Anymore it seems as though the cellular network has almost become the backbone of human existence. Forget oxygen my friends, without a cell phone (You know, that dangerous radioactive smoking gun that could spark your next nearest fuel explosion in your car) and you’re left high and dry.

With ever developing technology and/or the copying of it, it would appear as though the cellular companies are actually going to outdo any technical gurus that play in the same electronic market.  If it talks, the cell has it.  If you can record the video, yup, your cell has it.  If you want to share your life photos, that’s right, your cell has it.  So why stop there?  Who said we have!

Some of you may already be walking around with cell phones that can now track you via a GPS link and let your friends & family know your latitude longitude.  Pretty impressive right, but wait, it gets better.  Have you been watching the news lately?  Nokia, one of the large manufactures of cellular phones in this country has just purchased the GPS map provider  Navteq in its bid to secure the GPS cellular service.  Now your cell phone can outdo your MP3 player, video recorder, photo album, and even your GPS system.

I’d guess that in the coming years, our cell phones will be sold based upon your career path.  Police may have breathalysers at a fingertips notice, doctors with medical journals via phone, and who needs an extra key chain weapon when your phone may just have pepper spray where your antennae use to be!  Who needs passports, it’s in your phone!

Just my 2 cents on what’s to come.

Well, Debian turned 14 on the 16th of August.

That takes some thinking about. Although the number of Linux users has increased greatly in the past few years, it’s easy to forget how old the technology actually is (in relative terms). The Linux kernel we so love was Linus Torvald’s brainchild and has it’s own birthday on 17 September when it turns sweet 16.

Take a look at the original announcement of the release of Debian, dated 16th August 1993: Original Announcement.

Do you know how Debian was named? Well, the founder, Ian Murdock, combined the first name of his girlfriend, Deborah, with his own – hence, Debian. That also tells us how to pronounce Debian – I have heard many variants with ‘Deeebian’ being the most popular but take the two names and there you have it: Deb(orah)Ian.

I wonder if there has been any release that has been as influential in the wider Linux community as Debian has proven to be. Possibly Redhat?

Either way, Debian has been forked into many different distributions which is exactly what the founder, Ian Murdock, intended. According to Distrowatch there are 129 distributions directly related to Debian GNU/Linux (to give it the full and correct name).

Debian is well known for its slow release schedule. This reliance on stability and security is one of the main factors in the Debian influence. After 14 years we only recently had Debian 4.0 released. Rather sweetly, each release is named after a character from the Pixar movie “Toy Story”:

Debain 4.0 – Apr 207 – Etch

Debian 3.1 – Jun 2005 – Sarge

Debian 3.0 – Jul 2002 – Woody

Debian 2.2 – Aug 2000 – Potato

Debian 2.1 – Mar 1999 – Slink

There may not be a huge street party over this birthday but it may surprise you the number of celebrations that are planned. Is your local Linux Users Group (LUG) planning anything? Are you planning anything?

Maybe a small beer then.

In July of 2003 Spry moved into our first office space which we shared with NameIntelligence. It was quite a feeling of accomplishment at the time. It really helped us realize that we weren’t doing this as a hobby, or a side gig, that Spry was for real. If I recall properly at the time Spry had 4 employees: myself, 2 tech support/billing, and a sysadmin/developer.

Around this time I realized that not all of our customers were exactly like me. Many of you do not know, but my background before joining Spry was strictly UNIX and network engineering. I had never sold a product, or designed a website in my life. Not being very knowledgeable about selling servers, I decided it was time for us to hire our first employee for marketing and sales. I thought that someone that had been working in this arena for years would be a great fit, bring in some of the ‘gray hair’ to help us model the traditional ways products had been marketed. It seems very evident while writing this that was a rather short sighted decision. The internet, and especially virtualized operating systems were almost brand new! What could someone that had been promoting vacuum cleaners and hair-dryers their whole live know about search engine optimization and web design philosophies — effectively nothing.

We decided to enhance the product line to help increase revenue. We added three new product lines almost simultaneously; shared hosting, colocation, and dedicated servers. While we had always sold dedicated servers, there was nothing about them on the website. All of these were substantially tougher to manage than a relatively small number of VPS customers. It was time to invest in infrastructure again.

The network and our colocation footprint had been rapidly growing. We were up to what seemed like a massive 2.5 racks. We had obtained our autonomous-system number from ARIN, which allowed us to have our own IP space. We had connected to the Seattle Internet eXchange, allowing us to peer with both local and international providers. We also ‘upgraded’ our network to Riverstone networks. The switch to the Riverstone platform is one that I often think about. A close colleague of mine was very adamant that I invest in Cisco gear, saying ‘Once you go Cisco you’ll never go back’. We needed advanced router software to handle our Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) connections to our upstream providers, which the Riverstone provided at a very low cost. The Riverstone gear was not on our network for long, and for any customers who were with us during that period — I’m sorry. The lesson learned there was ‘We are not rich enough to buy cheap tools’. The cost of downtime, coupled with having to purchase Cisco gear in the end was an extremely expensive lesson.

After several months of shopping we got our own datacenter space, rather than just renting racks from a provider. It was Suite 911 in the Westin building. We had room for about 30 racks. We finished our network upgrade to all Cisco gear, and began selling colocation in earnest. That takes us through to November 2004.

Especially around Seattle people have heard of the name Spry. Spry was founded in the 90’s by a Seattleite by the name of David Pool. Spry was a software company and also a dialup provider. Much of Spry’s fame comes from a product called ‘Internet in a Box’, it was one of the first commercially available products including connection software (remember Winsock?) and a Spry branded version of Mosaic. Checkout the Wikipedia article for more information. Spry was purchased in 1995 for 100million dollars by Compuserve. The Spry brand name was phased out over the next several years. In 1997 Compuserve sold off to Worldcom, which opened up a new series of mergers and acquisitions.

Through that series of mergers someone forgot or neglected to renew the Spry domain. Our founder and CEO, Jay Westerdal from domaintools.com was wise enough to snatch it up. Jay and I had met at HostPro (now Interland) in 2000. He was the lead developer of a group of web properties offering free hosting and other webmaster tools to entice users to purchase hosting, while I was the systems engineer. It was evident immediately that Jay and I had a great working relationship. HostPro and Interland merged in 2001 and closed down the Seattle operation. Jay and I both chose to remain in the Seattle area, and I actually ended up renting a room from Jay.

Initially Jay entered into a resale agreement with a group of local guys selling FreeBSD based VPS hosting solutions. This continued for about a year until a difference of opinions ceased that arrangement. I had been chiding Jay for months telling him that I could run a better hosting operation than the people he was reselling for — and then Jay made me put my money where my mouth was. In July of 2003 I officially started working fulltime for Spry, mind you I was not getting paid.

I spent several months working with friends on building a FreeBSD based VPS solution. I’m not a developer by any means, but spent hours in-front of the keyboard writing provisioning systems, editing VPS templates, and attempting to build a control-panel for users to manage their VPS accounts. It wasn’t until October of that year that I was introduced to Sw-Soft and HSPcomplete. HSPcomplete was a turnkey billing and customer interface to provision VPS accounts onto Virtuozzo based Linux VPS servers. After evaluating the Sw-Soft product line Jay and I made the call that it would be best to get busy selling and managing accounts, rather than attempting to create our own system from scratch. Spry literally started with 4 servers — a Pentium-3 550, 2 dual Xeon 2.4ghz servers with 2gb of RAM and 6×73gb disks, and a 2.4ghz Xeon with 2×36gb disks. We had a single rack with a Extreme Networks layer 3 switch, and a 2megabit commitment from a single provider.

Around January of 2004 we started moving the hundred or so customers over from the reseller. It became quickly evident that I couldn’t handle the workload by myself, so Spry hired it’s first employee. We were working out of Jay’s house at this point, so our employee had to come join the party too! It wasn’t long until we needed another employee, and instead of looking for additional office space we decided it would be best just to have the guy move into the house with us! At peak I beleive there 3 of us working on the Spry project, and 3 working on DomainTools in the house. Walls were knocked down to help make room for additional desks. Did I mention that I had my girlfriend living with us as well? We took up all the parking on the block, and in July of 2003 the city of Bellevue let us us know that it wasn’t kosher to have that many people working in the house, so we got our first office space in Renton.

More on this story to come!