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Geocities Cage at the Exodus Datacenter

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Re: Geocities Cage at the Exodus Datacenter

#11

Post by nixgeek »

alex_hitchins wrote: post #9
Overtonwindow wrote: post #7

Does anyone know of an article like this about the dial in modem systems and infrastructure for some of the early dialup services?

I worked for a large UK organisation that had cut back on their dialup access but still had 50 or so modems in racks for field workers to dial in to to get their email etc. Also some site to site links remained a dialup connection. Sorry, no fancy pictures or anything interesting, just reminded me of the time.

At least a couple of the Dyn datacenters had dialup for out-of-band access back in 2013, think its all Ethernet now.

Re: Geocities Cage at the Exodus Datacenter

#14

Post by p_l »

nixgeek wrote: post #11
alex_hitchins wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked for a large UK organisation that had cut back on their dialup access but still had 50 or so modems in racks for field workers to dial in to to get their email etc. Also some site to site links remained a dialup connection. Sorry, no fancy pictures or anything interesting, just reminded me of the time.

At least a couple of the Dyn datacenters had dialup for out-of-band access back in 2013, think its all Ethernet now.

Dial up lines are still available in some datacenters, had some both for services and for OOB access as recent as 2015 (San Jose)

Re: Geocities Cage at the Exodus Datacenter

#15

Post by setq »

tyingq wrote: post #6
staked wrote: post #3

I love seeing stuff like this. Though I'd be a happy man if I never had to see the words "Veritas Volume Manager" again. Definitely one of my least favorite pieces of software from that era. I worked for a company around this same time that had servers in the NJ Exodus data center. Used to have to head up there once a month to swap out tapes in the Sun L11000.

Brought back some memories for me as well. In corporate IT, unix sysadmins had to know how to manage multiple different hardware architectures and operating systems that all did things different. AIX, Solaris, HPUX, Ultrix, etc, all with different filesystems, raid hw/sw, command paths, and so on. That picture of the ethernet hornet's nest too. Ugh. At least it wasn't AUI cabling.

Indeed. AUI was a killer. We had a policy of turning it into 10base2 right away with an adaptor, then 10baseT when that became a thing.

I liked this era so much I used to skip dive all the kit that was chucked out. Had myself a nice stacked Sun 1000E as a desktop in 1999, until I got the electricity bill. Must have cost as much as a house when it was new.

Then I found HP/UX was horrid. Had a run in with some HP N-class systems with Oracle. Yeuch, and that turned me to open source.

Re: Geocities Cage at the Exodus Datacenter

#16

Post by setq »

biofox wrote: post #13
RamenJunkie_ wrote: post #4

And then years later you could download all of Geocities as a few hundred GB Torrent.

Which makes me wonder: what would it take to match the capabilities of this setup with modern hardware?

Probably just a couple of HP DL380 G8's with SSD arrays on Linux would run rings around all that kit.

Or a smallish EC2 instance and the whole of the rest in S3...

Re: Geocities Cage at the Exodus Datacenter

#17

Post by freeone3000 »

biofox wrote: post #13
RamenJunkie_ wrote: post #4

And then years later you could download all of Geocities as a few hundred GB Torrent.

Which makes me wonder: what would it take to match the capabilities of this setup with modern hardware?

Could be done with a moderate-spec single server. Replace the JBOD enclosures with on-server 8xSamsung EVOs in hardware RAID6, and gain a bit in speed because we don't have drives that slow anymore. Xeon E5v4 could replace the computational power. Network multihoming would be done the same, except with 10000baseT instead of multiple cables. Run nginx on it and you're good.

Or, one could host the entire thing on S3 with CloudFront at a fraction of the cost.

Re: Geocities Cage at the Exodus Datacenter

#19

Post by setq »

p_l wrote: post #14
nixgeek wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least a couple of the Dyn datacenters had dialup for out-of-band access back in 2013, think its all Ethernet now.

Dial up lines are still available in some datacenters, had some both for services and for OOB access as recent as 2015 (San Jose)

Lots of companies still have inbound dialin access for EDI stuff still running on POS systems from the 1990s. It's scary really.

Re: Geocities Cage at the Exodus Datacenter

#20

Post by roganp »

acveilleux wrote: post #8

So much memories from that era. I saw my first 1TB storage array back then, it was an EMC Clariion fibre channel raid box, it cost nearly 1m$ and it was a full rack of 9GB dual-ported 15k RPM disks.

And that was EMC's "low-end" array. The Symetrix (Symetrics?) I remember being much more expensive for the same throughput.
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