An exciting and interesting year has started for us at bytemine. There are many items on our agenda for this year, especially regarding our product development. Not only there is a list of products we will be releasing over the year, but also we’re going new ways on how we develope these. Bernd Ahlers will hopefully elaborate in another blogpost on how we introduce behaviour driven as well as test driven development. (BDD and TDD).

As a new years present to our customers, we’ve released the 1.4 version of our bytemine openbsd appliance software, bringing once again lots of new features. There is a Changelog available. Among the features, is also support for the uthum(4) USB temperature sensors, we’ve backported the driver from OpenBSD-current.

bytemine openbsd appliance - version: 1.4.5 [1209]

hanah $ sysctl | grep uthum
hw.sensors.uthum1.temp0=28.36 degC (temp)
hw.sensors.uthum1.percent0=11.50% (humidity)

Right after releasing 1.4 we’ve had some other things to keep us busy. Since the year also started with moving into new rooms. In order to have more space we’ve moved into the new building of the technology center, where we have our office since 2005.

Here are a couple of pictures of two of the new rooms. The developers office, with one of our mascots already up (while the rest is still pretty rough :)

For the first time, we have a meeting room on our own. Well, it is not supposed to be a solemnly meeting room, but furthermore space where one can relax, read and code in a relaxed environment.

Pictures of the other office will follow, once everything is in place.

The conference schedule is about to start with the 4. Linux-Informationstag which will happen in Oldenburg on the 13th of February. Next item on the conference schedule is then our first appearance at the world’s largest IT fair, CeBIT 2010. For CeBIT we have some nice new product announcements up our sleeve, so you should definitly stop by our booth there (Hall 6). Right after CeBIT, there will be the Chemnitzer Linuxtage, where we will have a booth, just like last year.

Of course a new year has also started in regards to the services and hosted solutions we provide. We’ve started to provide the groupware Zarafa as a hosted solution. Each setup gets a Xen (and possibly KVM) instance with the zarafa version best suited for their needs. We’re also looking into adding more types of databases to our hosting environment, considering at least CouchDB.

This only being a subset of what is planned for 2010, you can see this will be an interesting year!

Yesterday we took our own AS live. We’ve moved in with NewColo in Frankfurt, being directly serviced by Antilo. Our AS is AS48991.

We’re currently evaluating the connectivity there, since we need a replacement for one of our racks that is currently co-located at Nacamar, the colo being formerly owned by Tiscali.

Us moving to our own PI-space with our own AS is a rather big, yet exciting step for us, as we will be able to provide even better housing and hosting services as before. With our own AS, we can directly peer with others, having more control about our connectivity. If all works out, we will be moving our frankfurt based services within the next three months to the new colocation.

Stay tuned, we will likely have more news regarding the connectivity of our AS soon.

What’s a serious mine without some rails and rubies?

Since the beginning of 2009 bytemine is offering hosting services for Ruby on Rails and other Ruby based web application frameworks. So if you’re looking for a new home for your awesome Ruby based web application, you just found one.

Our portfolio includes (but is most certainly not limited to) shared hosting, VPS based hosting or hosting on bare metal. Of course we will satisfy special requirements and/or wishes from your side, no matter whether it are small configuration changes or large-scale code changes (for which you can book our ruby developers! ;)

Building blocks

We are using the following powerful components to drive your applications.

• Xen & CentOS
• Ruby Enterprise Edition
• Apache & Passenger

Xen & CentOS

The shared hosting and VPS hosting options are powered by the CentOS operating system and the Xen hypervisor. This allows us to scale shared hosting virtual machines easily and deploy new VPS within minutes.

Ruby Enterprise Edition

Ruby Enterprise Edition is a modified Ruby interpreter which has been built to reduce the memory usage and improve the speed of Ruby applications. It’s a drop-in replacement for the regular Ruby 1.8 runtime so you don’t have to do any modifications on new or existing applications. Ruby Enterprise Edition is developed and released as an open source product by the smart guys at Phusion.

Apache & Passenger

The well known Apache web server combined with another great open source product of Phusion named Phusion Passenger (aka. mod_rails/mod_rack) is on its way to become the de-facto standard of running and deploying Ruby based web applications. Deploying a web application on Passenger is just a matter of uploading the application files via FTP. No special configuration steps required. Passenger is managing the needed Ruby background processes tranparently by quitting and spawning them as needed.

This blog is running on Apache and Phusion Passenger, of course. :)

We can also offer you other deployment platforms – like the popular nginx & mongrel couple – if needed.

Support

This infrastructure is driven by our skilled unix and Ruby guys who will happily answer your questions and solve any problems that may arise.

Questions

Don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any questions or if you would like to use some of our services.