John Berryman's questions

I have heard it recommended to stay away from AWS hosting for certain "big data" applications (e.g. Hadoop, Cassandra, Solr) because EC2 instances typically use network attached storage (though there are more recently some high i/o instances, but they are apparently pretty expensive).

It makes sense to me that NAS would entail a pretty decent performance hit, but how much? Since AWS exists, then presumably there are plenty of examples of applications that make sense in this type of environment, but what is a good rule of thumb for determining if a particular application is a good candidate for AWS and NAS? (Besides sticking it on AWS and trying it out.)

I have successfully installed mysql on my mac, and now on the command-line I can type which mysql and the mac replies back the expected path.

I would like to get started with the tutorial here. But according to that tutorial, I need to some additional set up before starting that tutorial. The document refers me to the server administration chapter, but this doesn't show my how to perform the remaining setup... it's more like a reference, so I don't know where to get started.

Is there any good document online to show me how to start administering my mysql database so that I can work through the tutorial?

update: If it's imporant, typing mysql -u root at the command line replies this error: ERROR 2002 (HY000): Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/tmp/mysql.sock' (2)

In case anyone is interested, this is the best mysql tutorial that I've found on the web.

I just installed mysql on my Mac per these instructions. However, at the command line which mysql and which mysqld replies nothing.

How do I get from the above link to this tutorial link?

My continued series of questions on IP addresses (ref Q1 and Q2).

There are several IP address to location services. For instance: http://www.ip-adress.com/ip_tracer/ and http://www.ip2location.com/demo.aspx . How do they collect their data? (i.e. mail surveys [yeah, probably not], tech-mobiles driving around and gathering information) What data do they usually gather?

I risk posing an ill formed question here, but I'll give it a whirl.

Does it generally stand to reason that the nearer IP address A is to IP address B numerically, then the nearer IP address A is to IP address B geographically?

Whatever your feelings, it would be most helpful if you could point me toward some good reading material on this.

Possible Duplicate:
How does Subnetting Work?
IP addresses and geographical locations

How does my IP address get assigned to me? Is there any ordering? For instance by time or by location or by queue? Who divvies up the IP addresses at each level, and what method do they use?

What do the individual parts of the IP address mean? (ex. 72.14.204.99) Does it move from least geographically specific at the left to most at the right?

I'm especially interested in understand the correlation between geographic location and IP address.

Hulo All, Linux newb here. I just ssh'ed into my first shiny new CentOS virtual server to install a LAMP stack. No yum, so I had to install yum. Yum needs gettext, so it got gettext. Gettext ./configure fails because gcc's not installed. All the directions I've found so far indicate that I should use yum to install GCC. Am I missing something here?

Apparently I got what I paid for when I asked for the minimal service. What's the approach here for getting things on track so that I can follow basic LAMP installation instructions?

Links to web pages are gladly accepted.

UPDATE: cat /etc/issue replies: CentOS release 5.3 (Final) Kernel \r on an \m

But this site says that my VServer can't be CentOS if yum is missing. It might be a Plesk VServer.