March 2013 Meeting

[Justin Etheredge]

Our March meeting is coming up this Thursday the 28th at 6pm.

Unless someone has a topic, this meeting is going to be an "open" meeting. For those of you who have not been to open meetings, we come up with topics that are interesting to developers, and the discussion is always lively and spirited. Or, awesome people like Harper will show up with a Makerbot and we will spend the meeting printing out bottle openers. You never know what will happen!

Hope to see all of your there!

We will be meeting at Snagajob's headquarters in Innsbrook:

4851 Lake Brook Drive, Glen Allen, VA

Ecstatic Labs is sponsoring the food, so please let me know if you're planning to attend so I know how much food to buy.

[Jonathan Pryor]

I'll be there.

- Jon

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[Peter Fries]

I'll be there

[Mike Huffaker]

I think I can make this meeting.

By the way I decided to get a Mac Mini and I'm going to try and host my website from my house using the Mac Mini and port forwarding off my Verizon router.  Its a higher cost upfront, but after that,  I have no monthly fee's besides my existing internet bill and I can setup the web server any way I want.   

A friend of mine suggested trying with a "raspberry pi", but I don't know if it could handle running Tomcat or another Java server and a DB, plus they use the small SD cards which I have heard can go bad after too many read/writes.

Mike

[Josh Stickles]

I'll be there.

[James Long]

I'll be there if it's warm enough to ride the motorcycle; I think my wife will have the car.

[Armen Babikyan]

Hey hey,

I suggest using a VPS (Virtual Private Server) provider. A website that
announces good VPS deals is here:

http://www.lowendbox.com/

After running my own servers for 15+ years, I have been moving in this
direction. They are totally worth it, for several reasons:

* Less expensive: At $10/mo at the high end, you can start small (probably
as low as $4/mo, I pay $7/mo), and then go up fairly transparently as your
needs for resources (CPU/RAM/disk/etc) increase. A 50W box at $0.15/kWH
costs more than $5 a month, which is like half the service price
already...

* OS Setup: pretty much handled for you, unless you want something obscure.

* Good Storage reliability. They take care of this - you don't need to
set up your own RAID1/RAID5 on COTS drives. You don't need to buy new
drives every couple years as bad sectors creep up. This is a definite
plus. I still will use rsync to local (offline) storage every once in
awhile, though, just cause that's a good idea.

* Better data rate - you don't have to deal with crappy upload tokenbucket
speeds of verizon/comcast. Note that you do get a limit of how much data
you can transfer, but I've never hit it. Don't serve up lots of content,
and you'll probably be all set. Serving up lots of content on a
cablemodem might incur grief of verizon/comcast anyway...

* Static IP address: I don't know what verizon offers, but last I checked
comcast requires business service for this feature. DynDNS is an
acceptable workaround though, unless you run your own mail service, or if
you need multiple IPs (e.g. multiple SSL-enabled websites).

* Open port 25: you can run your own smtp server, if you so choose.
verizon/comcast block these because of open relays.

* Not dealing with hardware: Someone else does it. It's never sounded so
good until you have a HW problem and need to deal with it ASAP. You don't
even pay for upfront equipment costs. Have several beers instead!

I get service from chicagovps.net for $7/mo. As someone else mentioned,
Amazon EC2 is a great way to go, too; at 0.015 cents per hour (at the low
end), that comes out to $11/mo.

My two cents. Cheers,

Armen

[Ari Ugwu]

I'll be there.

[David Janke]

i'll be there

[David Janke]

What are y'all doing for email hosting? Just dovecot or something on the server, or relying on free gmail/hotmail-type accounts?

[Justin Etheredge]

Just a reminder if you're planning on attending tonight, please let me know as soon as possible.

[Harper Trow]

I'll be there

Harper

[M. Scott Ford]

I'll be there.

[Armen Babikyan]

I'll be there.

--
Sent from my Android phone with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity.

[James Long]

Unfortunately I totally forget about an Easter thing going on tonight. :( Hope I can make it to the next one.

- James

[Mike Huffaker]

I'm not feeling that great today and its still like Winter, so I don't want to risk going out and getting sick ( or getting anyone else sick ).

So I will not be able to make it tonight.

Mike