Lots of pimpin!

Ahoy pals! It's hard to believe it's been almost 3 years since I've posted anything. I've been hard at work, pimpin hard and pimpin harder. In that time period, a lot of things have happened. I scaled up from having equipment in one local facility, to having equipment in two local facilities, 5 more domestic facilities in other markets, and one other in the UK. I acquired an ASN which now announces nearly 20,000 IPs, carries multiple downstream BGP customers, and speaks BGP with three upstreams. I started a VPS business based on the Xen platform, supporting some 200 customers. And in my in-between time, I've been developing software that I collectively refer to as the CRM, which is a datacenter automation package that is more complete and supports better end-to-end management than anything on the market today - notably Ubersmith Datacenter Edition.

I'm also guilty of a few mistakes along the way. Part of pimpin harder is learning from them. The bible says "confess your sins, one to another," so here goes. I bought too much networking equipment early on, which mostly collected dust and is now worth a fraction of what I paid for it. If I had saved that money, I'd be in a better position for growth now. I also lacked perspective on what I was doing at the time, so whereas a Juniper M40 with a couple of GigE interfaces might have seemed like a good idea in 2006, it's not quite as viable in 2009. GigE is no longer the currency - 10GE is. If you express interest in buying a 10GE circuit, carriers will shut up and take notes. To date I've never dealt with any 10GE. Once I discovered that there were certain Riverstone configurations that would route and run ACLs at line-rate GigE, I should have completely abandoned the Juniper notion until I had a reason to question the viability of Riverstone (thus far they've been fine). So they money I would have saved by abstaining from buying gear would have put me in a position to buy with the currency of the day, 10GE. I also neglected to use more common sense when negotiating for space in Jacksonville. I entered into an agreement for much more space and much more money than I could comfortably sustain. At the time I didn't know it was unsustainable, as my growth projections looked just fine and I couldn't think of any reason not to do it. But the deal was predicated on the fact that I had no assurance from my landlord that I could continue growing in a shared colo space, like I was prior to 2008. Finally, I failed to capitalize on the market correctly by continuing to advertise regularly, even despite indicators that its effectiveness was futile. I did not realize at the time that all it took was one or two powerful clients to materialize from those efforts, with a significant amount of revenue, to kick my business up to the next level.

Right now I'm continuing to do the day-to-day activities as best I can, while I plot a course for the next phase of my business and my life. I once said during a Shoutcast mixshow to some of my friends, that "a birthday is a good milestone of your pimping". You get to look back and say.. man I did this when I was 23, and man I did this when I was 24 or 25.. it's a good indication of how you can step up your game, and how your game has been stepped up over the years. I can look back and determine how my game has been stepped up every couple of years. When I was a little kid, I purportedly liked to take the hinges off of all the doors in the house using a screwdriver. When I was 8 I became fluent in Tandy's flavor of BASIC, when I was 10 I learned how to use a PC and DOS 3.3 - I was also one of only three kids in the country to have an Extra Class ham license. When I was 12 I did a science project on Ionospheric Radio Wave Propagation which took me to the state science fair, competing against kids who were much older than I was. When I was 13 I learned about Arcnet, Ethernet and TCP/IP communication using KA9Q NOS. By the time I was 16 I was knowledgeable about Novell Netware and worked at an ISP where I coded HTML, Java and PERL. I was exposed to NT 4.0 (at the time - 1996 - it was still in beta), as well as BSDi and Linux in its infancy. The following year I went to work for a local company doing database development and general IT stuff. When my boss left and I finished highschool, I became Director of IT and made more money than both of my parents at the time. I went on to start a consulting company, making no money but learning a ton. After some 5 years of that monotony, I decided it was time to break into IP services. When I was 25 I had a big IP circuit, plenty of IPs, and the opportunity to get into a new kind of pimping. And I'm so glad that I did.

So now is one of those pivotal moments, like when I quit my job to do independent consulting, or when I decided I wanted to sell IP services. The decisions I make now, and the way I make them, will no doubt comprise a major milestone in my life's timeline. I liken it to laying "a cornerstone in Zion" - it will be a good thing to me and anyone else who has the right perspective, but a "stumbling block" and a "rock of offense" to anyone who doesn't. I'm very much looking forward to turning the page. Let's get it!

free web hosting

I received a spam complaint from my upstream provider, citing the IP of the same customer machine which was already rooted twice. Needless to say, this didn't make me very happy. Upon further examination, the mail header revealed the domain used to propagate the spam. Exim will tell you in the header, which domain invoked apache (presumably through CGI or PHP) to send the email, which is revealed in the "envelope-from" field. Thank goodness!

The domain turned out to be one used for free web hosting. I immediately changed our customer agreement to disallow free hosting on our network. Despite foolishness from my client, citing that the signup script for free hosting was "broken," there were still several websites behind the same domain which appeared to be freely hosted (they had ads at the bottom of the sites, etc.). For all I know, my client could have been the one who broke the signup script, who knows.

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.