🚀 go-pugleaf

Jim Schlemmer (jim@hog.asrc.albany.edu) wrote:

: 	- very slow link over the net from my internet site (below).

We've seen *so* many complaints from NYSERNet sites.  Because we use MCI
as our provider, we only see NYSERNet through the overcrowded MAE-EAST
site.  This is a limitation of NYSERNet, since they're only given transit
through Sprint routers at this location.

MCI is the only backbone provider with OC3 (155Mbps) links rather than the
common T3 (45Mbps) backbones.  We're quite fast to everywhere.  NYSERNet,
during the day, is a problem though.

With all other sites we have excellent times.  We watch the traffic on our
T1 very carefully, and we have not peaked higher than 75% of it at this
time.

Irrespective of that, we do plan on adding more T1 lines to other
providers, possibly Sprint.  While improving capacity, this will have the
side benefit of improving connectivity to NYSERNet.

: 	  When I asked an albany.net techie what their take on this was,
: 	  I was a bit taken aback by the "it can't be us" response.  They 

I believe a misunderstanding occured here.  Are techs are pretty well
informed, and know that we haven't once in our history peaked the load on
the primary T1.  I think that was the idea he was trying to communicate.

: 	  indicated that the whole SUNY/nysernet networkwas slow and was
: 	  no doubt the source of the bottleneck.   

This is not quite the problem, but the MCI->NYSERNet connection through
the overcrowded Washington, DC peering point.

From the UNIX shell prompt type:

"traceroute <NYSERNet site>"

And watch the results.  There will be smooth sailing until MCI's
washington routers are reached.  Then, at the point the packets are handed
off to Sprint to be passed to NYSERNet, they fail.

Quite irritating at times.  As stated above, rather than trying to get
NYSERNet to change, we plan to move additional capacity that will bring us
closer to NYSERNet, among others.

: 		- crontab is disabled

Security.  Some users have a unnerving habit of running crontabs that
restart bots, among other things.

: 		- web server is configured so that IP names
: 	 	  aren't available to cgi scripts (I have to resolve
: 		  them myself)

This is a performance problem.  We get over 7million hits per month in web
services.  (close to 4 hits per second peak)

Resolving *each* hit would make web services amazingly sluggish.  We have
no good solution to this except turning off DNS and letting users resolve
them.

When we run the logs at night, the statistics generating program runs the
reverse DNS lookups, so people get them in their mailings.

: 		- web server stats files don't seem to be accessible. they
: 		  do send you daily mail with a nice, formatted

You're going to be the first group to know that we're starting a form
interface to statistics soon. (watch your e-mail)  You'll be able to
generate any combination of stats.

Making logs publically available is not currently possible.  Our
architecture is highly distributed, so I'd have to move logs from the web
servers (no user access) to a machine where you could access them..  all
1G of them per month. :/

Plus there's a privacy issue.  A lot of people prefer to have the record
of their sites kept private.  We have to balance a lot of issues before
releasing them like that.

: boundries.  I also have no experience as an internet service
: provider person and so am probably missing some of the 
: efficiency/convenience tradeoffs and some of the necessary safegaurds
: against user abuse.

Yes.  I'm way more restrictive than I'd like to be.  There are a number of
security enhancements (like chroot()'d filesystems) that are transparent
to you.  There are a number that are visible.

These are machines directly on the Internet and quite visible.  We *have*
to be very concerned about security.  Even with our firewalls and other
precautions, we have to be dilligent.

If you have something you'd like changed, please, e-mail support or me
with suggestions.  We always listen :-)

- Matt

-----------------*-----------------------------------------------------------
Matthew Zahorik /|\ Offering the finest connectivity in Albany.  Shell, SLIP, 
AlbanyNet      //|\\ and PPP. Speeds from 1200bps to 45MBps.
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