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I installed Leopard on an external hard drive this evening. I have to say, I am initially impressed with some of the new features. Also it seems faster running that Tiger, which is actually interesting since I am running on an external drive, and this is typically slower.

So why not install it on my production machine yet? Well the primary reason is that Apple didn’t send developers a final release of the OS prior to releasing it publicly. This means that many apps haven’t been testing yet on Leopard. I know that our app (which was in beta) broke between the last seed and the final release, and I assume others did too. So I am going to give it some time for those little issues to be worked out.

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Unless you opt out, Verizon plans to begin selling your personal data including things like who you call, when and how long you talk. I strongly suggest you opt out by calling 1-800-333-9956. You will be asked for your phone number, your billing zip code, and the last 4 or your social.

http://blogs.zdnet.com/ip-telephony/?p=2649

http://news.vzw.com/news/2007/10/pr2007-10-15g.html

I would also be vigilant if you upgrade your phone or renew your contract in the future to ensure they don’t slip it in. It would probably be good to ask the rep anytime you make a change on your account to ensure you won’t be opted in for CPNI sharing.

UPDATE: this applies to Mobile numbers only.

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Over the last few months I have researched many different load balancers for our web server cluster. I have looked at f5, foundry, coyote point, array networks, and barracuda.

I was drawn to the Barracuda, who is a new entry in the market, because they seemed to have a really capable product for a great price. A single Load Balancer 340 was priced at about $2,500. So a redundant pair came it right at $5,000. The next closest product in terms of price was from Array Networks (which is also a very capable product in our testing), but there was a $10,000 price gap (per redundant pair).

The main problem was that I couldn’t find a review, or really any information about the barracuda, so I was a little stand-offish about the product, plus I knew it was less than a year old. However, I decided to give it a try anyway. After deploying the load balancer we ran into some problems. The biggest problem was that all traffic appeared in our logs as sourcing from the IP address of the load balancer. We contacted support about this at first we were told this is the way the load balancer worked, however, after a bit more work with support we found out this was not the case if we used the Direct Server Return mode.

For those that are new to load balancing, Direct Server Return is an awesome technology that lets your server reply to the client directly, so the load balancer doesn’t have to handle all of the traffic like a reverse proxy. Instead through some MAC address translation it fools the client into talking to one of your real servers directly even though they think they are connected to the Virtual IP address of the load balancer. This lets you achieve some amazing throughput numbers with the Load Balancer 340. You usually have to buy a very high priced load balancer (f5, foundry, etc) to get this type of technology.

I had a few more small issues with the load balancer, one of which was a bug they knew about and was fixed in the latest firmware release which I wasn’t running yet. But the support has helped me through every issue quickly. They have a great support infrastructure where you click a button in the interface and it hooks the appliance up to Barracuda support and they can remotely configure or repair the appliance.

I have purchased a total of 4 barracuda 340 load balancers and I am happy with them. For the $20,000 difference between this solution and the next closest solution it has definitely been worth the issues I had with configuration. Plus having worked with the load balancer team I know they are committed to making the product work for you.

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