Reef Central Online Community – Things that cost more than premium membership…

3 terabytes is how much data we send across the wire in a month.

3 gig is around the amount of text data we have on the site. The index into that data is around 7 gig.

In addition to that we store over 6 gig in images.

The amount of data Reefcentral.com doesn’t seem that big. I mean, you can buy a 300 Gb drive for a about $100 these days. It’s the 3 terabytes of bandwidth of month that will kill you in terms of costs.

The Venture Capital Squeeze

Just as Joel Krause, one of the founders of Excite, mentioned in a recent article of Business 2.0, it can be pretty cheap now to start an online startup. Open source and LAMP is free, the server hardware is very cheap, and marketing through the web and word of mouth can be a lot cheaper than traditional marketing methods. In the link above, Paul Graham also mentions how programming languages have become much more powerful, so that less people are needed to code – another cost savings.

We’re outfitting a new server here in the office, and it appears the Western Digital Raptor WD740GD 74GB Serial ATA 10,000RPM Hard Drive w/8MB Buffer ($165 ZipZoomFly) is the fastest Serial ATA drive out there. It also has a five-year warranty and 1.2 million hours MTBF so it appears Western Digital is confident the high speed won’t be at the expense of reliability. We went with this drive since we’ll be running a RAID 0+1 and the 74GB x 2 will be giving us more than enough capacity. If you need a lot more capacity, the Maxtor Maxline III 7L300S0 300GB Serial ATA 7200RPM Hard Drive w/16MB Buffer ($129 ZipZoomFly) looks like a good solution. Put 4 of those in a RAID 0+1 and you’ll have large capacity, high speed and redundancy.

I added 2 1Gb sticks to our 1.8 Ghz PowerMac today in order to take care of the memory needs of Lasso since when Lasso was using a lot of memory, only a few megabytes of free RAM were available to the OS. The nice side-effect of this extra RAM is that WebStar and WebStar Lasso calls are much faster. Adding 2 Gigabytes of RAM to a machine isn’t that expensive these days (only $199 for 2 1Gb sticks at Fry’s), and it’s good to see OS X and OS X apps taking advantage of the extra RAM.

Simply CG Network :: View topic – Sony Product Transformations *FINAL ANIM ON PAGE 3

Great modeling and animation with 3ds max.

I hope once the Macintosh moves over to the Intel platform that one will be able to boot from a USB drive. USB 2.0 is fast at 480 Mb/Sec, and USB enclosures are usually less expensive and easier to find than Firewire drives. I guess we’ll see what happens in 2006.

A script is needed for Filemaker Server 5.5 auto startup. Although this link gets you there, it starts up FM Server with root as the user so that FM Server config can’t access FM Server:

FM Server 5.5 startup script

To remedy this situation, in the FMPServer file, replace the code with this:

#!/bin/sh

. /etc/rc.common

##
# Start up FileMaker Pro Server
##

# path to FileMaker Server 5.5
FMS_PATH=”/FileMaker Server 5.5/FileMaker Server Config.app/Contents/Resources”
FMS_SERVER=”${FMS_PATH}/fmserverd”
# admin username
FMS_USER=”username”

StartService ()
{
if [ “${FMPSERVER:=-NO-}” = “-YES-” ]; then
ConsoleMessage “Starting FileMaker Server”
sudo -u ${FMS_USER} “${FMS_SERVER}” start -c “${FMS_PATH}”/fmserver.conf
fi
}

StopService ()
{
ConsoleMessage “Stopping FileMaker Server”
sudo -u ${FMS_USER} “${FMS_SERVER}” pause
sudo -u ${FMS_USER} “${FMS_SERVER}” close
sudo -u ${FMS_USER} “${FMS_SERVER}” stop
}

RestartService()
{

StopService
StartService
}

RunService “$1″