[GLLUG] Broadband/cable provider [OT]

[Nix]

On 6 Mar 2013, JLMS said:
> What I don't understand is why people are running what seems like quite
> complicated set ups on their home networks.

We're Unix people!

I heard a saying once: Windows people run their datacentres like their
home systems; Unix people run their home systems like their datacentres.
(Actually I heard it so long ago that 'data centre' hadn't been coined
yet, but you get the gist.)

Like many such more-in-jest sayings, it's completely true. Damn good
thing for me too, since it made it practical to transition to working
from home, canning my commute and all that it implied: my home systems,
like those of most here, were by a fair stretch more reliable and
capable than the systems my previous employer was providing to its
employees, so were perfectly capable as a platform to work from. (They
were a 'Microsoft Partner', oh dear, and we were working on Unix
software. That meant Linux VMs hosted atop Windows Server 2008.
Phenomenally unreliable.)

> With the wide availability of cheap hosting, which is actually
> intended for all those services people are talking about, I am curious
> as to why people insist to keep complicated set ups in house so to
> speak.

My home is my office! Also I'm a control freak: if I outsource hosting
somewhere else, and something goes badly enough wrong, I have to wait on
someone else. With it all here, only hardware faults will force me to
rely on others, and I have enough backup capacity that I have few single
points of failure anymore (just one huge one, really, and getting a
replacement for it should it fail would be a matter of a few days: also,
it's a SPOF I *need* in-house rather than hosted, as transferring
gigabytes over my ADSL line multiple times a day the way I transfer
gigabytes to and from that machine on a daily basis would clearly be out
of the question.)

> Residential broadband is clearly intended for consumer mostly situations,
> if one has anything to serve it seems to me like residential broadband is
> the wrong solution (fixed IP addresses? Why? )

Because people might want to run servers, or have someone else's machine
contact their machine for other reasons, and that's extremely kludgy
verging on impossible without fixed IP? "Endpoints are not special" is
the defining characteristic of the Internet, and a major reason why it
has taken off as much as it has. (Indeed, the stupidity of modern
firewalls and consumer routers has throttled experimentation in all
sorts of things of late, hence the need to tunnel virtually everything
over HTTP and SSL because new protocols are almost impossible to roll
out anymore.)

> Perhaps there is a bit of the "all tools look like a hammer" syndrome here,
> specially since this list's constituency face regular professional
> situations in which the only available tool isn't a hammer :-)

That too! But, hey, it meant I could jump jobs from financial software
to employment by a Linux distributor, so I'm not unhappy about that :)
one must keep one's skills up to date, after all, and most UK employers
are really bad at letting you do that on work time. That means one must
do it at home.

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