yay for pictures. you look sharp with your dark hair.

too bad it turned all purple-ish though.
i need to get permanent hair dye.

Talking of purple, why are you wearing purple nail varnish?

Lovely photos, it's like pornography to me. Phoar, look at all that CAT5. Someone hand me a tissue.

Oops. Wrong link then. My bad.

cool. i would have to say that you would shit your pants if you saw some of the racks that i set up at a former employers colo.

free standing boxes wouldnt have been tolerated in the building, not to mention the cages.

its good to see that the servers are in though. as for the networking issue...

traceroute to www.livejournal.com (216.231.47.176), 64 hops max, 40 byte packets

7 internap.Seattlesel.cw.net (208.172.81.134) 8.586 ms 8.451 ms 8.219 ms
8 border18s.fe0-0-fenet1.sea.pnap.net (206.253.192.153) 8.803 ms 9.485 ms 8.821 ms
9 spk-1-sea.dsl-isp.net (206.253.195.218) 22.658 ms 14.808 ms 15.859 ms
10 dsl231-047-176.speakeasy.net (216.231.47.176) 33.554 ms 12.701 ms 12.548ms

seems to be cleared up.

however, your DNS records no longer reverse correctly. also, is livejournal just on a dsl segment?

reverse got setup (i watched), but they haven't restarted named yet it seems.

you might want to check your mail queue on the lj server.

It does appear to be on a DSL segment, doesn't it?
Why would you want to do that? As someone who worked for Covad, I can safely say that it would be a bad idea. ;->

well, i have asked brad about 10 times to let me know what the link was on livejournal... he still hasnt.

i checked the mrtg records for that block or call up the bgp traffic tables from internap, but speakeasy lumps their transfers so it wasnt proving to be very useful.

i could load the link and decipher from there since i have access to a 12000 series 6 hops (sub 9ms) from there.. however, that would kill service fairly harshly and would therefore be quite frowned upon.

blah. from what i see, he is sitting off the dsl trunk at speakeasy which feeds into the fdplx fe port on internaps border, which feeds into a gig int at cablewireless...

i tried looking for the post where he said "faster than 100mbit pipe" or something like that... and from what i can see... speakeasy doesnt even have that large of a link (although it is peered with more than 100mb aggregate).

I hate to be a cloud of gloom on something that is a very promising start, but damn... looks like they wedged you into a f'ng broom closet.

Wires flaying all over the place... no clear access to the back of the machines... no real safety in the event of an earthquake. No sign of any forethought as to how to organize the wiring ...and they even put your beautiful servers next to a Packard Bell. Talk about adding insult to injury! ;)

It's pretty sloppy by local standards, but it'll all be worth it if the people there are helpful and will work to get you the results you're paying for.

As for what Visions said about your connectivity problem being all cleared up... well, it's not. I just did a few pings and another tracert and got times 35 ms to 239 ms. You must have something intermittent going on there, I think, because the times on that last hop are still all over the place. They should be more consistant.

Hey, we can move to super-perfect InterNAP at $3,000/month any time .....

I'm trying to be Mr. Sensible Businessman here .... would you rather us pay $400/month or $3,000/month? And at Speakeasy everybody's super cool and helpful. I got a kinda weird feeling from the suits at InterNAP.

internap is massive overkill for livejournal. there, all you pay for is a guarantee. their service isnt all that great.

what service are you paying for at speakeasy? perhaps if you would actually divulge some information sometime.. people could help out more.

speakeasy people rule.

a bunch of them use livejournal, so they want it to kick ass also.

internap is a bunch of suits... speakeasy people are incredibly friendly, approachable and helpful with anything.

Hm. 3000>400...

You've got a point there. I actually thought that we were going with a $3000 a month solution. I was a bit concerned that new memberships wouldn't pay all the bills, which is part of the reason I want to really grow the # of new users/potential members.

I know of a way to make DSL connectivity faster and more redundant. It would probably cost you a few hundred for a new CPE and a few hundred dollars a month for extra DSL lines, but there is a technology called IMUX that you may be interested in. It allows you to bond multiple DSL connections into a single pipe, essentially. Netopia is really the best manufacturer for routers that support this technology.

If you want a GOOD server-class DSL connection, you can get, say, one DSL connection from company A and one from company B (and even one from company C and D) then combine the bandwidth using IMUX. This can be a far cheaper solution than getting a bigger pipe. It can also be pretty reliable and redundant. If one company/line has a problem, you should still have connectivity unless some major sh*t occurs. Many Netopia routers also support redundant V.90 or ISDN dial backup access, if needed.

See their press release at http://www.netopia.com/corp/press/00_07_10.html for a bit of an overview to all of this.

damnit, would everybody stop talking about DSL? speakeasy is a DSL ISP --- that's why you're seeing DSL everywhere ......

i have to do homework.

(i'm being pissed at everybody tonight. don't take it personally, mark .... you still rule.)

No... completely understandable.

I mean, LJ is quick again, and it's only costing us $600 a month for it to be so, which is a figure we can afford. Personally, that makes me a lot happier than before.

We're golden... but it would be nice to be platinum, eh? ;)

$600? where'd you get the other $200 from? *scratches head*

Um... I think I pulled it outta my ass.

Sounds like a good time for sleep. Now all I need to do is get sleepy.

Feh.

And I *know* the connectivity problem isn't gone.

I never said it was.

I'd be the first to know, not Visions.

perhaps that is true. i am talking to some internap people at the moment... so perhaps not.

yeah, if it were a internap issue in the first place.

i swear I'm about to ban you.

stop bugging me.

i'm getting sick of people.

haha. it doesnt like packets very much.

--- www.livejournal.com ping statistics ---
1001 packets transmitted, 149 packets received, 85% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/std-dev = 195.201/340.527/475.710/81.024 ms

that was with a 125k preload. in other words, the network cant handle the load very well. and no, it wasnt a precidence drop.

wow *stands in awe*

you mean to tell me that my wittle itty bitty journal is stored somewhere on that big black thing? (forgive my lack of computer knowledge)

neet. super. wow. good job!

More specifically, a copy of your journal is stored in both the two black things on the top front of the left black box.... if one of them fails, the other takes over while we replace the one that went bad.

Ever had Tandoori Game Hens or Chicken Vindaloo? That stuff is to die for :) Yeah, Indian food really hits the mark :)

Congrats on getting the new servers on line also :)

Maybe the servers would run better if everyone would stop pinging the damn things. geezus.

Thanks again brad.

My real concern is:

Who the fuck has a Packard Bell (on the left) in a colocation facility.. :)

sean