I had forgot that GeoCities started migrating to NetApp filers after the Yahoo! acquisition. As many thousands (tens of thousands?) of the filers they bought from NetApp, Yahoo! really shouldve bought them when they had the chance I feel.
Geocities Cage at the Exodus Datacenter
41–50 of 89 posts
Re: Geocities Cage at the Exodus Datacenter
#42Great 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…
That's a great story. It'd be interesting to know whether that was all they could afford, or if they were being very forward-thinking in using COTS hardware and a failure-tolerant architecture.
Re: Geocities Cage at the Exodus Datacenter
#43Does anyone know of an article like this about the dial in modem systems and infrastructure for some of the early dialup services?
I'll dig up photos of the ISP I founded back in 1993. I've got the evolution of it from 1993 till I sold it in 97, but they were all film photos for obvious reasons. Surprised I never took the time to post before.
Re: Geocities Cage at the Exodus Datacenter
#44And right there is why Sun was such a hit in the 90s and crushed in the bust.
Everyone in SV in 1999 used Sun boxes. Racking Ultra-2 Pizza Boxes was being very Internet Professional and money was flowing freely enough to pay for them.
yes in BT we where sun 4u servers at $40k a pop
Re: Geocities Cage at the Exodus Datacenter
#45Does 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…
In my smaller regional ISP we started off using USR courier and sportster modems with Cyclades cards before moving over to Livingston Port masters. I ended up selling the company before moving to all digital incoming lines (needed to support 56k modems).
Re: Geocities Cage at the Exodus Datacenter
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...
No need for an instance if there is no dynamic content. Everything in S3!
Re: Geocities Cage at the Exodus Datacenter
#47"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.
It was common in many customer cages. I even saw cages setup in 2000 where a cage contained 500k of sun and cisco hardware still in their box after 8 months. I guess that startup was growing so fast they hadn't gotten around to plugging things in yet /s.
More likely they either ran out of funding or never got the growth they expected. Back then there was often a large disconnect between H/w bought and H/w needed/used. But money was there and hypergrowth was "just around the corner."
Re: Geocities Cage at the Exodus Datacenter
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...
No need for an instance if there is no dynamic content. Everything in S3!
I was considering an upload gateway and administrative functions. You can't really just expose S3 on that scale.
Re: Geocities Cage at the Exodus Datacenter
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Your edit mostly got it right with the exception that it wasn't commonly called a T-1 or E-1 and the numbers are slightly off.
* ISDN BRI = two 64k B channels and one 16k D channel
* ISDN PRI over T1 = twenty three 64K B channels and one 64k D channel
* ISDN PRI over E1 = thirty 64k B channels and one 64k D channel (time slot 0 on the E1 was used as a sync channel and wasn't considered a B or D)
T1/E1 was considered an analog circuit with 24 or 32 respective 64kbps voice channels using in band signaling effectively limiting each channel to 56k. ISDN PRI used the same cabling and channel separation, but instead ran a digital circuit with out of band signaling enabling the full 64k to be available for voice and data. ISDN PRI (and BRI) also allowed the option to be packet based (similar to X.25) rather than circuit switched for data transmission.
Re: Geocities Cage at the Exodus Datacenter
#50Does anyone know of an article like this about the dial in modem systems and infrastructure for some of the early dialup services?
I'll dig up photos of the ISP I founded back in 1993. I've got the evolution of it from 1993 till I sold it in 97, but they were all film photos for obvious reasons. Surprised I never took the time to post before.
I would love to see those!