20th May 2013 by in Government

Is G-Cloud selling services or knowledge?

With a revised framework (version 3), a new cloud store approaching launch, and sales figures that are now being described as “exponential”, it is getting harder for industry analysts to continue to claim that G-Cloud is a failure (although they keep trying).

The G-Cloud team proudly tweeted some excellent sales figures for March, and the best thing is that the pool of suppliers making sales is growing and becoming more diverse.

I raise this point because in the early days there were a couple of companies making large sales which bumped the figures up, but this did not necessarily make G-Cloud a success with a core of companies winning all the business.

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13th May 2013 by in Web Hosting

SEO friendly web hosting. How friendly can it be?

One of the many considerations when choosing a web hosting service should be the impact it will have on the SEO of your website or a blog.

Laurence O'Toole - Analytics SEO

Laurence O’Toole – Founder of Analytics SEO

We met up with Laurence O’Toole, the founder and CEO of Analytics SEO, developers of an online SEO management software, to talk about the importance of hosting.

Do you agree with the term ‘SEO friendly hosting’? Is it correct to label some hosting as SEO unfriendly, and what are the signals that hosting alone will have a massively positive/negative effect on the SEO aspect of your online project?

That’s just a marketing ploy. A host could choose not to host dodgy or spammy sites, adult sites or any other type of site that is seen to be negative. In terms of hosting options, they could make configuring the server an easy task, as well as making sure it’s as fast as possible. They could also offer unique C class IPs as standard. But even if all those boxes were ticked, it doesn’t mean to say it’s “SEO friendly” as such. Short answer, it’s marketing fluff.

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6th May 2013 by in Technology

Top posts on CatN.com

With the CatN website and blog just over four years old, we have reviewed all of our content to find the top five most popular posts over the last four years.

We’ll start with number 5 on the list. The 5th most popular post is…

  1. Securing mod_php – without the vasectomy
    Mark Sutton wrote this post in the early days of CatN. He explains the basic insecurities of mod_php in a multi-tenant environment and goes on the consider all of the options available for improving security. This post is a cornerstone of the vCluster stack and gives an insight into some of the thought behind the cloud platform in the early days of CatN.
  2. P2V migration – a live CentOS server to a KVM guest
    Linux Engineer Dawid Golunski explains the process of migrating a physical live Centos server to a KVM guest. The key to this article is that he completes the clone and migration live with no downtime for the origin physical server.
  3. Preparing Procurve Switches for Production
    Here CTO Mark Sutton takes users through the required steps to make a pair of Procurve switches production ready. We took delivery of these switches for our cloud platform and during the build Mark took notes to share with our readers.
  4. T minus 1 year and counting – is your router about to go boom‽
    Another one from Mark Sutton here, identifying a potential issue to do with global routing table capacity. He conservatively predicted that in approximately 12 months time when the global routing table reaches 512,000 prefixes a large number of routers across the internet would be affected.
  5. Openindiana vs Nexentastor vs FreeNAS
    Written by storage expert Alex, he looked into why we initially chose OpenIndiana over the other operating systems offering ZFS support. The results are interesting and he has included some insightful performance analysis supporting the decision.

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29th April 2013 by in Labs, Technology

Access Control – Are you in or out?

access-control-feature

As CatN continue on our journey towards ISO 27001 accreditation, part of the information security policy requires that we have an active and enforced security model in place at our office location.

Since introducing an access control system in June 2010, all employees have been required to tap in and out of the office using RFID technology, however the process for keeping track of guests coming in and out of the building has been very much a manual process.

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23rd April 2013 by in Labs

Create an OpenStack instance with just Curl

For some reason, the idea of direct interaction with the various OpenStack components seemed like a good idea. The aim was to create an instance, set sane security rules, and add a public key all through the API.

I struggled with the documentation. It was a little hard to find, and what I did find seemed a little thin. However with the –debug option on the cli clients, which prints out all of the calls made to the various API endpoints as it goes along, it was game on.

First things first, we need an OpenStack environment to play with. RedHat with their newly released RDO comes to the rescue here. Out of all the one click OpenStack tools I’ve tried, RDO has been the simplest by far. Just three simple steps. Well, if you don’t include step 0 of course: http://openstack.redhat.com/Quickstart . We also installed a machine image through the dashboard to make life a little easier.

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18th April 2013 by in CentOS Images, Labs

Building a virtual machine image for CentOS

CentOS Images Featured Header

This post describes the process of creating a CentOS virtual machine image. Creating a base or master image is incredibly useful in a cloud environment as it allows the creation of multiple nodes / VMs or guests based on the original template.

We have an existing CatN Labs project where we are hosting pre-built CentOS golden master images for use when deploying multiple nodes. You can read about the project on the CatN Labs CentOS Images page.

The base image is a static template of software including OS which is mounted when the VM runs and referenced by further clone nodes. To get started on the base template you will need to have some tools installed on your Linux node. Adapt the following commands for your distribution of choice!

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12th April 2013 by in Labs, Team

CatN goes to CentOS Dojo Antwerp

It’s no secret that we use a lot of CentOS at CatN, in fact we have deployed thousands of instances over time on both physical and virtual machines, and we have 4 Red Hat Certified Engineers (soon to be 6) on staff.

As a company with deep expertise and experience with CentOS it makes complete sense that we understand where our software comes from. You only have to look at the state of our food chain to see that interest in your upstream makes a lot of sense. At the end of the day we have to trust the food [software] that we eat [install]!

Getting to events like this is a great way to get a feel for a community, meet people and potentially find a way to contribute back into the ecosystem as well. What’s not to like about that?

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8th April 2013 by in Cloud, Labs, LogPipe, Technology, vCluster

Advanced PHP error handling in the cloud

LogPipe is a PHP extension module that extends the default PHP error messages with additional information and allows you to pipe the logs to an external program or write them to a syslog facility.

When a user connects to a PHP website hosted on a cloud platform like vCluster, the response may come from different web servers running on different virtual and physical machines. This introduced the problem of needing to aggregate the PHP error logs from different cluster nodes and then split them up again based on the virtual host. Unfortunately the default PHP error message handler does not provide the information or ability to pipe the error logs to an external program, unlike the CustomLog directive in Apache does.

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28th March 2013 by in Team

Theme from a (fri)day at CatN

Following on from Joe’s recent post ‘Ultimate storms beware, you CatN touch this‘ we’ve carried on the theme of misspelling CatN by creating a tenuously linked playlist.

A bit of friday afternoon fun, we decided to create a CatN playlist with all our favourite songs which had ‘Cat’ or ‘Can’t’ in either the song title or artist name and share it with the world!

Let us know your favourite songs which we’ve missed, and why they should be included - if we like your suggestion then you could be made (in)famous for all time by your song being included in the privileged “CatN top 20″ list.

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25th March 2013 by in Team

Ultimate storms beware, you CatN touch this

Oil Rig Platform

Branding a product can be tough. Tougher still is branding the company or division behind a range of products. I often get asked why we are called CatN. I also often hear the name pronounced incorrectly – Cap’n, Cat’n, C-A-T-N and various others. For the record it is pronounced ‘Cat En’!

The decision to go with CatN as a business name is based on the initial project vision to provide products that sit in the platform-as-a-service space.

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