When I graduated high school, I decided that I'd do my best to make sure that the people in my grad class that meant anything to me would keep in touch. Namely, these would be the grads of my school's music program. I made a low-grade server out of old parts, set up Linux with PHP, MySQL and sendmail - added forums, and things were good. I'd hooked the computer up to my parent's DSL line. I'd always wanted to turn the site into more of a 'service' page than just simply forums, but to make anything like that happen, I knew that I wasn't going to be able get people's loyalty to the site with it hosted on DSL and not co-located somewhere.
Lo and behold, I found someone in Vancouver who was willing to colocate my server on his OC3 backbone for $5/gig and no other monthly fees. I knew it had to be too good to be true, but I figured I'd give it a shot anyway.
So after a week of my server not being connected to the internet, I finally find out that the 'techs' didn't approve my server for being hooked up to my network, as apparently it was too easy to hack. Being a reasonable person, I asked to find out what the security loopholes they'd found in my server were - and never got a straight answer other than "They're paranoid!", and complaints of heavy workloads and other customer's gear lining benches as far as the eye could see.
I live in Victoria, and there's no way I'd be able to pick the server up anytime soon, so I got my friend to do it today. He took it home, and hooked it up to his cable 'net connection. I ssh'd in and got everything running from his house, and decided to check my logs. Since I had shut the computer down origonally (to take it to be co-located), it had not even been turned on till now.
There were security holes in my computer, eh? How the hell did you know that without turning it on? And why (if you weren't going to hook my computer up in the first place) did you waste MY time bringing it down to you, my friend's time picking it up, YOUR time in both of these transactions, and the visitor's of the site's time for the online time lost? All that had to be done was tell me "No, I'm an idiot - I just want to waste your time. Don't give me your server, I'll just throw it under my desk for a week and forget about it."
Humbug.
Lo and behold, I found someone in Vancouver who was willing to colocate my server on his OC3 backbone for $5/gig and no other monthly fees. I knew it had to be too good to be true, but I figured I'd give it a shot anyway.
So after a week of my server not being connected to the internet, I finally find out that the 'techs' didn't approve my server for being hooked up to my network, as apparently it was too easy to hack. Being a reasonable person, I asked to find out what the security loopholes they'd found in my server were - and never got a straight answer other than "They're paranoid!", and complaints of heavy workloads and other customer's gear lining benches as far as the eye could see.
I live in Victoria, and there's no way I'd be able to pick the server up anytime soon, so I got my friend to do it today. He took it home, and hooked it up to his cable 'net connection. I ssh'd in and got everything running from his house, and decided to check my logs. Since I had shut the computer down origonally (to take it to be co-located), it had not even been turned on till now.
There were security holes in my computer, eh? How the hell did you know that without turning it on? And why (if you weren't going to hook my computer up in the first place) did you waste MY time bringing it down to you, my friend's time picking it up, YOUR time in both of these transactions, and the visitor's of the site's time for the online time lost? All that had to be done was tell me "No, I'm an idiot - I just want to waste your time. Don't give me your server, I'll just throw it under my desk for a week and forget about it."
Humbug.
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