AltSci Cell

by Javantea
May 13, 2010

AltSci is back up, with SSL as it should be. All the links that were broken (except one or two) should be working and shouldn't give any SSL warnings. Before AltSci went down in February, it had a really good uptime. My analysis of the hard drive was that age and not anything fishy caused the crash. I added a stick of RAM and a new terabyte (a thousand gigabytes) hard drive and AltSci is back up for business. I am looking at offering a few new services beyond the websites and shell for hackers. But when a person thinks of services, they must also think about their customer. So I ask you dear reader, would you use additional services? What do you think about each and would you be willing to pay for the service if it was offered by an allied service (not AltSci itself, but rather someone fully endorsed by AltSci)? If you would like a service but not be willing to pay for it, why not?

• Forums
• IPSec VPN
• KVM Virtual Server
• Open Source Software
• BitTorrent Tracker
• Web Hosting
• GnuPG E-mail *

And now for the soapbox part of my message. Cheap server colo is difficult to find. Cheap shell accounts that are trustworthy and unhindered by firewalls or downtime are difficult to obtain. Why is this? Data centers are not cheap to run. Each time a server goes down someone needs to handle it. Each hour an admin is walking someone over to their server is billable time being wasted. Thus if your server has an uptime of less than 100 days and doesn't fix itself or you spend a lot of time mucking about causing downtime, your provider will hate you. Even if your provider has a full datacenter, your 1U pizzabox costs them serious cash each time it goes down and needs a little love. The reason they charge $100 per month is because that gives them a razor thin margin to pay for the time your server goes down. Friends that give you a $50 per month rate for colo at a good datacenter will ask favors of you and will expect your box to stay up 99.99% of the time. That's right, you get 8.76 hours of tech support per year. At a reasonable hourly rate of $50 per hour, those precious 8.76 hours of tech support eats $438 out of the $600 per year you pay. Electricity probably costs around $88 per year, which leaves just $74 per year for bandwidth. See what I mean?

It certainly reminds me that automation and reliability are important for business models these days. Imagine a VPN service that costs $3 per month but requires 2 hours of tech support per customer to setup ($100 setup). It would take 3 years to pay off the initial investment. A VPN has to be almost completely automated and definitely scalable in order to succeed as a business model. I certainly think it can be done but it takes effort to make it happen. Have you ever tried setting up IPsec and L2TP? I finished the IPsec part and for some reason I am stuck on the L2TP part.

DATA

Yes, it's that time of the essay :D to break out the diagrams, or in this case the data from the server.

jvoss@dmitry ~ $ df -h
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1              60G  2.5G   55G   5% /
udev                   10M  168K  9.9M   2% /dev
/dev/sda6             847G   90G  714G  12% /home
shm                   941M     0  941M   0% /dev/shm

jvoss@dmitry ~ $ ifconfig eth0
eth0      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:1a:92:75:25:13
          inet addr:216.127.61.180  Bcast:216.127.61.191  Mask:255.255.255.192
          inet6 addr: fe80::21a:92ff:fe75:2513/64 Scope:Link
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:4475866 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:4280918 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
          RX bytes:2689083180 (2.5 GiB)  TX bytes:3710420399 (3.4 GiB)
          Interrupt:25 Base address:0x6000

jvoss@dmitry ~ $ free
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:       1925852    1729268     196584          0     109804    1298008
-/+ buffers/cache:     321456    1604396
Swap:      3903752      21592    3882160

jvoss@dmitry ~ $ uname -a
Linux dmitry 2.6.33 #1 SMP Fri Apr 30 02:03:12 PDT 2010 x86_64 AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 3800+ AuthenticAMD GNU/Linux

jvoss@dmitry ~ $ uptime
 15:16:14 up 6 days, 23:00,  4 users,  load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00

jvoss@dmitry ~ $ cat /proc/cpuinfo
processor       : 0
vendor_id       : AuthenticAMD
cpu family      : 15
model           : 75
model name      : AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 3800+
stepping        : 2
cpu MHz         : 2000.000
cache size      : 512 KB
physical id     : 0
siblings        : 2
core id         : 0
cpu cores       : 2
apicid          : 0
initial apicid  : 0
fpu             : yes
fpu_exception   : yes
cpuid level     : 1
wp              : yes
flags           : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush mmx fxsr sse sse2 ht syscall nx mmxext fxsr_opt rdtscp lm 3dnowext 3dnow rep_good pni cx16 lahf_lm cmp_legacy svm extapic cr8_legacy
bogomips        : 3999.62
TLB size        : 1024 4K pages
clflush size    : 64
cache_alignment : 64
address sizes   : 40 bits physical, 48 bits virtual
power management: ts fid vid ttp tm stc

processor       : 1
vendor_id       : AuthenticAMD
cpu family      : 15
model           : 75
model name      : AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 3800+
stepping        : 2
cpu MHz         : 2000.000
cache size      : 512 KB
physical id     : 0
siblings        : 2
core id         : 1
cpu cores       : 2
apicid          : 1
initial apicid  : 1
fpu             : yes
fpu_exception   : yes
cpuid level     : 1
wp              : yes
flags           : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush mmx fxsr sse sse2 ht syscall nx mmxext fxsr_opt rdtscp lm 3dnowext 3dnow rep_good pni cx16 lahf_lm cmp_legacy svm extapic cr8_legacy
bogomips        : 4000.07
TLB size        : 1024 4K pages
clflush size    : 64
cache_alignment : 64
address sizes   : 40 bits physical, 48 bits virtual
power management: ts fid vid ttp tm stc

And so now I feel like I should give a summary that brings the rest of the message around. AltSci has been a really fun project and I expect that it will continue to be. The last 2 months of downtime has showed me that I rely heavily on this service and that my peers may benefit from some services that I can provide using this host. And then I think about stability and time investment. AltSci is back up, for how long I don't know, but forever I hope.

Javantea out.