Welcome to the New Slashdot Chicago Cluster

Thanks to everyone who tested on Friday, as well as to all of SourceForge's netops crew, our corporate overlords at SourceForge for paying the bill, and of course all the engineers on Slashteam- Jamie McCarthy, Tim Vroom, Chris Nandor, Chris Brown, and Scott Collins, we are now running on the new iron in a cage in Chicago. We'll run a story in a few days about the ridiculously overpowered new hardware we have now, but now is the part of sprockets where we dance.

Sprockets?

[Doofus]

How many people are going to get the Sprockets reference? I can't tell if I'm laughing at the reference, or laughing at myself for finding it strangely amusing. It's frightening that a reference, on Slashdot, to a 20-year-old SNL skit makes me chuckle. Zoiks.

Re:OH NO!

[moderatorrater]

If only there were a large, dedicated community of introverts who could help him!

The only down side is that we might scare away NewYorkCountryLawyer since he has morals and standards. There's a good chance we'd get a lot of RIAA lawyers to the site, though...

Dugg!

[sonchat]

can you guys host digg on it too? Digg is too slow.

Re:Finally!

[JWSmythe]

    Chicago is the center of the universe? :)

    Actually, my work is considering where to move it's servers. It involves a HUGE amount of fact finding. Chicago is one of the places they want stuff, but that's for customer reasons, not for "center of the universe" reasons. Our locations are chosen based on current customer usage, and statistical information I gathered at previous jobs. When you have 8 million users/day from around the world, those demographics stick in your head real well. :)

    In my research, I found the best places to be are.

    New York City. 111 8th ave, 60 Hudson, or 25 Broadway. The selection would be based on provider interconnects and availability. Some providers service all three locations with their own private interconnects, so it really doesn't matter.

    Los Angeles. One Wilshire, or one of a few select locations nearby, again with private interconnects to One Wilshire.

    Miami. Near or at 1 NE First St.

    Chicago. Near or at 427 S La Salle St

    The runners up are:

    Chicago
    San Jose
    Amsterdam
    Frankfurt
    London
    Paris
    Tokyo/Osaka

    In time, I'd like to have equipment in all of those locations. Or we can go the Akamai route, and put stuff anywhere there's a rack. :) I swear, they're everywhere I've had an opportunity to wander the colo space.

    For just about any provider of English based contact, the rankings of customer location by major geographic area are:

    North East United States
    South East United States
    Europe
    Western United States

    Obviously that would be skewed for the content. For example, a Japanese speaking site, with local interest content would be best placed near JPNAP in Tokyo or Osaka. Likewise, a Russian site with say daily weather reports of Siberia would probably want to be in Chelyabinsk, Russia, and you probably want to use Rostelecom.

    I noticed that Slashdot is now using Savvis. They were offering an amazingly cheap deal on bandwidth recently. I wasn't actively pursuing the bandwidth side, I was looking for the physical location side where my providers of choice would be. I'd be willing to bet they're in the Telegraph building. I'm curious now to who's suite they're in. :)

Re:IPv6 please

[moosesocks]

I don't know..... does Slashdot's network provider allow IPv6?

If they did, would anybody actually use it?

It just seems that at the moment, IPv6 doesn't appear all that necessary.

Re:SourceForge

[rho]

I hate it when SF automatically starts a download. Most of the time I'm not downloading to my local machine, I just want the download link so I can paste it in a terminal window for wget.

It's weird to me because you just KNOW SF is aware that this is annoying and useless. Click a link to download. Don't javascript the download. Morons.