Geographic Location

[yellowfruit]

Just purely for curiousity, me and a friend - who both have unixhsells - were wondering what the rough location of the datacenter was? It came up when he was creating an SSL certificate actually.

Matthew

[matta]

It is in Atlanta, Georgia.

[adkap]

I had a similiar conversation with a friend who is co-leasee with me on our VPS. I did some research, which is confirmed by Matta's previous post. Here's what I did in sequence:

First I popped up a Terminal on my Mac, and ran 'traceroute adkap.com' (start the bruting all you script kiddies). That yeilded all the router hops to my VPS:

[dhcp-5-95:~]
% traceroute 72.9.228.54
traceroute to 72.9.228.54, 64 hops max, 40 byte packets
...
[SNIP]
...
10 ge6-0.chr1.atlanta2-ga.us.xo.net (71.5.186.134) 31.215 ms 31.227 ms 30.835 ms
11 206.181.187.110 (206.181.187.110) 32.039 ms 31.743 ms 31.268 ms
12 65.254.48.2 (65.254.48.2) 32.197 ms 33.473 ms 33.460 ms
13 72.9.242.247 (72.9.242.247) 31.452 ms 31.771 ms 31.984 ms

11-14 are not really useful at this point, but the hostname of router/hop 10 reveals that my packets are in or around Atlanta, GA, USA (...atlanta2-ga.us...). Our first clue :)

This was not enough for me. As a bored geek, I want to know the rack its on... So I continued to pound away. I see that router 10 is operated by XO. I know that XO is a tier-3 ISP, providing backbone services across the nation. Anotherwords, router 10 is most certainly on a very fat pipe. Its comforting to know that packets destined to my machine are only boucing around 3 routers once they get off the internet backbone.

Now to finish tracing the path...
Router 11:
[dhcp-5-95:~]
% whois 206.181.187.110

OrgName: XO Communications
OrgID: XOXO
Address: Corporate Headquarters
Address: 11111 Sunset Hills Road
City: Reston
StateProv: VA
PostalCode: 20190-5339
Country: US
[SNIP]
Reveals that router 11 is also owned by XO (big suprise there...).

Router 12:
[dhcp-5-95:~]
% whois 65.254.48.2

OrgName: Global Net Access, LLC
OrgID: GNAL-2
Address: 55 Marietta St, NW
Address: Suite 1720
City: Atlanta
StateProv: GA
PostalCode: 30303
Country: US
[SNIP]
Now thats interesting. Routers 12 is owned by Global Net Access, an Atlanta-based limited liability corporation. Lets continue.

Router 14: This is the most informative one.
[dhcp-5-95:~]
% whois 72.9.242.247

OrgName: Global Net Access, LLC
OrgID: GNAL-2
Address: 55 Marietta St, NW
Address: Suite 1720
City: Atlanta
StateProv: GA
PostalCode: 30303
Country: US

ReferralServer: rwhois://rwhois.gnax.net:4321

NetRange: 72.9.224.0 - 72.9.255.255
CIDR: 72.9.224.0/19
NetName: GNAXNET
NetHandle: NET-72-9-224-0-1
Parent: NET-72-0-0-0-0
NetType: Direct Allocation
NameServer: DNS1.GNAX.NET
NameServer: DNS2.GNAX.NET
Comment:
RegDate: 2004-10-11
Updated: 2005-01-26
[SNIP]
Again, owned by Global Net Access, no big suprise here. Notice that the "NetRange" here _includes_ my servers IP address. This indicates that Global Net Access is #unixshell - and therefore my - internet service provider.

The next logical step is of course to visit GNAX's website. Obviously, the site is www.GNAX.net (http://www.GNAX.net). The about us page reveals that GNAX is no bargain-basement hosting provider!

Some highlights:
"2 Generators with in ground 5000 gallon fuel tanks to ensure power if there is an outage. 1.5 megawatt and 800 KVA "
"State of the art datacenter ID system and security including video surveillance and recording. All entrances to the Data Center include biometric scanning in combination with card key to prevent unauthorized access."
" State of the art Avaya ANS BGP management system optimizing the routes on the 6 gig network in real time 7000 times per minute based on traceroute performance to ensure that your servers have the highest performance routing vs a simple bgp configuration."
"Connected to the most reliable power grid in the state of Georgia through quad vaults on 4 feeds - this protects the main hospital in Atlanta so it is on a last outage program as critical services and was extensively upgraded for the Olympics. We have not had to use our generators in 5 years."
"8 22 ton Redundant Liebert Air systems providing consistent temperature and humidity range in the datacenter"

..and finally...

"Our datacenter is located in one of the 2 main Telco Hotel vaults in Atlanta."

Awesome. Telco vaults are the Four Seasons of datacenters. Wait, did I say that GNAX was located on 55 Marietta? One of the Atlanta Telco vaults is located at 56 Marietta. The tech response time must be on the order of a few minutes.

A quick google search returned lots of information about 56 marietta, including

www.56marietta.com (http://www.56marietta.com)

A Pic of the building:
http://www.astnetworks.com/Images/56marietta1.jpg

A satellite image of the building (http://maps.google.com/maps?q=56+marrieta+street+atlanta+ga&t=k&hl=en)

I hope this satisfies your curiosity. I couldnt tell which rack the machine was on, but I did narrow it down to a single building :)

Note: This all took me about 6 minutes to find a few weeks ago.
Note2: All of the information here is public and readily availible to anyone who cares to look.
Note3: Unixshell rules!

[matta]

That is correct. We are co-located on a few racks at GNAX, they are regarded as one of the best hosting datacenters out there and definitely have a superior network setup. Most of the internet routing is performed at 56 Marietta and the datacenter itself is at 55 Marietta. A fiber ring exists among 4 points on the network (TELX and Switch & Data at 56 and 2 Datacenter floors at 55) for fully resilient routing. The ring is currently in process of being connected at 10Gbit/s ethernet. We connect directly into their aggregation layer, by-passing the edge (as we are our own) which reduces the hop by one.

[adkap]

Well I'm impressed.

When I tell people the cheapest plan is $8/mo on a shared server, they think
Dedicated server == Solaris workstation
Redundant Network == A T-1 backed up by 2 cable modems and a DSL line.

Good Job.