Silicon Beach Australia Google Group

Re: Sydney Silicon Beach Drinks this Friday

bigm...@gmail.com (Mick Liubinskas) — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 01:25:01 UT

Are they still happenging at the Grace Hotel? or should we have them
at Pollenizer?

Sydney Silicon Beach Drinks this Friday

bigm...@gmail.com (Mick Liubinskas) — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 01:24:10 UT

Hey everyone, happy 2010.
To kick off, I'll be at Silicon Beach drinks this Friday and shouting
a few drinks from Pollenizer to kick off 2010.
I think Steve Hopkins is up from Melbourne too.
Anyone keen to come? I haven't been for ages.

Re: [SiliconBeach] Redundant Servers

yara...@gmail.com (Yuval Ararat) — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 00:09:46 UT

Hi Geoff,
Thinking about it for a minute i guess your question is valid but
complicating the situation.
My assumption is that this is more a simple question of how we can get out
of the single point of failure in a simpler manner some thing more on the
lines of what Silvia has suggested.
DR is usually as expensive as HA and is

Re: [SiliconBeach] Redundant Servers

yara...@gmail.com (Yuval Ararat) — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 23:35:00 UT

Hi Geoff,
I think it is very clear that the discussion is over DR and not HA since we
are talking about redundancy and not performance issues.
Cheers,
Y.
On Thu, Jan 7, 2010 at 8:00 AM, Geoff McQueen - Hiive Systems <

Re: Redundant Servers

jeromy.ev...@blueskyminds.com.au (Jeromy Evans) — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 22:58:20 UT

Phil,
As a specific example for DR, as per Geoff's description, our primary
hosts are in a datacentre in NSW. We also pay for a lower-spec server
in QLD for DR. We use the VPS software to periodically clone the
primary server to the DR server via incremental snapshots. A script at
the VPS host also applies critical changes to the clone (ID, IP etc).

Re: [SiliconBeach] Redundant Servers

abhinav.kesw...@gmail.com (Abhinav Keswani) — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 22:35:44 UT

Phil,
Bearing the distinctions that Geoff makes in mind, you might find that
it is sufficient to use the Rackspace API or to manually create a new
server based on
1) a predefined image
2) the last backup snapshot of your primary server
You could hook up a monitoring system to do this on your behalf that

RE: [SiliconBeach] Redundant Servers

geoff.mcqu...@hiivesystems.com (Geoff McQueen - Hiive Systems) — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 21:00:32 UT

Phil,
When we look at this stuff, we distinguish between High Availability (HA) and Disaster Recovery (DR). The two are very different.
HA is where you want to minimise/eliminate single points of failure, and usually the kit or approach needs to be in the same hosting environment as your primary kit. This approach is generally more expensive and more complex to set up, but it means you can actually pull the plug out of the back of one of your machines and the website will keep on going, automatically, when set up right.

Re: [SiliconBeach] Redundant Servers

silviapfeiff...@gmail.com (Silvia Pfeiffer) — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 13:20:21 UT

How important is it for you to be 100% up? If you can do with, say,
30min downtime if something fails, all you may need is a virtual
server that is regularly backed up and can be brought back to the last
stored state.
If you need 100% uptime, you need to indeed put several servers in
place and failover (or at minimum a load balancer that notices when

Re: [SiliconBeach] Redundant Servers

yara...@gmail.com (Yuval Ararat) — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 13:08:16 UT

Hi Phil,
Not a system admin by profession but here are a couple of quastions that
might help us relate and may be put our experiance here.
Do you have a backup plan at the moment?
What is your software and hardware stack?
What type of redundancy are you planing for? hardware/software failure only
or fire and power outages too? i.e. Offsite/Onsite.

Re: Redundant Servers

and...@tj.id.au (Andrew Tunnell-Jones) — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 11:34:02 UT

If you're automating failover it may be easier to have 3+ servers so
that you can operate on the basis of a quorum of 2. The automation and
failover methodology you select will depend on your networks options,
software stack and availability policy. On the off chance PostgreSQL
and Pacemaker fit your stack feel free to contact me off-list for more

Redundant Servers

philip...@gmail.com (Phil Sim) — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 08:31:24 UT

Hi all, we're finally moving to put in place a redundant server and
failover.
We've running a local primary server and a redundant server on rackspace.
I'm interested in what other people are doing in terms of failover. Are you
automating it, and if so how are you doing it? Semi-automation? Manual? Not

RE: [SiliconBeach] Re: Hello! / Gold Coast Meet Up? / Office space / Sales person needed

geoff.mcqu...@hiivesystems.com (Geoff McQueen - Hiive Systems) — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 01:20:16 UT

Steve,
Thanks for that detailed info. Just to reinforce: the Wiki page for all of us to add our details to is [link]
It would be nice of course if we had some other meta-data here (so you could see all of the start-ups in your neighbourhood, or who are in a certain industry, etc), but I'd better shut up now before I end up volunteering to build such a thing...

Re: Hello! / Gold Coast Meet Up? / Office space / Sales person needed

st...@refactor.com.au (Steve Dalton) — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 01:11:03 UT

Hi Auley
We are on the Gold Coast (but our entire company is consulting in
Brisbane at the moment!) - if you search back through the
introductions post on googlegroups then you will find info about me
and our company.
There is stuff happening on the Gold Coast and I'm surprised you were
not able to find anything. I keep a reasonably up to date list at

Re: [SiliconBeach] Re: Introductions

rebecca.pa...@gmail.com (Rebecca Paget) — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 00:51:22 UT

Hi Charles,
Welcome to the group. Actually I think we have met before at University.
Thanks for your generous offer of publicity and connection to your networks.
I'm in the prototype stages of a new venture at the moment, so in the near
future I'd love to take you up on your offer and meet with you offline.

Re: [SiliconBeach] Re: Long time SB member, new entrepreneur seeking your assitance on ideas for our site

innotect...@gmail.com (Matt Moore) — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 21:25:19 UT

Alex,
------------------------------ ----------------------------
which of the following four offers the biggest market?
which potentially will offer the highest profit margin?
------------------------------ ----------------------------
Consumer applications probably offer the biggest market for what
you're trying to do but also present the highest risk for you as a