Hello. I make things.
Reboot
The time has finally come for a proper Sekati Reboot.
After a long(ish) redesign & rebrand process (we are, after all, our own worst client right?) of Sekati the next order of business was to laboriously index the last near decade of work. This required quite a bit of homework to create proper write-ups, locate awards, press & publication articles; in some cases re-staging full builds on the new archive server instance for posterity. All in all it’s been a fun stroll down memory lane & I’m very pleased with the end result (aesthetically & technologically) – which says something I think given my somewhat puritanical nature when it comes to these two disciplines.
Next came addressing my ailing collocated hardware. My good friend & colleague Tony Kapela has, for many years, graciously hosted Sekati’s business gear at his company (Five Nines Data) colocation facilities in Madison, Wisconsin (geek pride has its perks).
For years now all Sekati services were run from a 2U rack-mount server containing: a Pentium III @ 548Mhz, 256Mb RAM & a RAID 1 Mirror for two 40Gb IDE disks running OpenBSD. Laughable by todays standards but it was a good investment 7 years ago & has served well up until it’s recent decommissioning.
So, it was time to modernize (both in hardware & software) – here are the nitty gritty details for those of you willing & able to geek out on them: a 1U HP DL145 chasis was selected & loaded with two 3Ghz server-grade AMD processors, 10Gb RAM, two 500Gb SATA drives in a RAID 1 Mirror configuration powered by a 3ware 8506 Escalade 12-Port SATA RAID controller.
As for the software stack, it was time to do create the stable, reliable infrastructure I’ve made for some many of my agency clients & employers & it was time to virtualize. Now, I didn’t have (nor need) the scale of hardware I generally do, but the same rules applied & after testing several virtualization offerings I came to the conclusion that Xen would be my preferred (para) virtualization platform.
Resources were sliced to support four Debian guest DomU virtual servers to support a clean separation-of-service infrastructure & many new pieces of management software were written to insure ease of maintenance & longevity.
So here we are; the Sekati Reboot. Somewhat sadly sans flash – but there are still some subtle HTML5 / social-networky hidden features which harken back to the Classic Sekati & it’s multi-user functionalities. In the coming weeks & months I’ll be releasing many of the new (and some old) technologies I’ve developed for Sekati & client open source in the new sites Product section & on the new Sekati Github account.
Enjoy!
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