Ask HN: IT infrastructure on the go (like StartupBus) | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: IT infrastructure on the go (like StartupBus)

9 pointsimrehg7 comments

The Startup Bus is all over HN and I love the project. The sysadmin in me, though, got to wonder: what kind of IT tech one would have to prepare for something like that to work?

- What kind of net access is reliable and high bandwidth enough for going 60mph somewhere, ~30 people using it simultaneously? What would be the backup for that?

- Would one put a server on the bus to help the local network? What would be on that server? A web proxy? Mirroring locally some commonly used things (like hosting jquery, or whatever?) File shares? What kind of redundancy would be useful? E.g. normal hard drives probably don't handle a shaky busride so well, so use either SSD and/or RAID and spares?

- How would the network be accessed on a bus? All wireless? Guess there could be then only one router for the small space to avoid interference and got to be N since 30 people are using it in the same time. Or wire that bus up with a backup wireless? Would everyone be on their separate and walled off section of the local network (so not to screw up accidentally someone else's things)?

I'm really curious what other things to consider that I had no idea one would need.

How it worked last year:

- Internet: We had 3 Sprint wifi hotspots on the bus. You could connect to any of them, but if one started to get overloaded it definitely slowed down. California, Arizona, and Texas were fine, but Sprint seems to be unaware of New Mexico's existence. I had a Verizon Palm Pre and I used the mobile hotspot a lot. I know a couple others did similar things.

- Server: We didn't have an on-bus server. The internet was reliable enough to download things like jquery locally and do all the dev locally. Since my team used git we had an easy time pushing and pulling code from each other even when the internet was spotty. A couple of us are thinking about donating a laptop to run as an onboard server/git repo.

That sounds great, looking at my own questions I'm probably overcomplicating things and wouldn't know it well what works until I tried for real. Or maybe it is all part of the StartupBus idea - work with the given constraints. :)

I wonder how much of the requirements are specific to this situation, or one could put together a mobile-productivity-bundle: some hardware + software to deploy similar environment anywhere on a short notice. :)

Loved the idea of auto-geotagged blog posts that was mentioned on the site, I think. Any chance of sharing it? :)

I think you're right. It wasn't perfect, but it was good enough. :) And the constraints forced everyone to focus on only what needed to get done.

I think we can share it. We'll probably open source the map component. We're rebuilding it this week, if you're inclined to help with that let me know. :)

Sure! I've sent you an email. :)

Check out shiftb's post for how it went last year. This year we have some interesting ideas pretty much along the same lines you were thinking. Let's see how much we actually get done though.

IMHO the most important goal is to keep everyone productive. For that we'll mostly need git hosting, file-sharing and a collaboration suite.

On top of that I had the idea to buffer up content-pushs (videos, photos, blog-posts) on the local server to be pushed to the web whenever internet becomes available. Like I said, let's see how it goes :)

Of course anyone who's interested in this kind of stuff is more than welcome to help out.

As a non-tech/non-sysadmin jumping on board for the ride all I can say is: I'm glad someone's thinking about this!

Inmarsat satellite access will get you internet from pretty much anywhere on the planet with upward line of sight, but it's pretty slow and very expensive.

You should have caching components for all portions of your network stack, to minimize the cost of it (unless that really isn't an issue) -- cache DNS lookups, web requests, everything.

Local wi-fi is probably enough for 30ish people, though you can probably spare the room for switches + cables, you probably don't have to.

Setting up some local version control would probably be beneficial to, though picking which one is possibly political.

Aside from that, the only other high-bandwidth thing that I can think of to mirror locally (that you haven't already mentioned) would be an apt repository, but that's probably overboard. Of course, I don't know the audience.

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