We’re back from FrOSCon 2009 and had a fabulous time. Previously we have heard, that FrOSCon is a very well organized conference and we can definitely confirm that. Already prior to the event, the communication with the FrOSCon team went well.

We arrived Friday evening around half past eight and the whole FrOSCon team was in action to build up the event. This gave us the chance to have our booth set up by friday evening already. With each iteration of ‘bytemine on tour’ we worked on improving the presentation concept for our booth and yes, we came pretty far. The outcome of this can be seen in the picture. Wow!

We’ve presented the newest of our products, with software versions we’re releasing this and the next week. The visitors had a chance to take a peak at the upcoming bytemine openbsd appliance software version 1.2 as well as the beta version fo the bytemine manager 1.1. These will be covered here, once we released the software this and next week. Stay tuned for that!

Holger had the idea to use a table-top rack, usually used for music equipment. The rack is tilted by 15 degree, which gives the visitor the chance to take a look at the display and the appliance without having to bend down.

Both days were filled with lots of interesting conversations. The social event on saturday evening was nicely done and gave the chance to relax a bit.

One of side-effects of FrOSCon is that we will be exhibiting at OpenRheinRuhr this november. I will be talking with their organizers this week.

See you at FrOSCon 2010!

For the first time we are going to be at the FrOSCon and will have a bytemine booth there.

To quote their website:

“FrOSCon is a two day conference on Free Software and Open Source, taking place for the third time on August, 23rd/24th 2008 at the Fachhochschule Bonn-Rhein-Sieg in Sankt Augustin near the cities of Bonn and Cologne.”

We’ve heard many good things about this conference and are really looking forward to be there. As the conference closely follows on the 1.2 release of the bytemine openbsd appliance, as well as the 1.1 release of the bytemine manager (both will be released in the week preceeding FrOSCon), this is a good chance to check out our new stuff.

See ‘ya at FrOSCon!

While we posted a lot about our development activities and our products lately, this is a bit of a different blog post, as I personally review our final move to our new colocation and try to reveal to you some of the things, ususally not visible.

Thursday night we moved the last machines from our old colocation at Nacamar (formery operated and owned by Tiscali), often refered to by us as colo “FFM”, to our new colocation at New Colo (internally named colocation “FRA”). Both are located in Frankfurt and roughly 10 km apart (as the bird flies).

We’ve been at the old colocation for more than five years; quite some time. The times at Nacamar / Tiscali had its ups and downs. When Nacamar took over the operations, qualitiy did go downhill. The colo itself was still nice (almost like a clinic so clean), but phone service and remote hands. doh. As Nacamar had their ups and downs with the colo, so were also my visit there, sometimes better, sometimes horrible. I recall visits, where I expected to spend a few hours there and ended up staying overnight, because a machine decided to trash various parts of the harddisk. Yes, these were the early days of bytemine, back when I was – on the unix side of things – mostly on my own. Things have changed since then by lot – for the good. The move thursday night involved three persons and has been prepared since april. So besides changing colocations and switching to a place that suits our requirements better, we’ve also switched from a rack that contained infrastructure that was in place before all the other byteminers joined to infrastructure that was built up jointly by the current bytemine team. A lot of things become a lot easier, if you have an experienced team around you and that become very visible throughout the last year.

As I blogged earlier this year, we’ve setup our own AS and run now in our own PI-Space. Roughly a year ago, I began looking for a new colocation. Since this april we’ve been evaluating and testing NewColo, but directly booking from Antilo, and while we’ve had a few problems at first, it turned out that Antilo was very good at resolving these and assuring we get the quality we want and need. Before moving the new colocation into production mode, we’ve got another uplink through GHOSTnet, so that we have two independent peers. Aside from that we now have a presence at the Kleyer-Rebstöcker Internet-Exchange.

The first servers we moved then to the new colocation were our Xen Servers, on which we do the rails- and webhosting (Bernd blogged about a while ago) as well as other things like running SpamAssassin instances for spamscanning.

On Thursday we then moved the rest of the infrastructure, like e-mail services etc., to the new colo. The move itself went so smoothly that I can hardly blog anything interesting about it. The whole combined move (taking down, driving to new colo, building up) took roughly 2 1/2 hours and so far we did not spot any fallout.

After finishing the first setup of the moved machines at NewColo I had a chat with Sebastian (Owner and Founder of NewColo) and it is quite clear that a place like NewColo and Antilo is so much more fitting to bytemine than Nacamar. Both are fairly small companies (at least compared to Nacamar and Tiscali), but that is exactly what we need, since we know that problems will be resolved right away and not escalated through different parts of a gigantic enterprise :)