my web 0.2 website

Scalability – a talk at LugRadio Live 2007

I’m at LRL (currently watching Ted Haeger’s talk), and I am publishing my notes for my talk tomorrow, “Scaling Up for Champions”.

There are quite a lot of config examples in the notes which aren’t on the slides to support the talk.

Overview:

• Definition of Scaling & Problems of scaling
• You have to monitor things
• Scaling individual machines – Disk IO, Processors, Memory, Connectivity
• Multiple Servers – L7 proxying, L4 switching, CDNs
• Memcache
• Simple tuning

Its a 30 minute talk so its an overview of all of those things.

Download the slides here. 

Was PGP Signing the first social network?

I spent some time last night making some cards for the LugRadio Key Signing event. I’ve used pgp for a while (since 2001 – I am now on my second key) and have not worked on building up the number of signatures I had on my first key.

I understand that PGP works best with a ‘Web of Trust’, and it suddenly hit me – I think PGP key signing is the first online social network. It has many of the other features of Web 2.0 social networks :

• A common interest (in this case, in security – just like music on last.fm)
• A list of real people advertising a relationship (nomatter how tenuous – “I have verified your ID”)
• It is published (keyserver network)

Wikipedia thinks that Classmates.com was the first social network, released in 1995. PGP was released in 1991. I’d be really interested if someone who knows whether the web-of-trust features were there in 1991 – perhaps please comment if I am wrong.

In any case, if you know me, and would like to sign my key – these are the details

andy@pringle:~ $ gpg –fingerprint CCBCBE9A
pub 1024D/CCBCBE9A 2007-02-06
Key fingerprint = 2B62 D54D CF4A 8093 5189 804E 8991 FF62 CCBC BE9A
uid Andy Davidson
sub 2048g/9002F1A8 2007-02-06

If I know you, I would be delighted to sign your key.

I use subkeys.pgp.net as my keyserver.