administrivia: more on the situation with krusty/digest.net

[Richard Welty <rwelty@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

many of the replies (thanks for all the support) have suggested that i need 
to explain how krusty is set up a little better. the offers of help (and 
alternate hosting) are greatly appreciated, but some are not on target 
simply because not everyone understands (or even needs to understand) how 
things are setup.

this posting is guaranteed to make many of your eyes glaze over; if you are 
one of these people, feel free to skip over all the subsequent detail.

historical:

for many years, i ran the early lists (bmw, alfa, italian-cars) at 
crd.ge.com (also known as ge-crd.arpa in the old old days), while i was a 
contractor there.  the group of contractors i worked in was moved off site, 
but the lists remained at ge for quite a while because i had good relations 
with the sysadmin of the hosting unix box. eventually, ge figured it out 
and changed corporate policy, forcing me to move the lists to the off site 
location, the legendary balltown.cma.com. the lists sat there for a long 
time, and then events caused me to relocate to wizvax.net (an ISP run by an 
old friend from my RPI days in the late 70s/early 80s). this was an 
expensive solution, and i seriously considered building my own server to 
cut costs. about 5 years ago, i got the opportunity to try and spin the 
lists off into a separate entity, and built krusty-motorsports.com, the AMD 
K6-166 based server that is still running today. digest.net is a virtual 
domain on krusty. krusty lived under my desk at a brief, ill-fated startup 
named inet-solutions.net (i was chief internet engineert there), and then 
when i bailed out of inet solutions, krusty went to a colo shelf at wizvax, 
where it sat until last week.

krusty today is an AMD K6-166 running a somewhat hashed up version of 
linux. it is old but solid technology, with an ASUS P55P2T4 motherboard, 
256M of SIMMS (but for some reason, the linux system only recognizes 128M), 
and two aging western digital disk drives (i know that some people have 
problems with WD drives, but every one i've ever bought is still soldiering 
on without a lick of trouble.)

a new krusty is being built in my home office. it has a more modern ASUS 
motherboard (but not all that radical), and some parts of the upgrade are 
decidedly conservative, for example, the overlocked Pentium 166MMX which 
will be the cpu (the existing krusty typically runs at only 2-5% 
utilization, so processor speed doesn't seem like a very important issue.) 
it will switch to 256M of PC100 SDRAM, and will suport Ultra 66 disk 
drives, both major moves from the much older motherboard in the current 
krusty.)

the software is the more important issue. the original krusty was built on 
a 1996 release of Slackware linux, with the 2.0.0 kernel, and has gone 
through a twisted and not 100% successful series of upgrades, sideways to 
redhat 5.2 and then upwards since. switching linux distributions is very 
difficult, and krusty has not been a 100% happy camper for some time now 
(but on the other hand, even though the software isn't quite all there, the 
fact is that the existing krusty normally stays up for 100-150 days at a 
stretch w/o major problems or reboots.)

the new krusty will be based on red hat 7.0, with a bit of customization to 
meet my own requirements (i've spent years doing this email list thing, and 
krusty is as a result a much more effective email delivery platform than a 
typical out-of-box Linux server (with the possible exception of Debian 
GNU/Linux, which provides the same exim mail transport that i prefer.)

now, about network access:

i reviewed a couple of options, the first one being business road runner 
service. after some discussion with my sales rep, i concluded that the 
business flavors of road runner are spun towards a different customer 
profile, and that they had no cost-effective solution for krusty.

the current location of krusty at acmenet.net doesn't meet all my 
requirements, but i probably can't afford colo that meets my requirements 
(i've done a bunch of network engineering, and as a result am very picky 
about things like diversity of routing, redundant power supplies, UPSs, and 
generators, and that sort of thing.) i will continue to look at other colo 
options, and as i think the guys at acmenet are likeable and reasonably 
intelligent, at least at first glance, i may attempt to help influence 
their decision  making as they are a growing firm, and and will need to 
address the things that are important to me in the next several years anyway.

as for the issue of roadrunner vs acmenet, there's probably some deeper 
meaning here, but i haven't quite zeroed in on it yet.

as for why wizvax went splat, i have very little information. after the 
failure last week, they became very uncommunicative, and i literally didn't 
know that they'd moved krusty to acmenet for a while after they did it.

richard

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End of bmw-digest V9 #1694
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