[lug] colo at home info

[Michael Deck]

At 05:02 PM 8/14/2003, B Giles wrote:
>A quick recap for those who were wondering what I learned about (cheap) colocation at home options.
>
>1) Comcast only seems to have "comcast pro" as an option, which is really no improvement over standard service.  I'm sure it's great if you're a gamer, but it's in the same residential block of IP addresses so you'll have some of your services blocked, you don't have a static IP address ("persistent IP address" is not the same), etc.  Colocated systems need faster uploads, not faster downloads, and 5 persistent IP addresses (which are tied to a MAC address so you can't easily stack them on a single piece of hardware) isn't any better than one.

I signed up for the "comcast _business_ pro" service a couple of weeks ago and just put a machine out in the DMZ today. This machine is mostly a file server and I just need SSH to get files from it when I'm on the road. I have tested both SSH and HTTP into this box and have no obvious problems. I don't know whether it's in the Comcast "residential" block of IP's or not. Do you know what that block is? 

For other hosting needs I recently moved to tummy's virtual dedicated server, and it has been really, truly great. 

The contract that Comcast put in front of me agreed to not host any servers period. I asked about this and was told I could cross this out and write in that I was going to run servers but I understood Comcast wasn't responsible for maintaining them (as if I'd _let_ them) and that they weren't responsible for business losses due to outages. That apparently flew because they came out the NEXT DAY to connect me. 

The non-static IP is a worry but I just have cron email me the IP address once a day and I can pick that email up from anywhere. 

-Mike


Michael Deck
Cleanroom Software Engineering, Inc.