Co-locations near Petaluma?

Eric Eisenhart eric at eisenhart.com
Wed Oct 31 10:15:31 PST 2001


On Wed, Oct 31, 2001 at 09:03:48AM -0800, linmail at itab.com wrote:
> Within an hour at least.

Well, Santa Rosa is within an hour from Petaluma.  ATG offers co-lo, though
from their page it sounds like they want to rent you an entire cabinet:
http://www2.callatg.com/index_sub2.html.  Their website leaves something to
be desired (frames mean the URL I just gave you isn't as useful as it could
be), but I understand their network is quite nice.  SVN (www.svn.net) is
actually in Petaluma, and I'll bet they just might be willing to take your
money in exchange for space and bandwidth; though I don't actually see
anything on their website indicating they sell co-lo.  Sonic does co-lo, as
well; heck, nblug.org is hosted at Sonic.net.

> My current co-location is throwing me out unless I replace my towers 
> with 1U rack mount boxes.

Many places will still end up charging you more for towers than 1U rack
mount boxes.  They'll be leasing you a certain amount of rack space; if you
want to use 12U for 2 servers they'll just charge you more than they charge
the guy using 2U or 4U for 2 servers.  (1U for 4 servers is possible, even)

Call the three I listed, call some other ISPs...  One of these networking
companies in Petaluma has got to have some kind of co-lo deal available, I
just don't know which one it would be...  Ask about pricing and all that,
but also ask about after-hours access.  Most of the ones that do a good
amount of co-lo will have some way you can get in after hours; probably a
card or a key fob that talks to the door, records that it's you (your card
or fob will be unique), lets you in and disarms the alarm until you leave. 
The customers that pay more will have locked cabinets or for the really
pricey ones, their own cage; you're still expected not to mess with the
servers of the low-paying customers, though.

And if you really want to go with one that doesn't have some kind of entry
system to use, look into some watchdog cards or if it's *2* servers and
usually only *1* crashes, you can construct a circuit with a relay on the
reset switch of one computer hooked up to the parallel port of the other
computer; then you can log in remotely to the machine that's up and reboot
the other.  (We did this once; the relay being hooked up to the reset switch
of an NT box that would crash 3 to 12 times a day, sometimes locking up and
the parallel port part being on a Linux box next to it.  Actually my
co-working did all the work on this one; I just sometimes woke up at 3am,
stumbled over to the computer and ran the right command to reboot the NT
box)

sonoma.general might be a better place to get some good answers to this
question...
-- 
    Eric Eisenhart   Freedom is slavery.      http://eric.eisenhart.com/
 ^  ICQ#: 48217244   Ignorance is strength.   eric-dot-sig at eisenhart.com
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