Linux Web Server Clusters Emerge

Linux Web Server Clusters Emerge (excerpt)
David Orenstein, ComputerWorld, August 16 1999

...Brisbane, Calif.-based TurboLinux Inc. is bringing high-availability cluster traits like load balancing and fail-over to basic Web serving, said Dan Birchall, a beta tester of the company's TurboCluster technology at Web hoster Digital Facilities Management Inc. in Haddonfield, N.J. Birchall implemented a cluster that he said has performed well and cost about $7,500 compared with a $75,000 commercial Unix cluster.

Linux To Gain Features For Both Notebooks And Servers

Linux To Gain Features For Both Notebooks And Servers (Excerpt)
Mitch Wagner, InternetWeek, August 11 1999

...Vendors at LinuxWorld introduced add-ons to Linux. Among these was TurboLinux, which introduced its own support for Linux clustering. Any TCP/IP application can be clustered using TurboCluster software by running one copy of the application of each node of a Linux cluster, with TurboCluster handling load-balancing and failover of nodes, according to the company. No theoretical limit exists for the number of nodes that can be managed; the application has been tested with up to 20 nodes.

Web hosting company Digital Facilities Management uses the software on a two-node cluster, and the company is pleased with the costs savings compared with a Unix system, said Dan Birchall, a consultant to Digital Facilities Management.

"It gives us complete redundancy and does it for a tenth of the price of anyone else on the Unix end of things," Birchall said. The company priced SGI and Sun Microsystems clusters and found they would be priced at $30,000 per node; a server running Linux does the same job for less than $3,000 per node for a single-processor Pentium III server running at 450 MHz, with 250 MBs of RAM and 10 GBs storage on each box.

Speedy Delivery

Speedy Delivery (excerpt)
Allan Hoffman, Newark Star-Ledger, June 21 1999

...Sometimes the problems were caused, in part, by the speed with which the Internet became popular. A major Atlantic City casino, for instance, gathered about 10,000 e-mail addresses from visitors to its Web site, starting in 1996 or 1997, but hadn't made it completely clear whether they would receive e-mail messages as a result. About 1 or 2 per cent would "yell and scream and make a big fuss" upon receiving e-mails, notes Dan Birchall, an opt-in advocate and vice president of technology for Digital Facilities Management, a Web design and hosting company in Haddonfield.

Eventually, the 10,000-name list was scrapped. Customers were sent a final e-mail, asking if they wanted to "opt-in" to a new list (with special offers from the casino). "We're almost back to 10,000 again," says Birchall, who has a sort of slogan for the "opt-in" versus "opt-out" debate: "If you want people to complain when they get your mail, choose opt-out. If you want people to complain when they don't get your mail, choose opt-in."

(This "slogan" was dubbed "Birchall's First Law" by an Australian colleague in the spamfighting community.)

In Haddonfield, Web-Site Design Firm is Taking Off

In Haddonfield, Web-Site Design Firm is Taking Off
David Cho, Philadelphia Inquirer, January 3 1999

Like so many Internet experts, Michael Kuehl and Dan Birchoff learned their craft mainly on the computer in the home office instead of getting formal training in college.

And like so many new Web-site production firms, their month-old Digital Facilities Management of Haddonfield is sailing into a precarious business world where hundreds of companies seem to rise and fall every year.

In the tri-county South Jersey area, there are about 107 Web-page-design companies listed in the phone book, all less than a decade old. Some of those listed have already folded.

But Kuehl and Birchoff, whose company consists of themselves and eight part-time freelancers, believe they have the vision to turn a profit in a tight business field. Their 50 clients include some of the richest firms in New Jersey: casinos in Atlantic City.

..."When both of us went to college, there wasn't really even a Web,'' said Birchoff, 27, the company's vice president and only other full-time employee.

"Look at [Microsoft chairman] Bill Gates, who dropped out of college. Or Steve Jobs, who was just playing around with computers in his garage before Apple. If you really want to be in this thing in the beginning, you can't wait until college courses come around to jump in. By that time, it will be too late.''

Birchoff has been designing Web sites since 1989 and started getting paid for it in 1993. In 1994, he designed the Web site for Burlington City (bc.emanon.net), where he lived from 1994 to 1997.

"Town sites are always a little more complicated,'' Birchoff said. "There are different aspects of a town: the government, events and a gazillion little civic groups and historic societies.

"And each one tries to be more historical than others vying to be on the site. You end up being an ad-hoc tourist council for the town.''

The site also included the trash-collection schedule, demographic information, housing prices and information on community events. It was one of the first municipal Web sites in South Jersey; now, nearly all South Jersey towns have their own (a list can be found at www.southjersey.com/townsnschools).

(addendum: my name was misspelled, and I had been on the Internet since 1989, designing web sites since 1993, and getting paid to do it since 1994. Unfortunately, I was out of town when this article was finished up, so I didn't have the chance to offer corrections.)

The Most Expensive Chairs in the World

The Most Expensive Chairs in the World (excerpt)
Richard Morin, Washington Post, February 8, 1998

...Our informants discovered two couch chairs: the John N. Couch Professor of Biology at the University of North Carolina and the Cortner/Couch Endowed Chair in Cancer Research at the University of South Florida. "A love seat would complete the set," suggested Dan Birchall, a computer systems administrator in Moorestown, N.J.

He also said his personal search has turned up "many vice chairs, but was unable to find any 'virtue' chairs." (At Yale, they've come close, reports Brian Bradley of MIT. "I have always held Yale University's Sterling Fellowship in great regard," Bradley noted. "Where else can one be officially declared a Sterling Fellow?")

Junk E-mail jangles nerves

Junk E-mail jangles nerves (excerpt)
Susan L. Thomas, LAN Times, February 2 1998

..."I think the amount of spam continues to increase. There are fewer big-time spammers, but there are a lot more people getting into it on a smaller scale," said Dan Birchall, Internet systems administrator at 16 Straight Communications, a Web-hosting, graphic design and marketing company in Mount Laurel, N.J.

...Birchall said that the number of countermeasures against spam is also growing, and although he receives more UCE, less of it gets into his network and reaches the end user.

...The push now is to get vendors to default rather than relay, said 16 Straight's Birchall. On a good day he spends 15 to 30 minutes dealing with junk E-mail. That means reading it after it has been filtered out on the server and moved to a folder or calling sites whose servers have been unknowingly used for unsolicited mail.

...Although Birchall said he has tried to prevent spam at the end-user level, he has found it is more effective to do it at the server level, affecting hundreds of people immediately. Critics of cutting mail off at the servers, however, point to users losing mail they might otherwise need as well as the administrative costs. Often an administrator will not reject the mail but move it to a folder for closer scrutiny.

..."If there is a solution, it will be a combination of technical efforts, educational efforts, and legislative efforts," Birchall said.

Sorting Out Spam

Sorting Out Spam (excerpt)
Reid Kanaley, Philadelphia Inquirer, July 10 1997

A disgusted Dan Birchall, systems administrator for a Web-site design company in Mount Laurel, N.J., reviewed the scores of junk e-mail messages he had received in a week. Among them:

--"I Mail Your Ad to 30 Million People for Pennys!!!''
--"PROFITS''
--"Do Not Open If You're Under 18''
--"It Works ... So We're Doing It Again!!''

And on and on.

"Repulsive,'' said Birchall, 25. "Annoying and repulsive.'' To see the list, he said, "is the same kind of feeling you would get if you walked out the front door and saw that someone has sprayed graffiti on your wall.''

..."If I post to a Usenet group about my favorite band, some person will be running a piece of software that runs through the newsgroups and grabs all the e-mail addresses, and they'll send a message to all the addresses they got,'' said Birchall. "Within a day or two, I start getting things about get-rich-quick schemes and pornography, never anything about my favorite band.''

Birchall has written his own bozo filters to block junk e-mail for himself as well as his company, 16 Straight Communications, and its clients.

But because the mailers frequently change or fake return addresses, and new mailers are constantly appearing, a lot of spam still gets through, he said.

"Since the technological solutions aren't truly bulletproof, I would like to see some sort of legislative solution, but one as unobtrusive as possible,'' Birchall said.