AIAIO: Our Blog

The little coffee shop on West 21st Street has, dangling under its potato chip rack, a row of flip-flops.

I pointed to them today as I bought my pretzels. “Sell a lot of flip-flops?” I asked the owner, an affable woman who’s always manning the register.

“You know, we open sometimes on Saturday nights, when the weather’s cool,” she explained to me. “And all the clubs around here, they don’t let women in wearing flats. So all these girls come out after wearing their heels all night, and they say to me, ‘Do you have flip-flops? I’d pay anything for a pair of flip-flops!’

“So, we got some flip-flops. I know how they feel–I once spent $20 on flip-flops after a night like that. But they’re all college girls, you know? I don’t want to rip them off, so I just charge five dollars.”

Have your customers voiced unexpected needs to you? How are you solving their problems?

I had no idea Via CPUs had built in hardware encryption. Apparently this has been the case for awhile. Of course I discovered this right after I ordered my parts and made my last blog post. After some research, it also appeared that support for it seemed to be built into Vyatta, the firewall distribution I intend to install.

I spent a few days trying to figure out if going with Nano, a single threaded CPU with hardware encryption, would benefit us more than the multithreaded Atom CPU that I originally purchased. I knew the Atom would be a better multitasker than the low powered Via Nano (U2300) I was looking at, but I was always unsure about how much VPN traffic it could push.

I tried looking around for benchmarks, but there wasn’t much useful information out there. I guess people who like to build low energy systems don’t do as much benchmarking as people obsessed with having the fastest gaming rigs. :)

It finally occured to me to examine the hardware specs of the appliances that Vyatta sells. I immediately discovered that their Vyatta 514 appliance uses an older 1 ghtz Via CPU. Not only that, but the specs say it can do L3 forwarding at 200Mbps , and VPN forwarding at 113 Mbps (IPSec).

I was sold on moving to the Via CPU with hardware encryption/decryption.

Here’s my latest parts list. I also reduced the size of the flash here to keep the total below $400 without shipping or tax.

• Jetway NF76-N1GL-LF- $140
• AD3RTLANG – Jetway 3 x Gigabit LAN Daughter board – $48
• picoPSU-150-XT + 102W Adapter Power Kit – $70
• M350 Universal Mini-ITX enclosure – $40
• 4GB 40 pin Embedded Disk Card 4000 – $58
• 2GB DDR2 Memory – $28

Hopefully I’ll know by the end of next week whether or not these parts will all play nice together.

I’ve wanted to replace our office firewall for awhile now. I currently use a manually maintained bash script to manage iptables. It’s worked fine for me for a few years, but it gets tedious.

In addition, the firewall is an old desktop (from around 2001) running CentOS 4. It’s certainly been powerful enough for our needs, but its big and bulky, and uses more energy than it needs to.

I needed to know what software I was going to run before investing in any new hardware. I found a list of firewall distributions and picked out Vyatta. Once I chose my software, I started looking at hardware.

Since I wanted to make the new firewall as energy efficient as possible, my choice from the beginning was an Atom based system. The trick was finding the right combination of parts to get the 4 NICs that I wanted to fit into a more reasonably sized case.

I began looking for mini ITX rack mount cases. It would be a nice change from the old desktop sitting next to the rack now. But they were so expensive. After seeing how small the compact cases were (smaller than the cisco router hooked up to our T1), I decided that I’d save some money, and get a small case that’s wall mountable.

In the end, I settled on the following parts list:

• Jetway JNC92-N330 – $110
• AD3RTLANG – Jetway 3 x Gigabit LAN Daughter board – $48
• picoPSU-150-XT + 102W Adapter Power Kit – $70
• M350 Universal Mini-ITX enclosure – $40
• 8GB 40 pin Embedded Disk Card 4000 – $89
• 2GB DDR2 Memory – $28

For a total (minus tax and shipping) of $385. Depending on what you want to install on the firewall, you may be able to save some money by getting a smaller flash card. I believe Vyatta, for example, would be fine with a 2 gig flash card.

It’s a dual core Intel Atom based system. Many of the Jetway motherboards support daughter boards. I needed one of those so I can use their 3 NIC add on board.

The picoPSU power supply is very cool. They’re very small and efficient (the one I got is up to 96%.) I was shocked at the size, actually. They plug directly into the motherboard’s ATX power supply socket, and eliminate the need to have dedicated space for a DC-DC ATX board inside the case.

I am a little worried about having Realtek NICs. I may need to set up a build environment for Vyatta, and compile the drivers for them. You should definitely research whether the NICs are supported in your distribution of choice before investing in the same parts I did.

I’m not afraid of a little bit of work. Since I know that there are linux drivers for the NICs I’m getting, I know I can get them to work with Vyatta (eventually) if they don’t work out of the box.

The parts should be here within a week, and then I’ll be able to see if they all play nice together.

Adobe to buy Omniture for $1.8 billion.

We observe this transaction with interest, as Ai is a certified Omniture partner, and many of our clients are on the Omniture platform. Omniture has grown by leaps and bounds in the years we’ve worked with them, and they have built an excellent software suite that proves useful on a daily basis. (We also, of course, use Adobe products regularly.)

This is probably its main complement to Adobe: creating software that its users embrace as part of their daily workflow. Beyond that, this author finds the acquisition curious. Omniture is all about data–aggregating it, processing it, manipulating it. Adobe’s software, on the other hand, is about creativity, and empowering users to do better, more attractive work.

I suppose there’s a similarity from that empowerment angle–both the Omniture suite and Adobe’s core products enable people’s work to be more sophisticated than they would be on their own, or with a competing product.

The inevitable culture clash may arise in time, too. For now, I’m sure Omniture and Adobe will run independently. But as the businesses merge, it will be interesting to see whether, and how, Adobe’s creative California culture will absorb the data wonks in Utah that powered Omniture’s expansion.

Adobe is calling it a merger of art and science. I suspect Wall Street knows the truth.

Ai’s Devin Ikram and, er, yours truly were interviewed for an eMedia Vitals article on web design and content sites. It’s a good read, and covers both the high-level strategic perspective and the hands-on designer’s view of the same topic.

Check it out: What’s SEO without engaging Web design? on eMedia Vitals.