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...but all the "ANYBODY BUT BUSH/NO BLOOD FOR OIL/OMGWTFBUSHSUX0RS" 'liberals' have completely driven me away from that side as well.

If that's your main problem then I have no clue why you would ever support the Republicans because they turn on the smear machines on full against anyone that challenges them. Specifically against Kerry:

"Assuming that the unthinkable happens and Senator Kerry becomes president..." --Neil Cavuto, Fox's managing editor for business news.

"It is clear that at least one of Kerry's Purple Heart awards was the result of his own negligence, not enemy fire, and that Kerry went to unusual lengths to obtain the award after being turned down by his own commanding officer." --Swift Boat Veterans for Truth

Kerry "looks French" -- An anonymous Bush adviser told to the New York Times.

In political blogs I've seen countless right-wing proponents who claim that something to the effect of, "OMGIFSKERRYWINSWEAREALLGONNADIE!#$@!@" So please don't think that it's just the "liberals" who are even close to being guilty of this nonsense.

"pro hanoi" is quite a charge. Do you honestly think questioning the US's actions in Vietnam automatically means "pro hanoi"? If so, there are very very few voting Americans who would agree with you.

There's a difference between 'questioning the US's actions in Vietnam' and accusing your fellow soldiers of raping and mudering innocent civilians. The Viet Cong had no chance of defeating the US - we were just a far superior fighting force, and if the war was being fought by the generals instead of the politicians, it would have been over very quickly. Unfortunately, control of the war was highly politicized. The US eventually pulled out, not because it was being defeated but because the war became unpopular. Thanks in part to people like John Kerry, making unsubstantiated claims that our soldiers were all war criminals.

You can lament the simplistic worldview present in the "you're either with us or you're against us" idea all you want, but the facts are quite clear. Ho Chi Minh said in his memoirs that at some points in the war, the only thing that gave them hope of a US withdrawal were all the westerners protesting the war. People like Noam Chomsky and Jane Fonda would go to hanoi and have interviews with the NVA and talk about how horrible they felt the war was. Such actions are most definately pro-hanoi. You might not like the ramifications of this line of thought, and you may not like the fact that it's such a simple idea. But if you're in a fight, any sort of fight, if you don't throw all of your support behind your side in the fight, you most definately provide a service to your enemies.

I know most liberals detest the idea of fighting, and this is perfectly understandable. Once a fight is started, however, you want to finish it quickly and effectively. Getting into a war and then backing out out of it is a total waste of lives - the only thing that's going to be accomplished is that you'll lose your credibility in the face of other nations of the world, who'll take that as a license to start pushing you around. Look at that situation in Iraq right now. The other day there was a firefight in Najaf, where the Insurgents lost 300 men, while the Coalition suffered 'minimal casualties.' A 300:0 kill ration is just outstanding. There's absolutely no way the US army can be defeated militarily. The only way we're going to lose a war is if public opinion turns strongly against it. If everoyne in the US threw their full, unconditional support behind the war in Iraq, the insurgency would die down once they realized they weren't going to get us to leave. There isn't a doubt in my mind that guys like Howard Dean and Paul Krugman are giving hope to the insurgents over there. I really don't think that's their intention by any means, but I think it's one result of their actions.

I know it sounds like I'm some big facist. I'm not - I hate government as much if not more than the next guy. I do, however, realize the necessity of supporting your side in a fight. If your side is fighting a war you don't agree with, it's better to support the fight untill it's over, and then question reasoning the led up to the fight. Questioning before and after a fight is important. Questioning the fight while it's going on is only going to make things worse, and will most likely result in more deaths.

There are some excerpts from it here, including small versions of the cover and some of the illustrations. Another site which had a copy of the cover (which has a picture of Kerry with an upside-down American flag) claims to have received this letter., insisting that they take the picture down or be sued for a DMCA violation by a photographer who claims to have taken the picture.

The photographer, George Butler, is listed as an editor of "The New Soldier". The Library of Congress entry for George Butler shows only his "muscle pictures". George Butler produced and directed "Pumping Iron", wrote a biography of Arnold Schwarzenegger in 1990, and took the photos for several exercise books.

not a single vet in the adverts actually served alongside Kerry, they were merely in Vietnam at the same time.

I suppose this this picture has escaped your view?

Actually, my provider doesn't offer IPv6. I'm using a tunnel to Hurricane Electric. I did some research when I moved off of Freenet6 and they had the best service offering at that time (and I imagine that they still do).

Now you're complaining about a President that is stopping the hypocrisy. He's telling evil governments of all sizes to stop hurting people. The first priority is those who are exporting death. You can see the U.S.A. government is also removing support for repressive "friendly" regimes such as Saudi Arabia. The U.S.A. is also giving proper consideration to the authority of a U.N. which is dominated by governments which are not democracies.

Yet you're against the leader who is stopping the hypocrisy, and support someone who is making a profession of it.
John Kerry thinks it is a good thing to

• claim he voted for and against something,
• to state Saddam was a danger and was not a danger,
• who lies about Vietnam and his behavior
  • advertises that his being a Vietnam veteran is important
  • led Vietnam Veterans Against The War
  • used unconfirmed statements from VVAW's Winter Soldier Investigation in testimony to Congress...and these atrocity stories were from people who were never Vietnam combat veterans
  • lied that he was only an observer at Winter Soldier
  • said on "Meet the Press" that he committed atrocities
  • did not see atrocities and not in battle described on his web site
  • lied that he was not at a VVAW meeting in Kansas City
• and who can't even stop himself from saying
  • he doesn't own an SUV (New Hampshire),
  • does own an SUV (Michigan),
  • doesn't own an SUV (Earth Day - the family owns it),
  • and does own an SUV (say, does the family Gulfstream jet aircraft count?),
  • and family has more SUVs

Now, how are you going to "make sure" someone like that is going to do any specific thing which you approve of? Be consistent, you say.

Want to jump in with IPv6 now? Your ISP doesn't offer it to you? Get a free tunnel like this one from HE. I'm sure there's others, but this is the only one I know off the top of my head.

And Fonda was already working at getting soldiers to desert before 1970.

Kerry was an officer in VVAW, which was a radical anti-war organization. He provided false testimony before the senate, testimony which significantly aided the enemy, and which was used against our POWs. Many of the most famous, false sound-bites about the Vietnam War are from that speech. Kerry was such a phoney that he didn't even write the speech (although he pretended that it was spontaneous).It was written by one of Robert Kennedy's former speechwriters (Kerry was connected to the Kennedy's when younger).

That speech, hyped by the press, led Americans to believe that US Soldiers routinely (even gleefully) engaged in atrocities as a matter of course. It implied that every Vietnam Vet was a basket case because of the horrible things they had done.

It was based on the infamous Winter Soldier "Investigation" - which was funded by Jane Fonda. In that "investigation," many "veterans" testified to having witnessed or committed atrocities. Subsequent investigations showed that many testifying had never been to Vietnam and others could not possibly have seen the atrocities they witnessed. Congress caused two investigations to be undertaken to investigate the claims and to prosecute those who committed the atrocities, but with immunity given to those at the Winter Soldier Investigation. Not a single confirmed atrocity resulted. Kerry was a fraud then and is a fraud now. Just as Benedit Arnold was a war hero who turned on his country, so is John Kerry.

In the "Operation Dewey Canyon" demonstration, Kerry "returned his medals to the government" by throwing them on the Capitol steps. When someone years later noticed them proudly displayed in his office (he became proud of his service when it became politically advantageous to do so), he admitted that he had thrown someone else's medals! Also in that demonstration, veterans set up encampments on the mall and slept there. Kerry was one of the organizers, but while the others slept on the mall, he slept in a luxurious Georgetown apartment.

BTW, the reason Fonda was not tried for treason was not because war was not declared. It was because the political will to do so was lacking. Ultimately that lack of will lost the war.

Just as almost all of us who went to Vietnam would love to have Jane Fonda executed, we are not exactly fond of John Kerry's betrayal of American troops who were still in the field after he returned from his own short tour.

Although Diebold has agreed not to take any further action in these cases, that doesn't make up for the fact that they have blatantly abused the DMCA provisions in the past. It's kind of like being run over by a car, and then having the driver say, "well, I won't drive anymore." It doesn't exactly make you whole.

Also, OPG has asserted an interference with contractual relations claim-- essentially saying that Diebold is interfering with the contract between Hurricane Electric (the ISP) and its client, OPG. See section 3 of the application for a temporary restraining order.

The Grameen Bank, the original microcredit lending bank, is using cellphone technology to help remote villages get the information they need. Of course, they don't need a mob --- just one cellphone per village, owned and operated by a "phone lady" who rents it out to anyone who needs it. That way villages get the info they need without having to wire everything in sight. Here's a Wall St Journal article about one "phone lady". And a World Bank article about the GrameenPhone network.

My server has been slashdotted a few times and I can tell you it's pretty simple to not get overloaded.

The first time I learned my lesson. The server was on a T1 line that was 2/3 full already, and slashdot linked to a page full of large photos. That'll kill your link pretty quickly. Low-budget solution: sign up for a burstable web hosting account somewhere and just put all your large images there.

Later when we got some actual office space for the business, I moved the main server up to a colo facility in fremont. All slahdottable content is hosted there on a fast server with a 100mbps ethernet link. Other oddball services that need their own machine are hosted from the other end of a point-to-point T1 line going directly back to the office from the colo.

So depending on your budget it's really not hard to set up your site to survive a slashdotting. If you don't have a lot of dough to spend but you want to run your own server for configurability/security reasons, just host the static stuff somewhere else. Or if you're serving enough to make it economical, get a colo account with a burstable link.

There's a widespread misconception here that slashdotting is caused by server overload. In reality this is almost never the case. It's caused by insufficient bandwith. This in turn may cause server overload because of too many slow clients being connected, but that is purely a secondary effect.

I think your misunderstanding of the saying is:

It's not the money that makes it hard; it's the human bent to self-aggrandizement and unwillingness to recognize where material blessing comes from that makes it hard.

See the story of the Rich Young Ruler (Mark 10:17-30). The money didn't make him leave sad. It was his love of money that did.

The saying has little to do with money, and everything to do with one's attitude towards it.

Sorry if this is OT, but it's hard finding discussion on this. Is anyone here using an IPv6 tunnel broker that can successfully IRC and listen to the mp3 streams in the previous Slashdot story? I've tried Hurrican Electric and freenet6 with no luck. I'm using XP SP1.

This might help it happen sooner than we think.

I called up my ADSL provider, SBC (formerly PacBell): Took 4 people before I finally had someone who know what the difference was between IPv4 and IPv6. No plans to offer it anytime soon. No demand, customers aren't asking for it (I was the first, they claimed).

I called up my T1 providers at work - MCI/UUNET and Sprint. Neither one offer production IPv6 services. Sprint was offering tunneling to a test-bed IPv6 network (on the 6BONE), but I've emailed the contact 3 times, no reply. Same with UUNET, I emailed the US-UUNET 6BONE contacts, no reply. I did actually get a reply from the South Africa UUNET contact (funny thing is I know him from Shadowfire IRC).

You simply cannot convert to IPv6 here in the US without using the private IPv6 ranges (akin to IPv4 RFC1918 address space). Why? Because only ISPs get IPv6 address space, and then they are to assign it to sub-ISPs and/or businesses.

Actually, I take that back, if you want to pay for a T1 all the way to one of Hurrican Electric's sites, you can get native IPv6:
ipv6.he.net.

I've been using he.net's IPv6 tunnels to them for about 6 months. Mainly though, I set up tunnels between my sites, so the traffic isn't really flowing to he.net's network. Think of it as a VPN, but with globally unique IPv6 addresses (which you can access from any host that can get on the IPv6 backbone or tunnel via IPv4 to an IPv6 backbone).

So, everyone, email or call your ISP and tell them you'd like to get IPv6 address space.

But here's a thought, why should they spend the time and money to upgrade their infrastructure when what they have "works just fine" right now? Are you willing to pay more per month for your own IPv6 address space? I currently pay $15 more per month for my 5 (technically 9) static IPs from SBC. I'd trade those statics for a single IPv4 address and a IPv6 /64. I wouldn't pay even more for just IPv6 so long as there are free IPv6 tunnel brokers and I've got static IPv4 addresses to tunnel with.

Specific details are about 600 visitors a day, 4000 hits on the aforementioned server and about 40,000 on the photo server which is hosted over at Hurricane Electric. The Penguin server is a really nice system, extremely fast with the dual 600Mhz PIIIs and all that memory combined with a snazzy SCSI HD. Compared to the old 233Mhz server I used to use there is a huge difference. Even after a bit of slashdot traffic there isn't any degradation on the new server, and if there was it's because of the limited bandwidth more than processing. Ohh yes, the new server is also hosting about 6 other sites so we'll peg the total hits a day at about 7000, but keep in mind every one of these hits is generating a dynamic (ASP based) page...

Problems:

1) downtime. up. down. up. down.
2) changing policies. "Yes, Zope is supported as a CGI". - a few months down the road - "Dude, you can't run Zope, it sucks too much resouces."
3) The one that killed it for me, they lost my MySQL database. Suddenly my stuff isn't working. I start sending in support requests and I get a response of basically "We have no record of that database ever existing". So let me see, would a Google cache help you find it? No. It never existed according to them. Thats when I gave up and moved on.

I'm using imagineis.com right now. Support is a little slow but they always end up taking care of things. Tomcat/JSP hosting is nice. And the prices aren't bad.

I'm also using Hurricane Electric for a long time. Fast, great support (they once called me back to let me know things were fixed, at 9PM, for a $10/mo account) and few issues. I've heard that they've been a little too liberal to spammers but the proof offered didn't convince me.

At some point I'll upgrade to my own box at the end of a fat line or I'll use something like John Companies for hosting.

They have fairly cheap ($10) web hosting on shared Linux (Debian, I think) servers. For that ten bucks, you get:

True Virtual Host (http:// www.yourname.com)
Support for PHP 4
Your Own Secure Web (SSL) Directory
Your Own MySQL Database
Your Own Standard Web Directory
Your Own cgi-bin Directory
Your Own Anonymous FTP Directory
Direct Access Via FTP
Direct Access Via telnet
Direct Access Via ssh
Gigabit (1,000 megabit/second) Backbone
Multiple Connections For Backup And Redundancy
Battery Backup and Emergency Generator
High Performance Carefully Managed Web Servers
Online Billing Information
POP3 Authenticated SMTP
Multiple POP3 Mailboxes per Account
Unlimited Mail Forwarding
Unlimited Mail Autoresponders
Procmail filters
Detailed Daily Web and FTP Activity Reports
Access To Raw web server access_log Files
Server Side Includes
Full Shell Account
Full Unix Development Environment
Java and Javac
Perl
Tcl
gcc
crontab
Web-based email

(I just pasted that from their info page.)

The only downside is storage. You only get 50MB with the ten dollar package. For $25 a month you get 250MB (and 26 POP accounts).

-B

Hurricane Electric also provides free IPv6 tunnels...I used one to play around with IPv6, but tunnels seem to have fairly high latency.

In an effort to try and get more and more geeks using IPv6, I think I'll be mirroring content like this:

ftp://r2.ipv6.artoo.net/pub/soulpix/

Both DivX and QT formats have been mirrored.

If you don't have native IPv6 access (hmm, who does?) you can get tunneling access for free from he.net and a number of other tunnel brokers.

Use a tunnel broker. It lets you tunnel ipv6 connections over ipv4 to another endpoint. Two of the most popular are Freenet6 and Hurricane Electric. Hurricane Electric requires a static ipv4 IP, but Freenet6 works with dynamic IPs.

Sounded interesting to me, until I discovered you only get 25MB!

The same guys who host php.net and mysql.com mirrors have an absolutely amazing deal for website hosting. Ten bucks a month for full Unix development environment (with javac, gcc, crontab, and all that stuff), a real shell account, and a sweet webserver setup: PHP, MySQL, cgi-bin (with Perl and Tcl), anonymous FTP, SSL, and a whole mess of POP features. Plus, they have onsite UPS/generator, a gigabit backbone, and lots of other hardware goodies.

Running your own server loads of fun, don't get me wrong, but $10 a month for all this stuff seems worth it. Unless you really have money to burn, it's impossible to the same kind of performance out of your own server... Do you think Verizon will run a gigabit backone and Hubble power connector to my house for $10?

Hurricane Electric http://www.he.net/

Have a look at hosting with Hurricane Electric.

However, I'm an audio professional, and will happily and uniformly disparage all of these 'tools' for neglecting to have any real ability to edit audio. As just about anyone in the industry will tell you, audio is the bastard stepchild of video/film, with less than a tenth of any movie's budget spent on sound... and yet all of those same people will agree that sound is just as important as visuals, if not more - consider the Blair Witch Project, with cheap, shoddy visuals, but eerie and compelling audio to create the mood... Now imagine a rock-steady camera in a high-budget film, with sound that sounds like cheap vinyl... or even AM radio... It's just not acceptable, and nothing will alienate your audience sooner.

As an example of the downplay of audio, Digital Video Magazine has an ad in the last issue offering a turnkey video editing system... Dual 1 GHz G4, Final Cut Pro2, 80 GB Firewire drive, Superdrive, Firewire Media Converter, Sony's $5000 prosumer digital camera, 23-inch Apple LCD cinema screen, Sony 19" NTSC reference monitor (>$1000!), and... Harmon Kardon SoundSticks!

$20,000 USD for this system, and you're getting a $150 pair of speakers... which, frankly, suck (I just wrote an article to be published in December about those speakers, after running them through tests of frequency response, distortion, noise level, etc., and you'd do better with a $150 pair of headphones... but they aren't as pretty).

Additionally, none of these programs have the ability to scrub audio, a MUST as any real audio editor will tell you, very few of them will let you edit on a resolution smaller than a frame (30 fps means that 1 frame = 33 ms... However, a 5 ms delay is audible as phasing, and as low as a 25 ms delay can be audible as a distinct echo), most of them have linear VU meters (rather than logarhythmic, like our hearing... consider, with 0 dB FS as the top of the scale, -3 dB FS is half the power, and on a linear meter, half the distance down... However, -3 dB is a difference in level that is really only noticed by trained ears... Additionally, the SMPTE standard for digital audio is to have normal level (0 VU) at -18 dB FS... Or almost off the scale on any program with linear meters... That's freakin' insane. As a comparison, try using Photoshop with the brightness on your monitor turned down to almost 0. You're trying to work reasonably at the threshhold of noise of the system you're working on.

Also, the EQs in most of these programs have their frequency range set linearly, too... Human hearing goes from roughly 20 Hz to 20 kHz (roughly - young women and children can frequently hear higher frequencies, usually topping out by 23-26 kHz), but our interpretation of frequency is logarythmic: the top octave goes from 10 kHz to 20 kHz (or, the top HALF of a linear scale). The next octave (or, the next lowest quarter on a linear scale) is from 5 kHz to 10 kHz...
You don't start getting into useful ranges until you're in the bottom 32nd of the scale, from 500 Hz to 1 kHz - the fundamental of the human voice goes from about 125 Hz to about 500 Hz, most of the vowels and formants are from about 500 Hz to about 1.5 kHz, and the consonants are from about 1.5 kHz up to about 4 kHz (for the sibilants). There's very little energy in the human voice above 5 kHz... So have fun setting your EQs properly when you're looking at a linear scale that emphasizes the top two octaves... ABOVE what you're dealing with.

Then again, the two major audio editing software programs on the market, ProTools and CoolEditPro also miss some of these, so I guess I shouldn't complain too much. When you deal with sub-standard tools everywhere, you have to give up some expectations

By comparison, look at the Orban Audicy (used in most radio stations for production), and the Fairlight Merlin and D.R.E.A.M. Stations, used for most film/television production.

Sorry. :)

-T

A link to pictures of my neighborhood network complete with cat5 stapled to the fence.

before you ask, yes I posted this before

I remain upset that in response to the September 11 terrorist attacks, we gave in and gave the terrorists exactly what they wanted: a less free society, in which armed guards are present in many public places, and where many more people are now afraid of people with brown skin or different beliefs. I'm also unhappy that we killed many more thousands of already-victimized civilians in an overkill campaign against Afghanistan. "Oh yeah? My trillion-dollar army can beat up your army of children with sticks."

Likewise, adopting the spammer's illegal attack strategies serves only to reduce us to their level. I am not a criminal, I am not someone who harasses other people, even people who engage in illegal harassment of me.

Certainly, do what's legal: call spammers and complain, send complaints to the ISP and backbone providers (and follow up when it appears an ISP has "dropped the ball"), and of course fax removal requests back to the junk faxers. If you want to yell or use profanity in your calls and emails and faxes, that's probably legal in most places.

But sending death threats, flooding spammers with millions of copies of their own spam, or launching DNS attacks on their servers. Don't become "one of them" because then there are more criminals and fewer good guys.

This all sank in (for me) back in 1996, during the absurd "Yuri Rutman" (Thinner hair, el cheepo, the first Joe-job) spam-then-harassment campaigns. At one point, I posted a web page (which I deleted several years ago) that listed all the information about Mr. Rutman (most of it gathered by others and posted in isolated bits in the net-abuse newsgroup). One of the items was his home address (in addition to his office address, which was probably a mail drop). When I actually got Mr. Rutman on the phone, he asked me to remove his home address, claiming that he had children and feared for their safety -- because he feared that people might engage in physical retribution in response to his repeated, irrational, illegal, and vicious retribution against joes.com and Hurricane Electric. I decided then and there that although I owed Mr. Rutman no courtesy or respect, I would not do anything to endanger any human being's physical safety, especially children (whether or not they really existed), and so I removed his home address (though it was still available in the newsgroups, where a diligent anti-spammer might find it -- but I didn't want the information on my web site where someone stupid and simple might use it to do something stupid and simple. (Though there was no publicity, for his actions, Mr. Rutman was charged and convicted of a crime in Illinois, just a slap on the wrist but worse than what happens 99.999% of spammers.)

Yes, spammers do some crazy and evil things -- like Sanford "Spamford" Wallace filing a frivolous lawsuit against me just to get publicity (he quickly abandoned it), thus scaring off a bidder for my former dot-com business "because we don't want to buy a lawsuit." The next offer for my business was $175,000 less, and I had to pay $5,000 in legal fees to respond before Wallace abandoned the suit. Did I feel like doing something stupid and simple? Of course. But I didn't do it, because I am NOT like these cretins. Life sucks, sometimes, but the solution is NOT to do more sucking.

I've said this many times before, why are people in this kind of situation rolling out DSL? Why not just lay down new copper in the form of CAT5?

It's dirt cheap. I've done it. Just look at these pics of my neighborhood area network. Currently 10 neighbors share the cost of an internet connection. We also share stuff we've grabbed from kazza, we have a intranet that announces the happenings and events on our street. Very cool stuff. Basically each house has a switch, and we daisy chain houses so we don't run into the 600' Ethernet limit.

I can give a rat's ass about the AUP of my ISP because the question of packet ownership has to be asked. At what point do I own that packet? When I request a document from the web? When it hits my router? When it is on my copper?

People can do this themselves, it's not hard. In a rural area you just replace the AC transformer brick on the switch with a battery/solar panel combo every 600', or you could something that has a bit more distance to it like token ring. Yeah maybe this all sounds silly, but we're doing it out here in silicon valley and it's been working for the last year.

--toq

Late last year, I decided that I wanted the ability to execute .ASP scripts within .htm files. You can do that, but only by tweaking IIS so that every .htm file is interpreted as an ASP file. That would represent a huge change and would slow down a shared server.

So I decided it was time to re-establish colocation service. In the past, I have had my own servers colocated at Above.net (now MFN), and later at Maxim.net (later merged into another firm).

I bought a 1U Compaq server at the Webvan auction ($1,830, including tax).

The benefits of colocation are that the colo firm takes responsibility for making sure you have power (usually with UPS battery and generator backup), and they usually sell you bandwidth (though some colo facilities require that you contract for bandwidth directly with the provider, and the colo facility runs the wire from your box to your bandwidth provider's equipment at the facility. Another benefit, is that you can generally add bandwidth, or add more servers, very quickly (you can always add more servers at your own location, space permitting, but adding bandwidth may be more troublesome if you rely on a T1 or DSL line with inherent limits of 1.5 or 1.1 mbps).

When you sign a contract for colocation services, you pay for a specific level of bandwidth -- currently I am paying $200 per month to host a 1U server at Hurricane Electric (he.net) with 95% usage not to exceed 128Kbps of bandwidth. I am actually plugged in to a 10mbps ethernet connection, and I can spike my bandwidth (I often see spikes to as much as 640K in my traffic reports), but I pay no surcharge unless my server is using more than 128Kbps more than 5% of the time. (Currently I run from 75K to 100Kbps at the 95% average.)

Freedom is pretty broad, but of course each colocation facility has its own restrictions and each bandwidth provider also has its own restrictions -- spamming is always prohibited by all backbone providers (since the demise of AGIS), and or course nobody wants your server to be doing damaging things (like launching DNS attacks, distributing viruses, threatening the president's life, etc.). But most colo facilities will allow things like porn (though I'm sure there are companies that will draw the line short of what the First Amendment allows). Probably the most troublesome area would be "file sharing," if you operate a service that allows (or encourages) people to illegally download copyrighted works (free copies of Microsoft Office, click here!).

No matter what promises you may get, don't expect any colocation facility to stick with you if there is a substantial threat of litigation. You may be in the right, but the colo facility or bandwidth provider doesn't want to get sucked into a Napster-style lawsuit, nor branded as supporters of child-pornographers.

In addition, my experience is that you rarely get what you pay for, when buying colocation services. At Above.net, I paid a premium because they promised fast response time -- for example, someone could run out and cycle the power within 15 minutes. After a few months, however, Above.net was overwhelmed (too many promises, not enough staff to fulfill) and I often had to wait 40 minutes and talk to 3 different people, before finding someone who could just walk out and check if the power was on to my server! The final straw was when I began experiencing multiple outages each day, and Above.net simply denied that there were any outages. It took more than a month before they conceded that my mountain of proof was adequate, and then they simply agreed to let me terminate my contract early -- no credits or adjustments in my favor. I was mostly pleased with the service at Maxim.net (until they merged and announced a huge rate spike, which was justified by new service levels but wasn't worthwhile for me). I've been very pleased with the service at Hurricane Electric so far.

too bad the sites i visit that are hosted on dreamhost are always down...and on that note, i recommend hurricane electric for the worlds best hosting and indeed, the best customer service/support. each and every calltaker is a unix guru/server admin. their engineers probably take turns answering the phone!

Well if you want to host a server do like the rest of us and buy a T-1. $1500.00 a month is what I pay for the right to have a server and a static ip.

I used to have a similar setup at home. I just got tired of having to scramble everytime a remote root exploit in Bind was published. Otherwise I ran apache & qmail, so bind was about the only daemon that gave me trouble. I mean, after dealing with those issues at work every day (I do R&D in computer security, not system administration, at least not these days), I don't want to have to deal with them at home too. So I moved my http and dns servers over to he.net, which only costs $10/mo for the Basic Virtual Host (which handles my small vanity site just fine). They've been really cool to work with - one of my friend's hosts two sites with them, both of which are much larger than mine, and he's been really impressed with them.

Hope this helps!

-"Zow"

I've only been using Linux for about 2.5 years or so, but I am so happy that I learned on Slackware instead of other distro's. Learning on a vanilla distro like Slack really teaches you more about the in's and out's of Linux, as opposed to upgrading your kernal with an rpm.

I use primarially Slackware for my personal servers, as well as almost all the servers that I manage at my office (about 20). Sure, sometimes you have to fight with something when you wouldn't have to on RedHat or Debian, but if all you know is rpm --install, you're going to run into a wall at some point and not know where to go.

A company I colocate at (Hurricane Electric), uses primarially Slackware for all of their web hosting services. They've found that when you're managing a lot of servers, a basic distro is exactly what you're looking for.

Hey, I've actually been working for the past three months or so at assembling a proper non-profit colocation facility in Northern California. We're investigating non-profit incorporation or a partnership with an existing 501(c)(3) organization. There are about 40 folks on our mailing list (see our site for info on how to subscribe) and we just today signed an agreement with Hurricane Electric for preliminary hosting (DNS, mail, and monitoring tools).

We've found a real gem of a place in Palo Alto one block away from a major net drop that already is airconditioned and that we may be able to freely use (no rent!). We're putting together a setup where responsible admins can come, drop in a box (no commercial content, banner ads, pr0n, or warez) and be connected at 10mbps (unmetered) for less than $100/mo; we have a target goal of $50/month for our users, which should be low enough to not be a barrier to entry for interested parties, including individuals, nonprofits, open source projects requiring dedicated hosting, and independent researchers.

Send me an email at dweeklyATlegatoDOTcom to let me know you'd like to either help out or have your box hosted and I'll give you more information. We're probably having a face-to-face get-together next week in Palo Alto! If you know any lawyers who could do pro bono work on assisting our 501(c)(3) incorporation, too, that'd be a huge hand! =)

Cheers,
-david

...a Richard. Couldn't help it. I've had tons of luck with HE.net and Vex. Shell access as well as top notch service. Good luck!

Hurricane Electric has this free tunnel brokerhere that allows you to experiment with IPv6 by tunneling it over IPv4. Interesting stuff.

Three letters:
D N S
Take a look at anything in the domain ipv6.drobnak.com for examples. I have a mini IPv6 net setup here, using a very nice tunnel broker - hurrican electric. (www.he.net)
You use a 'quad A', AAAA, or an A6 record to put IPv6 addresses into the DNS database. Quite simple, just as long as you have a dns provider who supports it. (ie www.worldwidedns.net)

-Matt

Hopefully they'll get it fully integrated in, like IPv4 for the final release. I'm running a beta of XP (NT5.1, not 6.0 :) right now, and to install IPv6, you run "ipv6 install" from the commandline. If you want to configure static addresses and routes, you do it from the commandline too. But it does work... I got to see the Dancing KAME from IE6.0 :)

I still wanna know where i can get public static IPv6 ips.

http://ipv6tb.he.net runs a tunnel broker and gives out /64 blocks. I've got 3ffe:1200:3028:81e7::/64, which gives me 2^64, or 18446744073709551616 addresses :)

sit1 Link encap:IPv6-in-IPv4
inet6 addr: 3ffe:1200:3028:817d:dead:dead:dead:dead/127 Scope:Global
inet6 addr: 3ffe:1200:3028:ff01::2fb/127 Scope:Global
UP POINTOPOINT RUNNING NOARP MTU:1480 Metric:1
RX packets:166 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:156 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:0
RX bytes:22433 (21.9 Kb) TX bytes:18211 (17.7 Kb)

Server4Me.com has a $49/month leased server deal. For that, you get a P3-500, 64M, 8.4 gig (IDE), and FreeBSD 4.1. The bandwidth is done two ways. For $49/month you can get up to 3 gig transfer a month or a dedicated 56k. If it were 2 or 3 guys looking for a shell account and a box to screw around with, that's the best deal I've come across. If you want a serious server, this isn't the deal for you.

I think in your particular situation, I would pass the hat, build a server, and co-locate it at a local ISP. (Hurricane Electric has an acceptable reputation and OpenBSD Journal just moved to a co-lo there.)

I have my own domain, and just use Verizon for connectivity. My domain _happens_ to live elsewhere, on its own box, but you can get your own domain for $20 + $10/month. It's great for bragging rights, running your own email accounts, and webhosters don't make as enticing targets for spammers. Also, that's what they DO, not some bandwagon that an old, crufty Telco decided to jump on. Check out He.Net for an example.

Public Service Announcement: Log entries are usually recorded using your local time, so you should always include a mention of your timezone when mailing the ISP your logfiles.

As for dshield.org, according to this, their internal format doesn't bother with the time of the incident; only the date. This, unfortunately, means that dshield is pretty impotent when it comes to dealing with dynamic IPs. If I remember, I'll try getting in touch with the guy who's running it after the Slashdot tide dies down. If run properly, I could see this easily becoming the anti-script kiddie equivilant to SpamCop.

For $9.95/month, you get full shell access with SSH, up to 11 POP3 mailboxes, and a bit of web space and traffic. The URL for http can be your own private domain, and I don't think they charge extra for that.

I've been using he.net for about five years now and only one time have I ever failed to reach the server because *it* was down. Since it was 11pm on a Sunday night, I was stunned when an actual human answered the phone after one ring. He had already been alerted to the problem and was connecting to the console server as I called. Five minutes later, all was well.

I *highly* recommend Hurricane Electric, but only if you're a self-starter. They're not into holding the hands of newbies.

Lets see, $15 a month gets you 300MB, extra domains and all that jazz. They say unlimited bandwidth within reason, maybe you can talk to them about how reasonable they'll be. They run Linux / BSD and offer tons of tools and goodies on the servers. The performance is pretty good, when I tested from various locations using tracert.com they seemed to have great connectivity.

The only downside is support. Email and IRC only, unless you want to get brave and hunt up a number via WHOIS on their domain and try calling it. Plus, they died on me for about 6 hours once that I noticed. On the other hand, they freely admitted the problem.

Compare that to Hurricane Electric who have ridiculously low disk space limits and reasonable bandwidth limits but have great performance and great connectivity and decent pricing. I had to call them one evening because MySQL was dead and they not only had a live person who knew what was going on but he called me back at home within an hour to let me know it was fixed. The few other times I've called with dumb questions they've been quite helpful. And aside from that MySQL problem, I've never seen them have any problems.

I have had only two providers so far to host my site (which, as of now, has yet to actually go online, but that is another story). Both have been great providers, and why I switched from one to the other will become apparent.

My first provider was WebCom, an outfit in Cali (IIRC). Their interface was fast, and they were real easy to set up with. Everything is web based - no need to telnet or FTP or anything (though I think this may be an option). Security is real tight - they don't allow outside developed scripts for CGI, you can only use what they have. If you are setting up an e-commerce site (I don't think you are, but if you want to...), this place is perfect - the CGI they offer is mainly for such a site, with shopping cart CGI and such, plus the option of CC verification. Customer support was great, the best of any provider I have had. They also seemed to have great uptime. Cost for the service was a little high for such hosting (and for what you got), but I think the security of the site and the customer service made up for it. Now, with all these great features, why did I switch?

They were too restrictive.

I _wanted_ to telnet in, FTP in - not as an option, but as the standard way of doing things. I wanted shell access to my account, and I wanted to be able to write my own CGI scripts for my site (hey, if I needed shopping cart software, I could write it myself, or find it on the net). I wanted some kind of *nix for the site. I wanted more space, and any web interface I used, I wanted to be short and to-the-point. I also wanted a place that didn't care too much about what I put on my site, or if I wanted to "rent" a portion of my site for others pages. After a bit of searching, and a banner or two on /. - I found such a site:

Hurricane Electric

I chose them because of these reasons. Their customer service so far has been great. Most questions you have, though, can be answered by reading through the online documentation. This is a site that presumes you know what you are doing - they don't do hand holding here. This is what I wanted (having started using the internet via a dialup shell account back in 1993, I don't have a fear of *nix command lines - in fact, I love them). I have them auto-bill my credit card, so I don't have to mess with billing (they still send out an invoice in my email, so I can see what is happening - and I can check the charges online). I can telnet or FTP in from anywhere, and check my mail with PINE - or I can set up a POP client to read my email. The former is useful for work, if I just want to check up on anything, while I use the latter for home, where I would actually answer my email.

The one thing they don't allow is mailing-list scripts (which is understandable). So, for my future site, which I plan on having a mailing list, I am going to use eGroups, and for my webring, I will use Webring (I could have set up my own private webring, using some PERL script I found on the net, with a little tweaking, but the only reason I was thinking of going that route, was because I didn't know if Webring support Lynx clients - they do, so I didn't feel I wanted to waste time going the custom route). Which brings me to my last point...

It seems like HE understands the net - they don't use glitzy graphics or such for their site - it is fast and efficient HTML - heck, it even looks hand coded (I don't know how true this is), which I like (I detest WYSIWYG editors - VI is your friend!). They understand that information is what makes the net go, that graphics can get in the way, especially when not used properly.

Their prices are competitive, and you get a lot of space for little money per month (not as much as some places, but enough for most sites). But they are not for the faint of heart, or for those who need help setting up a site - go to WebCom for that.

I have a few small sites that I take care of. None of the owners wanted to spend a large sum of money so I directed them to Huricane Electric (www.he.net). They have a lot of features and the price is right (starts at $10 a month). I haven't really found anything much cheaper that allowed all that HE does.

If you want NT cheap, take M6 Technologies. www.m6.net Mediahouse site stats 5 are outstanding, a nice control panel to add/delete/config your emails, database at no cost, more megs and bandwidth than you'd ever use, cgi-bin is there and runs perl scripts well (something have had problems with NT hosts elsewhere). Speed is good, support good (though they don't work weekends). $10 setup, $10 a month. Superb.

If want *nix cheap, Hurricane Electric www.he.net is the best in town. PHP over mySQL database tossed in. $9.95 a month, $19.95 setup. Support pretty good, though their $9.95 is advertised as "self-serve", and this philosophy pretty well holds. Noticed they have started running adverts (the 'groovy' banners) on Slashdot also lately.

All the best, Robert

---
"And the beast shall be made legion. Its numbers shall be increased a thousand thousand fold."

You're correct: MySQL does not use a GPL license. But its license is "free enough" for me. According to the MySQL manual, "For normal internal use, MySQL generally costs nothing. You do not have to pay us if you do not want to. A license is required if: You sell the MySQL server directly or as a part of another product or service; You charge for installing and maintaining a MySQL server at some client site; You include MySQL in a distribution that is non redistributable and you charge for some part of that distribution."

This seems fair enough: they don't want you to profit directly from their code, without them earning a little something as well. Otherwise, they let you use it without charge, even to host commercial sites. That seems more than reasonable. Furthermore, access to the source code is freely available and distributable.

How exactly does one actually cheaply create a slashdot site. I have looked at various hosting places and they don't exactly do anything of this nature cheaply.

My personal website (Space-Dye.com) is hosted with Hurricane Electric, a hosting provider in San Jose, CA. Their servers are fast, their connection is fast (direct connection to MAE-West), and their technical support is excellent. They offer Perl, PHP and MySQL access to all accounts, which start at only $9.95 per month. I've set up a couple of database-driven applications on my website, and they seem to work great.

Ryan

You're correct: MySQL does not use a GPL license. But its license is "free enough" for me. According to the MySQL manual, "For normal internal use, MySQL generally costs nothing. You do not have to pay us if you do not want to. A license is required if: You sell the MySQL server directly or as a part of another product or service; You charge for installing and maintaining a MySQL server at some client site; You include MySQL in a distribution that is non redistributable and you charge for some part of that distribution."

This seems fair enough: they don't want you to profit directly from their code, without them earning a little something as well. Otherwise, they let you use it without charge, even to host commercial sites. That seems more than reasonable. Furthermore, access to the source code is freely available and distributable.

How exactly does one actually cheaply create a slashdot site. I have looked at various hosting places and they don't exactly do anything of this nature cheaply.

My personal website (Space-Dye.com) is hosted with Hurricane Electric, a hosting provider in San Jose, CA. Their servers are fast, their connection is fast (direct connection to MAE-West), and their technical support is excellent. They offer Perl, PHP and MySQL access to all accounts, which start at only $9.95 per month. I've set up a couple of database-driven applications on my website, and they seem to work great.

Ryan