Gregory's Server|
53 comments
  @Firesphere @aurynn @xssfox entirely possible, and very definitely easy if you host domestically! I'm not aware of many local companies that transit them for _domestic_ as it's more expensive to do so. I don't know why Solarix are, but my guess would be that they want it for mitigation reasons. "Magic Transit" isn't cheap really vs normal IP transit. Either way, most of your stuff goes NZ ISP -> CloudFlare -> Solarix -> Catalyst from what Atlas traces tell me. @Firesphere @aurynn @xssfox didn't think I was going mad; I did mention it in the past (April). The RIPE Atlas link I shared has a traceroute from most ISP's in NZ and basically all - even Spark - transit CF to get to Solarix and then to Catalyst ๐คทโโ๏ธ https://atlas.ripe.net/measurements/47551069/#probes the โน on the right-hand side shows the traces, if you want to check my checking ๐ @Firesphere @aurynn @xssfox to clarify, New Zealand Internet Exchange Inc is an NFP, not tied to CloudFlare or any one company. Everyone just peers there (and Megaport, which you may see in some other traces from atlas) hence it being so obvious in the trace. You can see the same from Voyager in the South Island as it traverses peering down there in CHC. @Firesphere @aurynn @xssfox They publish the stuff from AGM's no secrets really - https://ix.nz/2022/10/10/news-from-the-agm/ - aside from that they have done huge amounts for uplifting peering domestically. ix.asn.au is the Aussie side, they got ix.nz kick started over here. @alexs @Firesphere @aurynn @xssfox FWIW from here (Vodafone HFC, ie DOCSIS FTTN) path is Vodafone (under several names of former purchases), 3 hops of random 198.41.237.0/24 nodes (~6 IPS returned per hop), and then Catalyst edge. All of 198.41.128.0/17 is CloudFlare. I donโt see any Solarix hop at all in my path. The early 203.167.245.0/24 hops are Vodafone. First Catalyst named hop is 202.78.247.22, which is a Catalyst IP. @ewenmcneill @Firesphere @aurynn @xssfox More digging indicates Catalyst are seemingly directly up-streamed by CloudFlare also (BGP routes from Atlas) and your path indicates that also. For your route, Vodafone private peers with CloudFlare so you'd see the most direct path. Also, you can see the same in Aussie. ๐คทโโ๏ธ @alexs @ewenmcneill @aurynn @xssfox the more I see, the more I'm like "this company has a finger in every bowl of porridge" with or without us knowing @ewenmcneill @xssfox @Firesphere @aurynn yes I hate that too. Check IRD as another example, or RBNZ. @aurynn @xssfox screenshot above @Firesphere but also here's an Atlas run which will show from 70+ locations, https://atlas.ripe.net/measurements/47551069/#probes  @rbairwell @rastilin @xssfox @aurynn @Veticia @rbairwell @rastilin @xssfox yes. and I don't use Cloudflare because I don't want to support nazis. @aurynn @rbairwell @rastilin @xssfox Which they later retracted and kicked them out anyway. Or are you talking about another incident? @Veticia @rbairwell @rastilin @xssfox I am talking about the time they had to be pressured hard earlier this year to drop nazis, and kept refusing and kept refusing and kept refusing and are still unhappy that they had to drop the nazis because they're nazis and want to protect their own @aurynn @rbairwell @rastilin @xssfox @Veticia @rbairwell @rastilin @xssfox and also giving them more power over the internet at large if I did so, so, still no. As far as buying servers, I @aurynn @rbairwell @rastilin @xssfox But let me go back to the international traffic. Is using VPN common in NZ? To pretend all traffic is local? How big of a difference in price are we talking about? @Veticia @rbairwell @rastilin @xssfox Honestly this conversation makes me think you've never priced out actual server kit for actual production use with the full TCO and this is exactly the kind of irritating, unhelpful criticism that I was concerned about receiving. @aurynn @rbairwell @rastilin @xssfox @Veticia @rbairwell @rastilin @xssfox so because Cloud Island is something people rely on, itโs not one server Iโd have to buy, itโs multiple, including multiple disk servers to live in geographically disparate DCs to ensure recoverability in the event of catastrophe. Iโd have to get support contracts so that I have easy access to spare parts, and multiple servers so that the site isnโt offline for weeks while I wait for parts to arrive and for the DCs smart hands team to install. It adds up. @Veticia @rbairwell @rastilin @xssfox and this can be irritating, and I was snappy about it, because I donโt know that a lot of people know how much goes in to ensuring that you have a service that can be relied on to โฆ well, be reliable. @Veticia @rbairwell @rastilin @xssfox and if I want my service to be reliable, Iโm donโt feel that single servers in a single DC can provide it, whereas cloud lets me do a lot of things with a lot more capability than I would be able to otherwise, and I can abstract all of the depreciation and managing spares and maintaining DCs and everything away, and focus on making sure my users can rely on what Iโm doing. It is a tradeoff in cost, though, yeah. @aurynn @Veticia @rbairwell @rastilin @xssfox go look at hetzner.com - much cheaper - incl. The vms (where they stay up/ get restarted on new machine) just like ec2 etc. On other clouds. We run all our Companys services on physical servers on hetzner, with HA provided by Kubernetes setup. And scaleup works well enough with vm combo @KlavsKlavsen @aurynn @Veticia @rbairwell @rastilin maybe I'm missing something but I didn't think hetzner hosted anything in New Zealand ? @xssfox @aurynn @Veticia @rbairwell @rastilin lol no. I would exoect you would have a nearby equivalent though, if latency to new zealand is highest prio. Hetzner is in germany. Great loco for Europe @KlavsKlavsen @Veticia @rbairwell @rastilin @xssfox you may be surprised to learn that Hertzner is not an Aotearoa New Zealand company and would require relinquishing data sovereignty @aurynn @Veticia @rbairwell @rastilin @xssfox It should not cost you $50k to buy hardware to host a mastodon server. @yoshimitsu @aurynn @Veticia @rbairwell @rastilin sigh. You've never had to build a highly available, reliable, and scalable service before have you? @Veticia @rastilin @aurynn @xssfox it's still a single machine. Things fail other than disks. If that machine fails, can you quickly fail over to another machine? Aurynn can easily stand up and fail over to replacement instances if the hardware she's on fails. You're telling Aurynn that her service is over-engineered, without knowing the SLAs Aurynn is trying to work to. And I'll tell you now, they're SLAs that you cannot meet with a single physical machine. |
@Veticia @rastilin @xssfox @aurynn Yeah the way I see it, the cloud is for very small or very large workloads - attractive to get in because if you are not doing much it doesn't cost much, and attractive to large businesses because it costs more to pay your employees (not to mention dealing with headaches that can happen) to maintain infrastructure than to purchase that service externally. But the middle ground isn't so rosy.