1. Give participants a the chance to show off their technical expertise
2. Appeal to as broad an audience as possible
3. Take less than two minutes to complete

We anticipated strong performances, and we were as surprised as everyone else to see Tagged Director of Engineering Mark Jen masterfully rebuild the server in a blistering 30.7 seconds. His first attempt was slowed by a stray cable, yet it was still fast enough to take the lead from Idea’s Quang Tran. We flicked on our camera to document Mark’s second attempt in hopes we’d catch a faster time on film. Thankfully, he did not disappoint:

If you made it by our booth to try your hand in the competition, we thank you. Whether your time was thirty seconds or two minutes and thirty seconds, we enjoyed meeting you and sharing a little of what we do. To the team of folks that put together the Iron Geek Triathlon, thanks for inviting us to be a part of the fun!

To Mark: Keep those fingers nimble … now the Internet is going to see your tricks of the trade, and next time, it might not be as easy to walk away victorious.

-Kevin

P.S. For more Server Challenge goodness, check out the coverage on Data Center Knowledge and Keith Shaw’s hands-on test at Network World.

First and foremost, it is an absolute treat to have a team – from systems engineering and sales to marketing and IT – that shows so much passion for The Planet and our products. Never mind that everybody was on time and did their part — that was just a bonus. Everyone is engaged and having fun … from Jeff Reinis hocking T-shirts mid-aisle to Kevin Hazard and Phil Jackson challenging every geek at the show to a server-building race.

Kyle Monson competing in the Server Challenge

My highlight of the show was definitely when Russell Bishop from the UK took the server challenge. As he worked against the clock to put together the server, George – another show attendee – sang the theme song from “Greatest American Hero.” Needless to say, we all joined in. Things like that just don’t happen every day.

Russell and George (“The Singer”)

I’ve learned so much in the past few days. The whole team from The Planet quickly recognized my “deer in the headlights” look when anyone asked a complex question, and they quickly jumped in to make us look good. After they finished talking to the attendee, they kindly explained everything to me.

I’ve learned a lot about the power of social media … from something as small as tweeting about a lost iPhone to something as massive as our server challenge being Slashdotted.

Becky Rasch reunited with her lost iPhone

As I write this, it’s the last day of the show here at SXSW, and I find myself a little sad that every day won’t be like the past four … then again, with the same gang back at the office, I’m pretty sure we’ll still have a blast.

-Sherry

The Planet’s Server Challenge was selected as an official event in the tech triathlon, so Keith Shaw, Kyle Monson, Chris Boudy and Harry McCracken had to rebuild our Pentium4 server faster than their formidable opponents to walk away with the most points for the round. Hands flew, blood was shed and tears were cried, and after the dust settled, the results were posted:

1. Kyle Monson: 1:02.4
2. Chris Boudy: 1:13.4
3. Keith Shaw: 1:16.3
4. Harry McCracken: 1:58.2

Kyle walked away victorious from The Planet Server Challenge, but when the final scores were tallied from all the events, Chris Boudy was crowned the SXSW Iron Geek Champion. After prying him away from the droves of fans chasing his newly acquired stardom, we took a minute to chat with Chris about his experience in the Iron Geek triathlon and about his impression of SXSW Interactive.

Congratulations, Chris!

- Kevin

The Goal: Reassemble our Pentium4 server faster than your SXSW peers and win an ASUS Eee PC Netbook.

The Rules:

1. You may arrange the components as you’d like* before starting.

*Fan, Heat Sink and RAM must be on the table outside of the chassis.

2. You may not be touching any components when time starts.
3. All components must be installed for your time to be recorded.
4. Components can be installed in any order.
5. Components outside the server may only be touched one at a time.
6. You may attempt the build twice.
7. Time will be recorded by a representative from The Planet.
8. The leader board in the booth will reflect the current “time to beat.”

A Successful/Complete Installation:

• Install heat sink, latch both latches
• Plug heat sink into motherboard
• Install fan
• Plug fan into motherboard
• Install two RAM modules (in any of the 4 slots)
• Plug in Hard Drive power cable
• Plug in Hard Drive ribbon cable
• Plug in CD-ROM power cable
• Plug in CD-ROM ribbon cable
• Slide case lid into place

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, so I’m pretty sure videos are worth a few million. With that in mind, we recorded a quick explanation and demonstration of the challenge:

Do you think you have what it takes to get the best time? Swing by our booth and prove it! We will update the top times in the comments section of this blog so you can keep an eye on the current record in absentia.

UPDATE: We just spoke with one of the representatives from the Universal Records Database, and he suggested that we submit the fastest time to their database, and they will certify the winner as a universal record holder! Forget having the fastest hands at SXSW … You’ll have the fastest hands in the universe.

-Kevin

P.S. Don’t forget to RSVP for tonight’s Tumblr/SoundCloud/Kickstarter party!

Our Booth

On the SXSW Interactive Trade Show floor, you’ll find us spanning booths 303 and 305 in Exhibit Hall 4 of the Austin Convention Center. You’ll know you’re getting close when you see the pair of unlikely superheroes we are featuring on our “Redefining Hosting” graphics.

Meet The Planet Staff: Once you squirm your way through the droves of people flooding into the booth, you’ll be greeted by friendly faces who will love to chat with you about your business, hosting, the weather or the names of your childhood pets. In exchange for the privilege of meeting you, we can offer a tokens of our appreciation: your choice of one of our clever giveaway T-shirts!

Sign up for WebsiteSpark: With the help of a little company out of Redmond, Washington, we’re able to offer a special opportunity for attendees to sign up for Microsoft’s WebsiteSpark program on the show floor. If you’re unfamiliar with the program, it provides you with access to free licensing for the latest versions of Windows Server and SQL Server … Needless to say, it’s a great resource for businesses with tight budgets.

By applying for the WebsiteSpark program in our booth, you’ll walk away with a 2GB USB drive and a special Microsoft WebsiteSpark + The Planet T-shirt while supplies last. If that’s not enough of an incentive, we’re also offering a year of free hosting at The Planet to one lucky applicant chosen at random.

Compete in the Server Challenge: If our 10′ x 20′ space wasn’t already busy enough, we’ve got one more featured activity in our booth: The Planet Server Challenge – a little competition is designed specifically for techies. Participants have a deconstructed Pentium4 server sitting on a table in front of them, and the objective is to put it back together as quickly as possible. Bragging rights about having the fastest hands at SXSW might be incentive enough, but we’re sweetening the deal by awarding the competitor with the best time an ASUS Eee PC netbook.

We’ll post the current “Time to Beat” on a board in the booth so you can keep that netbook in your sights. The competition details will be available in the booth.

Our Social Events

If the time you spend hanging out with us in our booth isn’t enough for you, you’re in luck. We are participating in a few phenomenal social events, so you can party hardy with us as well.

Saturday, March 13: RSVP and meet us at Emo’s Austin at 6:30 p.m. to get your SXSW experience started on the right foot. We’ve teamed up with Tumblr, Kickstarter and SoundCloud to put on a little soiree for a thousand of our closest friends.

With performances by Eclectic Method, DJ Mel and DJ Suspence, you’ll be entertained, and with an open bar for those who RSVP, you’ll be hydrated.

Sunday, March 14: Speaking of hydration, The Planet is participating in the SXSW Block Party on Sunday between 4:00 p.m. and 6:00 p.m. While you’re schmoozing around, stop by our booth and help us imbibe the beverages we’re bringing in for the occasion.

Monday, March 15: Are you tired yet? We need you to power through one more day and one more party. The Planet is a gold sponsor of the Houston@SXSW event at Hudson on Fifth on Monday from 7:00 p.m. until 2:00 a.m. If you RSVP to the event, you get yourself on the list to enjoy presentations and exhibits featuring Houston-based companies along with a few film and music showcases.

Stay Updated

You’re now “in the know.” Are you ready for your pop quiz? Luckily, this isn’t going to be the only communication we do about SXSW. To get up-to-the-minute updates and reminders about what we’re doing, be sure to follow us on Twitter: @theplanet. If the stream gets a little noisy, we’ll move some of the updates to @theplanetevents.

See you in Austin!

-Kevin

We offer several ways for businesses to partner with us, so if you’ve ever wondered how The Planet and the channel can benefit you, take a minute to watch this crash course:

As I mentioned in the video, if you have any questions or want any more details about our channel partnership opportunities, leave a comment!

-Lewis

It’s not very poetic, but neither is the Thoreau I’m quoting … he’s actually the unkempt 50-something neighbor I run into every now and then when I check my mail. I forgot his name after the first time he introduced himself (it was either Henry or David), and his tattered appearance and hermit-like quality reminds me of someone just returning from an extended stay on Walden Pond. So, I arrived at the code name Thoreau, kind of like a McDreamy … minus the dashing good looks and medical degree. And ability to contribute in a large way to society (scripted for TV or not).

But I digress. The words of (neighbor) Thoreau are not wrong, and we’ve got a got a stacked event schedule for the month of March. Be sure to check us out if you’re in the area, so we can seize the opportunity to meet all the new people (and old people) we can.

Here’s a brief snapshot of where we’ll be in the coming month:

Connect10 – March 1-2 – Orlando, FL

The Planet is one of the co-sponsors for Connect10 – the Sant customer conference. Sant Corp. provides software to major corporations for sales proposal and RFP response creation, and they’re also one of our managed hosting customers. Their two-day customer conference in Orlando is chock-full of excellent sessions on how companies can best leverage the Sant software suite.

When you’re roaming the halls at the conference, be sure to stop by our table and pick up a tchotchke or two.

Channel Partners Conference – March 1-3 – Las Vegas, NV

Last fall, we launched The Planet Partner Plus – our channel program encompassing referral partners, resellers, and affiliates. Since then, we’ve been looking to evangelize the program to members of the partner community, and where better to do that than at THE conference for channel partners? (And, it doesn’t hurt that it’s in Vegas.)

We’ll be setting up shop at the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino in booth 1326 on the Expo Hall floor, and we’ll be giving away a couple video cameras, so it would behoove you to come say hi!

Visit the Channel Partners Conference site for more information.

South By Southwest – March 13-15 – Austin, TX

Last but certainly not least, The Planet will be making its first-ever appearance at South By Southwest Interactive, and we couldn’t be more excited. Held just a few hours away from our Houston headquarters in Austin, Texas, the show has earned a national reputation for consistently popularizing emerging technology, from social media platforms to the latest and greatest websites.

We’re looking forward to meeting customers, prospects and new friends of all kinds – from software and web developers to e-commerce entrepreneurs. We’ve got a few surprises planned, so make sure to keep an eye out for us.

-Katie

With the wealth of cloud products on the market, The Planet’s philosophy is that all of our products — cloud and otherwise — have to serve you, our customer. Our products have to be beneficial to your business. They should lower costs, make technology easier, speed up your environment or protect your data.

We introduced Storage Cloud last year as a way for customers to store data outside of their hosted server. You might be wondering, “How is Storage Cloud any more practical or beneficial than hosted storage in the server? Both are served over the Internet, aren’t they?”

There are three main differences between Storage Cloud and hosted storage:

1. Storage Cloud is metered, similar to your electricity bill. You pay only for what you use when you need to use it. If your storage needs vary considerably from month to month, it may be a good idea to store your files in the cloud rather than invest in an additional disk that may or may not be used — but will be paid for — in the next month.
2. Storage Cloud is scalable. Your storage needs aren’t limited by the capacity of any single disk, and your cost remains constant. Costs can even decrease as you consistently use higher volumes.
3. Storage Cloud is redundant and available as a service. Redundancy is available in hosted solutions with multiple disks and RAID, but in many cases, it’s not included by default.
4. Hosted storage mediums — internal disks, direct attached storage (DAS) or storage area networks (SAN) — are dedicated only to your hosted servers. Storage Cloud is more flexible. If you have a mix of on-premise servers and off-site clients (your laptop, for example), you could back up everything in one place.

When it comes to whether or not Storage Cloud is a more economical option, the answer isn’t cut and dry. Here’s an example of when it would make sense (from solely a cost perspective) to go with Storage Cloud over an additional disk for backups:

You purchase a new server from The Planet and run regular backups. You want to keep the most recent 20GB of backups, and you’re evaluating Storage Cloud against an additional disk in your machine. You’ve got 10GB of free cloud storage (included with all new server orders), bandwidth is free between your server and the cloud, and the second 10GB is 25 cents per GB (or $2.50) per month.

Those backups are being stored at less than the cost of adding any hard drives to your server, and you get the other inherent benefits of the cloud platform. As your volume of data increases, dedicated storage might become a cheaper alternative, so your decision to use Storage Cloud should be made based on the other benefits in the list above.

Storage Cloud isn’t going to be all things for all people. It’s a specific subset of our larger storage portfolio with its own benefits and use cases. For instance, if you’re storing a multi-gigabyte database, you should still consider internal storage or DAS first … Storage Cloud is an option, but it’s not always the best option for your needs. If you’ve got questions about the best storage vehicle for a given application, let us know and we’ll do our best to help!

If you’d like to learn more about The Planet Storage Cloud, visit http://www.theplanet.com/cloud-storage.

-Rob

She is our Sales Automation Manager. She keeps our sales department movin’ and groovin’, ensuring that leads are routed correctly, organizing work-flows, and basically giving the sales team all the tools they need to sell, sell, sell.

Rachel is very important to The Planet. She’s also very teeny.

Enter foul weather.

While our friends in the Dallas office experienced a little bit of Snowmaggedon 2010 last week, we here in the Houston office had a couple rainy, nasty, cold days. On Thursday, no one wanted to go out for lunch, so while we munched away on our sammiches and insta-pasta, we decided to have some fun. A while back, in the midst of a late-night work session, we discovered that Rachel could fit in super-small spaces. We set out to find some.

Rachel in a cubicle closet!
(With Graphic Designer Haidy Francis for scale)

Rachel in a file cabinet!

Rachel in the dry-erase easel!

Peek-a-boo Rachel!

Can Kevin fit? Noooo … But Rachel can!

The girl is seriously tiny.

Alright, back to work. Look for us on a rainy day for another edition of “Hiding Employees in Small Spaces!”

-Ali

To better understand how to use permissions, let’s take a step back and get a quick refresher on key components.

You’ll need to remember the three permission types:
r w x: r = read; w = write; x = execute

And the three types of access they can be applied to:
u g o: u = user; g = group; o = other

Permissions are usually displayed in one of two ways – either with letters (rwxrwxrwx) or numbers (777). When the permissions are declared with letters, you should look at it as three sets of three characters. The first set applies to the user, the second applies to the group, and the third applies to other (everyone else). If a file is readable only by the user and cannot be written to or executed by anyone, its permission level would be r--------. If it could be read by anyone but could only be writeable by the user and the group, its permission level would be rw-rw-r--.

The numeric form of chmod uses bits to represent permission levels. Read access is marked by 4 bits, write is 2, and execute is 1. When you want a file to have read and write access, you just add the permission bits: 4 + 2 = 6. When you want a file to have read, write and execute access, you’ll have 4 + 2 + 1, or 7. You’d then apply that numerical permission to a file in the same order as above: user, group, other. If we used the example from the last sentence in the previous paragraph, a file that could be read by anyone, but could only be writeable by the user and the group, would have a numeric permission level of 664 (user: 6, group: 6, other: 4).

Now the “chmod 777” I referenced above should make a little more sense: All users are given all permissions (4 + 2 + 1 = 7).

Applying Permissions

Understanding these components, applying permissions is pretty straightforward with the use of the chmod command. If you want a user (u) to write and execute a file (wx) but not read it (r), you’d use something like this:

In the above terminal image, I added the -v parameter to make it “verbose,” so it displays the related output or results of the command. The permissions set by the command are shown by the number 0300 and the series (-wx------). Nobody but the user can write or execute this file, and as of now, the user can’t even read the file. If you were curious about the leading 0 in “0300,” it simply means that you’re viewing an octal output, so for our purposes, it can be ignored entirely.

In that command, we’re removing the read permission from the user (hence the minus sign between u and r), and we’re giving the user write and execute permissions with the plus sign between u and wx. Want to alter the group or other permissions as well? It works exactly the same way: g+,g-,o+,o- … Getting the idea? chmod permissions can be set with the letter-based commands (u+r,u-w) or with their numeric equivalents (eg. 400 or 644), whichever floats your boat.

A Quick Numeric chmod Reference

chmod 777 | Gives specified file read, write and execute permissions (rwx) to ALL users
chmod 666 | Allows for read and write privileges (rw) to ALL users
chmod 555 | Gives read and execute permissions (rx) to ALL users
chmod 444 | Gives read permissions (r) to ALL users
chmod 333 | Gives write and execute permissions (wx) to ALL users
chmod 222 | Gives write privileges (w) to ALL users
chmod 111 | Gives execute privileges (x) to ALL users
chmod 000 | Last but not least, gives permissions to NO ONE (Careful!)

Get a List of File Permissions

To see what your current file permissions are in a given directory, execute the ls –l command. This returns a list of the current directory including the permissions, the group it’s in, the size and the last date the file was modified. The output of ls –l looks like this:

On the left side of that image, you’ll see the permissions in the rwx format. When the permission begins with the “d” character, it means that object is a directory. When the permission starts with a dash (-), it is a file.

Practice Deciphering Permissions

Let’s look at a few examples and work backward to apply what we’ve learned:

• Example 1: -rw-------
• Example 2: drwxr-x---
• Example 3: -rwxr-xr-x

In Example 1, the file is not a directory, the user that owns this particular object has read and write permissions, and when the group and other fields are filled with dashes, we know that their permissions are set to 0, so they have no access. In this case, only the user who owns this object can do anything with it. We’ll cover “ownership” in a future blog, but if you’re antsy to learn right now, you can turn to the all-knowing Google.

In Example 2, the permissions are set on a directory. The user has read, write and execute permissions, the group has read and execute permissions, and anything/anyone besides user or group is restricted from access.

For Example 3, put yourself to the test. What access is represented by “-rwxr-xr-x”? The answer is included at the bottom of this post.

Wrapping It Up

How was that for a crash course in Unix environment permissions? Of course there’s more to it, but this will at least make you think about what kind of access you’re granting to your files. Armed with this knowledge, you can create the most secure server environment.

Here are a few useful links you may want to peruse at your own convenience to learn more:

Linuxforums.org
Zzee.com
Comptechdoc.org
Permissions Calculator

Did I miss anything? Did I make a blatantly ridiculous mistake? Did I use “their” when I should have used “they’re”??!!… Let me know about it. Shoot me an email (rrobson @ theplanet.com) or leave a comment if you’ve got anything to add, suggest, subtract, quantize, theorize, ponderize, etc. Think your useful links are better than my useful links? Throw those at me too, and we’ll toss ‘em up here. I hope this helps make at least one or two confused sysadmin’s first foray into the Unix dimension just a little bit easier.

- Ryan