While we’ve been busy the last couple of months in moving existing Affinity and Gravity clients across to the new Hiive Systems platform, we’ve also been building out our offering by configuring servers in datacenters in North America as well as China.

Setting things up in North America was pretty straight forward, but the need to be on the other side of the Great China Firewall – to ensure we can offer fast speeds to mainland Chinese based clients – created a few interesting challenges.

The first challenge was to get some reliable server infrastructure that we can scale, and get it operating from a datacentre within Mainland China, in our case, in Beijing.

I had a bit of a short-cut here, having rolled out similar infrastructure for our sister company, Internetrix, earlier in 2008. Working off a Centos 5 platform, and pulling down RPM’s from repositories outside China was exceptionally frustrating and very, very slow . It appears the main why China maintains control/censorship over the internet is through DNS poisoning, so DNS lookups are very very slow, and changes to the /etc/hosts file on the server to match what I was seeing from here in AU proved to be a handy way to speed things up.

The next challenge we faced was to update the language libraries for Affinity and Gravity to ensure our latest versions are available in Simplied Chinese. While we did a full conversion a couple of years ago, we haven’t kept up to date with the latest upgrades, including the major 3.0 upgrade in September, so we’ll need to get our act together there soon.