Well, today I started out my day with a trip to the datacenter. Now most of you will think this is boring but I think its fun. I don’t actually need to do anything but a quick once over of the servers and make sure everyone is happy and then pick up the drive caddies I was missing yesterday. Well, I made it out there and we have new neighbors. This datacenter is considered a “lights out” facility where there is no one at the facility. Its kinda crazy to think how these datacenters work. Tens of millions of dollars in servers, major internet traffic running through this place all day everyday and there is no one there. So this place was recently bought out by a large ISP and we were customer #2 in the building which was crazy. Its a very old home but very redundant. This building used to run 1/2 of the Sprint and T-Mobile traffic in the South. Very robust place, just very old and dingy… but kinda homey. I like the place.
Our sales guy from our colo provider reached out today and asked if we wanted to upgrade to 10gig umetered internet… $500/month. In dork terms, this is like horsepower on a car. It feels amazing to say you have 500hp but realistically you just drive to work everyday. 10gig bandwidth is tempting though…what other projects can I do? I have another large continuous scraping job we are looking to do that will suck down almost a all of the bandwith we ahve….if we upgrade to 10gb, I need to buy a bigger firewall.
Well, I made it to the warehouse to boot up the servers, update the firmware and install the operating systems. Once server will run XCP-NG and the other will run TrueNAS. Grabbed the hard drives was staring to load XCP-NG when I realized this server is setup with a BOSS card and it’s best to use M.2 SSDs and not SATA SSDs. So, out come the SATA drives and I have to order a pair of M.2 drives. THere goes that install
I went to install TrueNAS on the 2nd server and guess what.. I forgot boot drives. Im running 6 SSDs for storage but apparently I didn’t think I needed boot drives. Well, I pulled the boot drives from the XCPNG server and put them in this one. Waste larger drives, but hey. I got the server up and running! I feel accomplished.
As far as the email campaign… its about unchanged from yesterday. Through the process we have had lots of people unsubscribe. A couple people marked it as spam. Will email the remaining of the list again next week but in a different way. Going to try a FOMO style email. Thank the people who did sign up and say we are excited they are excited, then see if any other the other providers who read the email get some FOMO and sign up. Oh, and I’ll probably include the sign up link this time. Somehow in the excitement/nervousness I forgot the signup link on the first email.
I spent the rest of the day writing these blog articles. This blog was a thought when I couldn’t sleep last night. People love building public stories so I said what the heck. Im gonna log my journey if people like to follow along they can. Tomorrow we are sitting down with our business partners and building a plan of attack for next week. Next week we start the cold calls. Wish us luck.
Registered providers: 2
Customers: 0 (we dont launch until Sept 1)
Completed Services: 0
