Sunday, February 20, 2011

Savings

Google is lately heavily advertising their Google Apps related savings.
I have tweaked the assumptions in order to match the following 5 nines setup:

  • ZFS + dedup storage backends 
  • clustered frontends (Solaris Cluster):
    • Postfix + Dovecot + SpamAssasin + OpenLDAP
    • RoundCube webmail
  • Mercurial for versioning
  • MediaWiki for content
The result was:

Do not get me wrong - Google Apps is a great SaaS. However In case of a large organization who happens to be cheap/money conscious, _EXTREMELY_ concerned about privacy and with it's own data centers - there are some alternative solutions. The costs go mainly in hardware as all software used is free and system admins are creative and payed well below the 70 USD/h that Google is assuming.
  

Thursday, February 10, 2011

Headhunting callflow







A                        Daniel                   Continental              
|----INVITE (Interview)->|                        |                        
|                        |                        |                        
|<-200 OK----------------|                        |                        
|                        |                        |                        
|                        |<-INVITE----------------|                        
|                        |                        |                        
|                        * Discussion with A      |
|                        * A proposes work for    |
|                        * Continental            |            
|                        * Proposal sounds good   |
|                        * Better rates than Conti|                        
|                        * Decline Continental    |
|                        |                        |                        
|                        |-488 NotAcceptableHere->|                        
|                        |                        | ???                         
|<-183 In Progress--------------------------------|
|                        |                        |                        
|----INFO (In Progress)->|                        |                        
|                        * Puzzled...             |                        
|                        * In what progress?      |                        
|-------------------BYE->|                        |                        
|                        * Amused                 |                        
|<-200 OK----------------|                        |                        
|                        |                        |                        
A                        Daniel                   Continental  


Isn't this callflow flawed?
What the heck... I refused Continental with a brutal 488. Still they believe that they are in progress.
Their timers are completely screwed. However I understand them - It would have been cheaper for them to hire me directly  than via A.