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Thursday, June 7, 2007

Isn't a single-homed datacentre a contradiction in terms ?
(posted at 10:33PM BST)

I bring this one to you courtesy of The Register:


I would like to go on record that one of the key reasons why I took Spilsby Internet Solutions on as a full-time venture was because I had worked in the industry long enough to see how *not* to do things and one of the places where I worked was Centrinet.

In comparison, Smartbunker appears to have been trading since 2003 and has many millions of capital behind it (I was privy to the original purchase price of their premises when I was still an employee) yet they only have single-provider connectivity, they do not specify the speed of said connectivity on their own website and they make the classic mistake of advertising 100% uptime.

A look at their network diagram shows dual Cisco PIX firewalls at their borders; a single remotely-exploitable flaw in the PIX's operating system would bring down a perfect 100% uptime - all Smartbunker can guarantee is that they have 100% uptime *so far*.

On the other hand, I am operating on an annual five-figure budget for hardware/datacentre/transit fees; I currently have a presence in three datacentres (Redbus Meridian Gate, London; The Planet, Texas; DediPower, Reading) and will soon have a presence in another yet-to-be-announced datacentre a bit nearer to my own base of operations.

My own border routers run on different CPU architectures, a mixture of operating systems and a variety of different routing daemons providing BGP/OSPF routing across the entirety of my network - a monogamy of any kind in your network infrastructure is a big no-no!

In all of these datacenters, I have multiple transit providers and dedicated links (UK to UK is via shared access to a dual SDH ring) between my disparate networks linking them into one - which means I have total datacenter redundancy.

I am not a multi-million pound venture but even with all that redundancy, I wouldn't bet the reputation of my business on a claim for 100% uptime because one day, I would get called out on it even it were for only a fifteen second outage.

Just for laughs, Google runs the largest collection of datacenters in the world as well as the world's most popular website but not even Google claims 100% uptime... and of all the people I would trust to be able to make that claim, it would be Google.

EDIT: I just had a thought - Centrinet are Checkpoint resellers and used to bleat about how absolutely brilliant Checkpoint firewall products are - so why aren't they using them for their own enterprise-level hosting network instead of Cisco PIX boxes ?

It would also appear that Centrinet are no longer a Checkpoint Gold partner and have been downgraded to Checkpoint Bronze... nevertheless, the fact that they don't use the very products that they push to their customers for use as an enterprise-level firewall should say it all.

Friday, June 1, 2007

Stranger things have happened...
(posted at 07:56PM BST)

I was having a typically average day today throwing together some rather arcane RewriteRule lines for a customers' Apache config when up popped an IM message from a guy I haven't spoken to for at least seven years....

Chris Horry (aka Zerbey) took Computer Studies at Boston College but due to the fact that he left before I arrived, I would have never met him if it hadn't been for people commenting that I was 'just like him' - apparently, he used to poke holes in Boston College's Novell Netware network just like I used to.

Anyway, Chris is apparently working for Symantec in Florida now (thankfully, not on the AV side of things - otherwise I would probably owe him a few whacks due to the umpteen TCP/IP stacks I have had to repair due to failed uninstallations of Norton Internet Security) and supporting their enterprise backup proggies.

I would love to get hold of Phil 'Gribz' Snell's e-mail addy just to start throwing 'Feesh!' at him like in the good ol' days... hopefully Chris will provide it to me!

 
slashdot

OpenAI's Sam Altman and Other Tech Leaders To Serve on AI Safety Board

Honda To Spend $11 Billion On Four EV Factories In North America

TSMC Unveils 1.6nm Process Technology With Backside Power Delivery

Alphabet Shares Jump 14% On Earnings Beat, First-Ever Dividend

Seagate Joins the HDD Price Hike Party, Blames AI for Spike in Demand

Open Sourcing DOS 4

US Teacher Charged With Using AI To Frame Principal With Hate Speech Clip

Garry's Mod Is Taking Down Decades of Nintendo-Related Add-Ons

US 'Know Your Customer' Proposal Will Put an End To Anonymous Cloud Users

Ubuntu 24.04 LTS 'Noble Numbat' Officially Released

Twilio Founder Buys Satire Site 'The Onion'

Stripe To Start Taking Crypto Payments, Starting With USDC Stablecoin

FCC Votes To Restore Net Neutrality Rules

ByteDance Prefers TikTok Shutdown in US if Legal Options Fail, Report Says

New Rule Compels US Coal-Fired Power Plants To Capture Emissions - or Shut Down

the register

Encrypted email service files DMA complaint claiming it vanished from Google Search

TikTok ban could escalate US-China trade war, ex-White House CIO tells The Reg

UK's Investigatory Powers Bill to become law despite tech world opposition

45 Drives adds Linux-powered mini PCs, workstations to growing compute lineup

IBM and LzLabs to clash in UK court over Software Defined Mainframe

UK agriculture department slammed for paper pushing despite tech splurges

Help! My mouse climbed a wall and now it doesn't work right

VMware’s end-user compute community told to brace for ‘Omnissa’ shift

Flaws in Chinese keyboard apps leave 750 million users open to snooping, researchers claim

Atlassian loses half its CEOs, but customers stay solid after Server products exit support

Intel excited by PC sales pop and GPU prospects, but investors aren’t because the outlook is poor

What's up with Alphabet and Microsoft lately? Profits, sales – and AI costs

Amazon to blow $11B on cluster of Indiana bit barns

Cops cuff man for allegedly framing colleague with AI-generated hate speech clip

Ring dinged for $5.6M after, among other claims, rogue insider spied on 'pretty girls'

ByteDance 'would rather' torpedo TikTok than sell it off

FCC votes 3-2 to bring net neutrality back from the dead

Detecting drift and dealing with the Silicon Valley mindset

Two cuffed in Samourai Wallet crypto dirty money sting

TSMC says first 1.6nm chips coming in 2026

Spotify claims Apple wants 'tax' for in-app pricing tweak

DARPA's latest toy is a 20-foot, 12-ton tank that drives itself

City council audit trail is an audit fail after disastrous Oracle ERP rollout

SK hynix breaks Q1 revenue records on back of AI boom

Russia, Iran pose most aggressive threat to 2024 elections, say infoseccers

Meta's value plummets as Zuckerberg admits AI needs more time and money

Atos hopes for lifeline as refinancing saga set to drag on into May

Japan's Moon lander makes it through another lunar night

Turns out teaching criminals to write web code keeps them out of prison

Throwflame launches fire-spitting robo-dog from Hell

Microsoft and Amazon's AI ambitions spark regulatory rumble

BMW calls for vendor openness in quest to mine its own processes

Forget the AI doom and hype, let's make computers useful

Indian bank’s IT is so shabby it’s been banned from opening new accounts

Samsung shows off battery tech it says will see you gone in nine minutes

IBM to acquire Hashi for $6.4B, hopes it will boost software biz and Red Hat

Australia’s spies and cops want ‘accountable encryption’ - aka access to backdoors

Governments issue alerts after 'sophisticated' state-backed actor found exploiting flaws in Cisco security boxes

With Run:ai acquisition, Nvidia aims to manage your AI kubes

Apple releases OpenELM, a slightly more accurate LLM

Musk moves Tesla's goalposts, investors happily move shares higher

Shouldn't Teams, Zoom, Slack all interoperate securely for the Feds? Wyden is asking

Now all Windows 11 users are getting adverts to 'make the Start menu great again'

Lenovo and Micron first to implement LPCAMM2 in laptop

Microsoft cannot keep its own security in order, so what hope for its add-ons customers?

US Chamber of Commerce to sue FTC for banning noncompetes in most jobs

Another Boeing whistleblower comes forward – with receipts

Management company settles for $18.4M after nuclear weapons plant staff fudged their timesheets

Google cools on cookie phase-out while regulators chew on plans

US charges Iranians with cyber snooping on government, companies

 

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