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Geocities Cage at the Exodus Datacenter

detritus.org

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Re: Geocities Cage at the Exodus Datacenter

#31

Post by halbritt »

acveilleux wrote: post #23
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?

A few decent things I could find online that jive with what I remember: https://www.patton.com/technotes/build_yourself_an_isp.pdf http://www.gwi.net/behind-the-scenes-of-a-90s-internet-start... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8352432 The absolute minimum, and representative of the very first dial-up ISPs: http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/2025 http://www.datamation.com/erp/article.php/615281/My-own-priv... Th…

Lots of people used the US Robotics Total Control boxes in the early 90s.

http://www.kmj.com/tcont.html

Re: Geocities Cage at the Exodus Datacenter

#32

Post by acveilleux »

halbritt wrote: post #31
acveilleux wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A few decent things I could find online that jive with what I remember: https://www.patton.com/technotes/build_yourself_an_isp.pdf http://www.gwi.net/behind-the-scenes-of-a-90s-internet-start... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8352432 The absolute minimum, and representative of the very first dial-up ISPs: http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/2025 http://www.datamation.com/erp/article.php/615281/My-own-priv... Th…

Lots of people used the US Robotics Total Control boxes in the early 90s. http://www.kmj.com/tcont.html

That's what I had in mind when I said "boxes with multiple modems in them".

Re: Geocities Cage at the Exodus Datacenter

#33

Post by GFischer »

tyingq wrote: post #28
joezydeco wrote: post #10

"As you can imagine (and see from these pictures), this equates to a whole bunch of ethernet cables. Cable management gets increasingly difficult to grasp each time a new box is added to the mix " Eeeeeek. I'm not in IT and I got the sinking stomach feeling when looking at this. Thankfully there is https://www.reddit.com/r/cableporn/ to cure that.

That mess wasn't common in any environment I worked at during the same time period. Pretty sure that would have got someone sacked in the various datacenters I happen to have worked in.

They did eventually fix it, see the newer racks:

http://www.detritus.org/mike/gc/rearpatchpanels.jpg

Re: Geocities Cage at the Exodus Datacenter

#34

Post by acveilleux »

roganp wrote: post #21
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.

Veritas was definitely better than the alternative. I was a dba at the time and it was a godsend.

I still can't believe a top-tier UNIX vendor required an expensive 3rd party software to have halfway decent file-system. Or in the case of HP-UX, partitioning.

I get that Veritas also did logical volume, raid and so on and that was a guenuine value added at the time. But so many box I saw had veritas so they could partition and get a file system that was OK with 36GB+ monster SCSI disks.

Re: Geocities Cage at the Exodus Datacenter

#35

Post by acveilleux »

roganp wrote: post #20
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.

Symmetrix, two Ms. They were more of a mainframe thing I thought. I never really got to play much with the really big gear, Starfires, Superdome and so on. By the time I got to use a 64-way SMP box (Origin 3800) it was already obsolescent and replaced a few years later with a pair of dual-quad core Xeons.

Re: Geocities Cage at the Exodus Datacenter

#36

Post by chrissnell »

Great memories. During this era, I was at Citysearch and spent a lot of time in the Orange County Exodus DC. We had a nice rack of Sun gear, Extreme Networks switches and Alteon AceDirector load balancers.

I remember vividly that there was a cage down the row from us that was populated entirely by eMachines, which were a low end desktop PC that you could buy at Circuit City and Best Buy. We laughed at their cage but the company, 911gifts.com, ended up getting acquired for a nice sum, while our site and company was basically gone a few years later.

Re: Geocities Cage at the Exodus Datacenter

#38

Post by acveilleux »

freeone3000 wrote: post #17
biofox wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wi…

Raid 10s or bust. But otherwise correct.

Re: Geocities Cage at the Exodus Datacenter

#39

Post by aidenn0 »

_wmd wrote: post #26
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 can't speak for early early dial up infrastructure, but by the turn of the century the equipment involved was not all that impressive to look at. A typical configuration would terminate the analogue lines over ISDN, which supported somewhere up to 30 B channels ('voice calls') over a single cable, running alongside one or two Ethernet cables to a single router with one or more modem option cards installed. We had C…

Are you sure you're not thinking of T-1 (24 B channels) rather than ISDN which was most typically 1 or 2 B channels?

[edit]

ISDN is a catch-all term tat included BRI (2 B channels) and T-1 (24 B channels) and E-1 (30 B channels) so the parent comment is correct.

Re: Geocities Cage at the Exodus Datacenter

#40

Post by api »

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)

It's also used for OOB access in high security environments in case you are getting strategically DDOSed.

Makes me wonder what you'd find wardialing in 2016.

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