Rage Returns

Date: 2002-05-01 14:32:06

Welcome back. It's been a while.

There are probably plenty of gory details here that I don't even know about yet, but the short answer is that Rage is now on Peter's cable modem, conveniently located half a kilometer from the Boulder Compound. Rage has been transfered from its 4U case to a mini-tower, which was responsible for the delay in bringing Rage back to us. Apparently Peter's cable modem setup provides only dynamic IPs, while Scott's provides static IPs, so Scott will move Rage to his location in the near future, probably Saturday morning. At that point, Rage's IP will most likely be 12.252.56.250.

During this recent Rage outage, I considered my options for living in a post-Rage world. I was not able to implement any of my schemes because some critical content existed, without backup, on Rage. (I think I'll have to back it up.) At first -- starting my freshman year of college -- Rage was in a significantly better place than any of my computers could hope to be. At that time, Defiant had a static IP but sat behind Union College's nasty firewall, which most of us who frequent Content Solutions have grown to know and hate. Everyone else I knew existed under either those conditions or with dialup. Therefore, it made sense to ally myself with someone who could give me root on a server with a fat pipe.

The world has changed a lot in the past three years, even ignoring the dot-com bubble. In 2002, it's a whole lot easier to get a fat pipe in one's home than it was in 1999. Serving stuff in real datacenters is still the way to go, but it hasn't gotten any cheaper. So since Buildmeasite isn't exactly dripping in money, Rage is living at Scott's while the Cobalt stays at Inflow.

Conclusion? For the short term, I'm still going to ride with Buildmeasite. But I'm not nearly as dependent on Scott to provide my co-location -- especially when the best he can give me is equal to that which I can -- and probably will, in the near future -- get myself.

(It probably wouldn't hurt, either, to come up with some sort of brilliant system to exchange Content Solutions headlines and chatter without a centralized server on which all of our webpages live.)