[CAnet - news] Personal Colo Services

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 [Thanks to Jim Foster for this pointer. A good example where personal colo
has gained a lot of traction is in Wellington NZ where thanks to a unique
public-private partnership small businesses and individual can acquire their
choice of dark fiber or managed service.  A carrier neutral facility is an
important part of the equation that is also made available operated by
CityLink http://lists.canarie.ca/pipermail/news/2005/000079.html-- BSA]

http://www.vix.com/personalcolo/

What is personal co-location?

Thanks to BSD and Linux, many thousands of power-users have the knowledge
and talents necessary to operate their own servers for e-mail, web, and so
on. The traditional models for providing these services are "shared hosting"
where a power-user has an "account" on a provider's server, and "dedicated
hosting" where a power-user has full administrative control over some "host
computer".

Power-users with CableTV or DSL based internet access to their homes often
try to operate "dedicated hosting" using personal computers in their garage
or attic, but this can be a frustrating experience. CableTV and DSL
providers often prohibit "servers" from being connected through their access
networks, for business or technical reasons. Lack of uninterruptible power
systems, lack of remote-hands when the family is on vacation, and the need
to keep personal records in an offsite location are all additional reasons
why connecting a "dedicating hosting" server via a CableTV or DSL access
network can be less than optimal.

In recognition of this need, the dedicated hosting industry now has a niche
for "personal co-location", which is characterized by:

    * mostly noncommercial -- personal or family purposes
    * traffic is balanced (same inbound volume as outbound), or
outbound-heavy
    * traffic volume is low, a few megabits per second averaged over the
month
    * 1U (one rack unit), 1.5A (~200W) of power, 100BaseTX, and serial
console 

Note that cPCI or ATCA would be a more efficient server co-location design
than 1U, but as far as I know nobody offers it yet (where the co-location
provider supplies the chassis and the customers provide the blades.)
Who's a power-user?

You won't be able to occupy this niche unless you are an experienced BSD or
Linux system administrator. Windows and MacOS don't have good serial console
support and are thus very difficult to reliably install and repair without
being able to put your own hands on your hardware. Both you and your
hardware and your operating system must be capable of working without KVM
(keyboard, video, and mouse) 99.9% of the time.

The best way to prepare for this endeavour is to "stage" your system at your
own office. Get the software installed and configured, make sure you can
access it by SSH (or equivilent) over the network, make sure your serial
console is working. Renumber it several times to make sure you know where
all the bones are buried. Then ask your personal co-location provider to
tell you the IP address, netmask, gateway, recursive DNS addresses you'll
need, configure them into your system, then shut it down and ship it out.

That's right -- in most situations FedEx is cheaper than an airline ticket
and your server will make the trip without you. This is a little bit like
building a ship in a bottle, and it's expensive for you to have to have a
box shipped back home if you don't get it right the first time.

...


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