We have been with dedicated hosting companies for almost 3 years now. It's time to on to our own setup, I have seen all the arguments against it but we really want to take this step as a company.

Now, we are familiar with the Red Hat Setup and all the dedicated server administration but really have no clue where to start when it deals with getting connected to the internet on a network setup.

We would like to do this, have two T1 lines come in on the same network, making it so if one T1 goes down, the other is there, also having the traffic distributed between the two lines.
I am not family with a CSU/DSU or any part of this entire setup.

Can someone please point me in the right direction to learn about how to get from the T1 connection to the network setup? I.E. How would we have this T1 line setup and the servers connected to the network?

Any where on the internet that gives setup instructions from step one to finish would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you.

2 T1 lines won't cut it. Get an OC12.

Assuming 2 T1's is enough, how do we set this up?

Hey,
Get a 2620 with dual WICs (make sure it has ethernet for LAN on router). The ISP contacts the telco and the telco installs the line with an rj48 handoff which goes into the WIC. Configuring the router is fairly easy, and often the ISP will help you. For more information, talk to the ISP.

To go with that setup, i'd recommend getting a cisco 2621, not a 2620. The 2621's have 2 ethernet ports, allowing you to out to 2 switches instead of one, eliminating a possible SPF. But in your situation, it might be easier just to find someone to rent space from, or to colocate considering pricing on T1's, local loops, etc. you're looking probably at 700-1400/mbit, a lot of setup fee's, a long contract (most likely for the t1's), and some expensive cisco equipment (well relatively so), and more expensively, someone who can competently keep the cisco equipment in shape, and configure it initially. It might just be easier to find space in a building, or a cage and have someone give you an ethernet handoff, a few ip's, and just plug it into a managed switch, and then move up to a router when you expand to that need.

or see if yipes and/or cogent can be setup in your area. are you looking at reselling the bandwidth, or are you just going to be hosting your business site/concerns.

the company i used to work for upgraded to a full t1 from business dsl for their company site + company internet and it included rent for the cisco routers and the telco they got it from came and set everything up for them. so maybe look into that as well.


hmm. i'm not sure, does yipes have a minimum mbps you have to purchase? if they're around $256 per month for 1mbps, could you just get 1mbps or would you have to sign a multiple agreement? i would imagine if you only wanted 1mbps you'd pay relatively more. i think they're around $3K for 10mbps per month, which is fairly good.

but yeah.

We have already considered co-location.

This is not what I want, a conversation about what hardware is best. No matter what hardware we use, there is a basic setup, i.e. put the t1 connection here, connect that to here, setup this, setup that.

I am looking for setup instructions on how to establish this network, there must be something like that on the internet. Already tried searching with no luck.

you should ask your privider for more information about the hardware.


also, check into yipes.com and or cogent. i believe you do not have to get heavily into routing hardware, because it's high bandwidth over ethernet......

Our provider now is a dedicated hosting company. Really wouldn't be good to ask them how to go on without them.

We do not have an existing T1 or even dedicated network connection, we need help and to pointed in the right direction.

Someone must know some where on the internet that details this setup information?

find a provider for your connection(s). whether it be yipes.com(ethernet), cogent(ethernet), sprintlink, your local phone company(bellsouth if you're in the south), or something. if you're deadset on getting T1's (for some reason), don't get them from the same provider. search around.

then, they will explain to you what equipment you'll need. in most cases they'll include the router or whatever you'd need either with the monthly payment or for an extra fee.

if you're going with ethernet connections, such as cogent or yipes, then i don't *think* you'll need to get as in depth into hardware, csu/dsu crap.

here you go, 10 minutes of searching the internet. hopefully they help you out a bit with information:

http://www.t1anywhere.com/
http://www.t1reports.com/
http://www.everythingt1.com/
http://www.howstuffworks.com/question372.htm
http://www.business.com/directory/telecommunications/broadband/t1_and_t3/index.asp
http://www.t1carriers.com/
http://www.xo.com/xofferings/internet/dedicated/
http://www.acterna.com/downloads/white_papers/t1_tn.pdf

I am really sorry to say this. I really am. You all have done a MAHVALOUS job of being helpful as to the original question without pointing out the obvious.

It's a ugly Monday morning, so I will.

What in the hell are you thinking, trying to set up your own hosting facility when you can't even get a T1 provisioned, or the most basic of networks designed, on your own?

I always enjoy the "shut up about colo, it's not for us, just tell me again, how many customers will a t1 handle?" posts.

No offense, but this is usually indicative of not having all the tools you need in your toolbox to start a hosting company. For the price you're going to pay JUST for the circuits, you could colo 5, 10, maybe even 15 servers at a local colo facility in your area. No capital needed for power, cooling, staff, nothing. You should even be able to get 24x7 access so you can go touch 'em whenever you want. But Nooooo, gotta do it yourself. 99% of those who choose this route will out of business within the year.

Brandon

Originally posted by inbuco
We have already considered co-location.

This is not what I want, a conversation about what hardware is best. No matter what hardware we use, there is a basic setup, i.e. put the t1 connection here, connect that to here, setup this, setup that.

I am looking for setup instructions on how to establish this network, there must be something like that on the internet. Already tried searching with no luck.

Realistically, if you don't have the knowledge to setup your own network, then you shouldn't do it.

Hire someone to do it for you, or find an alternative.

Matt

As for the comments on the choice of connection, 2 t-1 lines would put through about 600+ GB or traffic per month, that is a lot of traffic not to mention the price difference per month of an oc-12 vs 2 t-1's is about 68000 dollars a month.

Check the Intel's web site, I remember them having something for all of this.

xnet, no need to exaggerate, an OC3 is only needed if you host 1000 servers, otherwise 1 or 2 T1s is plenty. In my experience you can have about 1000 shared customers using less than 1 Mbit/sec. We have Level3 burstable bandwidth up to 10 Megs and only use a small fraction of that.

I have to also agree with everyone else. With all due respect, if you don't know how to design a network, then simply forget it or you WILL go out of business very soon. You just can't rely on your ISP to get you going; you must know everything possible about networking topologies, TCP/IP, building routing tables, port filtering among a multitude of other things to be successful. If I were you, I would go for co location. We co locate on a data center that allows us access 24/7 and I am about 10 minutes away from it, so I can be there whenever I want.

Just something to think about. :)

We are not looking to startup our own hosting company but rather hosting 5 of our sites.

Originally posted by inbuco
We have already considered co-location.

This is not what I want, a conversation about what hardware is best. No matter what hardware we use, there is a basic setup, i.e. put the t1 connection here, connect that to here, setup this, setup that.

I am looking for setup instructions on how to establish this network, there must be something like that on the internet. Already tried searching with no luck.

Hey,
ISP -> loop -> dsu -> router -> ethernet -> switch -> servers

Router gets lets say .1 in IP block. Route the rest of the IP addresses to the ethernet. Servers can configure IP addresses at will with "default gateway" set to .1.

Go to www.google.com and search for "cisco routing". You'll probably end up using a Cisco. Chances are, your ISP will give you/lease to you a router and it will be a Cisco 26xx or a 17xx. After reading a few hundred thousand documents on this, I'm sure you'll get the hang of it.

Good luck...

Inbuco,

The first thing you're going to want to do is register an Autonomous System Number with ARIN at http://www.arin.net. This will cost you $500.00. This number will give you the ability to BGP peer with you providers. Next, you will want a router that will hold at least one or two full and or partial BGP tables. The minimum router needed to do this is a Cisco 3640 with 128MB of RAM. You can get by with a 2621, but I would not recommend running BGP on a router that can only hold 64 MB of RAM as you will not be able to receive full routes. You will need a NM-2E2W and 2 WIC-1DSU-T1 cards. Connect each of the cards to the NIU (Network Interface Unit) that the telco installs at your facility. After bringing up the T1 connections, you will have to establish a BGP peering session over the supplied /30 netblock. This typically takes the form of

interface Serial0/0
description ISP connection to UUNET 701
ip address 192.168.1.2 255.255.255.252
!
interface Serial0/1
description ISP connection to Sprint 1239
ip address 192.168.2.2 255.255.255.252
!
router bgp <your ASN>
network 10.0.0.0 255.255.255.0
neighbor 192.168.1.1 remote-as 701
neighbor 192.168.2.1 remote-as 1239
!
ip route 10.0.0.0 255.255.255.0 Null0



In this VERY trimmed down router configuration, a T1 connection to UUNET is established over the WIC-1DSU-T1 card inserted in WAN slot 0 of the NM-2E2W. A second T1 connection to Sprint is established over the WIC-1DSU-T1 card inserted in WAN slot 1 of the NM-2E2W. BGP peers are configured using the 192.168.1.0/30 and 192.168.2.0/30 (These are of course fictituos and would be public IP space provided by your peers). The 10.0.0.0/24 netblock is then announced to each of the peers with the network command under the BGP config. To make the advertisement visible, you must route the entire block to the Null0 interface.

When setting up the peer, you must tell your upstream providers what your Autonomous System Number is and the netblocks you wish to announce. They will then ask you if you'd like full or partial routes. Tell them you'd like full routes. Note that a full table takes up approximately 14Mbytes of memory and the BGP process will take up about 48Mbytes of process memory. They will configure their router accordingly and modify any access lists. Be sure and tell your upstream to remove the static routes after the BGP peer is up.

If one of your T1 circuits goes down, you still have an active BGP peer with a different provider. This not only allows performance enhancements by placing your closer to end destinations (i.e. if a destination is few AS hops over one peer, traffic will prefer that peer), but also adds a level of resiliency which will let your network function in case of circuit failure.

If you'd like assistance putting together a configuration, please PM or email me and we can work out an arrangement.

Regards,

Larry Patterson

Ok,

I cant take this anymore,

Incubo, i don't remember who said it, or even if i'm wording it properly, but here it goes "a stupid man fails to learn from his own mistakes, but only a utter fool fails to learn from others mistakes". I'm begging you to listen to whats being said, a lot of people around here have seen/done what you're trying to do, and realized it was a mistake, and they were attempting to advance too fast. It's like going from a reseller account and going "i know everything there is to know about webhosting" to then deciding to open your own 50,000sqft data center, they'd be missing such a vast amount of knowledge that they'd be likely to fail. Listen to whats being said, move the servers to somewhere that you can get 24x7 access, even if it is your own suite or a cage in a larger center.

porcupine, I appreciate your advice but just to say it's too difficult or mistakes will be made is just not an excuse, if we took that road, we might as well not have started down the business path to begin with.

There is no doubt that mistakes will be made but like with any company that wishes to host it's own sites, you have to start somewhere and that somewhere is with knowledge. Now, rather than simply contacting an isp like so many have recommended, we have tried very much to gain the needed knowledge to ensure that we are heading down the right path.

I can tell you, we have gone with several hosting companies, many of which are considered to be experts in the field only to find that these people knew nothing, so I can't imagine doing any worse being that a few of the companies we dealt with didn't know the difference between an apache daemon and an apache configuration file.

We have received much of the needed knowledge, while we are not experts or even beyond the beginners cycle, I myself am at least a bit more knowledgeable about the fact. We may very well need to higher an outside consultant but no matter what, just because the task may seem to difficult or others has failed before, doesn't mean we wont at least try, after all, every great accomplishment started with one step.

While this project wont make a difference in anyone's life's beyond our own companies, after it's completed and if more things go right than wrong, I project at least in six months to a year, we will have our own network, with may produce a savings of at least $10K a month. I don't know about your company but with ours, the potential of saving $120k a year, while maybe difficult, is at least worth a try.

I appreciate everyone's helps and I have received so much information, considerably more than from most, so I say Thank you.

yeah, i figured you were just hosting some of your own sites, not really trying for your own hosting concerns. hence my recommendation of ethernet lines (yipes, cogent, there's plenty more i'm sure) that are fairly affordable. you're not looking at tier 1 however, you're getting great performance vs. price. and if you're not really looking to resell the lines, i believe the prices are much lower.

but, good luck with everything.

Obviously I don't get it. All of a sudden we've gone from "I want to host 5 of my own sites" to "This is going to save me $10K a month".

Man, you must be paying some seriously overpriced hosting charges. I wish I was your host. ;)

Seriously, I know there's more here than what you've indicated on the surface...how will this save you so much $$?

Brandon

Originally posted by cbtrussell
Obviously I don't get it. All of a sudden we've gone from "I want to host 5 of my own sites" to "This is going to save me $10K a month".

Man, you must be paying some seriously overpriced hosting charges. I wish I was your host. ;)

Seriously, I know there's more here than what you've indicated on the surface...how will this save you so much $$?

Brandon

Brandon, that is a little weird. I wonder what he's paying now and for what :confused:

Running t1's will NEVER save you money nowdays. Thats like saying getting a old chevy with a v12 engine in it will save you gas money.......

Originally posted by porcupine
Running t1's will NEVER save you money nowdays. Thats like saying getting a old chevy with a v12 engine in it will save you gas money.......

You are very much wrong. Space in data centers costs quite a bit of money. Take for example above.net, which charges $600/month for a half rack. You can save quite a bit if you already have allocated space and simply run the lines...

The cost of managing the servers also goes down. When servers are in a remote data center, you depend on the ISP to be there for you. Most providers don't have the resources to provide the kind of attention you yourself would dedicated to your servers. This alone is worth having private lines...

inbuco, go ahead and run private lines. You'll more than likely be successful. Just start off with 1 T1 and get the hang of it. Once everything is good, run a second T1. Try to get your ISP to run "IMA" (inverse multiplex over atm) so you get a "binded" solution. AT&T/Savvis do this. You can also go with Sprint which does some form of per-packet load balancing to achieve similar results.

Good luck...

Overpriced? Want overpriced? Go with a cheap host.

We have been with several dedicated hosting companies, often looking for the cheapest one only to find that if you go with a cheap host, you end up spending a fortune on down time, outside consulting companies and more.

We we pay a lot for our dedicated servers, yes but when you consider that with an entire yeah online with our current hosting company, we have had less than 5 minutes of downtime but I guess that is what you get with multiple connections, F5 load balancers and more - it's worth every penny but there is always room for improvement.

I am not complaining about the price of our current solution, it's just we want two things, #1 - the long term benefits of having control over our own equipment and #2 - if we are going to spend so much every month, I want to know that we are buying and building our network then someone else's.

Another possibility (not sure whether this has been discussed) is to deal directly with backbone providers, like WorldCom, InterNAP, Level3, Above.net, etc. Doing this will allow you to minimize your cost and you have control over your own switch/router remotely/physically. In fact, in InterNAP and Level3 you can choose many different providers other than InterNAP/Level3 (you just pay for cross connect) and if you are able, maintain your own BGP4 session. Also, most of these larger company do provide you with 99.999% if not 100% network uptime guarantee, so uptime should not be a problem.

I am not sure how much it costs (initially/monthly) to start your own network and how much you think you can save, but I have found that these companies are pretty aggresive in selling their bandwith and I do believe in terms of bandwith, they can be cheaper than if you choose to bring your own lines.

just my 2 cents.

cheers,
:beer: