Cheap IP transit

It seems that some of the big name Tier1s have come down a bit more in price lately. On commits of 200-500 megabits, GBLX can be bought for $20/mbit or less through a reseller, same with Qwest. Level 3 isn't much more expensive at $22-$25/mbit. Meanwhile, Cogent continues to prove that opex on their backbone is close to $6/mbit. If that holds true for those other Tier1s, pricing could continue to fall all the way across the board.

I absolutely love it. IP services are awesome because of their aggregation potential. Everything that once was, from telephone to television, can be reduced down to frames of IP and routed down a backbone. iSCSI and other types of distributed storage area networks call for big pipes, relying on IP as the transport medium. It's almost as cheap to pick up some inexpensive IP from a company like Cogent to offsite your SAN, as it is to buy an optical wave or SONET transport. These are definitely interesting times!

I have a client who has now been hacked twice. The machine is CentOS 4.3 with the latest version of DirectAdmin, a popular control panel for shared web hosting. The first time, he simply had high load averages on his box with very little CPU utilization; not much else that would lead you to believe it was hacked.

We reloaded his OS and everything was fine for a week or two. Now, twice in the past 48 hours, i've received abuse complaints, stating that one of his clients was serving up a phishing site. The site is obviously being spammed via email or similar. It is obvious that the owner of the website is not responsible, as the files are in the directory owner's name, which automatically excludes things like apache or php from being the culprit (they run as 'apache' or as 'nobody', not as the webhosting user). The owner of the site is presumed innocent because I can't find any record of him ever uploading the phishing files via ftp, etc.

I do feel bad for my client who owns the server. It's obvious that some program in DirectAdmin has a major vulnerability which is causing his box to get rooted. I'll bet that the developers of the software (exim, php, etc.) probably don't even know something is vulnerable. What a shame.

It's all about the metro

Lately, the focus of IP networks has shifted from long-haul stuff to metro fiber transport. Carriers like Level 3 and Cogent are continuing to expand their metro presence constantly. I recall reading in Cogent's latest SEC filing that they will expand by 50 something buildings in the second half of 2006 - one of those will be right here in Jacksonville. As for Level 3, they've been on an acquisition spree, buying up Wiltel, Progress Telecom, and (soon) Telcove. All three of these companies, particularly Progress and Telcove, have a vast metro presence which will be good for Level 3.

Why is metro so important? Customers, customers, and customers. More and more customers are starting to deploy services like Metro Ethernet instead of private lines for intra-office connectivity. More datacenters are springing up to accommodate new demand for infrastructure, particularly in lower tier markets. Companies like colo4jax need connectivity between POPs. All of these customers have transport in common, which relies on metro fiber.

More metro assets translates into better customer reach, which translates into more revenue. In reality, Level 3 is simply using their favorable financial position to outflank all the other carriers who don't have a favorable financial position (like Cogent). They're really just duplicating Cogent's strategy of appearing where people need them. The unfortunate downside is that companies who want dark fiber have fewer options with Wiltel, Progress and Telcove now folded into L3.

Hi budz. I just completed the new redesign for my Jacksonville Colocation company's website. Feel free to peep it out and give me feedback. colo4jax has been growing like crazy - to the tune of over 800% since November 05. I anticipate several hundred percent more by the end of 2006. We sell dedicated servers, colocation, and IP transit in the Jacksonville Florida market.

In other news, we just built the first machine i've ever seen with 8 logical processors. It's based on the new Intel Xeon Dempsey chips, which are dual-core with hyperthreading. 2*2*2=8. Although the cheapest motherboard you can get for these things is around $340, I anticipate they'll come down about $100 within the next 90 days or so. This puts colo4jax in a great position to offer high-powered machines at a low price.

checking in

Hi palz. It's been a while; we've been getting on with our lives and pimping harder. But the good news is that we now have a new found love for sipping latte'z and updating our blogz @ starbuckz kekekekeke. So expect more pwnage comin through your web browser very shortly.

kthx.