T1 at last!

For those who have patiently followed the ongoing saga of my quest to get a T1 installed in my home office, the T1 is now in and operational! And only two months and 10 days after it was ordered. :-)

Actually, considering that my local telco is Verizon, and their workers have been threatening to strike since early this month, I count myself fairly lucky that it didn't take longer. I've still got my web and email servers running on the DSL line, since I haven't decided yet whether to keep my current configuration -- in which I keep the servers behind the router using NAT and just forward the necessary ports to the appropriate private address -- or put the servers directly on the Internet, since I've got more IPs available with my current service. The upside of making this change would be less router configuration (although I've learned a lot about configuring a Netopia router, anyone who's done it can tell you that it's not the most user-friendly interface), while the downside would be a much greater need for patch and configuration vigilance on the servers. And, of course, I'm procrastinating about it somewhat, since migrating the DNS to new IP addresses will cause at least some disruption while the new records propagate.

I'll probably end up keeping the servers behind NAT, and make the migration sometime over the weekend, since (given the holiday) I can probably safely assume that traffic will be pretty modest anyway.

 

7 Comments

  • If you want to pull this off seamlessly, you'll need to get your server(s) onto both networks, with IIS, and whatever else you have running answering to the class c ip behind your netopia box, and to the routable IP for your T1. Update DNS, allow 72 hours for it to propogate, and then take the non routable ips form behind the nat off the servers. This will require dual nics, preferably, or pumping the T1 onto the same switch as the DSL. The latter is possibly.

  • That's what I love about blogs...there's always someone who's got a better idea than you out there somewhere.



    Thanks for the suggestions, Brian. Perhaps I'll see if I can't scare up a couple of extra NICs. They're certainly cheap enough that there's no good reason not to go out and buy a couple to avoid disruption.

  • What is the T1 costing you a month?

  • For a 384k fractional, I'll was quoted $339/mo. There's some question about whether that was an accurate quote, so it may actually end up being $359/mo.



    And although I'm eligible for a $300 rebate on the hardware, getting a T1 installed can be very expensive. In addition to a $650 hardware charge, and a $450 installation fee (which may yet be waived, but I'm still working on that), my local telco demanded a $600 "construction" charge before they would install the line.



    So it's ended up being a good deal more costly than I'd've liked. But the upside is that I've got a much more reliable connection now, and I can easily upgrade if I need more bandwidth, whereas with DSL -- because of my distance from the CO -- I was maxed out at 384k. And given the increased reliability I'm in a better position to provide services from my office that may help me offset the cost.



  • Brian,



    Thanks a lot for the suggestion. As it happened, I already had an extra NIC in my web server, so all I had to do was enable that, drop a spare NIC in my mail server, and I was good to go. The DNS is updated and should be propagating as we speak.



    Man, but it's nice when things actually work the first time! :-D

  • No problem. I wouldn't have known to check back here had you not blogged with my name in it. Best to email about these sorts of things, until the site emails replies to comments.

  • Hi to all, i have read your article and all post here, thanks for the great info and all the comments, i really got an idea because of this.

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