(no subject)

[theducks]

Been a bit of a hectic week.. had tuesday and wednesday off work with some form of plauge. Most annoying. Got offered a medicial cert for thursday as well, but wanted to get some stuff sorted out.

Thursday I didn't feel that great all day, but was good enough to be at work. The orders have been placed for the evil plan I've mentioned a few times. So I may as well say here..

We get a lot of complaints about the cost of Internet access (mm $40/gb) from students living on campus. And we agree, it sucks. We're not profiteering however, it really does cost us about $38/gb to provide that service through the University's AARNet connection. But y'know, it doesn't have to, and in some cases, it really shouldn't. Last October, I started looking into how much it would cost to actually provide a service that didn't go through AARNet.

We talked to Legal, we talked to AARNet, we talked to our prospective clients, got all sorts of approvals, quotes and inputs. We've put in an order for a 10M/10M connection to a commercial ISP, and providing access to that connection for students living in UWA colleges, wireless users at The University Club, and intend to offer it to Venues Management for events on campus, commercial affiliates on UWA property like Winthrop, Philips Farmer Photography, and probably to other affiliated non-academic organisations such as UCC.

10M/10M isn't that great, but once we get some more users, we'll upgrade it to 20M/20M and probably 30M/30M within 2 years. Mmm bandwidth.

Also on Thursday, found a Orinoco 802.11b Gold PCMCIA card (not cardbus!) and after a bit of work, I now have a wifi capable Powerbook 1400. Of course, the battery is shot, so it won't actually be that portable.

It also seems that sadly lizbyrd seems to have got whatever I did. wups. She left work early today (before lunch). Poor thing.

Work this afternoon and today was basically packing up most of the office. Hopefully all my stuff will be in our new offices on monday morning. Mmm new offices. We also had a bit of a wake for the contents of the fridge. So consequently, no need for dinner for me.

Went to see X Men 3 tonight. It was a fundraiser for Swancon. As lizbyrd was sick, I went with susie. Movie was good, was fun seeing all the people who came too.

Tomorrow I'm going to see my mum. She's off to do the trans-siberian railway from Beijing to Moscow on Sunday, and doesn't get back until after we leave.. so I won't see her till August. That seems a loong time away.

Enough random ranting for now.

Comments

[dannipenguin.livejournal.com]

The important question will be if it is possible to still route things like say, the free networks via Aarnet. I quite like my Grangenet speeds to Berkley, they also don't saturate as easily.

[trs80.ucc.asn.au (from livejournal.com)]

UCC will be getting something like 8 IPs, on which we'll put web, mail and ssh. All machines will still have 130.95.13 IPs, and hydra can do some magic routing. Probably stick a web proxy in there too.

[theducks.livejournal.com]

Dunno about 8 IPs... In any case, I suspect it won't be ready for the colleges by the time I leave, and secondary groups like UCC and Winthrop will probably not come on until I get back and come up with guidelines, costs, etc.

Budget for about 2 IPs to begin with. In terms of how it's delivered, the standard we'll be doing for colleges is to PAT on the external gateway to internal IPs, but we may be able to do a VLAN, but that means getting the Guild involved..

But yes, much much hydra crack :)

[mkj.livejournal.com]

Yeah, well we've already got the SNAP vlan coming our way, assume it shouldn't be too hard to do that for other stuff too.

Now to figure a way for incoming internet2 traffic to hit the 130.95 IPs. DIY akamai-esque DNS anyone?

[erikarn.livejournal.com]

Heh; Akamai's bag of tricks is patented. Whee.

I'd suggest a magic proxy with the magic forwarding crack; but remember to keep good logs in case the AARNet Mis-Billing monster comes your way..

[dannipenguin.livejournal.com]

s/hydra/madako/

I don't think we're going to get 8 IPs, nor do I think we need them. I think the most sensible thing to do would be to have one IP address, on the router we route everything outbound that isn't a Freenet SNATted through that IP. We also make that IP available for free inbound ssh using a DNAT to something.

Everything else should stay on existing, reliable, fast 130.95.13/24 IPs. Mail really should continue to go through asclepius (even if we ever get that machine to Sydney we should still put our mail through asclepius for filtering).

[ducts.livejournal.com]

NAT and transparent proxying like asclepius really does suck. It's handy tool for an end user, not an infrastructure provider - we really do have services we want to expose to the world.

A /29 would be nice, but if we can't, we can't.

[dannipenguin.livejournal.com]

I wouldn't want to move things like our webservers onto a bodgy 10M, college saturatured link. I would much rather simply offer a free ssh link and be done with it. With the decrease in invalid email, our bill has already dropped significantly.

[theducks.livejournal.com]

I'd say UCC's use of AARNet is permitted, as it is non-commercial and as part of the University community, so it may well be able to maintain that connection. Some users however aren't, so this differential path won't be done by our equipment.

I think basically, UCC will be on their own if they want to do this, but seems like it should be possible. YMMV and E&OE however.

[coxymla.livejournal.com]

"wireless users at The University Club"

fuck yeah!

[david adam <zanchey> (from livejournal.com)]

I predict membership to rise dramatically when our "FREE INTERNETS!!1" posters go up.

[theducks.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure how "free" it will be.. they will print out a little ticket for each person with a username and password, and then you will use that to login to a captive portal before you get teh internets.

I would hope they would do a good deal for members, but who knows..

[erikarn.livejournal.com]

The key here: membership will go up, but so may the usage of "leechz0r3'ing".

[paperishcup.livejournal.com]

Oh, accursed plague!

Sorry to hear you were sick...pass on my love to lizbyrd.

[mpfl.livejournal.com]

I do not appear to have your mobile number. Dinner tonight is for 18:00. I couldn't get a later booking.