Apple talking with ISPs as it prepares to launch its Content Distribution Network

Apple talking with ISPs as it prepares to launch its Content Distribution Network

According to a new report from CDN and Internet Services analyst Dan Rayburn, Apple is going ahead with plans to develop its own content delivery network. Rayburn says the company is working on interconnection deals with Internet Service Providers, as it prepares to take its CDN live.
Apple is said to have spent the last 5 years building its CDN, which would be responsible for carrying out iTunes and iCloud content to customers. Currently, the iPad-maker outsources this delivery to third-party companies like Akamai, which means it has no control over quality of service�
Here�s more from Rayburn�s report via ArsTechnica:

In February I blogged about a new group formed inside of Apple last year, tasked with building out their own CDN to deliver Apple software updates, apps and other Apple related content. Since my post, Apple has been very busy with their build out deploying a lot of boxes running Apache Traffic Server and buying a ton of transit, co-location, wavelengths and other infrastructure services. Their CDN is quickly growing, and it won�t be long before we start seeing a portion of their content getting delivered from their new CDN.
As part of their build out, Apple is currently negotiating paid interconnection deals with some of the largest ISPs in the U.S. I�m not going to disclose which ISPs they are talking to and what deals they have already done, but it�s interesting to note that with all the talk lately of net neutrality, peering and interconnect relationships, Apple isn�t out in the market making any complaints.

Part of Apple�s reasoning, Rayburn explains, for building their own CDN, is due to performance issues with iCloud. You see, the company wants more jurisdiction over the end-to-end experience, as it already controls the hardware, the operating system, and of course its iTunes and App Stores.
And of course, Apple wouldn�t be the first tech firm to bring its delivery in-house. Netflix, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, and eBay all have their own CDNs, and pay various ISPs for interconnection. This gives them access to a large chunk of the ISPs� resources, ensuring fast content delivery.
Again, Rayburn expects to see at least a portion of Apple�s content delivered on their new CDN in the very near future.

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Announcing Portable MariaDB Small portable binary MariaDB distribution for Linux

Announcing Portable MariaDB Small portable binary MariaDB distribution for Linux

Portable MariaDB is a small, portable binary distribution of the SQL server MariaDB (Montys fork of MySQL) for Linux i386 (32-bit). Only the mysqld binary and a versatile init script are included. Portable MariaDB can be run by any user in any directory, it doesnt try to access any mysqld data or config files outside its directory. Portable MariaDB can coexist with regular mysqld (MySQL or MariaDB) and other instances of Portable MariaDB on a single machine, as long as they are not configured to listen on the same TCP port. The only dependency of Portable MariaDB is glibc 2.4 (available in Ubuntu Hardy or later).

The most up-to-date documentation of Portable MariaDB is here.

The sources are here.

Why use Portable MariaDB?

• Its small (not bloated). Fast to dowload, fast to extract, fast to install. Quick size comparison: mariadb-5.2.9-Linux-i686.tar.gz is 144 MB, the corresponding Portable MariaDB .tbz2 is less than 6 MB.
• Its portable: does not interfere with other MySQL server installations on the same machine.
• Its self-contained and consistent: copy the database and the configuration in a single directory from one machine to another.

Installation

To run Portable MariaDB, you need a Linux system with glibc 2.4 (e.g. Ubuntu Hardy) or later. 32-bit and 64-bit systems are fine. For 64-bit systems you need the 32-bit compatibility libraries installed. You also need Perl.

 $ cd /tmp # Or any other with write access.
 $ BASE=https://raw.githubusercontent.com/pts/portable-mariadb/master/release
 $ #OLD: wget -O portable-mariadb.tbz2 $BASE/portable-mariadb-5.2.9.tbz2
 $ wget -O portable-mariadb.tbz2 $BASE/portable-mariadb-5.5.46.tbz2
 $ tar xjvf portable-mariadb.tbz2
 $ chmod 700 /tmp/portable-mariadb # For security.
 $ /tmp/portable-mariadb/mariadb_init.pl stop-set-root-password

Usage

For security, dont do anything as root.

 $ cd /tmp/portable-mariadb
 $ ./mariadb_init.pl restart
 Connect with: mysql --socket=/tmp/portable-mariadb/mysqld.sock --user=root --database=test --password
 Connect with: mysql --host=127.0.0.1 --user=root --database=test --password

Feel free to take a look at /tmp/portable-mariadb/my.cnf, make modifications, and restart mysqld so that the modifications take effect.

Security

By default, connections are accepted from localhost (Unix domain socket and TCP) only, all MySQL users are refused (except if a password has been set for root above), and root has unrestricted access. Unix permissions (such as the chmod 700 above) are protecting against data theft and manipulation on the file level.

It is strongly recommended to change the password of root to a non-empty, strong password before populating the database.

Java support

Java clients with JDBC (MySQL Connector/J) are fully supported. Please note that Java doesnt support Unix doman socket, so make sure in my.cnf that mysqld listens on a TCP port. Please make sure you have ?characterEncoding=UTF8 specified in your JDBC connection URL, otherwise some non-ASCII, non-Latin-1 characters would be converted to ?.

Unicode support

Just as with MariaDB. All encodings and collations are supported. The latin1 encoding is the default, which can be changed in my.cnf.

Language support

All natural languages (of MariaDB) are supported for error messages. Set the `language flag in my.cnf accordingly. English is the default.

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