Discuss mailing list

[Mauricio Pasquier Juan <mauricio AT pasquierjuan.com.ar>]

On Sat, Feb 23, 2013 at 05:46:09PM -0700, Jeff Taylor wrote:
> 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.

+1 from one of those savage places where a celeron is a great server

> 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.

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