Thursday, July 24, 2008

local hosting?

Is anyone interested in local hosting? That is you would have a server in-state within a 90 minute drive that would have dedicated 10/10 bandwidth and burst rate to 100 meg (bi-directional)? My company uses what are called Carrier Hotels. These are comm rooms located very close to the bandwidth provider. In these comm rooms (sometimes entire buildings) you have access into the building and access to your locked rack, closet, room or cabinet. You can go in, do what you need to your equipment and leave. It's more complicated than that, of course, but you get the picture.

The thought dawned on me why not set up something like this locally? I was looking at Mac Mini Colo (and, of course, the big daddy, Rackspace - and I don't intend of implying that I would be directly competing with either, in fact I'd prefer to say quite a bit smaller) and I thought "why not just host the device where the bandwidth is?"

There would be a major "got-cha" and that is all devices would have, and only have, a routable IPv6 address. It would be conceivable to set up a hosting enviornment where you could port-forwared from a single routeable to X number devices but having worked with IPv6 I would say it might be cleaner just to dive in and swim with the big numbers. Plus you could still map to hostnames. Granted, some applications would have issues I'm sure, but that is where port mapping and private addressing could come in. Private addressing would also work for someone who wanted to set up a VPN enviorment for remote workers where the VPN concentrator would have the public address and all protected hosts behind that concentrator would have private addresses defined by client.

Anyway, what say you, crowd? If nobody is inerested in this I'll just get a fat pipe of my own at my brother-in-law's house down in Wilson and forget about the rest. If anyone else is interested I'll start to put together a real plan and see where it goes.

7 comments:

Mark Turner said...

Are you asking if I'm interested in local hosting? Or am I interested in local hosting with an IPV6 address?

Local hosting might appeal to me, but I'm not sure why I would want or need an IPV6 address.

So, where does the IPV6 part come from? Is this a requirement of the hosting provider you are investigating?

Mark

Unknown said...

local hosting? absolutely.

not sure on the whole IPv6 thing, though, myself

what would be the benefit of v6 addresses over standard v4's? I know the technical reasons behind v6, but since not everything supports v6 yet, I'm curious as to why you're looking at those exclusively.

Parlez à la Main said...

Yes, the IPv6 thing is a requirement of the provider, sadly. I can get tons of bandwidth, but few IPv4 addresses. IPv6 addresses, even entire networks that can be sub netted, are not a problem to obtain. Ergo all locally hosted servers would have an IPv6 address rather than a IPv4 (unless they are behind a NAT device, which itself would have IPv6 on the "outside" and IPv4 on the "inside", or however you configure it)

Unknown said...

since I'm ignorant, I'll ask: what would it take to "redirect" a v4 address to a range of v6 ones?

Parlez à la Main said...

Warren:

That depends on how the network is set up and what kind of gear you're using and how you network is designed. With Cisco devices it's just a matters of mapping the addresses together either in a VLAN for an address range or there are some other ways to do things. IPv6 is weird on the surface (and remains so.. I'll always think of a host in xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx/x|xx terms) but with a little bit of mind-bending v6 can configured and deployed in the vast majority of cases.

Parlez à la Main said...

and you're not ignorant, Warren! IPv6 is very strange. I've only been using it for the past 18 months and it's still odd. But remember it's just the same as an IPv4 address. Sort of. In a way. :) If all goes well it's just as easy to route and map to host names as a bloc of IPv4 addresses.

Unknown said...

excellent! now I'm not ignorant... just horribly confused!! ;)

/me shall have to spend some time on wikipedia etc for more info :)