Julian C. Dunn

My team at the CBC is hiring for two vacancies: System Administrator and Senior System Administrator.

Our group does day-to-day server and application management of the CBC.CA infrastructure, which runs almost entirely on Linux (so RHCT-level experience is needed for the former job, and RHCE for the latter). Equivalent experience, especially in the media industry, is welcome. Above all, since we’re a communications company, excellent communication skills and a pleasant demeanor are essential.

To apply, click on the links above. The postings close on Friday, November 26.

Every so often I hear criticism from CBC’s audience that we choose "proprietary codecs" for the distribution of our audio and video material. The arguments usually go something along the lines of:

1. CBC is a publicly-funded organization
2. CBC shouldn’t be beholden to proprietary technologies as it limits accessibility
3. Therefore CBC should stream audio and video in completely open formats (e.g. Ogg Vorbis, Ogg Theora, etc.)

Nobody wants to be accused of limiting accessibility, and CBC certainly doesn’t start with a position like, "hey, we should be jerks and just lock out anyone who’s using FreeBSD/Linux/OpenSolaris/HP-UX/etc. from watching/listening to our material!" But many moving parts in the encoding and distribution ecosystem prevent us from being completely open, as I’ll explain in this article. Continue reading…

I was going to start this entry with the headline “It’s a bad time to be in the media”, but I decided to stop short of that doom-and-gloom prognostication. I won’t deny that many media organizations are suffering; some venerable institutions are closing and others are threatening to. However, I believe that those which are positioned and prepared to reinvent themselves as content factories and not as platform companies will be the winners in the long run. Doing so also involves embracing technological change and making technology a core underpinning of their workflow — something that’s going to be very difficult to digest for some. Continue reading…

Operating an Apache httpd-based origin in conjunction with a CDN presents some interesting challenges and opportunities. For example, one can actually eliminate a lot of sophisticated cache control directives by trusting that the CDN will Do The Right Thing ™ when communicating with client browsers. Furthermore, implementation of a few judicious Apache modules and mod_expires directives can go a long way towards reducing origin bandwidth and load on the webservers.

However, dynamically-generated web pages (including those generated via SSI) can result in unnecessary cache evictions due to the inability to determine last modification time. In this article I’ll explore exactly why SSIs are so irritating from a CDN-interaction perspective and why all I want for Christmas is a CDN-aware mod_include and/or mod_expires, as per the title of this post. Continue reading…

We at CBC.ca have made major improvements in our web platform over the last two years. When I first returned to CBC in September 2006, we were still running Apache 1.3.29 on SuSE Linux Enterprise Server. Since then, we’ve upgraded first to Apache 2.0.59 (still on SuSE) and, with the migration to Red Hat Enterprise Linux in July of this year, to Apache 2.2.8. (You can see the evolution of our web platform over at Netcraft.)

Two days after the Canadian Federal Election, we implemented the next major upgrade of that platform and that was to convert from the prefork MPM to the worker MPM. Since we monitor the performance of all our Apache servers using Cacti, I can share some detailed information about the performance improvement that has resulted from this change. Continue reading…

Those of you who have been following the CBC Radio Two revitalization have noticed that, buried amid all the controversy about juggling classical music so that it only appears between 10 a.m. – 3 p.m., CBC launched four web-only streams on Monday: Classical, Jazz, Canadian Songwriters, and Canadian Classical. These are available twenty-four hours a day, just like any other Internet radio station. Continue reading…

In the previous entry, I made the statement that many of us working in new media don’t have a clue about what’s going to be successful and what’s not. I wanted to expand on this topic with a few key points. At first glance, you could interpret these as being pet peeves. My intention, however, is to set some basic ground rules for success even in a space where tools, technologies and strategies change at the drop of a hat. Continue reading…

I returned late last week from attending Akamai Technologies’ first Global Customer Conference in Boston. Intended to bring together Akamai’s major customers, in order to share knowledge and information about current and future Akamai products, I think I derived more insight out of my conversations with other media & entertainment customers than out of the program material. I’ll explain why. Continue reading…

Those of you who have been following my journal closely know that I’ve been working on a project at work to migrate our main web and Java cluster from SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5. Well, we did the cut-over tonight and I’m pleased to note that everything pretty much went according to plan. Netcraft will now tell you that CBC.ca is running Apache 2.2.8 on Red Hat. Continue reading…

I always laugh whenever I visit Hewlett-Packard‘s website. I have no idea what kind of crazy spaghetti computer systems they have running the site, but URLs of the format h20000.www2.hp.com make me imagine that the site is being fronted with Apache running on OpenVMS/VAX, with the back-end running Nonstop on a Tandem minicomputer. (All products that HP owns.)

I received the following error message today:

Message from the ISAPI plugin:

No backend server available for connection: timed out after 10 seconds or idempotent set to OFF.
Build date/time: Jun 15 2006

Change Number: 779505

I dearly hope idempotent is not set to OFF. Unless HP/UX really is that bad and you need to keep trying so that at some point you’ll get the answer you were looking for. (“1+1=3 … nope. 1+1=4 … nope. 1+1=2 … ah-ha!”)

Incidentally, i was trying to determine the oldest server that we still have in operation. We still have a few PA-RISC-based HP 9000 A-class systems running HP/UX; they’ve probably been past their prime now for about 7 years. I’ll let you know if I find anything older!