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Geocities Cage at the Exodus Datacenter

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Re: Geocities Cage at the Exodus Datacenter

#51

Post by aidenn0 »

jsjohnst wrote: post #49
aidenn0 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

In the 90s in my little corner of the mid Atlantic US at least, it was very commonly called a T1 or DS1 and the terms were used interchangeably even though they refer to slightly different things (at least by sysadmins; use the terms wrong around a telecom equipment engineer and you'd likely get corrected).

Re: Geocities Cage at the Exodus Datacenter

#52

Post by flomo »

acveilleux wrote: post #47
tyingq wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

My conspiracy theory was VC funding required companies to spend X% on Sun/Cisco equipment, whether they needed it or not. In any case expensive, unused Sun servers were lying around everywhere during that period. And you'd hear thing like people bragging about their spare E10K.

Re: Geocities Cage at the Exodus Datacenter

#53

Post by Overtonwindow »

jsjohnst wrote: post #43
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'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.

Yes please !!

Re: Geocities Cage at the Exodus Datacenter

#55

Post by beachstartup »

alexhawdon wrote: post #42
chrissnell wrote: post #36

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…

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.

probably a combination of both.

i worked at a startup in the late 90's and the price of sun microsystems gear was mind-blowingly high. from memory: ultra 5 workstation with a scsi card and disk array was $15,000+. an ultra e450 server was on the order of $100,000 and went up from there depending on how you wanted to build.

of course, that was exactly the time people started switching to linux on x86 en masse. pentium pro's were good and cheap enough to scale out less expensively on a per unit basis. today you can buy a 72-core xeon server with gigabytes of memory and terabytes of ssd's and 4x 10G ethernet for less than 10 grand. amortized over its functional lifetime, it costs less than a cell phone bill.

Re: Geocities Cage at the Exodus Datacenter

#56

Post by bluedino »

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.

AT&T installs a USR modem for the pots line to manage the routers for their bVoIP

Re: Geocities Cage at the Exodus Datacenter

#57

Post by kyledrake »

beachstartup wrote: post #55
alexhawdon wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

probably a combination of both. i worked at a startup in the late 90's and the price of sun microsystems gear was mind-blowingly high. from memory: ultra 5 workstation with a scsi card and disk array was $15,000+. an ultra e450 server was on the order of $100,000 and went up from there depending on how you wanted to build. of course, that was exactly the time people started switching to linux on x86 en masse. pentium…

I got the impression "hardware dogma" still happens when I was planning our infrastructure. The datacenter world is still a place where you can spend $36k for something you can get for $1000 if you're not careful. I didn't use Cisco for our switches and some IT guys I talked to acted like I was a heretic. But the decision saved us several thousand dollars and we ended up with a design that was IMHO more reliable than stacking proprietary switches.

The big trick is to make everything redundant (redundant power, network bonding, Ceph instead of a NAS) and not have a SPOF. Then it matters a lot less if anything fails, and you can use cheaper hardware if you need to. That said, I still prefer server grade hardware - just not always the newest or the most brand name.

Re: Geocities Cage at the Exodus Datacenter

#58

Post by jrnichols »

acveilleux wrote: post #37
sulam wrote: post #29

And 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.

Yep. I was at Netscape in Mountain View around that time, and the data center was mostly full of SGI stuff and Sun stuff. The new datacenter on Ellis opened up, the AOL thing happened, and even more Sun hardware started showing up. E4500s, E450s, you name it. I had an Ultra 5 sitting in my cube just because I could. And then the Intel stuff started showing up in droves. Compaq servers running Linux. And I don't remember seeing a single Sun box show up in that data center after that...

Re: Geocities Cage at the Exodus Datacenter

#59

Post by scurvy »

chrissnell wrote: post #36

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…

Their revenue mattered a lot more than their COGS. At least in this case.

Re: Geocities Cage at the Exodus Datacenter

#60

Post by shams93 »

I worked for geocities as a front end person back then. We got to work on some cool javascript stuff for the page builder app that was really pretty far ahead for its time. I got into trouble for bringing a laptop with suse linux on it into the office, back then linux was considered a major security risk, you notice all the machines are from Sun. They were also very early adopters of server side java, but most of the plumbing was composed of c code, the javascript people were kept far away from the server side and we didn't make it up to yahoo, but they did snatch up almost all of the unix admins.
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