______________________________________________________________________ NetSide Corporation - Internet Services Provider ______________________________________________________________________

NetSide System Information
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Look Ma! This system ain't a PeeCee!
NetSide can honestly beat any "good" deal you may have gotten so far from the hoopla masters!
NetSide owns all its equipment and facilities outright, and can pass along the savings to its customers.
This is what you get to use for just 50 cents a day:

Connectivity

NetSide provides Internet connectivity for client machines on the following hardware platforms:

Network and Communications

NetSide is connected directly to the Internet backbone via a high speed point-to-point full T1 link (1.544 Mbps) into the MCI backbone (at Pompano Beach). A Cisco 4000 router is used to direct the in-house Ethernet TCP/IP network traffic to and from the Internet. To help reduce the network load and improve performance, two Ethernet 10-BaseT interfaces, connected to separate AT&T StarLAN 10 hubs (with blinking lights :-) forming in effect subnets, are used on the servers. Each subnet connects to a different Ethernet port on the Cisco router. High-speed serial ports for dial-in access are provided by 64-port SerialSmart asynchronous communications controllers for the SUN SPARC platform from GNP Computers. To ensure the quality of dial-up/leased lines and unlimited future growth capacity, NetSide uses an OC3 fiberoptics cable connected directly to the BellSouth telco switch. All our analog dial-in modems are top of the line Microcom DeskPorte FAST+, supporting both V.34 and V.FC protocol connections at 33.6Kbps. We also suport V.90 56K and ISDN dial-in via Ascend MAX 4048 routers.

Server Hardware

The main host sunny.netside.net is a SUN SPARCstation 10 MP, using dual 75 MHz HyperSPARC processor modules with 1 MB of e-cache each, and 512 MB of RAM. A second SUN SPARCstation 10MP serves as dedicated business Web server. The third SUN SPARCstation 10MP is used for handling a full USENET news feed. The fourth SUN SPARCstation 10MP is a dedicated Web server for high-volume sites. A fifth SUN SPARCstation 10MP is kept for special projects and as a backup machine. In an emergency, this machine could be configured to act as the main host, web server or news server, as it is unlikely that more than one server is out of order at the same time. To date, we have 51 GB of fast SCSI-2 hard disk space (Seagate and Quantum) on our servers, including two 9 GB dedicated news drives, and 1.5 GB total of RAM in 64 MB simms. Backups are performed with an 8mm Exabyte 8505XL tape drive, which can dump 5 GB of information on a single 8mm tape cartridge without data compression. An 8mm Exabyte 8500 tape drive is used for dumps on the other servers. The tape and CD-ROM drives are on another SCSI-2 Sbus controller, separated from the system disk drives. Other nice features, benefitting mostly systems staff, are 19" Sony Trinitron high resolution color consoles and GX graphics cards for Web pages development, several C-Itoh ascii terminals for system monitoring and programming, as well as other UNIX-based computers that are generally not accessible to the public.

Emergency Provisions

Besides redundant servers, NetSide is also prepared to operate in emergency conditions, such as city-wide power failures as experienced during Hurricane Andrew. Housed in a solid concrete block structure, we don't expect heavy storm damage to occur. Our fiber rack (for telephone and data lines) has 3 rows of battery backup rated for 8 hours of continuous operation. NetSide owns 2 emergency generators: an extended-run heavy-duty Coleman Powermate Vantage (14HP 2cyl electric start gas engine - 7000W), and a portable medium-duty Dayton (5HP gas engine - 2200W).

System Software

The operating system used by NetSide on all servers is Solaris 2.4 and 2.5.1, SUN Microsystems' implementation of SVR4 UNIX. The standard O/S features were augmented with GNU utilities, including the C/C++ GNU compilers, Perl and Python. Shell users can chose between the traditional shells supplied with Solaris (sh, jsh, csh, ksh), or other popular shells (bash, tcsh, zsh). Those not familiar with UNIX commands can use a friendly menu interface for their system command needs. Manual pages are available online for virtually every system command. NetSide offers SLIP/PPP graphical interface access and a home page at no extra charge! In fact, our setup allows the user to select at login time the preferred method of system access.

Utilities and Miscellaneous Net Software

NetSide users enjoy a wide variety of Internet information search, access, retrieval, and forwarding tools. The CERN httpd 3.0 World Wide Web server on port 80, http://www.netside.net, allows each user to create and maintain a personal homepage (simple template provided to get you started). NetSide maintains a User's White Pages Directory, accessible world-wide. For those that prefer the NCSA web server, a stand-alone ncsa_httpd daemon is running on port 8080. We also support commercial Web pages for our business account customers. Commercial Web sites with domains are running on our dedicated Apache Web server. NetSide's main home page contains links to popular sites conveniently arranged by topics of interest. NetSide also maintains an anonymous FTP server, ftp://ftp.netside.net/pub, as well as a gopher server, gopher://sunny.netside.net, which allows users to download free Internet access software for their PCs. We support several popular packages, among them Netscape, Trumpet Winsock, telnet, Eudora, Free Agent, Archie, FTP and Gopher for Windows. Online e-mail packages include UNIX mail, elm, and pine. Users can chose from several text editors, such as vi, pico, emacs, joe. Some may prefer to communicate online using the talk, ntalk or ytalk utilities, or chat live with other users on icb and irc servers. And even though NetSide runs the Solaris 2.4 operating system, a System V based flavor of Unix, many utilities (and even certain games) were ported from the BSD environment. Unlike on most other systems, NetSide user are free to select from a choice of various Unix shells, a friendly ascii menu, SLIP, or PPP when accessing the system.

With 18 GB of dedicated news storage, NetSide offers a full, uncensored USENET feed, accessible locally with the tass, tin, nn, rn or trn newsreaders, as well as via popular PC news readers, such as Free Agent or Netscape.

In case you wonder why some of NetSide's own Web pages look so plain, here's the reason: have you ever tried to access a graphics-only page through lynx? NetSide's own home pages are designed to work with any browser, from any environment, even plain ascii terminals, and also accommodate users with slow modems who may not appreciate downloading Godzilla's graphic image. We rather lose in the glitter department when compared with other overbearing providers, and remain functional for all our users!

We have worked hard to offer South Florida a professional Internet access service at competitive prices. Users are encouraged to express their desires, and NetSide will continue to tailor services based on popular demand. Please do not hesitate to contact us with your suggestions and (we hope not as many :-) complaints at admin@sunny.netside.net

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