Community webserver?

[Dave Parker]

Not strange at all.  The biggest problem I think would be TPC 
(The Phone Company).  If you're in a Southwestern Bell area then
you'd probably be better off contacting Birch, BUT - the FCC has
'directed' the ILECs (Incumbent Local Exchange Carriers) to make
DSL available to competitive '...providers of high speed Internet
access and other data services.'  This can even be an analog voice
line where the low freq portion carries the voice traffic and is
administered by the ILEC, and the high frequency portion of the
same wire pair can carry the high speed xDSL traffic and be 
leased from the ILEC by a local ISP and re-sold to you.  I think
that if you could demonstrate that you were a business (license,
tax-id, bus. cards, etc.), that there's not much they could say
to anyone wanting to get DSL, put a server in their closet, and
host websites.  In fact, this would be the perfect setup for
the KCLUG, where the organization could share the costs and 
members could have accounts (not dialup, necessarily) and/or
websites/pages and host collaborative projects.  

This is an intriguing idea.  I have DSL now (272K SDSL) in an 
area where the ILEC does not offer the service, but is expected 
to soon.  I'd be very interested in something like this, and could
even host it, but I'm really busy with other projects right now
and it would take me a while to get it all set up.  I'm definitely
interested in talking about this, though.

Tony Hammitt wrote:
> 
> Hello,
> 
> I just had a strange thought.  There are some people here in town who
> can actually get business-class SDSL connections to their homes.  There
> are other people like me who would like to but aren't in an approved
> area of town.  Would it be possible to get together and drop off a box
> at someone's residence that we could all use?  I'm already paying $30/mo
> for various web hosting services.  That's a good chunk of what the
> service would cost.  I've also got some usable hardware for a server.
> 
> The only problem I could see is getting the other server parts and
> reimbursing the homeowner for power.  Does anyone else think that this
> is a good idea?
> 
> I'd love to have a box I could actually configuremyself.  Right now my
> web host doesn't have a decent database, etc. so I'm having to work
> three times as hard hacking together a search engine.  If I just had a
> box I could install software on, I'd skip all of that.
> 
> Love to hear what you all think,
> 
> Tony
-- 
Dave Parker/DLP, Inc.    dlparker at dlpinc.com    www.dlpinc.com