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[Jeff Taylor <shdwdrgn AT sourpuss.net>]

Perhaps you don't realize that this is exactly the kind of equipment
that OpenNic was built up from?  Until the last year or two, I would
have wagered at least 90% of OpenNic's infrastructure was hosted over
standard residential internet connections leading to old computers in
people's basements.  I personally host over 150 domain names, providing
websites, email, and full DNS services - and the primary servers
managing all of this are three old Dell desktops that were released in
2002.  My firewall is running an ancient athlon XP 2000 with 768MB of ram.

If you are going to judge someone's ability to run dedicated services
based on what hardware they have available, you are in for a huge
culture-shock.  OpenNic is a world-wide project with members who may not
even have access to equipment which you would consider throw-away.  For
some people, top-of-the-line equipment is what the US threw out a decade
ago.  And quite frankly, there is nothing wrong with that equipment. 
DNS is not incredibly resource-intensive -- you don't need the latest
8-core CPU with a terabyte of ram to participate in this project.  What
you DO need is the persistence to maintain your equipment, to monitor
your services, without the expectation that you can walk away for a
month and everything will be fine.  I don't care if you are hosting from
the most reliable data-center in the world -- if you don't personally
monitor your services, they can and will fail on you.

DNS is fault-tolerant.  It can handle brief outages of individual
servers.  The OpenNic project survived just fine for a decade without
any sort of service monitoring... Sure we had occasional outages, but so
does every ISP on the planet.  Now that we do have monitoring in place,
the worst problem we face is server operators who ignore the
notification emails, so on top of monitoring we have also implemented
automatic server removal.  Anyone can operate a T2 server on any
equipment they feel is up to the task.  Its their job to make sure they
maintain their server, and its my job to make sure that only the
reliable servers are listed for OpenNic users.  The hardware being used
is a very minor part of the overall picture.


On 02/23/2013 02:49 PM, Guillaume Parent wrote:
>
> Make sure your ups covers networking equipment too otherwise you might
> as well not have one from a reliability perspective. Also I really
> don't like the idea of a T2 on throwaway hardware hosted at home on a
> non commercial line. If that's the standard we're allowing, I think it
> undermines the credibility of the project.
>
>