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Geocities Cage at the Exodus Datacenter

detritus.org

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Re: Geocities Cage at the Exodus Datacenter

#71

Post by dkresge »

shams93 wrote: post #60

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…

Wow, Page builder (formerly Geobuilder) -- crazy times. I don't remember the Suse incident! But your mention of server side java reminds me that we also experimented with server side javascript via Netscape Enterprise Server. Compared to the C CGIs that comprised most of Geo's backend at that point it seemed a panacea. Too many bugs and not ready for prime time later we stuck w/ Apache (but moved more to handlers).

Re: Geocities Cage at the Exodus Datacenter

#72

Post by icedchai »

jrnichols wrote: post #58
acveilleux wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 remem…

Sun hardware was everywhere in the late 90's / early 2000's. I remember working at a couple of startups that had E3500s (mini-fridge size machines?) and a few E450s. We had Ultra 5's and 10's on the developer desktops.

I have an Ultra 10 rotting away in my basement. It cost a pretty penny at the time, but I haven't booted it up in almost 15 years.

Re: Geocities Cage at the Exodus Datacenter

#73

Post by dkresge »

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.

I seem to recall the adjacent cage hosting a Very Large Company's hot web-based email product which was cabled "organically" and made this look like art. (Hi Mike!)

Re: Geocities Cage at the Exodus Datacenter

#74

Post by tyingq »

SSLy wrote: post #66
setq wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah pricing was awful. I remember someone playing £12k for a single PA RISC CPU option and when they cracked it open to have a look it was 95% heatsink. Cue the "bloody expensive heatsink" comments. It had about as much go as one of those "big slab" xeon slot CPUs at the time which was 1/10th of the cost.

Well, I've seen appliances over $50k a piece ( you need at least two to be useful.) So systems like that are still here.

Right, because they aren't currently commodity items. Wouldn't take much, for example, though, to get haproxy to a state where it starts eating F5 lab's lunch. A nicer ui, etc.

It took Linux and commodity servers a while to kill the $100k+/each proprietary unix server market.

Re: Geocities Cage at the Exodus Datacenter

#75

Post by eb0la »

GFischer wrote: post #33
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.

They did eventually fix it, see the newer racks: http://www.detritus.org/mike/gc/rearpatchpanels.jpg

That's not fair!

Patchpanel backs are cabled only once by electricians. All is connected to another patchpanel that's near the catalyst and it is the place the mess starts growing.

Memories :-)

Re: Geocities Cage at the Exodus Datacenter

#76

Post by ccakes »

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)

I've used dial up via a cheap modem to a Cisco 2500 as recently as a few years ago for OOB console access. It's not gold plated but still works fine

More recently though it's all been on ethernet handoff either via the DC or a local provider

Re: Geocities Cage at the Exodus Datacenter

#78

Post by chiph »

We were hosted at Exodus in the Herndon Virginia area around this same timeframe. The staff gave us a small tour and showed us a cage about the size of a double-wide trailer. Inside were two Sun Enterprise 10000 servers and a whole wall of drive arrays. Plus networking gear, tape drives, etc. Easily $7-8 million worth of stuff.

They said it was from a search engine we probably had heard of. Our guess was it was Altavista.

We didn't own our Compaq servers - we leased them from Exodus, like a lot of firms. And when the bubble popped, all those startups stopped paying for all that expensive equipment (which was now used and worth much less), and Exodus was on the hook as the owner of it all. Killed them.

Edit: Found this image from someone who picked one up for a song to add to their collection. From a prized million-dollar enterprise-class server, to being hauled around in the back of a pickup truck.

http://imgur.com/a/lXvOk

Re: Geocities Cage at the Exodus Datacenter

#79

Post by drewg123 »

chiph wrote: post #78

We were hosted at Exodus in the Herndon Virginia area around this same timeframe. The staff gave us a small tour and showed us a cage about the size of a double-wide trailer. Inside were two Sun Enterprise 10000 servers and a whole wall of drive arrays. Plus networking gear, tape drives, etc. Easily $7-8 million worth of stuff. They said it was from a search engine we probably had heard of. Our guess was it was Altav…

Hmmm.. I'm pretty sure AltaVista ran on DEC Alpha hardware, not Sun. And Google used self-built high-density racks of Intel hardware.

Maybe it was Inktomi? I'm pretty sure they used Sun hardware.

Re: Geocities Cage at the Exodus Datacenter

#80

Post by drewg123 »

acveilleux wrote: post #34
roganp wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I ran DEC Alpha servers at the same time, and Tru64 (aka OSF/1 aka DEC UNIX) shipped with AdvFS. It has a lot of the same features as ZFS (volume management combined with the FS, so you could add/remove drives, and grow/shrink capacity w/o downtime). I remember my Sun admin friends being incredulous as I shuffled disk space on a live server. It is kind of a shame HP killed it.
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