I am finding the X-treme Trading achievement to be the worst one so far. It's basically holding me up from starting on the Dead is Dead playthroughs. What follows are my spoilers for getting through that achievement.
Firstly, I tried stations + CAGs and some CLS routes. These are very profitable, and this got me up to Tycoon at a slow but reasonable clip. Then I hit Tycoon, and everything slowed down drastically. As in 5-6 hrs of game time (about a half hour total in SETA) to get 1%. This is far too slow. The big problem with CAGs is that increasing profitability means expanding your stations, which is a pain to me, and it causes you to drop out of SETA a lot. CLSs also require a bit of fiddling to get just right (for me). So UTs ended up coming to the rescue. Setup is a bit quicker and easier. Every once in a while, they turn stupid and stop working, but not too often.
The other key to this is to build, build, build... for the Yaki. Repair your rep with them to the point where you can take missions. Then go to Senator's Badlands or Weaver's Tempest and look for build missions, green plus icon. (In my game, there were no stations in Ocracoke's Storm by the time I went there.) Start doing a SETA cycle -- see previous post about using a timer and SETA to avoid rank loss -- with the local map open and keep an eye out for more build missions. If you have bad rep with any of the races, make sure you can buy the factory they are requesting. :) Do this continually as you train up UTs. (more on UTs below). Over time, you will end up building lots of stations in Yaki space... and you are the only one who can trade with them!
For training UTs (one at a time), I typically start the ship as a Local Trader in Ore Belt. This has been a pretty consistent training ground for me. It seems to get the trader up to UT-capable in 5 or so cycles. After the trader hits level 8 or higher, I'll send them to one of two places. If Yaki space is not very built up with stations, I send them to Power Circle. They will gradually level up and eventually won't return to Power Circle much. However, after Yaki space is populated with stations, I send the Level 8s to Empire's Edge. From there they are in range of the Yaki sectors and they train up to max quickly. With about 30 UTs, it's taking about 2 SETA cycles to get 1%. Up from 5 or 6 cycles with just the CAGs (for food and secondaries) and CLSs.
As for which ships to use for UTs, I have mainly been using Split Caiman SF XLs (10k cargo, 89 m/s). Mistrals are bigger, but are also a lot slower. In case I need to retask them to do something else, I prefer the caimans. I buy them 10 at a time, and send them through the outfitting gauntlet.
- Purchase Large versions from Zyarth's Dominion
I have the hub connected to the neighboring system, so it's convenient to buy from there.
I purchase the L version with shields already equipped if possible.
Caution must be exercised because there are frequent Xenon attacks in Zyarth's
- Send to Terracorp HQ in Home of Light for Jump drive (and all other upgrades)
- One at a time, set all ships to Autojump: Yes, Minimum jumps: 0, Refuel amount: 50 jumps
- Send them to the nearest SPP or one of my factories to get fueled
- Send them to an equipment dock, and get all upgrades (Split if you want ALL the upgrades, including turbo, carrier command, spacefly collector, but not needed)
- Send them to OTAS HQ in Legend's Home for Docking Computer and Triplex
- Park them in a protected system until they are needed
Last time, I bought 80 of them and did this all in a row. Since 80 is too many to put in a station, I parked them in space in my home system. Then I would send them 5 at a time to Ore Belt so I always had some in place to start the Local Trader command when the trainee graduated to UT.
This takes a while, and it would be nice to find faster ways to train UTs. But it works, and the UTs + Yaki station building has drastically upped my trade rank earnings. I don't claim this is the best way to do it, but it's working for me.
One of the big challenges for small businesses, especially service-based organizations, is a server infrastructure that is both resilient of failures and inexpensive. Small businesses can't typically afford to shell out the cash for a SAN and high availability servers. Yet they still need their servers to operate with a high level of reliability.
This post will attempt to describe one solution that I have been designing, and why each choice was made.
Base Computer: Mac Mini (quad-core)
System Drive: External storage in Hardware RAID-1
Backup Drives: Internal Hard Drive, 2x USB Drives (swapped each day, one taken home)
Virtual Machine Software: ???
Virtual Server: Windows Server
So what does this complicated setup gain me?
Mac server + System Drive on external storage
In my testing months ago, it was possible to install OS X onto an external drive and boot from it. Then, I could actually power down the computer, take the external drive and plug it into another (different!) Mac and boot that from the external drive. The original system came up on the different hardware like nothing happened.
This is a great hardware failure recovery story. Say the power supply burns out in your server... Just grab any other (Intel-based) mac, plug in the external storage, hold shift while booting, boot from the external storage, and the server is back up! No sophisticated expertise required.
This is just not possible in Windows or Linux.
The RAID inclusion is to address the fact that hard drives fail pretty often compared to other parts of the system. With a mirror, you can lose a drive without taking the server down. Otherwise, this common failure would result in a "restore from backup" situation. Hardware RAID-1, 2-bay enclosures are not all that expensive (~$200) compared to the cost of unexpected downtime during critical business hours.
Backup drives
Backing up using the built-in Time Machine software. The simple reason for using the internal hard drive as a backup is because it's already there anyway. The 2 USB drive setup allows you to swap out the backup each day so that you can take a backup offsite after hours. Technically, both backups are actually onsite most of the time: one plugged in, and one in your car or on your desk so you can remember to swap it. So if it really bothers you that your backups are onsite most of the time, then you can even go to 3 USB backup drives. You can never have too many, really.
Virtual Server
Let's face it; OS X Server has had some really mixed reviews. On top of that, OS X server might not support the apps that you typically run (e.g. ASP.NET). So why choose? Use Virtual Machine software to run the server you need on top of OS X.
To make this setup work, all data files should actually be shared from the host OS (Mac OS X) so they are backed up by the host OS, and are not internal to the VM. Then the VM simply uses the shared folder from the host OS for server functions (file sharing, web serving, database backups). So the data is automatically backed up by time machine, and not a backup within a VM backup situation.
What about the VM itself? Since the data is hosted external the VM, the VM ends up just being valuable for it's server configuration. Since the VM file will change very often while running, it should be excluded from backup. (Copying a multi-gigabyte file every hour will eat up your Time Machine backup space quickly.) When there is a configuration change, the VM should be copied (probably offline) to a folder that is backed up, so the server configuration is backed up.
The complete restore process ends up being: Restore Time Machine backup to new Mac. Copy VM from backup location to correct location so it can be run. Done.
Another advantage to having the server run in a VM is that you have remote administration capabilities (through the host OS) that ordinarily cost a lot of money to implement with real servers. The main things I'm thinking of there are remote power on/off, booting in a recovery mode, inserting CDs (by connecting ISO images as drives), etc. These things are extremely convenient to be able to do remotely.
VM Software
So the main reason this is still a work in progress is because I have not yet picked out VM software to make this work. My primary low/no-cost candidates are VMWare Fusion and VirtualBox; both of which can be run headless and scripted to start on computer startup. But, there are still wrinkles to iron out. For instance, I'm not sure if folders that come from the host OS can be reshared as Windows file shares. I'll probably have to adjust the design based on experimentation.
Conclusion
This is a work in progress. I still have things to figure out. However, I believe this kind of setup would create a really compelling story for small businesses who require low and remote maintenance with a relatively inexpensive server for it's level of resilience (including data backups).
