From time to time the subject of Grex residing at a co-location facility has come up. What usually follows is a flurry of opinions but never, that I know of, a serious attempt to get numbers and facts. I'd like us to get those numbers and find out more about how it works and what's available in our area. This is just early discussion and fact-finding. Please don't get feathers ruffled. Our current lease, and insurance coverage, runs until June 1, 2004.184 responses total.
I'd heard about this company from some techies at work. http://onlinetech.net/index.cfm?pageSRC=Connectivity I called 'em up and explained, briefly, what Grex is about and of our needs and our shoestring budget. Here is what my notes show: 1. Phone lines available for dialup access: Yes 2. 24 hour access to a locked cage 3. Located on the north side of Ann Arbor, near Plymouth & Green 4. Air conditioned with backup air conditioning 5. Electricity is included in the monthly rate 6. No insurance needed - they carry the insurance 7. A .0125 mbps connection which can be increased 8. Site power conditioning and backup 9. ~ $188 per month Anyone else know about them? Mark, when you add up our insurance, bandwith, rent and electricity, what is it running us a month? Anyhow, I don't know the techie end of things but I thought this sounded like something we should discuss.
It is something we should discuss, Mary. Thank you for coming with some pricing from a local provider. :)
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Not so weird, and even less weird in the near future. But yeah, 24x7 access has been one of the sticking points.
Currently our expenses are:
80.41 Rent
45.97 Electricity
135.00 DSL
39.58 Liability insurance
------
300.96
If that's really 0.0125 megabit per second connection speed...well, that's less than half the speed of a 28.8 modem (0.0288 mbps). We should look at a 0.5000 mbps or so connection. Are there any bandwidth fees? Whether we want to keep the dial-in lines could be debated...
Cool.
There are still some people who only have dialup access. My family is among them. (I personally can get on through work.)
You would lose at least four grex users (including two paying members) if you cut the dialin lines. No way am I going to telnet to grex except in emergencies. Everything takes twice as long, and sometimes I sit there for 30 seconds with nothing happening.
Yep, there are folks who can only get in by dialup access. Keeping Grex available to them is part of Grex's mission, in my opinion. I called to get the bandwidth issue clarified. Included in the $188 a month is a 0.125 mbps connection. We can increase that in 0.125 increments at $30 each. So for $278 a month we'd be getting 0.5 mbps. At some point it's going to be helpful to have one of our techies start speaking with this gentleman as he is clearly quite proud of the service he offers but it's way over my head. I think he said he's been with the company since 1995, don't know if that's also when the business opened. One of the aspects of this that thrills me no end is how we wouldn't need insurance. That has been an issue in the past and it's only going to get worse, and more costly. I'd much rather put our money into bandwidth than Hastings Mutual.
I don't have those kinds of problems, Sindi. I believe I get faster access via telnet than I ever got with a modem. Also, with a co-locate we would probably expect to have a faster connection than we have now. With the NextGrex hardware, I expect we'll see *much* faster response times with *everything*. Except modems.
I don't think the insurance issue is quite as clear as he suggests. I can see them carrying insurance to protect our equipment from their problems, I _don't_ see them carrying insurance to protect themselves from us. Just as a rental owner will have insurance to protect the television from the roof going bad, but the renter has to carry insurance to protect the roof from the television going bad. However, if their insurance _does_ protect them from us, and us from us, and us from them, it would be a good deal. According to their web site, Online Technologies Coroporation was established in 1994. So it sounds like your contact has been with them almost from the beginning, Mary.
We talked some about the insurance and I explained how we needed to carry liablity coverage under our current lease. He clearly said that wasn't necessary with co-lo. And I must not have been clear - I contacted this company for the first time yesterday. I asked the person I was speaking to if it was his company (mostly is) and how long he'd been there. I wanted to get a feel if this was an established business or a new venture. Hence the 1995 comment.
Thanks for the clarifications, Mary.
Jep, you have a DSL line. I dial in at 28.8 (my 33K modem suddenly started to connect at 26400).
Mary said we WOULD be able to have dialins at this location. I think in that location we can even keep the same phone number. How big a cage is this? Grex will be switching over to the new machine, which is a standard full tower - not too big. However, we run more than one computer. Gryps is a mini-tower, I think. We would quite probably want to keep old-grex around for a while. It's huge. What's the power like? Do they do UPS / backup generators or is all power conditioning up to us? Actually, it'd be nice for a deligation to visit the place. Talk to people face to face, see what it all looks like. This would require getting rid of a lot of junk stashed in the pumpkin now. I consider this a pure win though.
A visit would be a good idea. Their web site doesn't answer your specific questions, Jan, but it does offer hope for the right answers. For one thing, they are in the same building as an Ameritech Data Center. They advertise "Environmental Controls" but not with specifics.
The 24/7 locked cage thing is on the horizon but not immediately available. He's setting it up now and it sounded like weeks rather than months, long before we'd be needing it. This location is really big time into minimizing downtime. It's my understanding they have backup power as part of their service. I would assume that includes power conditioning. But really, someone from staff should collect some questions and give him a call. The price he quoted was for *a* rack. Bring more and I suspect the price goes up. But I'm not the person to talk about our hardware. I more into narcotics. ;-)
Keep the dial-ins. Some of us need them.
A rack should be more than enough space for anything we could want to put in the site. The tower will fit on one shelf, the Sun will fit on another shelf (the bottom one, were it me), with the SCSI disk enclosure on another shelf, perhaps between the tower and the Sun. Actually, two towers can be put side-by-side on one shelf, but it should be a reinforced shelf, to prevent it bowing and leaning the two machines against one another. And there's still room above that for another shelf or two. If the Sun is gone by then, that means just that much more room for the stuff we are using.
Nobody is arguing that we ditch the dialin lines.
see resp 8 here and richard in Agora.
Right; someone suggested it, and others think it would be a good idea. We've seen others say that it is NOT a good idea, given grex's overall mission. I, too, think it is premature, to say the least, to consider turning off the modems.
I got an answer on the insurance issue - there isn't one. We don't have to carry liability and I asked about whether our equipment was covered in the event their building had a fire. He said their insurance would cover our loss. I assume there is some fine print in there somewhere, there always is, but so far I like the answers. Too, regarding power, the facility has a backup power generator, redundant air conditioning units, UPS power and filtration with battery backup, and redundant connectivity. One thing I don't understand is the bandwidth. We would contract for a specific amount and be able to increase that whenever. But if we have a bandwidth "overage" we get billed at a slightly higher rate. So staying within a bandwidth limit is our responsibility? It isn't, say, metered with an upper limit cutoff? Does this make sense to anyone?
That seems to be fairly standard in the industry, from what I've heard. Metering is expensive to do on the fly, so the information is usually aggregated and billed after the fact.
I'm concerned that the traffic on our machine would swell to be limited by the speed and settings of our system if the bandwidth is not actively capped. Especially with the new machine.
That could be difficult to live with. I agree that a Grex staff member should talk to these people. I'm just not sure which staff member. I really know nothing about these kinds of facilities. Marcus and STeve would be better choices if they weren't so much pressed for time. Steve Gibbard would be perfect, except he's not on staff anymore. Steve Weiss? Joe? Kip?
It would make things like spam filtering pretty critical. A long spam message sent to all our users could cost us a lot of money. We'd have to think of all the ways we can control bandwidth usage from our end.
I was thinking of stopping by there tomorrow morning, since I'm going to be in the vicinity any way. I'll ask the questions that have been raised here but not answered.
I suppose if somebody wanted to buy me a plane ticket I could fly out and take a look at the place, but I don't really think that's necessary. I may be mistaken, but I think Online Technologies is the company that used to be BizServe. Somebody from there was involved in the early days of the HVCN project, I think. Later I used to see their equipment in at least one of the Metro Detroit colo facilities, but I don't know much about them. "A rack" has a pretty standard meaning. It should be 19 inches wide, and seven feet high. The ideal is to use rack mountable equipment, which screws into the rack, but the alternative if you've got extra space is to get rack mountable shelves (Graybar or Alltel in Livonia will have them; a few years ago there didn't seem to be a good source for such things in Ann Arbor) and put non rack mountable equipment on those. The standard method of usage based billing is to collect five minute averages of bandwidth use over a month (why five minutes? Because that's the default in MRTG, the program originally used to do this), and then take the 95th percentile. That means you can be over your limit for a little over an hour a day (36 hours in a 30 day month) without it mattering. But not all usage based billing is done that way, so it's worth asking. A Cisco router or switch should be able to very aggressively rate limit the connection, to the point of dropping packets and letting TCP figure out it needs to back off whenever the connection gets over the rate limit. There's enough processor and administrative overhead for that that it's unlikely the colo provider would be willing to do the rate limiting on their own equipment, but if Grex wanted to do that itself the necessary equipment appears to be going for around $800 on EBay. Packeteer makes a much nicer box to do that, which I was going to say would be much more expensive, but I see some on EBay now for around $600. Having spent a lot of time recently designing colo facilities, here are my thoughts on what to look for: I wouldn't worry so much about open rack vs. closed rack vs. cage so much as what the chances are that the equipment will get messed with, and what sort of access you'll have to your own equipment. When dealing with a relatively small amount of equipment, unsupervised access to a cage or a locked cabinet are pretty interchangable, and supervised access to an open rack should be fine too provided there isn't large per-use charge for the supervision. I would hope they have sufficient redundancy in the routing infrastructure that a single router falling over and dying won't take down colo customers, but there's no one right answer to network architecture, and while I can say how I'd do it, they could do thinks rather differently and still be reliable. A question to ask would be whether they are multi-homed and run their own AS (do they use BGP to switch between upstream providers if one goes down?), but that's probably sufficiently basic at this point that the answer would always be yes. Another good thing to look for is that they should be using HSRP (hot standby routing protocol) or some non-Cisco equivalent on the routers their colo customers talk to, meaning that if one of those routers goes down, your default gateway address should seamlessly move to the other one. I would pay particular attention to the cable plant, largely because it's an issue that's often neglected in networks set up by computer geeks rather than telco geeks, and it's an area where confusion tends to lead to outages. As antithetical as it is to the normal Grex way of doing things, good datacenters are run by "cable nazis," with all cables labeled clearly on both ends and neatly tied into place, and run on ladder racks across the ceiling -- never across the fronts of other racks or across the floor. Any connections to things outside of Grex's rack should be delivered by the facility to the rack -- customers running their own cables outside of their racks have a tendency both to make a mess of things and to accidentally unplug the wrong stuff. Cooling is a big issue. If they're reasonably full, do they have enough capacity to keep the place pretty close to 68 degrees on a hot day? If they're reasonably empty, how much currently unused capacity do they have in their cooling system? Does the air conditioner run at night and on weekends (often a problem in multi-tenant buildings)? What's the backup power situation? Ideally they should have a generator that kicks in automatically in the event of an outage. Battery backup is also needed to bridge the gap between utility power going out and the generator kicking in, but whether that's something the customers supply in their own racks or something the facility supplies is really more an issue of what the customer needs to budget for than anything else. What's the on-site support like? Nice colo facilities tend to have somebody there 24 hours a day who you can call and get to cycle power, check cables, or swap cards for you. If not, you'll still be stuck sending people over there if something breaks. On the other hand, having people there constantly costs money, and raises prices. There's a lot I'm not thinking of, but I'm tired and need to sleep. Really, just about anything would be a safer and less hostile environment than the Pumpkin, so my ideals probably aren't anything to hold anybody to.
OpenBSD has a couple of software solutions for self-limiting or traffic shaping. I'm probably overstepping here, but is there room here to discuss something between staying at the Pumpkin and moving to a professional colo space?
Why would such a question be overstepping?
Re #30: Considering that any cooling and any network redundancy they have is going to be better than what we have now, I wonder how important those concerns really are for us. I think a major concern for Grex is going to be after-hours access, since we have volunteer staff members with day jobs.
Gawd no, Kip. Anything you have to offer here is welcome. And I hope I never have to say that again. ;-) I've heard that ICNET also offers co-lo, of a kind. They host machines, allowing 24 hour access, but the machines aren't individually secured. Co-lo is not their focus.
Thanks, Steve. That was very informative.
re 33:
I agree. I'm looking at this from the perspective of how to design
such facilities with as close to 100% reliability as possible, but a lot less
than that would still be an improvement for Grex.
One thing I neglected to mention but should have was network separation.
Would Grex get its own VLAN (or separate physical LAN entirely, but that's
probably overkill), or would it be put on a shared LAN with other customers?
Shared LANs are bad both because it makes it easy for a single customer's
misconfiguration to take down other customers, and because it can lead to
broadcast storms saturating the network.
I think my biggest concern with this would be being sure that we could keep the bandwidth cost within our budget. If that can be dealt with, the rest looks like a pure win to me, at this point in time.
Another question is whether one really gets a whole rack, or just a couple U of space in an existing rack. Also, if we *do* decide to go colo (and honestly, it seems like a *much* better deal than the pumpkin + DSL), would it make sense to buy a rackmount case for nextgrex and move the guys of the new grex computer into it before moving? As Kip noted, OpenBSD has traffic shaping functions built in that could force it to stay under the bandwidth limit.
I stopped by Online Technologies this morning. First, I gave them a printout of this item, through response 32. I also gove them the URL, suggesting they may want to check out the discussion, or even join in. :) I spoke to Ty, who was surprised by how quickly Mary has moved on this, and Bob (I missed his last name, despite two tries. :( ) Yes, this is the company that used to be known as bizserve.com. No names were mentioned, but the Board of Directors has brought in a new management team to change from the previous president's focus on web-hosting to colocation. They are in the process of expanding their existing machine room and moving the offices to the second floor. This morning, when WEMU was reporting a temperature of 69F, the machine room was noticibly warm. They specifically noted that improving the cooling was in progress. I triple-checked the insurance: they find it easier and cheaper to get an umbrella policy that protects everyone than to risk a loss caused by an uninsured client. They CAN do network throttling, if we need it. The cabling was neat, in ladders along the back and under the raised floor. They have a couple of really large APC UPSes in tandem, with a backup generator in the next room. They are looking to replace the UPSes with an even larger one, as part of the expansion. So we won't need our own UPS. The price quoted to Mary was for a 1U space, not for an entire rack. I realise now I should have asked for ballpark quotes on more space. (1U is roughly six inches high, I think.)
Thanks, Joe. I forget the exact measurement for a "rack unit," or "U", but it's a little over an inch and a half. Needless to say, they can't possibly be offering your own locked cage for 1 U of rack space. There are plenty of nice, powerful, 1-U intel-based servers out there, although I suspect nextgrex probably has more disks than would fit in such a case.
I never was much good at estimating distances. :/
If someone would make a estimate of the space we'd need I'll contact OTC and get an updated price quote. I'll make sure it reflects the cage and 24/7 access. Thanks for the road trip, Joe.
Yes, thanks for making the trip out there, Joe.
Yes, thanks, Joe. It would be good to find out what the phone line situation is; do we pay per line, or per connection, or what? What are the prices?
The demark is on the second floor; they can run as many connections as we want. I didn't ask about pricing, though. 'Twill probably be much the same as it is now: we pay installation to OTC and monthly fees to SBC.
It's fairly common for colo providers to charge a cross connect fee for any connections between their tenants and other tenants or phone company demarcs. It's also entirely possible that this colo provider isn't charging cross connect fees, but it's certainly something to ask about rather than making assumptions.
I emailed OTC asking about modem, rack space, phone line connection and what I found out is we'll need to get more specific about our needs for any cost estimate to be helpful. OTC will be able to supply 24/7 access to various sizes of locked cabinets designed for this purpose. They can go "at least as small as 1/3 of a rack if not 1/4". So we need to know how much space we'll require. How many IP addresses are needed? I'd assume two but not sure here. How many servers are involved? Should we price this out at 0.500 mbps? Do we have any special power needs? We can supply our own modems. SBC (or whomever we choose for land line service) will charge a one time connection fee and for monthly service. OTC will need to get a quote from their installers as to the charge for connecting our machine to the point at which the phone line enters their building but there won't be a ongoing monthly charge for access. I'm starting to sense this might be too expensive for our modest means. But who knows. I'd still like to take this to a fairly close estimate. And yes, I know we're like 9 months away from needing a decision, but this is Grex, and you know what that means. ;-)
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Actually, make that 6 months.
I'm glad you've gone ahead and done all this checking, Mary. Are there competitors to OTC in Ann Arbor?
We use ICNet at work to co-lo servers (downtown A^2). Roughly speaking, it sounds like OTC is fancier service at fancier prices than ICNet.
Could we keep our 761-3000 phone number?
It might be worth finding out the price of both a full rack and a third of a rack. That would help with making decisions about how much value there is to getting hardware that uses rack space efficiently. It might be interesting to know the prices for .125 Mbs or so (which is roughly ISDN), and for .5 Mbs, and for 1.5 Mbs. (Is the DSL currently used by grex .5Mbs in each direction?) But maybe we already have enough numbers to sort that out. Do we have a clear picture of whether we could afford to spend more on rent and network connectivity? Would the modem line cross-connect be handled using a 25 pair cable from the demarc point to grex's rack, or by installing the exact number of anticipated lines needed, or what? (This mostly becomes an issue if there is ever a desire in the future to add more lines.) Is there cost-effective server-side 56k modem hardware that will interface with an ISDN BRI these days? If so, upgrading from analog phone lines might make sense.
I'll add the space and speed questions to the list. Thanks. I think Ameritech would be the one to tell us whether our 761-3000 is portable. I'll do anything not to have to call Ameritech. I doubt we'll ever need to increase phone lines past what we ask for initially. But who knows. I'll ask about the demarc point. I suspect we'd simply get fed the number of lines we request and adding more would mean going back to the building's demarc. Regarding whether we can afford something like this. My personal opinion is if we can't affort it now, meaning, pay the monthly fees without going into reserves, then we shouldn't be doing it. I wouldn't support any increase in service which would be dependent on faith that money would follow. Re: Jep's question up there I've not contacted any other co-lo as yet. If someone knows of one that might fit the bill, please mention it here, and eventually I'll get around to calling them. But I thought I'd first go through the process of collecting all the appropriate questions and getting a useful bid. Then we ask the next company the same questions and compare apples to apples. Too, I kind of gave myself this job, not asking for permission from anyone. If someone else would rather take this on, maybe someone with more technical expertise, I'd think that would be very appropriate and I'd not have a single hurt feeling. :-)
You don't have to contact Ameritech Mary, they are now SBC.
Ann Arbor has two phone company central offices, and unless something has changed very recently, phone numbers can't be moved between the two. However, phone numbers can be moved anywhere that stays connected to the same central office. 734 761 is off of Ann Arbor Main (ANARMIMN), which covers everywhere in Ann Arbor except the Southeast corner, and much of the surrounding countryside. It looks from Online Technology's website as if they're in what used to be the ITI building. Is that correct? If so, it should be in the area covered by Ann Arbor Main, and 734 761 should be portable there. I'm not sure contacting SBC would be an improvement over contacting Ameritech.
re SBC vs. Ameritech: as the ads they ran when they changed the name over said, "New name, Same Bloated Company" . . . .
OTC used to be the ITI building, but now they are in a building near the Kroger that became a Busch's, near the hotel with the Guy Hollerins bar.
I think I'm several years out of date on my Ann Arbor strip malls.
*grins* Strip malls? Does that mean strip joints/clubs? I can never work out what people see in them...
No, strip malls are those long buildings full of stores alongside a major road.
OTC is off Green Road, south of Plymouth, behind the Plymouth-Green shopping center.
Okay, thanks for the translation, Scott :)
I've not been paying careful attention to grex's finances, but it seems like there's been a significant increase in money in the bank in the last couple years. I know that some of this reflects the hardware fund and hasn't been spent yet, but I think grex has been running a bit of a surplus if you take that amount out. I agree that it would be wrong to decide to spend money on the basis of wishful thinking that more money will come, but it is also difficult to feel inspired to donate money to an ever growing surplus in the bank. It would be worth figuring things out far enough to be able to say ``we can do <foo> if we raise an additional $50/mo'' and then people can evaluate whether the <foo> inspires them to pledge money towards that.
You're mistaken, Joel. At the beginning of August, 2001 we had $4,634.80 in the bank, and currently we have $4,591.15. So there has been no surplus over the last two years, and in fact a small deficit. Our membership was steady at about 90-100 from 1995 through the end of 2001, but last year it dropped to about 80, and it's been between 75 and 85 since. Last year was a rough year; we finished about $800 below where we started. I'm hoping this year will be better - we cut a phone line to reduce costs near the end of last year, and when our Centrex contract runs out this fall we should be able to cut some more. You can find all the treasurer's reports since 1993 in ~aruba/reports. ~aruba/reports/2002.txt is a summary report for 2002.
(I think devnull's second paragraph is still right on the money, so to speak. While it's great that we've been able to cut expenses as membership levels have declined, it wouldn't hurt to say, "if we had X amount of members, we could afford to do Y." Goals are good; we should have them.)
Co-location may be that goal. :)
(you mean "if we co-locate, we can do without Z members?")
No, I don't; I expect colocation to cost us more. At least partially because we'll be able to do more.
I heard back from OTC and the news is not good if the estimate of what we'll need is accurate. Bid Specifications: - 2 servers - 5 IP addresses - 0.5000 mbps connection - 1/2 rack (20u) of space - all the other stuff mentioned in #0 Monthly fee: $1,077 Anyhow, I thanked him for his time and the offer and explained how this is a little rich for our shoestring 501(c)(3) budget. The door was left open to fine tune the numbers if we find out our space needs aren't quite this large.
Thanks for all your work on this, Mary. Was it the space that pushed the numbers up so high, do you think?
Undoubtedly. If grex could squeeze into 3U or 4U of space, it could probably afford it. Unfortunately, none of our current servers are in rackmount cases.
Space is expensive. The bid for 1u with 1 IP address, one server and the same bandwidth came in at $269 per month.
I'm interested; what would be the price for 4U of space and 2 IP addresses?
Tell you what - I'm not going to take up this man's time with lots of "what if's". When we know what we need then it will be appropriate to go back as for more numbers.
I can promise you that Arbornet isn't paying anywhere near that.
I haven't looked at colo pricing all that much recently, but that rate for rack space sounds generally out of line with the rest of the industry, especially if there's nothing special (like an exchange point switch) in the space.
There is a lot of service that comes bundled with OTC, service we don't need. Tech support on beepers 24/7, remote notification a server is down within 5 minutes of the crash, redundancy for everything but the oxygen in the room, and the list goes on. If you were making money from a business that simply couldn't be down, this would be what you'd need. But that's not Grex.
Yes, and those are all part of just about any standard colo deal (other than having to wake up a tech support person with a beeper -- most places I've dealt with will have somebody on site answer the phone), which doesn't make the pricing any more reasonable.
I'm a little distressed that people aren't willing to talk to these guys anymore, when it seems we went and asked them all the wrong questions the first time around: 1U was clearly too little space, a full half a rack was clearly too much. Why not go for a nice middle ground; ask about 8U of space?
(I don't think it's so much that no one's willing to talk to them anymore as it is that no one wants to talk to them again without having more specifics in hand.)
Right. There are only so many times you can jerk someone around before they write you off as a waste of time. We _should_ see if there are any other co-location options in the local area, and then ask them the questions we asked OTC.
A web search turned up two possibilities:
Chain Communications
3915 Research Park Drive, Suite A5
Ann Arbor, MI 48108
734-260-1979
800-753-2003
and
Able Colocation
888-740-8326
which is located in Flint, Michigan.
Their prices look reasonable, though:
To colocate your web server in our Michigan Data Center, the
fees are only $300 per month. There is a one-time setup fee of
$250. The monthly fee covers data transfer up to 20 GB per month.
Also, they price by server, not size. See
http://www.ablecolocation.com/colocation_services.html
And, of course, there is Msen:
http://www.msen.com/g/server_colocation.html
Since we're not strictly a web server, they might have quibbles...
Flint would certainly mean changing our phone number, and would cause obvious problems for Grex staff when they needed to work on the machine.
The way I left it with OTC is that I would get back with them as soon as we know exactly what we'll need. I think that sounds fair. We're the ones who need to do the work and come up with numbers. I'd also like to see what ICnet could do for us. I'm planning to give them a call sometime next week, unless someone else would rather.
why should grex consider moving until the lease is up and it absolutely has to? grex has always had its own residence, is it going to become suddenly exhorbitantly more expensive to keep things the way they are? the money saved by co-locating would be worth upsetting grex's traditional living arrangements?
We are considering it now to give us time to decide before the lease is up.
Richard, grab a paper bag. Hold it over your mouth. Breathe slowly. That's better. ;-)
what I meant was, shouldn't renewing the lease still be the first option? you can "overconsider" outside options so much that you end up making those options the first choice simply due to the degree of thought you give to them. I mean if the lease can be renewed at or close to current terms, why bother moving? just because co-locating is suddenly a hot idea to save money?
Colocation gives considerable benefits over life in Grex's current home. Not the least of which are some things called air conditioning and environmental conditioning, which will let the computers and their peripherals live longer, healthier lives. Another is (hopefully) better network service. The downsides are cost, accessability, lack of a place to store kindling, and maybe a little fear about physical security. Security in the more general sense also goes both ways, by the way: some colocation facilities might not be terribly thrilled with housing a system that gives access to anyone. I think that the situation now is pretty much universally thought of as less than ideal. In particular, the (physical) environment in the pumpkin sucks, as far as I can tell, with no easy way to fix it.
(on the plus side, the Pumpkin is awfully photogenic.)
Richard, the hope is that we can get a better environment and a faster network connection for less, or at least close to the same, money. If we can't, we can't and so won't make a change. (Well, we _probably_ won't make a change. It really depends on what we can get for what we are willing to pay.)
it makes sense to consider it I guess, I was just thinking of what I've read of mnet's colocating experiences. Such as mnet co-locating out at wwnet and being seriously attacked, and the box being so far away that it was like days before anybody could get out there to check the box and realize the severity of the situation. if co-location is desireable, would it be preferable to co-locate in some member's home, as opposed to in the business location of some third party who may have grex's best interests in mind? Surely grex could consider a co-locate in the basement or storage room of somebody's private residence who is already wired and such if it comes to that right?
I think co-locating in someone's home is a lot more likely to lead to unfortunate situations, really.
Locating in a member's house is undesirable for a number of reasons, which Richard could have listed easily if he'd tried. I guess you don't have to go all the way to Cambridge to find someone totally unencumbered by the thought process!
Re #91: Dan, I, for one, don't think the physical environment in the Pumpkin is a big problem. I wish we didn't have so much junk that costs us tax money every year, but that's also not a huge deal, and is really a separate issue. As far as extending the life of Grex's machines - Our current machine has operated very happily in the Pumpkin for 6 years. I fervently hope that in the future we don't wait that long before upgrading our hardware. So I don't think longevity is a good argument for colocation, either. Saving on insurance, *is*, however. Our premium just went up another $50 for next year, to $525. That's more than our average income in a month, and more than half of what we're paying in rent.
I spoke with Mr. Bill Lockwood today, from ICNet. Here is the lowdown on what they can offer us. 1. They are located in downtown Ann Arbor. 2. 24/7 access is not a problem. We'd have access with an electronic key. I'm going to ask him next time we speak if our equipment is secure to only us. 3. They could string telephone access to our machine but there would be a one time charge for the hookup and for monthly service. Because of the location we'd probably be able to keep our 761-3000 number. It's possible would could buy our lines from ICnet's pool and get a better price than going directly to SBC or another provider. 4. We wouldn't need any liability insurance. If we wanted to purchase loss coverage for our equipment that would be our choice. Their policy wouldn't cover our loss. 5. They provide backup power and power conditioning. He said that during the big blackout of last month their service was up the entire time. 6. We'd sign a 36 month contract. For $219 / month * 4 u of space * 8 IP addresses (5 available for use) * 512K bandwidth For $299 / month we'd upgrade to 768K. Anyhow, here is their web site: http://www.ic.net/newsales/ICMT.html Is this something we should consider?
Yeah, it sounds like a pretty good deal. We'd need to factor in getting a rackmountable case for nextgrex, though.
Equipment at ICNet is in a commonly-accessable room. Between electronic secuity, being so close to A^2's Police HQ, the very limited size and user demographic of their co-lo renters, etc., I don't see much of an issue there. I recall them being tight with extra security cards to get inside - that might be an issue for us. Their co-lo service includes UPS's backed by a (natural gas) generator - everything stayed up right through August's blackout. Though (grumble) not perfect, ICNet's uptime record has been very good for a number of years. You may want to ask Bill if their bandwidth is still "typically but we do not promise any more" burstable to much higher data rates. Last i knew, the charged an extra $150 for 4U of extra rack space...but it's been a while.
The quote was for 4u of space. But I'll get confirmation on that when his email bid arrives.
I was thinking of a second 4U - 8U total - since we're interested in having two systems going. At (my memory of) their price, it would be more reasonable to spend money slimming down our systems.
I think grex could fit in a 2U or 3U machine, with any other system we needed fitting in 1U. I think we could get away with 4U of space. The trouble is tape drives and the modem....
Isn't Ivars Upatnieks still the owner/president of ICNet? If so, he's an old-time M-Netter and might be willing to give Grex a price break.
I'm not sure if he's still associated or not. Regardless, we first need to decide if co-location is something we want to do. The quoted price is close enough for us to make some decisions. I hate to be a gloom and doom type person but I think liability insurance is going to be an albatross around Grex's fiscal neck. Each year it gets more and more expensive and harder to get. I'd much rather put that money into bandwidth. But that's my concern. I don't know if it's shared by many others. Our lease has one more option to renew, taking us from 06/01/04 through 05/31/05. After that we may be able to get a simply extension or it may mean renegotiating the terms. We need to notice by February 1, 2004 as to whether we'll be renewing for another year. So any decisions regarding co-location should be made by early to mid-January, at the latest. I'd like to know if we could afford this and how much it would cost to get the necessary racks. If anybody else has any co-location ideas it would probably be a good idea to get them on the table now, to allow for public discussion, before any decisions have to be made.
(For what it's worth, ICNet was Grex's first ISP, back when its internet connection consisted of one 28.8kbps modem.)
Unless it's really recent, Ivars is still the owner/president of ICNet. I've no idea if he'd be interested in giving grex any discount.
If anybody has ideas for providers who might give discounts on colo, or other donors who might give something, it's probably much better to handle this in mail to baff (board and staff) than in the coop conference. To air that sort of thing in public puts pressure on the potential donor, and is as likely to lead to resentment as to generosity.
That's a good point. My apology for posting the suggestion about discounts in public.
I had a conversation yesterday with a representative at provide.com, an ISP located in Ypsi. Without going into a lot of details about Grex, and our needs, it looks like they could offer us colo space, at $100.00 per month, plus phone lines. We wouldn't need insurance. Electric is included. They have backup power. We'd have access to the equipment approx. 12 hours a day, 7 days a week. We wouldn't need to be housed in a rack. That price would include a 50 gig feed. At present that feed isn't capped but "they're working on it". Stringing phone lines sounded like something they don't do routinely, but they'd be willing to get creative in terms of finding a way. Anyhow, I think this sounds interesting. If others do, then I'd suggest someone from staff give him a call and see if such an arrangement could work. We've got some time to consider such a thing, but not a lot. We need to give our landlord notice about our next lease by the end of January, 2005.
I think it's provide.net, not .com.
Wow. It's hard to see anything wrong with that scenario. What would the additional cost be to support RetroGrex, assuming the numbers you report above are for NextGrex?
Sounds great, Mary. I'd like to hear some more details.
aruba, can you provide an average monthly figure for grex "operating expenses"? I.e. rent, insurance, electricity, phones, network? It would be helpful to have a figure against which to bounce any alternative location scenarios that come our way.
There's a lot more information we'll need to get before knowing if this is a solution for Grex. How many IP addresses will we need and will that increase the cost? What about retro-Grex? How many phone lines could they supply and will we need? I think the next step has to be someone who knows about our needs and equipment talking with provide.net. I'm not qualified. Maybe Joe, or Jan, or Kip? I'd be happy to pass along the contact information, just let me know. I think one of the things we all should talk about now is phone lines. Could we get by with one?
I very much approve of getting Grex more cost effective housing, but I don't really want to get involved in the project right now. I just want to work on NextGrex. Anyway, I don't know the answers to most of the questions. I think Grex now has a block of 8 IP addresses, but it seems perfectly possible to me that one would suffice, but I don't really know.
I''d say that we need at least two phone lines, maybe three. I have no problem with staff having a line that is last in the queue or otherwise more often available. Having staff be able to dial in to grex to fix things without getting shut out by us dialers is worth supporting, in my book.
This response has been erased.
FWIW, I use Provide.Net for my ISDN access. I will undertake to talk to them in the next day or three, certainly no later than next Tuesday.
Thanks, Joe. I've sent email.
I think we should continue to pursue the library option, which seems to me better than this.
At this stage, I don't see this as "either/or." We are gathering information prepatory to making a decision. The more information we have, the better the decision is likely to be.
We have a provide.net mug. Several people have told us they are very happy with provide.net, and I spoke with them once and got a good impression. They are honest and friendly and competent. But so is MCRS - do they also do colocation? I don't understand the terminology well enough to ask very detailed questions. Either of these ISPs ought to get enough extra customers from happy grexers to make it worth their while. It would be lovely to start off the new grex in the new year in a new place. Or does the lease run until later and we just need to decide by January? I think we need at least two phone lines. I tend to tie up one of them for an hour or two at a time. And maybe a way to send a message to whoever is on the phone line that someone else wants to use it.
The lease expires next summer; June 30, I think. However, the landlord needs notice of what we are going to do.
Our lease runs through May 31st, 2005. We need to give 120 days notice of our intention to move or renew. This year we'd also need to renegotiate a new lease or a new renewal clause.
Four months? Sounds excessive to me. A lot can happen in that time.
We're talking Grex here. The standard lease asked for three months notice, we ask that be extended to four. I still think we'd have trouble finding new housing, arranging phone lines, and moving in that period of time. Heck, just making a decision would take at least 90 days.
I talked to Dr Strange today. A fun guy to listen to. :) He says we can get some space upstairs in the machine room for the price of the bandwidth: $100/50GB Transferred/month. More bandwidth would be similarly priced. Electricity, air conditioning, insurance (for the building, not our stuff), etc, are included in the price of the bandwidth. WE *might* want to consider insurance of our own, for our equipment, and maybe for the liability of damage our equipment might do, but Provide.Net won't require it. (Based on our experience, both with damaged caused and the price of insurance, we can reasonably decide to forgo the effort, in my opinion.) If we want a full rack in Southfield, the price is $400/mo, for 15-amp service. Plus bandwidth. More amps means more money. Southfield offers 24/7 access, while the Ypsilanti location offers "when open" access (currently 0800-2200 daily). In Ypsilanti, we would have to negotiate the telephone lines with the telephone company, just as we do now. So here's a question: How much bandwidth do we currently use on our DSL? I know that Kip reset the password, to allow him to look at the modem's logs. So what do they show?
The price is right with Providenet if you ask me. I think we can probably get away with less than 24 hour access. Plus if it is located in Ypsilanti, it will be easier for staff to have access. If it were located in Southfield, I think it would be too difficult for staff to get there.
The board and staff present at the board meeting last night all felt co-locaton at provide.net sounded like a good deal and a good fit for our needs and budget. Joe was going to call back with a few more questions, but, this may just work.
The questions included what happens if we go over our bandwidth allotment and can we lock in the space now but not move in until May. Naturally, we'd not begin paying until we moved in.
Would it cost any more to move in January and continue paying for the old lease but not the electricity or insurance or bandwidth?
An empty pumpkin room would mean no electric charges, but as long as we are renting at the pumpkin we'd need to follow the rules of the lease, including carrying liability insurance. It might be possible to pay off the balance of rent due and end the lease early, allowing us to cancel the insurance. Bandwidth is on a yearly contract, running through sometime in July 2005. We're going to check and see if we can get out early, with a reasonable cancellation penalty. Cleaning out the pumpkin will take some time.
I checked our DSL contract, and it says that if we terminate the agreement early, we are liable for 75% of the remaining monthly charges. Our contract runs through July 15th. It automatically renews for another year unless we tell them otherwise by June 15th.
So let me see if I'm thinking this through correctly. Right now, in the pumpkin, our costs for rent, electric, two phone lines, DSL and insurance run around $300 a month. At provide.net, assuming we'll have two phone lines, our monthly expenses would be around $150 a month. So how many months early could we move to co-lo and break even on expenses? Someone who knows the exact amounts of the different expenses and is really good at math is needed here. I have someone in mind... ;-)
Well, it looks to me like moving out of the Pumpkin would save us, between now and the end of May, per month, 61.02 Electricity 46.00 Insurance 33.75 25% of our DSL bill ------ 140.77 In other words, if we moved today we could pay off our lease, cancel the insurance and get a refund, cancel the DSL and pay 75% of the rest of what we're contracted for. So we'd immediately begin paying $140.77 less per month than we pay now. If provide.net is really $100/month, that means moving at any time saves us $40/month until the end of May. Phone lines will cost $42 each to move. To me, the provide.net deal sounds too good to be true, so I'd like to see something in writing.
It never hurts to get something in writing.
I suspect, with the move, we'd probably drop from four phone lines to, maybe, two. More overall savings, after installation. Could we empty the pumpkin in a month's time? Once we get all that legacy stuff out of there, we'll owe less in property tax too. Not even sure we'll pay any property tax in co-lo. Thanks for the figures, Mark.
Thanks for the mark, figures.
Point.
Since provide.net is outside the city limits, you are right, Mary: we won't owe Ann Arbor property tax on our stuff. I'll add a written offer/contract to the list of questions.
If property tax is paid yearly, is it prorated if you move out of town in mid year? Any further information about the Mallet's Creek Library option? Jim and I can recycle any obsolete equipment that nobody bids on. Greenboard, cpu, copper (pure or mixed with plastic), aluminum, magnetic, mixed metals - all taken at Friedman's, the rest (plastic) is trashed. We have received $2 per bikeload (big load) for the good stuff that only took 10 hours to disassemble.
Point.
Re #142: Sindi - I'm assuming that our Insurance policy is prorated if we cancel it. That's certainly true of car insurance. Anyone have any experience with liability insurance?
Point.
Re. 142: Two bucks for 10 hrs. work? Good thing it's for a good cause.
Provide.net gave us a written quote, which I presented to the Board this
evening:
Provide.net
663 S. Hewitt Road
Ypsilanti, MI 48198
(734) 480-4200
(888) 480-4200
Quote for Co-location of GREX systems
Co-location of GREX Computer $100.00/month
Includes: 50GB transfer allocation
connection to 100mb netowrk
connection to UPS
connection to KVM
physical access to computer 10am to
10pm any day (except holidays)
physical access available other times
by arrangement
Extra bandwidth available in 50GB increments at $50.00/month.
Second computer (sharing bandwidth with first) $30.00/month.
Phone lines for modems must be ordered by you (bill in your name).
No extra charge will be made for cross-connects (running
phone lines from our phone box to your modems).
No signed contracts are necessary. Insurance is not required.
The bandwidth is measured by generating graphs from the router. If we are consistently over our allocation, they will contact us to arrange either to cut back or usage or jump to the next price-point, effective the next month.
The board voted to make this move, by February 1st. One thing that needs to be decided, quickly, is how many phone lines we'll need to have installed for this new location. I believe we now have 4 dialup lines available. I'd love to see Jan run recent data on usage but I'm not sure he's available for this. I'd also like to get some feedback from our dialup users on whether they'd be willing to have us cut to two lines, meaning they'd get a busy signal from time to time, with the idea that such a move could save us a chunk of change. We'll only start saving money when we are out of the Pumpkin. So we need to be out of the Pumpkin. The plan, so far, is to empty the Pumpkin by February 1st, pay off the remainder of our lease which runs through May, and cancel our insurance getting the unused seven months of premium back. We'll no longer be paying for electric at that time. We'll need to look into the DSL lease to see if we could pay a penalty and be out of that contract sooner. Which leaves the problem of emptying the Pumpkin. I suspect that will be a challenge but one we'll meet as long as we set a firm deadline. Do we need a new item to discuss this?
Does paying off the lease cost less than paying seven months of insurance?
What exactly are "GB"? Gigabits per second (as in "Gigabit ethernet")? Gigabytes per second? Gigabytes for the entire month? Gigabits for the entire month?
Gigabytes per month. 50GB/month translates to roughly 144kbps, which is faster than our current DSL, I'm told.
Two things: (1) I believe we can use pf in OpenBSD to do some form of traffic shaping, to avoid going over our bandwidth allocation. (2) Can the nextgrex machine be ready to go into colo by February 1? Maybe the best thing to do would be get everything ready and do the switch before or during the move into colo.
It would be wonderful if NextGrex was ready by late January, but I don't think we should wait to move for this to happen. Firstly, we have no idea when it will happen. Second, we need to cut back on expenses sooner, not later.
I don't mind cutting back to 2 dialin lines. I have not had a busy signal for at least a year with 4 lines. I signed up for $5 with access-4-free which entitles me to 10 hours/month free internet connection and could telnet instead if I were in a hurry for grex. $5 is a one-time fee and if you go over 10 hours it is $1/hour or $10/month max. There is also m-net from which you could telnet to grex if you paid to be a member. USOL is $7/month for use M-F 6-6 (?not sure of the exact hours). Provide-net is $10/month and is a worthy cause. I wonder if they could set up some way to dial into their own phone number and thence telnet to grex (but not use any other internet services) for some minimal charge for such an account.
M-net is discussing abandoning all dialup access as a part of their next colocation deal; I am not certain that they have decided to go forward with that, but I wouldn't make any future plans relying on M-net's dialup access.
This is a good thing.
We need to figure out what to do with all the stuff in the pumpkin.
There are a couple categories.
(1) A small amount of stuff that is actually handy to have to at hand
when working on the system. For the Sun we have a couple ring
binders with very useful documentation that I pretty often refered
to. It would be good to have a pen and a notebook, possibly some
stickly labels or tape so you can put notes on things. A supply
of blank backup tapes. Miscellaneous little screwdrivers,
needlenose pliers, etc. It would be nice if we could leave a
box at the colo with small collection of this stuff.
(2) A collection of spare parts for active machines. The size of
this collection will be much reduced once the Sun is no longer
an active machine. We won't have to keep as many spares once we
are on a more normal machine, where you can readily go out and
get new parts on short notice. This stuff needs to be kept
someplace where we can get our hands on it if necessary. I guess
somebody's house.
(3) An awful lot of crap. All sorts of old things we don't need any
more. Give it away or throw it away, I say.
I'm going to try advancing the next Grex project.
I checked our DSL contract, and it says that if we terminate the contract early, we must pay 75% of the remaining charges. That's through July 15th.
So what does that amount to? ($)
That beats the 100% I was expecting. Thank, Mark, for checking the fine print.
And the total is...
I think we are paying something like $130 or $140 per month for DSL
OMG. What bandwidth?
7 * ~$130 / month * 75% = ~$680. That's a hell of a big chunk of change for grex to "eat".
We'd be eating it even if we didn't move.
How do you mean? If grex wasn't moving, it would need the DSL line for its internet connection, right? Note that I'm all in favor of the move. The question is, is there an optimal timing that avoids as much of these "throw away" costs as possible?
I would think the optimal day would work out to be the day on which our pumpkin lease expires. I think provide.net is cheaper than pumpkin + insurance + pumpkin electric bills. So even if we still had to pay full price on DSL, we'll start saving money the moment we are out of the pumpkin. I don't know when the pumpkin lease expires. By the way, moving Grex's computer to provide.net is the easy part about vacating the pumpkin. The hard part is going to be getting all that other crude out of there. At least we know where to put the computer. It's the stuff we don't want very much that's the hardest.
I would think the optimal day would work out to be the day on which our pumpkin lease expires. I don't agree. That's asking for something to go wrong, like the supposed computer-mover calling in sick.
I think Jan meant in that last month of rental :)
The following is my recollection of our monthly expenses. Mark or
anyone else should feel free to jump in and fine tune the numbers if
needed.
Our monthly expenses, not including phone lines, come to
approximately $325 a month. That's:
$80 rent (due through May 2005)
$70 electric (as long as we are running computers)
$45 insurance (as long as we have the space)
$130 DSL
At Provide we're projecting montly expenses at $180 month, again not
including phone lines. This will buy us more bandwidth and hookup
for a second machine. We won't need liability insurance. We won't
be paying electric.
So the plan goes something like this - we move Grex into Provide on
February first. March 1st we're out of the pumpkin. Completely
out. We'll pay off the remainder of our rent and turn over keys.
We'll cancel our insurance and, hopefully, get a refund on the
unused months of coverage. The policy runs through sometime in
August, I believe. The DSL gets cancelled by February 15th,
hopefully, and the modems will then be at Provide. We pay off the
rest of the DSL contract that runs through July 15th ($130 x 5 x
75%. Again, these numbers are a approximate, but close enough to
get an idea of what we're getting into.
So if the plan comes off as above here are the projected
expenses not including those related to phone lines:
Pumpkin Provide
January $325 $0
February $290 $180 (estimated 1/2 usual electric)
March $728 $180 (pay off Pumpkin lease, stop
electric, no further insurance
needed, DSL contract paid off)
April $0 $180
May $0 $180
By the end of our Pumpkin lease, at the end of May, we'll have spent
$2063. If we simply stayed at the Pumpkin and didn't go co-lo, we'd
have spent $1625 and still be obligated to pay for 45 days of DSL,
or approx. $200. So moving early isn't going to cost us a lot and
it will give us a much faster connection.
The real trick is going to be to get the Pumpkin empty by March
first. Lynne and I have a plan and it involves threats and sledge
hammers. But we'll save that for another item. ;-)
And I sure hope my math above floats. Someone double check it
please.
Yes, Mary and I have a plan. I don't know if her plan is the same as mine but I was thinking we could wreak havoc and destruction on the contents of the pumpkin. And maybe this plan will involve tequila. I dont know.
Tequila. I could be talked into it. Easily. If we end up getting a rebate on the insurance, which I think we will, then that's another $225 we'll have in favor of being out of the Pumpkin by March 1st. So it really gets very close to break even.
Doesn't keesan know of some scrap dealers & such who'll actually pay (quite modestly) for old computer hardware as scrap? Dim memory is that it has to be taken apart (chassis metal from circuit board from rubber feet from plastic from etc.), but that might be needed for honest local disposal anyway.
We can recycle everything not wanted if someone will deliver it here in manageable chunks (a cubic yard at a time, maximum). Friedman's Nonferrous Metals pays about 10 cents/pound for the nonferrous parts (even more for some bits if we spend a lot more time separating metals). Plastic goes in the trash, ferrous (magnetic) by the curb in a bin. Jim spends the $2 at the local Indian store as a reward for his 10 hours of time, per bike load. Green circuit boards are recycled for their gold content. We take floppy and hard and CD-ROM drives apart down to components and there is some aluminum and copper along with ferrous, plastic, and 'white metal'. This won't make grex any money but if there is not too much stuff, it could ALL be emptied out into some place other than the pumpkin as soon as the move is made to Provide.net. I volunteer my building site if you give us a few days notice to clear a spot. People could sort it out there (dress warmly, but it is enclosed and lighted and there are space heaters). Anything not currently in use could be moved there now, with a promise to sort it out within a month or two. Any volunteers for storing Current Grex actually used hardware after the move? I don't follow why NextGrex could not be set up Next Week at provide.net.
Mostly because we haven't planned for that kind of transition, Sindi.
The vast bulk of the "junk" in the Pumpkin is old Sun hardware. Some of that belongs to mdw (a few Sun 4 cards), and probably a few other pieces will have to be pried out of STeve's cold, dead fingers, but the rest will go easily enough. Maybe a half ton of sheet metal and 100 pounds of the old, big Sun boards that metals recyclers drool over.
The sheet metal could probably be dropped off at the recycling center directly (if they don't charge you for the privilege) and the 100 pounds of boards might fetch $20 at Friedman's. If it helps to have a place to move this all to while working on it, my offer still stands. With a day's notice I could make space on the enclosed but unlocked front porch to drop it off.
That's a generous offer, Sindi, but I'm not at all sure folks are going to have the time to tear this stuff apart in for $20. We need to be out on a deadline or it will cost us far more than $20. Grex doesn't do well with deadlines. So I suspect we'll take the "straight ahead" approach that worked well for Jan and simply give a move-it-or-lose-it date to those staff interested in removing what's worth keeping and the rest will be dumpstered by anyone willing to help lift and drop. I expect that deadline will be set at our next board meeting.
We are only a few blocks from the grex dumpster and Eric offered his truck and we offer our backs to help move it. We will recycle anything not picked up by whatever date we choose. My porch is larger than the dumpster. The truck can't be a whole lot smaller than the free space in the dumpster and it could make several trips if needed. When can people pick things up from the pumpkin? Jim wants his electrical meter back after the move. Help recycling what nobody has removed from my porch would be appreciated but is not necessary - the two of us have done truckloads of computers before. Please give us a day's notice so I can empty the porch first. It is 5.5' x 14' x 7.5'. I have some more covered space outside where we could very temporarily store the shelving, computer rack, and chairs, if absolutely necessary, to give people a way to pick them up without getting into the pumpkin. We have places to dispose of ferrous metals that won't fit in recycling bins even folded. We don't get paid for ferrous metals - if someone else wants to transport the ferrous metals to some place that pays, and give the money to grex, let us know. This is not a way to make money. We will gladly donate our time to avoid wasting materials. We can make space now if there is anything to move now.
That is indeed a generous offer, Sindi. You'll have more than a days notice, I'm sure. Thanks you very much for helping with this.
That's very gracious of Eric, Jim, and Cindy.
This is Jim's way of helping with the hardware end of things ;=)
TROGG IS DAVID BLAINE
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