[aclug-L] Re: High-speed server access

[Carl D Cravens <raven@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, 27 Dec 1999, Dale W Hodge wrote:

> While an interesting idea, I'm not sure of the practicality of it.  Web
> hosting & shell access is easy, as well as virtual mail domains.  However,
> I'm not sure how well mailing lists would work with virtual domains, if it
> is even possible.  

It's doable.  I still question the practicality... for one, how do you
divide up the cost?  I'd feel inclined to limit or meter bandwidth.  All
in all, if it were in my basement and I had to deal with the burden of
systems administration, I wouldn't be letting folks have the service "at
cost"... unless you consider my time to be part of the cost.  And if it
were in someone else's basement and they were doing it for free, I'm sure
that it wouldn't be up to my standards... the primary point being
"long-term reliablity".  

> Dial-in access gets costly in a hurry. I'd be inclined to
> offer only a single dial-in number for remote administative access.

Why offer even that?  It's connected to the net, let folks telnet in. 
 
> Co-location wouldn't be bad if we had a block of addresses.  

I would want to limit it to that... actual machine co-location, so that
there isn't any "shared" hardware.  But then that is still a pain... I
wouldn't want to open up my basement to folks I hardly know when they want
to do a hardware upgrade.  Or be woke up in the middle of the night by
someone wanting me to do a hard-reset of their machine.  There's a lot of
responsibility on the shoulders of the guy who has to host the actual
hardware... he still has to manage the local network and router. 

> Otherwise,
> we're limited to what can be accomplished with virtual hosts. 

Which is quite a bit. 

> Another idea
> we might look into is providing dynamic dns services for members, including
> MX backup.  But we have to be careful here, because it's ACLUG that gets
> into trouble if someone does something foolish.

There's very little reason for it... virtually everyone doing dynamic DNS
is violating their terms of service with their ISP. 

> I'd like to see some feedback on this, and if there's interest, we can

--
Carl D Cravens (raven@xxxxxxxxxxx)
We tend to judge others by their actions, ourselves by our intentions.
   -Dr. Ed Cole.