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Category: nuxx.net

Time to Move Colocation Providers?

Published April 11, 2008

For a few months now I’ve been considering replacing the mid tower server currently hosting nuxx.net, rowla.nuxx.net, with a new 1U box. After Waveform moved my server between facilities, powering it off hard without warning, I’ve been thinking that I should really look for other colocation facilities in Southeast Michigan.

Thanks to some folks introduced me to via IRC, I seem to have two options, both in Southfield. One of the facilities I’m looking at is a privately leased rack in 123.net‘s facility and would cost around US$80/mo for 1Mb, billed to 95th percentile. The other option is Clear Rate Communications colocation facility, and that would run $99/mo for the same amount of bandwidth and no-charge access during business hours.

While Waveform has generally been good to me, I have noticed some issues with customer service since I moved in there a few years ago. Response to support tickets is very slow, and it’s almost impossible to actually get someone on the phone. I’ve also received a handful (two or three, I believe) of unsolicited pieces of email from individuals who are looking for some way to contact anyone at Waveform. It seems that their boxes had gone down for whatever reason and they were unable to get a hold of anyone to reset them, ship them back, or even tell them what was wrong for multiple days.

This all brings me to my thoughts about a possible replacement server. Ideally I would buy a new 1U server, put that in the new facility, move the data away from Waveform, transfer all services, then shut down the box at Waveform. I’m fairly sure I know what I want server-wise, but I don’t know if I can (should) afford it. Ideally I’d get something like the following:

· Supermicro SuperServer 5015M-MT+ / 5015M-MT+B ($629.99 at Newegg)
· 2x Seagate Barracuda ES.2 SATA 3.0-Gb/s 500-GB Hard Drive ($131.99/ea at Newegg)
· Intel Core 2 Duo E6750 ($188.99 at Newegg)
· Supermicro AOC-IPMI20-E IPMI Card/BMC ($55.95 at Amazon)
· Crucial 2GB kit (1GBx2), 240-pin DIMM, DDR2 PC2-5300 memory module ($63.99)

This is $1070.91, plus around $35 in shipping and taxes. Of course, I could just move the box from Waveform to Clear Rate (or wherever). That would cause a few days of weirdness, but it’d be a lot cheaper. I could then wait until the current box becomes a bit more questionable and get a new machine at that time.

I’m just not really sure what to do for now, so I think I’ll just wait a bit. Hopefully Waveform (and my box) will at least remain stable.

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Good Customer Service

Published April 9, 2008

Those of you who know me know that I’m not particularly shy about complaining about poor products, poor customer service, or other things which I’m not too happy about. While I also will mention products and companies I’m happy with, I don’t make particularly permanent record of it.

Recently I’ve had a couple good customer experiences and I wanted to make note of them, so I started a page on nuxx.net called Good Customer Service. The three which I currently have listed are Cateye (replaced a broken part, although it’s arguable if this is good or just acceptable), VG’s (who put in a bike rack on request), and Cequent (who sent me a new bolt after I stupidly broke the last one).

On a slightly related note, I received a fastener kit from Cequent today which included the U bolt I broke, and I had no problems fitting it on to the car. I even torqued it down with the questionable wrench, but only after first exercising the wrench to be certain that it’s appropriately clicking when reaching the desired torque. Now that I understand it and it’s shortcomings, it’s a reasonable, but cheap torque wrench. I don’t think I’ll be returning it.

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First Multi-Blog Post

Published March 31, 2008

Well, here’s my first multi-blog post. I’ve been wanting to move more content over to nuxx.net, so I set up a blog here to do so. However, as discussed here I didn’t really want to move away from the social network aspects of LiveJournal, where I’ve been posting things for six or seven years.

So, what did I do? I set up a copy of WordPress at https://nuxx.net/blog and took the Fluid Blue 1.0.1 theme and changed it to better match the rest of the site. I used this AdSense widget for the side bar. To tie it all in nicely with LJ I first took ljxp, the LiveJournal Crossposter, got it working with WordPress 2.5, then stripped off the crappy (ala ) automatically inserted header.

As part of using the crossposter, and this is the biggest part of continuing to use LJ, I’ve left comments enabled at both locations. This means that the social network is still wholly in place at LJ, but the blog posts will also exist for more… general consumption.

I’ve also implemented LJ user ex so that I can still use <lj user=foo> tags in both places. (This plugin is going to require a bit of tweaking, but it shouldn’t be too difficult to do. I don’t like how particular it is for the tags…)

I’ve also put WP-Cache in place, just in case of a Slashdotting or Digging or something like that, and Google XML Sitemaps is running because… Well… Sitemaps are a good thing.

Currently I’m thinking that I’ll only use this dual-posting system for the more technical / photo oriented / non-personal content, while posts which talk about what I’m thinking, politics, memes, and other crap like that will remain solely at LJ.

Well, here goes… Time to hit publish and see it all in action for once.

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