];
 
        # Use the CIDR class to get networks in the range
        my $cidr = Net::CIDR::Lite->new;
        $cidr->add_range("$start_ip-$end_ip");
        my @networks = $cidr->list;
 
        # Put networks in the iplist array
        foreach(@networks) {
                $iplist{$country} .= "\t" . $_ . ';' . "\n";
        }
}
 
# Close the infile file handle
close FILE;
 
# Open outfile for writing
open(FILE, '>', $outfile);
 
# Loop iplist array
foreach my $country (sort keys %iplist) {
        # Write to outfile
        print FILE 'acl "' . $country . '" {' . "\n";
        print FILE $iplist{$country};
        print FILE '};' . "\n";
}
 
# Close the outfile file handle
close FILE;
 
# We're done

Simple usage:

$ ./geoip.pl GeoIPCountryWhois.csv countries.acl

You’ll need the Net::CIDR::Lite extension for Perl, in Debian/Ubuntu the package is called libnet-cidr-lite-perl.

WordPress 3.2 beta 1 speedtest

May 14, 2011 in Benchmarks, Web hosting with 1 Comment

With every new WordPress release, things seems to be getting slower. But not anymore? With the release of WordPress 3.2 developers state that performance is getting better.

The test was done on a 512MB rackspace instance, running Ubuntu 10.10. With the following packages installed with default configuration: libapache2-mod-php5 mysql-server php5-mysql. Benchmark was done with ab, doing 10 000 requests to the front page, over 10 concurrent connections. Both blogs used the Twenty Ten 1.2 theme, and the supplied sample post.

This is the result, in requests delivered per second:

As you can see, things aren’t any faster, yet. But this is still a beta, and i only tested the performance of the front page, nothing else. I also tried the Twenty Eleven theme, but that wasn’t any faster.

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