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I used to work at RackShack during these times, and when it was renamed to Ev1Servers, which this article is about. I can answer any questions and clear up any

by bvinc 8y ago

I used to work at RackShack during these times, and when it was renamed to Ev1Servers, which this article is about. I can answer any questions and clear up any misconceptions. The company started out pretty much exclusively with Cobalt Raqs at first. They eventually bought their own real datacenter and physically moved all of the servers there and had a lot more room. I remember when they got these machines they're talking about. They sold them as AMD Athlon "white boxes" I believe. I was a little surprised when I noticed they were literally super cheap desktop machines, similar to "emachines" back then. They even had CDROM drives! But it didn't really phase me. Why the hell not? He obviously got a good deal on them. We just made racks, 5 on each row, 4 rows. They ran Linux just fine and had 100mbit network cards in them. And yeah, no firewalls. That's your job on your server. Most people ran servers on these machines, why would they want a hardware firewall? The networking was simple. Just 5 daisy-chained switches, one mounted on reach rack. 100 servers would share a block of 512 IP addresses. If your subnet ran out of IPs, we would literally move your server to a different subnet. They also saved money because most support techs were 18-20 and made just above minimum wage. But it was a great opportunity and I learned a lot. And we really did have a lot of really smart people working there. Someone else in here said that they would require your root password on support forums. No one was stupid enough to request that and customers were generally not stupid enough to post it, but I'm sure it probably happened once or twice. It was a similar situation in the official IRC channel. Some customers didn't grasp the concept and would accidentally paste their root passwords in there. The story about their fiber connection being down, I remember that I think, but it was before my time. I believe they only had 3 fiber connections, and one of them was severed. They decided that it was because of a dump truck picking up a garbage can. They were pretty open about it and posted pictures on their forums. They kept acquiring fiber connections. I believe they eventually had 10 different 1-gigabit connections at a single DC.

bvinc 8y ago
Oh, another thing I just thought of. They didn't just give you access within the hour, like the article suggested. Within the hour may have been the guarantee, but typically, it was instantaneous. New machines would have a default password. When a customer bought a machine, a script would log in, change the password to the customer's, and notify them of their new machine's IP.
walrus01 8y ago
For those who weren't doing Linux admin stuff back in the days when this was new: It might take some explaining that at the time bvinc is referencing, there were two major differences from how dedicated server hardware is sold now: a) there was no such thing as a multi-core CPU. One core. b) each machine was literally one server. there were no hypervisors such as xen, kvm or vmware esxi to divide up a single physical machine with a great deal of RAM and CPU cores into multiple severs. One bare metal machine equals one Linux install, with one system, one root password, etc.
wink 8y ago
Would love to know when that was (more accurate than "late 90s") because at my first workplace we also paid for Cobalt Raqs (and I'm not sure if "random desktop pcs in a DC" were available), but because it was the summer of 2001 iirc it's maybe a bit too late to draw parallels (3 years back then could be a lot more revolutionary in hosting than today).
- mbrumlow 8y ago
  Rackshack had a a few racks of colbalts too. They were fragile, and some what of a mystery to work with. Once they started offering white boxes on bread racks things actually looked up and support could actually help people because it was the same standard tools they already knew. Later in the days they made big deals with Dell, and even then we were racking dell desktops and office services on bread racks for a long time. I remember when we got our first few lines of real rack mount servers -- they were sooo sexy.

by bvinc 8y ago

bvinc 8y ago

Oh, another thing I just thought of. They didn't just give you access within the hour, like the article suggested. Within the hour may have been the guarantee, but typically, it was instantaneous. New machines would have a default password. When a customer bought a machine, a script would log in, change the password to the customer's, and notify them of their new machine's IP.

walrus01 8y ago

For those who weren't doing Linux admin stuff back in the days when this was new: It might take some explaining that at the time bvinc is referencing, there were two major differences from how dedicated server hardware is sold now: a) there was no such thing as a multi-core CPU. One core. b) each machine was literally one server. there were no hypervisors such as xen, kvm or vmware esxi to divide up a single physical machine with a great deal of RAM and CPU cores into multiple severs. One bare metal machine equals one Linux install, with one system, one root password, etc.

wink 8y ago

Would love to know when that was (more accurate than "late 90s") because at my first workplace we also paid for Cobalt Raqs (and I'm not sure if "random desktop pcs in a DC" were available), but because it was the summer of 2001 iirc it's maybe a bit too late to draw parallels (3 years back then could be a lot more revolutionary in hosting than today).

mbrumlow 8y ago
Rackshack had a a few racks of colbalts too. They were fragile, and some what of a mystery to work with. Once they started offering white boxes on bread racks things actually looked up and support could actually help people because it was the same standard tools they already knew. Later in the days they made big deals with Dell, and even then we were racking dell desktops and office services on bread racks for a long time. I remember when we got our first few lines of real rack mount servers -- they were sooo sexy.