[Rack] Action with our Monkeybrains link, please respond if you care

[Andy Isaacson]

Dropping treasurer via BCC, no reason to spam all our money people.

On Tue, Oct 11, 2011 at 02:53:41PM -0700, Rubin Abdi wrote:
> > Another relatively-more-evil provider, but one that's fast, would be
> > to get a Comcast circuit in. If we do, I'd much prefer to tunnel over
> > it than use them for transit, as I don't much trust them as a company.
> 
> I think having a setup like that, though nice, would provide more points
> of failure to a system not many of us want to dedicate ourselves to
> already. I also like giving Sonic money because they're not evil.

I have a Comcast business line at home; it's 22/5 Mbit with 5 IPs for
$105/mo.  I've been saturating the uplink since the day it installed,
mostly with Bittorrent seeds of free software installers, and it's been
very reliable.

They're still quite evil as a company, of course, but the service is
reasonable.

We can definitely tunnel out over a Comcast physical layer to colo
space.  We're heading towards getting a portable ARIN assignment
anyways, this is just more fuel for that fire.

> > TL;DR: if anyone cares, I'm happy to make the Monkeybrains circuit be
> > useful, otherwise let's just bond Sonic pairs.
> 
> Well, I think the first step with plan A is to figure out what shit is
> so slow. Andy, would you feel troubled for just simply shooting an email
> to Monkeybrains asking what's up with our current link's bandwidth? If
> it's stuck at that speed then we have our answer to how to proceed.

Now that we've paid our bill (Thank you Kelly!) I'm more comfortable
asking Monkeybrains for help.  Bugging a vendor to whom you're a year in
the hole is too douchey for me to countenance.

First thing we should do is get a machine that can route traffic over
the MB link, and run a 5 minute cron job bandwidth test for a few hours.
Once we have a few hours of data, we can bug MB.

AFAIK, the link should be set up for something pretty symmetric.  When
the link was originally installed, it was pushing about 5 Mbit/sec;
Monkeybrains tuned it up and we were getting 30 MBit/sec burst, 20
MBit/sec reliably.

What bandwidth are we getting now?  Let's get some data and move
forward.

-andy