[Rack] possibility of tenants in the new rack

[Dr. Jesus]

On Sat, Mar 5, 2011 at 4:23 PM, Jonathan Lassoff <jof at thejof.com> wrote:
> On Sat, Mar 5, 2011 at 11:28 AM, jim <jim at systemateka.com> wrote:
>>
>>    i'm writing to the rack list to see if there's real
>> interest or objections or contributions to the idea of
>> setting up the new rack and getting some tenant computers
>> in it.
>
> I kind of agree with Rubin and Andy on this topic. I think it's not a
> good idea to offer this as a service inside of 2169, however I think
> it would be a most *excellent* idea to form a purchasing collective
> for some colocation space and bandwidth in a facility that's geared
> towards offering that.
>
> On your point about having a place for people to practice: I think
> this would be a most excellent use of space and power, provided that
> the use of the equipment is temporary and transient while people are
> using it. If a learner/student is interesting in setting up an entire
> system or stack of hosts, the Noisecloud resource that Dr. J has would
> be a much better place to test those things out.
> By learning the basics of what systems need to be setup and applying
> that knowledge through a provisioning script or configuration
> management tool, it should be possible to spin up an entire stack of
> hosts in a modest amount of time.
>
> Rubin summed up a lot of what I think are the salient points, however
> I'd also like to proffer that we'd get incredibly shafty prices on
> electrical power and bandwidth as compared to a proper colocation
> facility.
>
>
> Along these same lines though, I've been wanting to get a proper
> colocated 1U host setup for some time now. I'd be happy to help
> administer, coordinate, and organize a cooperative to go in on a group
> purchase of some space, power, and bandwidth.
> Jim, Rubin -- It sounded like you were both interested in getting
> something personal set up. Know anyone else? What kind of space could
> we be looking for? Quarter rack? Half rack?

A couple things:

2111 Mission has webpass already and I'm trying to broker a deal where
we would be able to rent 8 sqft in their facilities shop to install a
rack in.  I'm not making any guarantees but so far there don't seem to
be any showstoppers.

I'm already colocating hardware in the market on the first floor.
There's a limited amount of space available to colocate more stuff as
long as it's a very small amount of power, like a pogoplug or a geode
board.  There's a dedicated business DSL circuit for that hardware,
but we can run a riser to our network if we need to.

Noisecloud doesn't help people learn PC hardware voodoo.  You need
physical access to PC hardware to practice voodoo on.  That's what
Jim's going for here.

If someone wants physical access to a server lab, Ace Monster Toys has
a very nice lab with something like a dozen proliants, a stack of 14
1U supermicro machines, gig switches, and a bunch of other stuff I'm
probably forgetting.  They all netboot except for one machine with a
nice SCSI array in it that's being used as the storage server.  I
stuck one of the supermicro boxes in the closet next to the rack at
2169, in case someone wants to see what the supermicro machines are
like.

Noisecloud does have three hosts which are used as controllers for
speaking management protocols to all the other chassis at each site.
We can host a few things on those machines since they have to be up
anyway, but we have to be really careful to avoid doing anything
that's going to cost the service donors a bunch of money.  Transit to
some ASes at one site is unusually expensive for some reason I don't
understand, and I'm personally responsible for making sure all
operations comply with certain rules required by the tax-exempt nature
of the operation.

I'm also sitting on a DL585 I'd like to use as a virtualization host,
but it's not cheap to run.  I might have a site that will host it, but
I need to spend something like $400 on wireless hardware to beef up
the link to the site since it's a boat.

I do have 10 cobalt machines which are really cheap to run.  The MIPS
ones are something like 14 watts and the x86 ones are something like
20.