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1, "Set up multiple consumer grade internet connections." 2, Discover that all of them are just reselling the same service provider's product and they all go t
by excuse-me 14y ago
1, "Set up multiple consumer grade internet connections."
2, Discover that all of them are just reselling the same service provider's product and they all go to the same cable in the same junction box under the street.
Even with totally independent enterprise grade 'N'-9s uptime guarantees we discovered they are in the same trench under the road outside our site. A lot of major data centers have discovered that it only takes a single idiot with a backhoe.
- jakozaur 14y agoPerhaps checking trace route with mtr should give you the answer to 2.
- excuse-me 14y agoNot with DSL. At least in europe the last mile is always BT/Deutsche Telkom etc but the other ISPs put their adapters in their racks. So it shows a different ISP all the way to the host but they are on the same wire and the same PSU in the same cage.
- bradleyland 14y agoSure, but the vast majority of outages aren't related to a cut cable. I've done a ton of telecom work, and the thing I encountered most commonly was billing issues (ha!). Next up is equipment failure at either end of the line; bad card at the CO or bad modem on premisis. A distant third is outside issues like bad interconnects, and waaaaaaay out in forth is cut cables. It really doesn't happen all that often, even in big cities. By going with DSL and cable, they may be in luck even on that side of things. In a lot of places, phone lines (DSL) were run underground way back when the cities were built. Cable came much later, so it is frequently run above ground on utility poles. This means that if someone backhoes your DSL cable, the coax on the pole for cable internet will still be fine.
- excuse-me 14y agoYes - most of our problems have been our provider = "we decided to process your office move from 6months ago AGAIN and have disconnected you!" But unthinkingly deciding that having `N` systems means your risk of failure is `1/N` when you don't know how they are connected is a classic way of getting on the front page of the dailywtf.com !
- bradleyland 14y agoAgreed there. I missed one cause that encompasses all of them: the customer has no idea what they actually have/don't have in terms of infrastructure, which negates their ability to effectively measure and manage redundancy.
- Robin_Message 14y agoI assume that's why they got both cable and DSL, although depending on how things work out they might still run in the same trench.
- weirdedhimself 14y agoTrench? Wishful thinking in California. :) There's a big telephone pole behind our building, and both the cable and phone lines run from the building to the pole... This setup is by no means good enough to run any mission critical services off of. It is, however, a big improvement over a single business line to keep a group of 30-40 people reliably connected to the internet.
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- omh 14y agoIt sounds like they still have several single points of failure. Most obviously the multi-WAN router - I doubt they paid double for a cold or warm spare unit.
- weirdedhimself 14y agoAbsolutely, the Peplink is a SPOF. They do support an HA mode with two Peplinks, but that hasn't been necessary for our uptime requirements yet. It helps that the unit has been rock solid, too. Not a single crash or hickup. We do have another (non-Peplink) router we can drop in within a few minutes, we've had to do that a few times when we were running another brand of router prior to the Peplink.
- omh 14y agoI've set up something similar with old hardware and pfSense. It supports Multi-WAN and HA failover, and the price is nicer than the custom hardware units (as long as you can find a fast enough unit to run it on).
- weirdedhimself 14y agoI love pfSense, it's a great platform! I used to run that at home for several years, and even in the early days at Sumo Logic. The only achilles heel I've found is the fact that it runs on a PC, and PC hardware tends to have a lot more moving parts and break. You also need to take care to make configure the BIOS to turn on the PC after a power failure, etc. pfSense is definitely a great option, but I've basically decided I'm too lazy and prefer the robustness of the Peplink. A smaller Peplink unit only runs $300-400, definitely comparable to an entry level PC...
- wmf 14y agoLTE can help with this since it should be more diverse than cable and DSL.