Global Networks started

I've started this brand new blog to discuss about Global Networks.
The scope of this blog is to give a brief overview about the way individuals can build their own networks in a scalable way, and make profit out of it.
In distributed networking it isn't necessary a big bandwidth to make it available on the Internet, as long as the necessary tools and software kits are smoothly distributed.

As an example: suppose you would like to run your own pop3s (POP-3 over SSL) server, aka mail-box server and share it to a couple of friends. You are just anoyed with your ISP accounting: they limit you with some Megas for the mail-box, but you often receive about Gigas of emails per day, such as entire moves). All you have to do is to place a Linux server inside a reasonable served service you own (say 20 upstream Mbit/s bandwidth, and check the traffic limits regularly -- if that applies to your ISP).

The global networking concept is also applicable to those who really like to have a transparent service through the Internet. Suppose you own a company with several minor offices. There are Windowz shared-drives to access sparse documentation, such as forms, etc. The solution nowadays is quite simple and unexpensive: a DSL connection on the Internet for all the offices, and a protected service on Samba ports (139 actually). Tuneling via ssh is the easiest solution; the better is to deploy a VPN through each p-t-p.

Lots of problems get solved using these kinds of ad-hoc solutions, inherently cheaper. The offer and supply laws of economy are applicable to the global world of networks, and simpler solutions are emerging -- expensive and complex solutions will not survive in long term.

The convergence of services is a traditional paranoia, in my opinion. Different mixed flavours of distributed systems supply the same look & feel for the end-user. Centralized services are getting more and more obsolete.

Let's dig into some more interesting examples.

A reasonably big car-selling company provides a site for their own advertising. They need a big database for storing all models and brands of cars. Instead of buying a centralized service with 20 servers, this company adopted to have 5 servers in each four corners of the country. Two of the total four servers are 100% redundant in each 10 minutes period. The remaining two servers are slaves for the service, and only contain the last 6 months of information, synched on every day.

The redundancy obtained by two separate main servers increases the security of database against catastrophic disasters (fires / terrorist attacks), but demands further bandwidth across the servers -- nowadays the increased cost of the bandwidth is negligible, since leased lines are getting cheaper every day. The classical converged solution would require a big data-center lease with enormous costs, our solution shown an improvement of speed, due to geographical distribution. The trade-off is a distributed database solution.

Another example is based on SourceForge compiler farms. Nobody should think to deploy software for different OSes would require one physical machine per OS: virtualization is free, why expending money on Helpdesks for your company to make the maintenance of several servers, as physical machines, when you can have a single machine running dozens of different environments? The compiler farms on SourceForge are an example of a cheap external contract (in the case of SourceForge, free for developers of open-source software) with such environments.

Yet another example: if you look around any decent software sources or binary package, you will see a bunch of free mirrors to download it. On a simple scalable way. Distribute. Do not concentrate any service. IP-it!

The global world of networks is wide-spread, and smalltalks about convergence do not convince me!

I will try to not mention any commercial services or products in this blog, apart from those I really think are worth to take a look.


On the picture above you can see a simple service provided by a Perl package called Usermin; simple to use and free. Install it to provide mail-reading for your employers, instead of buying windowzed Exchange services.