Pondicherry is not a big city. It is more of a tourist spot, and a place wehre politicians fight for their superiority within their 1 KM zones in which they would be elected. I have never cared to learn what it is called in English, but in Tamil, they call it Toguthi. Well, so, the only standard ISP in Pondicherry just like in most parts of India is BSNL, and both at my home and at my office I am stuck with BSNL broadband, since the only other good one available is Airtel and it has a very very limited coverage here in Pondicherry.

Untill a few months ago, the connection at my home used to give problems every once in a while, and I used to get heavy bills for the usage though I doubt that I have used it much in those days, but right now, with the unlimited connections both at home and office, there is hardly any downtime.

Untill recently. At the office, for the past few days in the afternoon hours a strange phenomenon is occuring when the internet goes off every 150 seconds and comes back after every 150 seconds. This simply acts an an on off cycle with a frequency of 150 seconds. I got fed up with this today and went directl to the exchange, and they asked me to bring the modem stating that it si a modem problem. Bloody hell, a modem will not act like this, it is the problem of the bloody port to which our line is connected.

They are just refusing to check it, and when I came back to the office I found that net is working without the breaks, but with latency of upto 5 seconds per ping. I wonder how that works, there is a delay of 5 seconds or over 5000 ms for every request that is sent every second. Maybe the people programmed ubuntu know what they have been doing, and its correct.

Well, what is the best way to get connected to the internet? People these days do say that there will be satellite downlinks all over India in the next 2 years, and India would be the next server farm, and that you will find one in every home. If BSNL doesnt improve its service, people will start hosting their servers on BSNL, and that would come down as another black mark for India. The Land of Bad Servers.

A server farm or server cluster is a collection of computer servers usually maintained by an enterprise to accomplish server needs far beyond the capability of one machine. Often, server farms will have both a primary and a backup server allocated to a single task, so that in the event of the failure of the primary server, a backup server will take over the primary server’s function.

Server farms are typically co-located with the network switches and/or routers which enable communication between the different parts of the cluster and the users of the cluster.

Server farms are commonly used for cluster computing. Many modern supercomputers comprise giant server farms of high-speed processors connected by either Gigabit Ethernet or custom interconnects such as Infiniband or Myrinet.

Another common use of server farms is for web hosting, which are sometimes referred to as web farms.

Server farms are increasingly being used instead of or in addition to mainframe computers by large enterprises, although server farms do not as yet reach the same reliability levels as mainframes. Because of the sheer number of computers in large server farms, the failure of individual machines is a commonplace event, and the management of large server farms needs to take this into account, by providing support for redundancy, automatic failover, and rapid reconfiguration of the server cluster.

The performance of the very largest server farms (thousands of processors and up) is typically limited by the performance of the data center’s cooling systems and the total electricity cost rather than by the performance of the processors. For this reason, the critical design parameter for such systems tends to be performance per watt, rather than performance per processor.

A wiki farm (or WikiFarm) is a server farm that provides wiki hosting, or a group of wikis hosted on such servers.