The worst part of being self-employed By Morally Inflexible in Morally Inflexible's Diary Sun Mar 25, 2012 at 12:11:16 AM EST Tags: (all tags)
	You've got an asshole for a boss and you always have at least one completely worthless employee. I've got all sorts of new projects;  I've worked out a deal with unixsurplus where I'm renting their servers out, but only paying for the servers I can get customers on.  (these are for the dedicated server product, which will be launching next week)  I've also got a deal where I'm renting quarter racks, and only paying for the quarter racks I've rented out.    Perhaps I ought to lower my Co-location prices further, just 'cause normally, you have to sign long contracts, and there is risk of vacancy, and my main goal here is to build up bulk so I have more leverage to drive down my costs.  Maybe I should lower the monthlies and raise the setup fees?  I mean, that's when I have to do work.  Of course, the pay as you go thing only works for the low-density (1920w/rack) racks;  my higher density racks are all on traditional contracts.

Oh, speaking of other projects and long contracts, as part of my plan to sell he.net (cheap) bandwidth where it isn't available, I've gotten a rack direct with coresite (rather than through a reseller, like my other two in the building) at 55 s. market st.  Man, that was a pain in the ass.  Not only are they expensive, but they have higher insurance requirements than most and it was a pain in the ass figuring out what I had to buy.  My agent was pretty cool and did some of the legwork, but coresite wouldn't call the guy back until I pestered them more.  I don't want to deal with insurance bullshit.    I mean, you know that if you sign a contract that is over a certain complexity you are getting fucked, so I always figure insurance is going to be useless if I ever really need it and buy the minimum.   Anyhow, the paperwork was faxed in Friday, so hopefully I'll be able to get access to the rack after only paying for it for two weeks.  My badge ring is getting larger (though, I guess that I will have 2 55 s. market badges is kinda cheating)   The plan there is to get a pair of fiber between 55 s. market and 250 stockton.  It's only about a mile, and there are shitloads of  fiber bundles in the basement of 250 stockton, so there has got to be multiple providers to choose from.    The only quote I've gotten was $5K a month from some broker, which seems high.   I spent hours trying to directly reach someone at XO that knew what dark fiber was, but all I got was a bunch of people trying to sell me T1s.  What is it, 1994?  Do you want to sell me ISDN if I say that is too expensive?    It's pretty irritating.   Really, I want to find someone that has fiber into the building that isn't selling lit services;   xo has no interest in creating a competitor (and yeah, I'm a mosquito compared to them, if that, but if I have the fiber and start selling lit waves, I will be competing with them, in a very small way.)    I need to figure out how to contact some of the more obscure providers (who owns the fiber that was 'enron broadband services'?)  and then how to get through to someone authorised to rent to me. The crazy thing is that right now?  over five years, the best quote to lay a new bundle of fiber from 55 s. market to 250 Stockton is actually cheaper than any of the quotes to rent an existing pair of fiber for the same time period.   So I have a more immediate project;  the serv-o-mat.  I am creating a management system for dedicated servers.  Customers will have access to the serial console, they will be able to switch the power on and off, and they will be able to edit their pxelinux.cfg file and upload new kernels.   The idea being that with that, you should be able to install whatever you like (via pxe) The business model I had planned for serv-o-mat was to white-label the service.  You have a bunch of servers you want to rent out?  we'll rack and stack and maintain the hardware and the network.  You sell to customers, provision using our API, then your customers can install whatever they like on the boxes.   I've been talking to UNIXsurplus in mountain view, and it sounds like they'd prefer to just rent me the servers and have me do the rest;  but they are taking a bunch of the risk out of it by only charging me for the servers I'm renting to customers.  It looks like my first batch of servers is going to be dual quad core opterons with 32GiB ram, 2x500gb disks, and an asus motherboard with LSI raid onboard.  My target retail price? $220/month.  We will see, but I will be renting them under my brand. Server config still isn't final.  There was a mixup where I ended up getting 16gib ram servers instead of 32GiB.   So far, I've used prgmr.com for everything.   I'm partnering with Chris on this one, though, so it will be a different company.   I think it's a sufficiently different product that  this makes sense, but mostly, I owe chris and I am irrational about giving people pieces of prgmr.com. I am a shitty photographer and I'm using a cellphone in a low light environment, but here are some photos of my cable lacing - As you can tell from my photos, this is a reaction to just how messy my current racks are.   My youngest brother showed up and helped punch down the patch panels.  It's still not all done, as I'm setting up patch panels so that I can centralise my switching and slowly replace my current matted tangle of wires with something better. I went to the hacker dojo happy hour and didn't drink.  I ran into a programmer from unixsurplus there and hung out with him for a bit.  Then I talked with gah, I'm blanking on his name.  He wrote a book on HTML5. some guy about the idea of either doing PoE co-location (run what you want if it runs on PoE)  or of buying a bunch of tiny ARM servers and renting them out.  He was really into arm shit and suggested the armdevices.net blog, which is some guy with a ridiculous HUD and a head mounted camera interviewing  manufacturers about ARM boards.  It's pretty awesome looking. I don't know if doing ARM hosting is a good idea on it's own?  but there is a whole lot of interest.  I think it could be pretty great publicity, if nothing else.  (note, I am not getting distracted by arm hosting right now.  Maybe later.  It is cool, though.)

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