My little corner of the internet

This is my spot and I’m not leaving it!

The setup

• Colocation of a 2U server in the Montreal region
• R720XD - 244GB of RAM - 24TB of HDD (yes - spinning rust :( )
• A + B power feeds
• 1Gb/s internet connectivity
• My own AS from ARIN
• My own /24 from ARIN
• Running ESXI + Vcenter as a VM on the same ESXI.
  • Yes, on one single physical server.
  • Yes it’s a giant SPOF.
  • Never do this. I regretted it instantly. More on that in future posts! There are more flexible solutions.

Stuff that I can host inside ESXI

• Personal backup stuff
• Openshift
• Rancher
• Openstack
• Personnal projects
• Media sharing
• Seeding ISOs for Linux distributions
• VPS for friends / family
• Labs for Ansible / k8s

The why

It’s a nice experiment! I don’t get to do much networking these days so this was a nice thing to put in place.

From a consumer perspective, I am a bit worried about the internet becoming a walled garden. The internet itself should not be defined by any of the big tech players. I’d rather have nation state building neutral internet “zones”, where we can have some real competition + innovation.

Is this economical? Probably not but it’s fun!

Plus, look at how much that would cost on AWS/GCP.

There are ways to optimize the cost but it’s a significant amount of money!

Right now, I have been paying 113$ CAN a month and I am quite happy.

The How

I always had some bits of servers lying around. It was time to either use it or sell it. Fortunately, someone I know provides good prices for 1U+ colocation in the Montreal region.

At that point, it was just the matter of paying for the space and getting setup.

Getting the BGP stuff going was also fun! But more on that later!

Next

• Post about getting your AS + IP space from ARIN.
• Getting BGP setup + how to secure it.