Day: February 28, 2003

Clemens “Neo” Vasters:

Ladies and Gents, it seems like XML is growing up and is getting all dressed up for prime time — get over it.

Via MacNN, Constantin von Wentzel posted a dissection of his Airport Extreme base station.

Linux Journal has a great article up that deconstructs a sweet little perl utility to sync local and remote web sites via ftp.  It is explained well and taught me a thing or two about perl in the process.  I started reading it yesterday, but Windows Update told me to reboot my computer before I rememberd to post it.  Thankfully, Newsforge picked it up today.

Thinking forward, I’m trying to figure out what OS to run on my 1U server that should be shipping sometime today.  My initial thought is Red Hat 7.x (or 8.x, though I’m not sure how well suited 8.x is to a server environment), as I know it better than any Linux/*BSD distro out there.  (I did install Slackware from floppies on the family Pentium 60 several times, but that’s another story entirely…)

After a little investigation, I began to warm to the idea of putting Ensim for Linux on the server.  It runs on top of Red Hat 7.2, and would make administering my sites really really easy.  It would also come in handy on the off chance that I managed to sell some web hosting.  I might even be able to partially defray colo costs.

I took a look at the ensim demos yesterday and I’m really impressed.  The web interface makes administration a joke.  Yes, I’m fully qualified to edit text files and run stuff at the command line.  I do it on a daily basis.  At the same time, I’d like to be able to stow this server and forget about it for the most part.

I’ve taken a look at the specs, though I have a few questions before I throw my money at them.  It looks like I can run tomcat, which is a bonus.  It looks like Python 2.1.x is installed by default, which is acceptable, but I’ve been working with 2.2.2, which is what I’d like to run.  It appears that at least part of the ensim backend is run with Python, which could lock me into a specific version.

Here’s my question: does anyone out there have any good or bad experiences with Ensim?  I’m sure some of us in managed hosting land are using a skinned version of Ensim for our control panel.  I have a feeling that it might be a good compromise between what I want and how much work I’d like to put into it.  Of course I can always SSH in and putz around.  It also looks like they make some python command line utilities to administer Ensimland.

I think it’s the right solution for me, but I’m open to praise, horror stories, alternatives (yes, Webmin rocks, I know), or anything else you’ve got.  Email me, I’d love to know.

Klaus Miller’s article at O’Reillynet covering simulation with SimPy looks like one of those things that I would look into with a 25th hour to my day:

Simulating complex real-world systems is now possible with SimPy, an open source simulation package. SimPy, originally developed by the authors of this article, has been developed to production quality by a small team of enthusiastic open sourcerers around the world. As far as we know, it is the only existing discrete event Python simulation package. Actually, it is one of a very small number of fully object oriented simulation systems. This article is written with the explicit goal of whetting the appetite of simulation newbies to play with this powerful problem solving technique and to get even more users and developers for SimPy.

There are hidden truths in this article:

21         if waitTime < Customer.toomuch:
22             return 'happy'
23         else:
24             return 'unhappy'