bert hubert finally blogs

PowerDNS, Sun Niagara T2000, Mortgage

Posted by bert hubert Wed, 28 Jun 2006 20:51:00 GMT

PowerDNS

It’s been a period of contrasts. One the one hand I’ve had to deal with the fact that banks currently take the narrow minded view that I’m an unemployed bum (see previous post), while on the other hand the PowerDNS recursor appears to be taking the world by storm, and does bring in money.

A really really rough guestimate would be that around 40 million internet connections are now powered, or will soon be powered by PowerDNS. This includes deployments (or upcoming deployments) I know about, and a healthy 50% bonus for those people running the recursor without telling me, or having to report bugs.

The bonus is pretty conservative, I only hear from most PowerDNS users in case they have problems, and it appears many PowerDNS installations are mostly trouble free.

This also highlights a problem with generating PowerDNS, or more in general, open source, income. Being free software, we don’t make any direct money from PowerDNS sales.

Furthermore, if people really trust software, and experience nor expect any problems with it, they won’t feel the need to buy support. Nor do we really want to become a company mostly consisting of support personnel.

The upshot is that we are being punished for writing software people feel good about. Rather perverse.

The good news is that some big PowerDNS users have found it in their hearts to send money our way anyhow, either in the form of paid enhancement requests, or by simply taking out support which they don’t really expect to need.

Sun Niagara T2000

I’ve previously written about the ‘Try and Buy’ Sun ‘Coolthreads’ T2000, which was made available for us to test. More about this later, but Sun has decided to make such a server available permanently for PowerDNS development, which is good news. This is a big server with lots of processors and memory, with some special features to boot. We’ll make sure PowerDNS performs really well on this architecture, which should be good for everybody.

Mortgage

Wow, did I almost fall for it. I tend to want to understand things around me, which is why I studied physics. I’m good with numbers and I deal with complex systems all day.

Then I went to get a mortgage and decided to just trust my bank. I’ve rarely been shafted that badly. Thanks to my good friends Remco, Remco and Tsjoi, I barely escaped from a hideously complex and expensive mortgage.

It is like this (at least in The Netherlands). The bank has lots of savings from other people, and they need to make money to pay the interest those other people expect. So they decide to rent out that money to people who need it, and are willing to pay for it. A mortgage generally has a house to back it up, so their risks can be near-zero. If the mortgage is worth less than your house, perhaps because you are not an unemployed bum after all but have savings, the bank is in a happy position.

They can rent you the money for a nice fee, and if you can’t pay, they sell the house, take the money you owe them, and give you the rest. So almost no risk at all. They also demand that you insure your house, thus eliminating even the risk of it burning down.

Renting out money like this is not a high-margin product for a bank. Everybody with money to spare can offer such a deal, and competition is fierce.

So if you barge in with zero knowledge of mortgages, what happens? They sell you a monstrosity consisting of:

• an expensive life insurance (possibly including a thorough medical evaluation)
• an investment plan
• a loan you only pay interest on, and never pay back

They invest your savings for 30 years, make you pay for the life insurance, and after thirty years, in theory the life insurance pays out and your savings will have increased to an amount around the original loan, which is then paid back in one go.

Sounds fine. Except that you’ve just committed to a 30 year life insurance you could not select yourself, there is but one choice. If you die, the insurance pays the money to the bank, not to you.

Furthermore, you’ve bought a full 30 years of managed investment, so delivered by your bank. You can’t get anybody else to invest for you.

And most interestingly, in the end, if their investments didn’t work out you are screwed, because you’ll have a residual debt.

So, after my friends told me I was being screwed, I decided to get to the bottom of things. I now have a Gnumeric (Open Source equivalent of Excel) spreadsheet that is more spiffy than any of the mortgage software I’ve seen at banks, and in fact has caught a number of errors in mortgages that have been calculated for me.

Then I went back to the banks and saved a stunning 40% in total costs.

So it is really true that knowledge is power.