{"id":448,"date":"2008-01-15T12:55:00","date_gmt":"2008-01-15T17:55:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/2008\/01\/15\/cool-stuff\/"},"modified":"2008-01-15T12:55:00","modified_gmt":"2008-01-15T17:55:00","slug":"cool-stuff","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/2008\/01\/15\/cool-stuff\/","title":{"rendered":"Cool Stuff"},"content":{"rendered":"<ul>\n    <li>FDC (FDCServers.net) has come a long way since I last dealt with them. (I remember back when they had a couple Cogent lines). They&#8217;ve now got 81 Gbps of connectivity.<\/li>\n    <li>Internap has long been <em>the<\/em> Internet provider when latency\/speed matters. They basically buy lines from <em>all<\/em> the big providers, and peer with lots of the smaller ones, so that, unless your hosting company has their own private peering agreements, it&#8217;s basically impossible to find a shorter route. People hosting gameservers, or really just anything &#8220;high quality,&#8221; love Internap. I&#8217;ve seen prices in the $100-200 range for 1 Mbps. (This is purely for the transit: it&#8217;s all well and good to envision $100 for a 1 Mbps line to your house as good, but that&#8217;s not what it is. This is when you&#8217;re in a data center where they have a presence and run a line to them. The cost is just for them carrying your packets.)<\/li>\n    <li>FDC now has a 10 Gbps line to Internap. &#8220;Word on the street&#8221; is that Internap had some sort of odd promotion at $15\/Mbps if you bought in bulk, and FDC wisely jumped, getting a 2 Gbps commit on a 10 Gbps line.<\/li>\n    <li>I&#8217;m working on getting Xen running on my laptop. It&#8217;s interested me for a long time&#8211;it&#8217;s a GPL&#8217;ed virtualization platform. You can use it on your desktop to experiment with various OSs inside VMs, but it&#8217;s also awesome on servers to run multiple virtual machines as virtual private servers.<\/li>\n    <li>Do you remember Cobalt RaQs? I distinctly remember ogling them and thinking they were the best things ever. (Of course, now we see them as 300 MHz machines&#8230;) It turns out that, when Cobalt went belly-up, they released a lot of the code under the GPL or similar. The <a href=\"http:\/\/bluequartz.org\/\">BlueQuartz<\/a> project is an active community-developed extension of that, and, combined with CentOS, it apparently runs well on &#8220;normal&#8221; computers now. (True, you don&#8217;t get the spiffy blue rackmount server or the spiffy LCD, but you do get to run it on something ten times as powerful.)<\/li>\n    <li>I&#8217;m still itching to host a TF2 server. I&#8217;ve found that they&#8217;re all either full or empty, with few in-betweens, and that a lot of them aren&#8217;t &#8216;adminned&#8217; as tightly as I&#8217;d like: games like this seem to attract irritating people, and not enough servers kick\/ban them.<\/li>\n    <li>cPanel seems to have come a distance since I last used that, too, and you can now license it for use just inside a VPS at $15\/month.<\/li>\n    <li>Mailservers are hard to perfect. There are lots and lots of mediocre ones, but it&#8217;s rare to come across an excellent one, something that can deflect spam seamlessly, make it easy to add lots of addresses, and provide a nice web GUI. All of the technology&#8217;s out there, but for some reason, mailservers are among the hardest things in the world to configure. (Even my <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/2008\/01\/03\/geekostat\/\">thermostat<\/a> is easier to use!) Especially given my affinity for <a href=\"http:\/\/www.openbsd.org\/spamd\/\">spamd<\/a>, it&#8217;s no wonder that I&#8217;m so impressed with the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.allard.nu\/mailserver\/\">Mailserver &#8216;appliance&#8217;<\/a> that Allard Consulting produces. It&#8217;s essentially all of the best things about mailservers (greylisting, whitelisting, SpamAssassin, Postfix with MySQL-based virtual domains, a spiffy web interface with graphs, Roundcube&#8230;), hosted on OpenBSD, coming as a pre-assembled ISO.<\/li>\n    <li>Computer hardware&#8217;s come a long way lately. I&#8217;d imagine it&#8217;d be fairly easy to assemble a machine with a good dual-core (or quad-core!) processor, 4 GB RAM, and a few 500 GB disks for around $1,000.<\/li>\n    <li>Colocation + 1,000 GB transfer on Internap at FDC is $169. (Or $199 for 5 Mbps unmetered, but that&#8217;s probably overkill.) Are you thinking what I&#8217;m thinking? (Hint: everything on this list indirectly leads to these last two point!)<\/li>\n<\/ul>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>FDC (FDCServers.net) has come a long way since I last dealt with them. (I remember back when they had a couple Cogent lines). They&#8217;ve now got 81 Gbps of connectivity. Internap has long been the Internet provider when latency\/speed matters. &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/2008\/01\/15\/cool-stuff\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,5,10,15,16,18,19,22,24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-448","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computers","category-cool-links","category-ideas","category-living","category-materialism","category-ocd","category-performance","category-programming","category-rants-raves"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/448","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=448"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/448\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=448"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=448"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=448"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}