As many of you know, I do hosting for web, mail and various other internet services. For the last three years or so, I've leased a cabinet from Infinity Internet in a colocation facility in downtown Portland. I chose them because they offered by far the best rates for the services I required.

Anyway, a few months ago I noticed my bandwidth had become pretty drastically reduced (a download from kernel.org that previously came down at 2-3MB/s now comes down at 100-200Kb/s). They have been expanding (doubling the number of cabinets in the colocation) so I wrote it off as growing pains and figured it would shake itself out sooner or later.

Recently, however I became more concerned as I have acquired a customer who is hosting a VOIP server in my cabinet. He's had some jitter and dropouts on his calls so in an attempt to help him isolate where the problem is, I started investigating my bandwidth issues a bit deeper. After talking to a couple techs at Infinity, one of them reveals to me that my port is capped at 5Mbps. This sounds pretty low to me, so I inform him that my contract specifies 2000GB/month transfer. "Oh, that's 5Mbps" he assures me. Well, I figure, what has happened is they've finally tightened down on their bandwidth usage, but this is too low for serious hosting (congestion will be a noticeable issue, especially for the VOIP guy), so I go ahead and call one of the sales people to see what it's going to cost to get myself up around 10Mbps. Turns out my bill will just around double. The salesman informs me that I've been getting a "sweet deal" that they don't offer any more and in fact he's surprised no one has contacted me to try to renegotiate my contract.

I'm surprised too.

Anyway, I decide I should shop around and compare rates to see if Infinity remains the best deal in town. The problem is that my 2000GB/month of transfer isn't a option most facilities offer, so I turn to a bandwidth calculator to give me a more reasonable comparison. Interestingly, it turns out that 5Mbps is not 2000GB/month. 6.1Mbps is the absolute minimum. Mildly annoyed, I call the tech at Infinity and inform him of my discovery. 6Mbps isn't super hot either, but it's a 16% difference which is significant and I figure it will help until I work out a permanent deal (either with Infinity or somewhere else). The tech informs me there's nothing he can do, but he can refer me to someone who can help. That person turns out to be Infinity's other salesperson. I inform her of my issue, asking only that I have my bandwidth capped at 6Mbps rather than 5Mbps. She tells me she'll check and call me back. About an hour later she calls me back and informs me they won't change it. I'm a bit taken aback, as I didn't think my request was that outrageous. I really had expected her to tell me "no problem, we'll take care of it." Once my initial shock wore off, I ask her if this means they were going to void my contract, so I'd be free to shop around. "No." she informs me. I ask her how she expects to violate my contract and at the same time expect me to uphold my end of it. "Well," she explains, "the contract allows for us to change our rates at any time." I consider this for a moment and then ask her "without notifying me?" "Yes." she asserts.

I hang up and decide I'd better dig up my contract. These sound like pretty untenable claims. I have doubts about whether such a collection of terms would even amount to a contract in Oregon courts (but I'm not a lawyer, etc).

Anyway I find my contract, and low and behold, not only does it explicitly require that they give 60 days written notice prior to any changes to it, it also has attached the service order which states that I'm entitled to 2000GB/Month burstable to 10Mbps. Translated, this means 6Mbps burstable to 10Mbps. What they have been giving me for the last few months is 5Mbps non-burstable.

I'm making attempts to move higher up the management chain at Infinity, but quite frankly, after the shoddy way I've been treated I don't think I'll remain there under any circumstances.

I've always hated putting CD-ROM drives in my rackmount equipment. They waste space, have a high failure rate and require that I keep a bunch of rescue CD's around.

I decided to investigate using a compact flash (CF) card instead. My idea was to use an IDE-to-CF converter and simply leave a small (128MB) CF card permanently installed inside the server case.

Turns out that it's not only cheaper to use CF, it's also remarkably easy.

I bought the CF->IDE converters from tekgems.com. I liked these because:

1. they were bootable
2. they were cheap
3. simple design leaves little room for mistakes
4. positive user reviews from Linux users

I ordered 10 of them for a grand total of $32USD. One thing I'd recommend is either buying a very short IDE cable (i.e. one or two inches) or an IDE gender-changer. Due to the layout of these adapters they are somewhat difficult to mount inside the case (IDE connector is on one side, floppy power connector on the other).

I happened to have a couple old 128MB SD cards lying around, so I chose to use one of them, but if I were to buy one I'd probably get a 1GB since the price difference is negligible and you'd have a bit more room to customize.

I wasn't really looking to have a full Linux live environment available. Rather I wanted the equivalent of a rescue/install CD (something to let me do repairs and/or reinstall when needed).

I'm in the process of building a new server (Opteron) for running OpenVZ on, so this was a good candidate for my test. I chose Gentoo for the host OS since I wanted to minimize downtime when upgrading the host OS.

I looked at a variety of projects for small and embedded Linux distros, but none of them really met my goals. I realized I was going the wrong direction and instead investigated simply putting the Gentoo Minimal/Install CD on the CF card.

Turns out this was not only remarkably easy (far easier than dealing with some of the micro-distros) but only took around 10 minutes.

I followed these instructions (a CF card on an IDE adapter appears to be a normal disk). I would recommend changing at least one parameter: the author puts a timeout of 150 seconds. This is way too long. I'd recommend 30 seconds top. Also, if you want to get a bit fancier, you could mount the squashfs image, customize some of the parameters (IP address, add a root password, start sshd, etc).

In a perfect world, I'd like to figure out a way of having a server failure cause it to boot from the CF card with sshd started so I could remotely access it in case of disaster (versus having the server try to boot normally and fail to complete). It's occurred to me to have the server always boot from the CF, but it's not obvious how I'd have it select whether to boot normally from that point or enter rescue mode. Too bad GRUB isn't scriptable.

In conclusion, a CF solution with a 1GB card will run you well under $20. That's cheap enough to permanently install one in every server (cheaper than a no-name CD-ROM drive and much cheaper than a slimline CD-ROM as is often found in rackmount equipment). Also, it's much easier to build a customized boot disk than with a CD (think of it in terms of ease of fixing mistakes).