Here in the Core: gulker.com has had an internal private network for years. Some might find this kind of silly, because we mainly support 2 users, with occasional guests. Nevertheless, as a learning exercise I maintain a Class C network here at gulker.com (lesser hackers are doubtless scribling notes as they read this). It's called the 'core.'

The core has its own DNS and SMTP servers, 2 blogging servers, a Mac OS X server providing numerous services, a half-terabyte SAN and a few other toys. We've run things like a search engine and spider that just looked for references to penguins on the web. We once set up and documented an ISP class spam filter just for gulker.com. It's kind of like the hot rods my older teenage cousins once owned - a lot more horsepower than you could ever use, at least legally, in the case of their hopped-up Mercurys and Fords.

It would be easy to put 253 computers or other IP-needy devices on our local area network, and with a little work we could add another 64,000+ devices. Yeah! As it stands, 6 computers grace the family room (7 when my work machine is up - here's an old photo of same). It's hard to move in here without bumping into a keyboard, monitor or CPU of some description: there are Macs (from mini to dual G5), a 64-bit AMD powerhouse running Linux, a Windows laptop or two -you name it. A rack in the garage holds a bunch of other machines, mostly servers, mostly dating from previous eras and not currently online.

It is great fun, when discouraged or otherwise blue, to just dive into the Core, and immerse oneself in FAQs, HOWTOs and other 'RTF' documentation before creating some new service, configuration or wacky capability.

But, nowadays, the trend is away from dedicated servers and storage: virtualization is the latest trend and it makes sense: you abstract everything - from disk space to CPU cycles to bandwidth - allowing rapid addition, re-configuration and other common vexing chores. The idea is to turn everything into your own mini-Google data center where everything is a commodity available at market price, and failure recovery is built-in.

So, we're doing a lot of re-thinking here in the Core. Free and cheap web services now offer stuff that was once expensive and difficult to provide internally. We're thinking this evening about what the Virtual Core looks like...
Comments 10:24:33 PM