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Comment by meifun | Hacker News Reader

I owned an ISP in upstate NY for a few years. Basically hosting websites for clients. I bought a used APC NetShelter cabinet and put 2 large UPS's in the bottom along with and Air conditioner cooling fan in the top. I have a Sun Fire V 1 u server that was running apache. I have a few Sun Blade 100 Workstations handling mail and a few more handing DNS, NTP, etc. All I remember spending at least 25K on all of this.

One interesting thing that I remember was trying to build a drive array back then. Trying to figure out how many IDE drives I could stuff into a 4U case to use as what we call NAS now a days.....

I did this from my house and had to upgrade to 200amp electrical service and have dedicated circuits run to my house. In order to do this the phone company had to dig up part of the road and it took them a week.. Not convenient for all that traffic down my street.

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The phone company gave up on the idea of digging in our case.

We had stupidly not thought the phone situation through, so we got offices first and investigated the phone line availability second. Luckily this was before de-regulation so the incumbent telco was legally obliged to provide service no matter what at a fixed price per line.

Unluckily we'd gotten offices in the embassy area in Oslo. Unlucky because due to the embassies, this area was one of the first in Norway to get upgraded to an automated exchange, and said exchange had last seen a major upgrade in the 1930's or thereabout (given that this was before commonplace internet access spurred a flurry of exchange upgrades), and was near capacity - until we arrived this was not seen as a problem, as the area was fully built up and there was seemingly no reason to expect any big increase in number of lines that couldn't be accomplished just fine mainly by line splitting (multiplexing two lines onto one copper connection to the exchange) that worked fine for voice calls, but not so well for modems...

Their solution turned out to be to run a massive cable largely hanging in the trees along a major road from the nearest newer exchange with decent capacity a few hundred meters away, through a hole cut in one of our windows, to a multiplexer cabinet they installed in our office.

They did tell us they were going to get it sorted out "properly" but by the time we moved to new offices they still hadn't been able to.

At least they did it quickly.

wow, running a cable through trees into a hole in a window. That sounds crazy, but a conversation piece for sure!

They ran my circuit to the outside of my house, but would not drill a hold for me to connect it to the inside wiring I had already in place.

I tried to do this myself, measured wrong and ended up tapping into my main power wire with a 1/2 inch 2 foot long drill bit and setting my house on fire. Thankfully the damage was minimal and I was up and running a few days later once power was restored to my house.

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