I know a t-3 is 45 Mbps. but you cant buy a 10Mbps pipe so you have to buy the next step which is cheaper than 10 T-1's and the equipment to multiplex them. also for the many of you whining about the prices I quote.
Actually, depending on provider, you can get a 10MB SMDS circuit but they are pretty pricy (~$5K-10K). I believe PSINet used to offer 10MB ATM circuits too.
Your prices are largely accurate. I know since I own an ISP. However, if you can provide your own bandwidth and connect into someones channelized T-3, you can backhaul a T-1 for the cost of one side of the loop, e.g. a T-1 for about $200-$500. Granted, most folks can't pull this number off. Also, generally, within the same CO you can run point-to-point and provide the equipment on each end. But you need bandwidth from somewhere like an employer, a friend, something. But this pushes up the price considerable given how much the comm gear can cost.
again I issue my challenge... Get a T-1 in your house with Net access for 5 times the cost of your Cable modem. it cant be done.
I can, for exactly 5 times the cost of the cable modem here. But again, I'm unusual in that I can meet the conditions I state above. The fact of the matter is that your contention is largely accurate. Not totally but pretty darn close. I'd guess there are maybe 1 in 1000/.'ers that know how to pull this off and have access to the resources to do it.
The problem is hubs. I have yet to see a good gigabit hub for under $2k or so. Most of the gigabit-compatible hubs offered use gigabit for uplink, and a handful of 100-base-T links for the rest of the ports.
Exactly my thought. Which is why I suggested multiple gigabit PCI cards. What I didn't state was that I was assuming that this would not be unsaturated. I've seen some less expensive switches in the "off brands" like D-Link, Netgear, etc., in the sub $1000 range but we are talking about a home network.
And your internal routers are either not routing (saturated) gigabit traffic through multiple cards, or not running on commodity hardware.
True. I'm not routing gigabit Ethernet, much less saturated. The network isn't saturated, despite lots of data flowing. They are running on commodity hardware though: some rackmounts w/ oem motherboards, "obsolete" name brand "business" grade and some highend clones. Just routing packets. It takes a lot of packets to saturate. However, Cisco uses the PCI bus for their routers as well like on the 7200 or the 2600's. Pretty much all their gear. Which clearly are not comodity equipment but they are PCI.
More than one saturated gigabit ethernet interface would certainly swamp a 32-bit 33 MHz PCI bus.
I haven't witnessed it myself but you probably are right about saturation with gigabit Ethernet. I don't have a sense about gigabit Ethernet on 64-bit PCI slot.
I am a-priori assuming an application that will saturate gigabit ethernet channels. Otherwise there's no reason to use gigabit at all, as you point out.
MAE East up until a couple of years ago was using ancient (assuming an Internet generation is 6 months and a calendar generation is 20 years) by Internet time DEC Gigaswitches, which are fast Ethernet switches. Designed to burst up to just over a GB for the whole switch, my recollection is they were operating at about 1.6 GB sustained in late 1997 or early 1998. This was basically saturated so you can imagine my wondering about saturating gigabit Ethernet at home.
I find given current needs in a home that gigabit Ethernet would be needed on the mind-boggling side except in rare instances. Sorry for the crack about crack;-) I think you and I are largely on the same page as it were.
The problem is hubs. I have yet to see a good gigabit hub for under $2k or so. Most of the gigabit-compatible hubs offered use gigabit for uplink, and a handful of 100-base-T links for the rest of the ports.
What sort of crack are you on? Check out the Linux Router Project , freesco, etc. I own an ISP that is Cisco free using entirely LRP based routers and firewalls.
Some of these firewalls and routers are 486 and Pentium based systems. The core router currently is a measely Pentium 75 with 16 MBs ram and all is does it route packets....with ease. The core router is connected via fast ethernet to the backbone of my provider where I'm colo'd. The inside fast ethernet connections go to various class C networks.
Aside from the more typical ISP functions, we light office buildings and sell bandwidth on a private network to networks and individuals within the building, all connections firewalled. There Pentium based machines with 16/32MB RAM and 6 ethernet/fast ethernet ports and K-6/2 or Celeron based machines with 64/128MB of RAM and up to 17 fast ethernet ports or 8 T-1's w/ CSUs. Most of these are rackmounts and some are "obsolete" low profile business grade systems.
Using a PC as a router in place of a hub isn't an option, as one gigabit ethernet card will come very close to saturating a 32-bit 33 MHz PCI bus. Start streaming large amounts of data through the house and the router will fail to handle the traffic.
I think for a router you will find that in practice it will be pretty difficult to saturate the 32-bit 33MHz PCI bus. This is a home network and we have a hard time saturating the bus in 100,000 square foot (12,200 square meter) office buildings with several hundred people getting internet access. Also, if you really must use GB Ethernet, I've seen copper Gigabit Ethernet cards for under $50. At that price, skip the hub/switch and put multiple in the router and bridge them, for connection to the downstream connections. If performance is critical, skip the hub idea altogether and really route or get a switch.
For the time being, Gigabit Ethernet is probably unnecessary so use fast Ethernet. You can even get a 4 port PCI card that is a fast Ethernet switch. So that and another fast Ethernet card, and you've got your router. Or put 2 fast Ethernet cards in the router and buy a switch. Even the Realtek 8139 based cards work just fine and can be under $10 with some looking.
At home, or at work, a PC based router is an elegant, inexpensive, highly reliable router.
Resumes are dynamic, not static documents. You should always produce custom resumes for every job you are trying to land instead of the same piece of one-size-fits-all document. Sometimes listing a porn tech job is absolutely the right thing to do like if you are applying for something that requires tech heavy skills. The same things goes for a non-porn job. If you are applying to work for the Moral Majority, you wouldn't list it. An non-tech example would be *NOT* listing on a resume that you were the CEO of a Fortune 500 when you are applying to be a secretary.
Good porn sites frequently use some of the most sophisticated web technologies around. Someone having been a geek at a porn site wouldn't prevent me from hiring them. Someone having worked for a site that provided poor customer service, failed to pay its bills or generally was disreputable would keep me from hiring them. These are not the same thing.
I haven't used this myself but surfing over to the WinCVS website, I found cvsscc. It's a project to map the scc stuff that MS uses to cvs. Another attempt, perhaps more mature, is Jalindi Igloo. The first paragraph from the website says:
"Jalindi Igloo is a program that allows you to connect Microsoft Visual Studio and other IDEs directly to a CVS repository. The program is completely free and can be used anyway you like."
They owned the data passing through the network. Yes, your info, or your company info. Viewing porn was a TOS violation as was hosting a website, mail server etc.
Pretty ugly TOS and one that I would never sign off on.
Hmm, this make a far better colo than even the ex-Bell System CO's. You know the ones, the pre-breakup buildings that all look alike and have 2ft thick walls and floors that can hold scans of equipment and survive a nuking.
Especially given the fact that these already have scads of high quality power runs, those pretty Tempest enforced wire paths for comm cabling, and hellacious power backup prebuilt, etc., this price is a fraction of what it cost to build out something a facility like this.
This would be the place for a startup hosting company with the vc cash of 2 years ago to make a real run at it. Wish I had it!
I bought Nick Aubrey's book from from Nick himself at Geek Pride in Boston. Kind of struck me as an engineer turned homeless guy trying to be a salesman. And I've got to say, had Nick not been persistent, I wouldn't have bought the book.
Okay, I bought so that he'd stop talking to me. Now I wish I'd have spent the day talking to him. And listening.
Skip buying/stealing your next fix of virutal crack long enough to run to your computer to find Nick and BUY this book. My girlfried made fun of me because I couldn't and wouldn't put it down. She's an artist.
If you aren't a geek, likely you'll be left about page one but I've been passing it around to geeks and it's somewhere now around the Redmond campus.
OT I know, but Nick should know that this is truly compelling portrait of the future (I think he knows already). And I hope to be lucky enough to run into him again.
The city operates a municiple utility. They have a hydro plant that generates electricity via wave action for the sole purpose of selling power to the grid in order to provide a monthly rebate. In other words, the buy and sell power to the grid every month (kind of like every other utility).
Marblehead is a "head" of land that juts into the ocean near Salem (of witch killing fame). I lived their a few months ago and my most expensive electic bill was $18 in December, 1996, with 8 computers and a big audio system on all the time, dishwasher, etc. Okay, heat was from oil but in the summer, the electric bill with rebate was as low as $10! Yes, this was residential.
NSI *has* released one I know of. I client of mine lost www.esni.com due to non-payment. The only problem was not receiving a bill. Not the 2 emails nor the paper bill that NSI says it sent.
I know of one other name/site I host that had the same problem but since he has only one (and not a ton going to the same site). Nobody would have wanted this name anyway since it has 18 characters vs. 4.
I called Mike (the once and maybe future owner of esni.com) to tell him that he wasn't recruiting anymore but that he was selling viagra for $6 bucks a pill from Korea to other Americans without a perscription. And the name has not one thing to do with the drug seller's name or business.
Truth be told, IBI registered this, not NSI (one of the new registrars). But that means NSI released it. And within a few weeks of the supposed billing. Hopefully, Mike will pursue it since it is the acronym of his company and the new corporate imagery is based on it. NSI offered to and then transfered me to what amounts to their legal office when I called about the name and no bills since obviously there was a problem. Hopefully, he'll get it back.
Let me first issue a caveat. Cheap is in the eye of the beholder.
That said, I think the solution is here. Find any old preferable Pentium based box with at least 2 PCI slots, and some Trendnet 4 port 10/100 hub pci card kits w/ a single port 10/100 card and a 15 cable ($79 incl. shipping) and there you have it. Bridge the 2 hub cards and use whatever other nics you want and have room for. Use the Linux Router ProjectEiger based version. Here's a link to an image w/ DNS caching, dhcpd, dhcpcd (if you need it), some web based reporting. This guy already did the hard part for you. Just add the rtl8139 module to it and follow the directions to run it headless (easy to do). Yes, tulip based cards have less latency but these work well.
Your total investment should be under $300 for a 16 MB firewall, with 8 port hub, fast ethernet on the DMZ and WAN side, etc. Pick a system like a decent clone or the Dell Optiplex that doesn't need keyboard, mouse and monitor hooked up. I'm using a similar configuration for building infrastructure in office buildings. And it works well.
I'm in the Boston/Brookline area. I find DSLReports quite accurate but it depends on who is being sold to that determines your price. If you are a home user, than your price is cheap. If you are a business customer, frequently you have to bend over comparatively.
Most DSL providers have some serious issue and the person responding from not-reseller (wholesaler?) of DSL is right about the he-said she-said nature of dealing with reseller-to c/ilec-to wholesaler nightmare of communications. Unfortunately, is doesn't get any better if you are dealing with a c/ilec that has their own DSL infrastructure. Again, the previous poster said, the cable plant is a nightmare, the clec doesn't like to clean it up and they tend to ignore the problem. The other problem is that the ilec ignores the problem.
My experience directly relates to HarvardNet. I previously was collocated in their Charlestown, MA, datacenter AND had a DSL circuit to my home office (no backhauling of T-1's allowed since they want to be paid twice for bandwidth). I also manage vender relations for clients that happen in some cases to have DSL circuits from HarvardNet.
So the DSL story is the circuit install took a long time (don't remember the actual number) and (this one I do) to an additional 8 weeks for service to be reliable even if it was in a degraded state. At the time, they exclusively offered rate adaptive DSL (RADSL). I signed up for a 256/256 kb circuit and received about 112/112 kb. As long as it stayed up, I could like. They were still unwilling to charge less than the 144/144kb minimal service offering they had.
Service sort of was stable with a few outages daily lasting from several seconds several minutes, mostly around I think 10 AM and 10 PM. 10 weeks after mostly stable 112 kb connections, the line quality fell apart again. So they turned up the circuit from the 256kb setting (remember I was seeing about 112kb) to 784kb and then I got about 200kb/200kb with the same routine outages daily. No problem.
Then they sold their soul to Cisco and threw out the Paradyne equipment and latency went away and so did what line reliability their was.
At this point getting things fixed became even harder because the basically ignored any repair tickets.
While all this was going on, I was having trouble in the datacenter as well that I won't go into here. They took forever to resolve any problems and they would always resurface. And billing was a disaster.
Finally, I had to declare my contracts with the breached. Their VP of Sales said in a conference call that it didn't matter if they didn't provide the service they promised; they expected to get paid. Our attorney's are talking. I assume HarvardNet's VP's attitude comes from the fact that DSL is not a tarrifed service like voice calls or traditional data circuits (not subject to the same duties and rules). That must be why SBC is being sued by their customers here.
Regarding clients, one in particular received installation service from HarvardNet when the customer premises equipment was left unplugged on a box of toilet paper in the telephone closet. That was their installation. I installed the CPE for the customer 3 months after the HarvardNet install (I came on the scene for the customer 3 months later). The services that were contracted for (DNS, webmail, etc.) had not been set up as stated by a fax dated 13 weeks earlier from HarvardNet. Someone even called from HarvardNet tech support asking 2 weeks prior to my installing (read that as plugging it into power and ethernet) asking if they had a firewall because they couldn't access the CPE. That would site outside the firewall and does. This customer receives 1/2 to 2/3 of the bandwidth they are supposed to. HarvardNet doesn't want to deal with it. I get called about it daily by someone in support asking to if the problem magically went away so they can close the ticket.
HarvardNet used to be a great company to deal with. Then they had 25 people (January 1999). Most of those are gone since they received venture capital and early this year they had in excess of 300 hundred, largely unskilled contractors. They said early this year that they expect to reach 700 this year.
The reviews of DSL reports are largely right on. Of the HarvardNet reviews (9 last I looked and none from me) 6 were negative and 3 positive. 1 of the positives changed to negative and the other 2 obviously were from HarvardNet employees, especially the anonymous one from an internal address range used by HarvardNet employees.
What makes this so bad is that HarvardNet charges a premium and markets to business customers, not home users. They claim great service. Unfortunately, the only place they deliver is pre-sales.
DSL potentially is a great technology but what hinders it is terrible technical infrastructure, lack of communications and lack of desire to fix problems. And I don't think my situation is unique.
Claiming that they own each and every domain name possible in the TLDs that they ultimately control the registration of I believe is tantamount to being the government. Basically, they are saying its their property first which amounts to eminent domain. That is crap. Correct me if I'm wrong but I don't believe the National Science Foundation transfered that authority to them.
Auctioning domains. That's pretty interesting. An ISP that I worked with (I helped manage but wasn't an employee of) had its domains turned off claiming non-payment. Interesting since NSI had cashed the checks 3 months before. The only way Dale got that resolved was to call their attorney.
And they are so easy to get a hold of. Frequently you get no response from their automated forms and you are lucky to get someone on the phone. They frequently blow off faxes as well. And I speak from experience that they've lost the whois database many times. Usually no one catches it when they restore from a week old tape but one time they restore a 6 month old copy. Well, better old than none but this is crazy. I agree with the previous poster that NSI is trying still to enforce a monopoly that they don't own.
Beware trying the jump registrars. NSI disavows responsibility if you lose your domain in the process.
For years, NSI has been arrogant, unresponsive and inept. This is another example of arrogance. And easily could lead to the other two since they make frequent mistakes.
I was using HarvardNet in the Boston area for DSL and colocation and have fired them. They are not a reseller and claim that they sell business grade circuits and charge that way. Depending on who you talk to, their name should be "HarmlessNet" or "HarmfulNet". My experience says harmful. The experience of myself and those I've spoken too have all been similar: failure to deliver contracted for (and billed for!) service. And to paraphrase the VP of Sales: it doesn't matter if we don't deliver what we promise, we expect to be paid. Regardless of who sells you the DSL, unless they are an lec, they are getting the copper elsewhere. Since most T-1's are HDSL anyway and one company is providing IP while the other provides the circuit, you'd think that it wouldn't matter much. I've got a story that I'm writing for submission here on/. about lack of service in the age of big VC and I think these experiences pretty much describe it. My experiences with most ISP's and telco's over the last several years have all been similar but certainly the degree is different. The majority of the people dealing with customers are hired off the street, they don't cost much and aren't given any customer service training. And when you finally get someone on the phone who is knowledgeable, they generally are irritable and don't want to talk to anyone. I know a fair number of people that work for have worked at ISP's like Genuity (nee GTE Internetworking nee BBN Planet), Sprint, UUNet, CAIS, etc., in the DC and Boston areas and typically the knowledgeable ones work incredibly long hours. In the case of HarvardNet, anyone with knowledge in engineering basically was told to leave when they received gobs of venture capital (about $70 Million to date). Unfortunately, the VC wanted their own people in so that meant low salaries and people that look good in suits. Now that I went a little off topic, I'll real it in and talk about DSL. HarvardNet uses RADSL has a clean internal network in terms of ping times and traffic but has about zilch for border routers and seems to use static routes everywhere. They went through a major changeover in equipment to Cisco both for their routers and switches and their DSLAMs. At least the Paradyne DSLAMs worked in a degraded network environment(anyone who has lived with Bell Atlantic/Nynex/NE Telephone knows exactly what I mean). HarvardNet's customer care manager went so far as to state, after the switch from Paradyne to Cisco, that "Cisco had no idea what was wrong". That was about 2 1/2 weeks after the gear was replaced. No one returns calls unless you really raise hell and they act like 20% packet loss is normal unless you can roll out the industry statistics. Specifically, a circuit turned up for 784kb shouldn't routinely have the throughput of about a 19.2kb modem from a known source a couple of hops away with no load. You should see about (784/8) * 0.87 = 85kb or bandwidth in bits divided by bites * overhead in a best case scenario. But the measured bandwidth when things were working well came in at around 12 - 15 (2 B channel ISDN) and sometimes an abominable 3k, or 28.8 kb modem. And this was all within their network when ping times between hops, other than the DSLAM, of about 1 ms. I've heard a lot of this same sort of thing regarding DSL about a lot of providers. HarvardNet seems to be as bad as Flashcom. The people with good experiences with any DSL provider seems to be the ones who are lucky and everything worked when it was turned up. Since I had a rack in their colo which is where the DSL originates, it provided for greater testing ability since I could do it from both ends entirely withing their network. Which, since they were unwilling to look into it meant that I had to test it myself. Over the months I watched the number of hops actually increase and decrease overtime. That's odd since there's an ATM network between the router and remote DSLAM and the only reasons to screw with that is that its either broken or increasing capacity. That's pretty amazing since there were outages (no notification) and HarvardNet claimed ignorance of the whole thing except for one engineer who was surprised that anyone noticed. And there are something like 5 customers on the DSLAM I'm on. I was sickened that I had my girlfriend get a cable modem instead (I work from their a lot so she sees that I'm at least alive). It's uptime is vastly superior as is its performance. I don't particularly like it because it saturates easily but, hey, its $40, not $400.
We gotta catch Carmen. I saw the Chief for the tv show last night as the Judge on "Law and Order". But I don't think I trust her since she was the DJ in "The Warriors" that kept informing all the bad gangs where the poor white "good gang" was in the City. I ask you, would you trust the Chief?
Slashdot Mirror
I know a t-3 is 45 Mbps. but you cant buy a 10Mbps pipe so you have to buy the next step which is cheaper than 10 T-1's and the equipment to multiplex them. also for the many of you whining about the prices I quote.
Actually, depending on provider, you can get a 10MB SMDS circuit but they are pretty pricy (~$5K-10K). I believe PSINet used to offer 10MB ATM circuits too.
Your prices are largely accurate. I know since I own an ISP. However, if you can provide your own bandwidth and connect into someones channelized T-3, you can backhaul a T-1 for the cost of one side of the loop, e.g. a T-1 for about $200-$500. Granted, most folks can't pull this number off. Also, generally, within the same CO you can run point-to-point and provide the equipment on each end. But you need bandwidth from somewhere like an employer, a friend, something. But this pushes up the price considerable given how much the comm gear can cost.
again I issue my challenge... Get a T-1 in your house with Net access for 5 times the cost of your Cable modem. it cant be done.
I can, for exactly 5 times the cost of the cable modem here. But again, I'm unusual in that I can meet the conditions I state above. The fact of the matter is that your contention is largely accurate. Not totally but pretty darn close. I'd guess there are maybe 1 in 1000 /.'ers that know how to pull this off and have access to the resources to do it.
Turn this into its own top level post and turn off the lameness filter so we see the list.
The problem is hubs. I have yet to see a good gigabit hub for under $2k or so. Most of the gigabit-compatible hubs offered use gigabit for uplink, and a handful of 100-base-T links for the rest of the ports.
Exactly my thought. Which is why I suggested multiple gigabit PCI cards. What I didn't state was that I was assuming that this would not be unsaturated. I've seen some less expensive switches in the "off brands" like D-Link, Netgear, etc., in the sub $1000 range but we are talking about a home network.
And your internal routers are either not routing (saturated) gigabit traffic through multiple cards, or not running on commodity hardware.
True. I'm not routing gigabit Ethernet, much less saturated. The network isn't saturated, despite lots of data flowing. They are running on commodity hardware though: some rackmounts w/ oem motherboards, "obsolete" name brand "business" grade and some highend clones. Just routing packets. It takes a lot of packets to saturate. However, Cisco uses the PCI bus for their routers as well like on the 7200 or the 2600's. Pretty much all their gear. Which clearly are not comodity equipment but they are PCI.
More than one saturated gigabit ethernet interface would certainly swamp a 32-bit 33 MHz PCI bus.
I haven't witnessed it myself but you probably are right about saturation with gigabit Ethernet. I don't have a sense about gigabit Ethernet on 64-bit PCI slot.
I am a-priori assuming an application that will saturate gigabit ethernet channels. Otherwise there's no reason to use gigabit at all, as you point out.
MAE East up until a couple of years ago was using ancient (assuming an Internet generation is 6 months and a calendar generation is 20 years) by Internet time DEC Gigaswitches, which are fast Ethernet switches. Designed to burst up to just over a GB for the whole switch, my recollection is they were operating at about 1.6 GB sustained in late 1997 or early 1998. This was basically saturated so you can imagine my wondering about saturating gigabit Ethernet at home.
I find given current needs in a home that gigabit Ethernet would be needed on the mind-boggling side except in rare instances. Sorry for the crack about crack
The problem is hubs. I have yet to see a good gigabit hub for under $2k or so. Most of the gigabit-compatible hubs offered use gigabit for uplink, and a handful of 100-base-T links for the rest of the ports.
What sort of crack are you on? Check out the Linux Router Project , freesco, etc. I own an ISP that is Cisco free using entirely LRP based routers and firewalls.
Some of these firewalls and routers are 486 and Pentium based systems. The core router currently is a measely Pentium 75 with 16 MBs ram and all is does it route packets....with ease. The core router is connected via fast ethernet to the backbone of my provider where I'm colo'd. The inside fast ethernet connections go to various class C networks.
Aside from the more typical ISP functions, we light office buildings and sell bandwidth on a private network to networks and individuals within the building, all connections firewalled. There Pentium based machines with 16/32MB RAM and 6 ethernet/fast ethernet ports and K-6/2 or Celeron based machines with 64/128MB of RAM and up to 17 fast ethernet ports or 8 T-1's w/ CSUs. Most of these are rackmounts and some are "obsolete" low profile business grade systems.
Using a PC as a router in place of a hub isn't an option, as one gigabit ethernet card will come very close to saturating a 32-bit 33 MHz PCI bus. Start streaming large amounts of data through the house and the router will fail to handle the traffic.
I think for a router you will find that in practice it will be pretty difficult to saturate the 32-bit 33MHz PCI bus. This is a home network and we have a hard time saturating the bus in 100,000 square foot (12,200 square meter) office buildings with several hundred people getting internet access. Also, if you really must use GB Ethernet, I've seen copper Gigabit Ethernet cards for under $50. At that price, skip the hub/switch and put multiple in the router and bridge them, for connection to the downstream connections. If performance is critical, skip the hub idea altogether and really route or get a switch.
For the time being, Gigabit Ethernet is probably unnecessary so use fast Ethernet. You can even get a 4 port PCI card that is a fast Ethernet switch. So that and another fast Ethernet card, and you've got your router. Or put 2 fast Ethernet cards in the router and buy a switch. Even the Realtek 8139 based cards work just fine and can be under $10 with some looking.
At home, or at work, a PC based router is an elegant, inexpensive, highly reliable router.
Resumes are dynamic, not static documents. You should always produce custom resumes for every job you are trying to land instead of the same piece of one-size-fits-all document. Sometimes listing a porn tech job is absolutely the right thing to do like if you are applying for something that requires tech heavy skills. The same things goes for a non-porn job. If you are applying to work for the Moral Majority, you wouldn't list it. An non-tech example would be *NOT* listing on a resume that you were the CEO of a Fortune 500 when you are applying to be a secretary.
Good porn sites frequently use some of the most sophisticated web technologies around. Someone having been a geek at a porn site wouldn't prevent me from hiring them. Someone having worked for a site that provided poor customer service, failed to pay its bills or generally was disreputable would keep me from hiring them. These are not the same thing.
I haven't used this myself but surfing over to the WinCVS website, I found cvsscc. It's a project to map the scc stuff that MS uses to cvs. Another attempt, perhaps more mature, is Jalindi Igloo. The first paragraph from the website says:
"Jalindi Igloo is a program that allows you to connect Microsoft Visual Studio and other IDEs directly to a CVS repository. The program is completely free and can be used anyway you like."
These look to be just what you are looking for.
Well, it does once you pick your country and go back. Persistent cookies and all that.
Anyone ever read the TOS?
They owned the data passing through the network. Yes, your info, or your company info. Viewing porn was a TOS violation as was hosting a website, mail server etc.
Pretty ugly TOS and one that I would never sign off on.
Hmm, this make a far better colo than even the ex-Bell System CO's. You know the ones, the pre-breakup buildings that all look alike and have 2ft thick walls and floors that can hold scans of equipment and survive a nuking.
Especially given the fact that these already have scads of high quality power runs, those pretty Tempest enforced wire paths for comm cabling, and hellacious power backup prebuilt, etc., this price is a fraction of what it cost to build out something a facility like this.
This would be the place for a startup hosting company with the vc cash of 2 years ago to make a real run at it. Wish I had it!
er, John Sundman I mean!
I bought Nick Aubrey's book from from Nick himself at Geek Pride in Boston. Kind of struck me as an engineer turned homeless guy trying to be a salesman. And I've got to say, had Nick not been persistent, I wouldn't have bought the book.
Okay, I bought so that he'd stop talking to me. Now I wish I'd have spent the day talking to him. And listening.
Skip buying/stealing your next fix of virutal crack long enough to run to your computer to find Nick and BUY this book. My girlfried made fun of me because I couldn't and wouldn't put it down. She's an artist.
If you aren't a geek, likely you'll be left about page one but I've been passing it around to geeks and it's somewhere now around the Redmond campus.
OT I know, but Nick should know that this is truly compelling portrait of the future (I think he knows already). And I hope to be lucky enough to run into him again.
The city operates a municiple utility. They have a hydro plant that generates electricity via wave action for the sole purpose of selling power to the grid in order to provide a monthly rebate. In other words, the buy and sell power to the grid every month (kind of like every other utility).
Marblehead is a "head" of land that juts into the ocean near Salem (of witch killing fame). I lived their a few months ago and my most expensive electic bill was $18 in December, 1996, with 8 computers and a big audio system on all the time, dishwasher, etc. Okay, heat was from oil but in the summer, the electric bill with rebate was as low as $10! Yes, this was residential.
OT*** Why did I ever move?!?!
NSI *has* released one I know of. I client of mine lost www.esni.com due to non-payment. The only problem was not receiving a bill. Not the 2 emails nor the paper bill that NSI says it sent.
I know of one other name/site I host that had the same problem but since he has only one (and not a ton going to the same site). Nobody would have wanted this name anyway since it has 18 characters vs. 4.
I called Mike (the once and maybe future owner of esni.com) to tell him that he wasn't recruiting anymore but that he was selling viagra for $6 bucks a pill from Korea to other Americans without a perscription. And the name has not one thing to do with the drug seller's name or business.
Truth be told, IBI registered this, not NSI (one of the new registrars). But that means NSI released it. And within a few weeks of the supposed billing. Hopefully, Mike will pursue it since it is the acronym of his company and the new corporate imagery is based on it. NSI offered to and then transfered me to what amounts to their legal office when I called about the name and no bills since obviously there was a problem. Hopefully, he'll get it back.
4 character are hard to come by.
Let me first issue a caveat. Cheap is in the eye of the beholder.
That said, I think the solution is here. Find any old preferable Pentium based box with at least 2 PCI slots, and some Trendnet 4 port 10/100 hub pci card kits w/ a single port 10/100 card and a 15 cable ($79 incl. shipping) and there you have it. Bridge the 2 hub cards and use whatever other nics you want and have room for. Use the Linux Router Project Eiger based version. Here's a link to an image w/ DNS caching, dhcpd, dhcpcd (if you need it), some web based reporting. This guy already did the hard part for you. Just add the rtl8139 module to it and follow the directions to run it headless (easy to do). Yes, tulip based cards have less latency but these work well.
Your total investment should be under $300 for a 16 MB firewall, with 8 port hub, fast ethernet on the DMZ and WAN side, etc. Pick a system like a decent clone or the Dell Optiplex that doesn't need keyboard, mouse and monitor hooked up. I'm using a similar configuration for building infrastructure in office buildings. And it works well.
I'm in the Boston/Brookline area. I find DSLReports quite accurate but it depends on who is being sold to that determines your price. If you are a home user, than your price is cheap. If you are a business customer, frequently you have to bend over comparatively.
Most DSL providers have some serious issue and the person responding from not-reseller (wholesaler?) of DSL is right about the he-said she-said nature of dealing with reseller-to c/ilec-to wholesaler nightmare of communications. Unfortunately, is doesn't get any better if you are dealing with a c/ilec that has their own DSL infrastructure. Again, the previous poster said, the cable plant is a nightmare, the clec doesn't like to clean it up and they tend to ignore the problem. The other problem is that the ilec ignores the problem.
My experience directly relates to HarvardNet. I previously was collocated in their Charlestown, MA, datacenter AND had a DSL circuit to my home office (no backhauling of T-1's allowed since they want to be paid twice for bandwidth). I also manage vender relations for clients that happen in some cases to have DSL circuits from HarvardNet.
So the DSL story is the circuit install took a long time (don't remember the actual number) and (this one I do) to an additional 8 weeks for service to be reliable even if it was in a degraded state. At the time, they exclusively offered rate adaptive DSL (RADSL). I signed up for a 256/256 kb circuit and received about 112/112 kb. As long as it stayed up, I could like. They were still unwilling to charge less than the 144/144kb minimal service offering they had.
Service sort of was stable with a few outages daily lasting from several seconds several minutes, mostly around I think 10 AM and 10 PM. 10 weeks after mostly stable 112 kb connections, the line quality fell apart again. So they turned up the circuit from the 256kb setting (remember I was seeing about 112kb) to 784kb and then I got about 200kb/200kb with the same routine outages daily. No problem.
Then they sold their soul to Cisco and threw out the Paradyne equipment and latency went away and so did what line reliability their was.
At this point getting things fixed became even harder because the basically ignored any repair tickets.
While all this was going on, I was having trouble in the datacenter as well that I won't go into here. They took forever to resolve any problems and they would always resurface. And billing was a disaster.
Finally, I had to declare my contracts with the breached. Their VP of Sales said in a conference call that it didn't matter if they didn't provide the service they promised; they expected to get paid. Our attorney's are talking. I assume HarvardNet's VP's attitude comes from the fact that DSL is not a tarrifed service like voice calls or traditional data circuits (not subject to the same duties and rules). That must be why SBC is being sued by their customers here.
Regarding clients, one in particular received installation service from HarvardNet when the customer premises equipment was left unplugged on a box of toilet paper in the telephone closet. That was their installation. I installed the CPE for the customer 3 months after the HarvardNet install (I came on the scene for the customer 3 months later). The services that were contracted for (DNS, webmail, etc.) had not been set up as stated by a fax dated 13 weeks earlier from HarvardNet. Someone even called from HarvardNet tech support asking 2 weeks prior to my installing (read that as plugging it into power and ethernet) asking if they had a firewall because they couldn't access the CPE. That would site outside the firewall and does. This customer receives 1/2 to 2/3 of the bandwidth they are supposed to. HarvardNet doesn't want to deal with it. I get called about it daily by someone in support asking to if the problem magically went away so they can close the ticket.
HarvardNet used to be a great company to deal with. Then they had 25 people (January 1999). Most of those are gone since they received venture capital and early this year they had in excess of 300 hundred, largely unskilled contractors. They said early this year that they expect to reach 700 this year.
The reviews of DSL reports are largely right on. Of the HarvardNet reviews (9 last I looked and none from me) 6 were negative and 3 positive. 1 of the positives changed to negative and the other 2 obviously were from HarvardNet employees, especially the anonymous one from an internal address range used by HarvardNet employees.
What makes this so bad is that HarvardNet charges a premium and markets to business customers, not home users. They claim great service. Unfortunately, the only place they deliver is pre-sales.
DSL potentially is a great technology but what hinders it is terrible technical infrastructure, lack of communications and lack of desire to fix problems. And I don't think my situation is unique.
Claiming that they own each and every domain name possible in the TLDs that they ultimately control the registration of I believe is tantamount to being the government. Basically, they are saying its their property first which amounts to eminent domain. That is crap. Correct me if I'm wrong but I don't believe the National Science Foundation transfered that authority to them.
Auctioning domains. That's pretty interesting. An ISP that I worked with (I helped manage but wasn't an employee of) had its domains turned off claiming non-payment. Interesting since NSI had cashed the checks 3 months before. The only way Dale got that resolved was to call their attorney.
And they are so easy to get a hold of. Frequently you get no response from their automated forms and you are lucky to get someone on the phone. They frequently blow off faxes as well. And I speak from experience that they've lost the whois database many times. Usually no one catches it when they restore from a week old tape but one time they restore a 6 month old copy. Well, better old than none but this is crazy. I agree with the previous poster that NSI is trying still to enforce a monopoly that they don't own.
Beware trying the jump registrars. NSI disavows responsibility if you lose your domain in the process.
For years, NSI has been arrogant, unresponsive and inept. This is another example of arrogance. And easily could lead to the other two since they make frequent mistakes.
I was using HarvardNet in the Boston area for DSL and colocation and have fired them. They are not a reseller and claim that they sell business grade circuits and charge that way. Depending on who you talk to, their name should be "HarmlessNet" or "HarmfulNet". My experience says harmful. The experience of myself and those I've spoken too have all been similar: failure to deliver contracted for (and billed for!) service. And to paraphrase the VP of Sales: it doesn't matter if we don't deliver what we promise, we expect to be paid. Regardless of who sells you the DSL, unless they are an lec, they are getting the copper elsewhere. Since most T-1's are HDSL anyway and one company is providing IP while the other provides the circuit, you'd think that it wouldn't matter much. I've got a story that I'm writing for submission here on /. about lack of service in the age of big VC and I think these experiences pretty much describe it. My experiences with most ISP's and telco's over the last several years have all been similar but certainly the degree is different. The majority of the people dealing with customers are hired off the street, they don't cost much and aren't given any customer service training. And when you finally get someone on the phone who is knowledgeable, they generally are irritable and don't want to talk to anyone. I know a fair number of people that work for have worked at ISP's like Genuity (nee GTE Internetworking nee BBN Planet), Sprint, UUNet, CAIS, etc., in the DC and Boston areas and typically the knowledgeable ones work incredibly long hours. In the case of HarvardNet, anyone with knowledge in engineering basically was told to leave when they received gobs of venture capital (about $70 Million to date). Unfortunately, the VC wanted their own people in so that meant low salaries and people that look good in suits. Now that I went a little off topic, I'll real it in and talk about DSL. HarvardNet uses RADSL has a clean internal network in terms of ping times and traffic but has about zilch for border routers and seems to use static routes everywhere. They went through a major changeover in equipment to Cisco both for their routers and switches and their DSLAMs. At least the Paradyne DSLAMs worked in a degraded network environment(anyone who has lived with Bell Atlantic/Nynex/NE Telephone knows exactly what I mean). HarvardNet's customer care manager went so far as to state, after the switch from Paradyne to Cisco, that "Cisco had no idea what was wrong". That was about 2 1/2 weeks after the gear was replaced. No one returns calls unless you really raise hell and they act like 20% packet loss is normal unless you can roll out the industry statistics. Specifically, a circuit turned up for 784kb shouldn't routinely have the throughput of about a 19.2kb modem from a known source a couple of hops away with no load. You should see about (784/8) * 0.87 = 85kb or bandwidth in bits divided by bites * overhead in a best case scenario. But the measured bandwidth when things were working well came in at around 12 - 15 (2 B channel ISDN) and sometimes an abominable 3k, or 28.8 kb modem. And this was all within their network when ping times between hops, other than the DSLAM, of about 1 ms. I've heard a lot of this same sort of thing regarding DSL about a lot of providers. HarvardNet seems to be as bad as Flashcom. The people with good experiences with any DSL provider seems to be the ones who are lucky and everything worked when it was turned up. Since I had a rack in their colo which is where the DSL originates, it provided for greater testing ability since I could do it from both ends entirely withing their network. Which, since they were unwilling to look into it meant that I had to test it myself. Over the months I watched the number of hops actually increase and decrease overtime. That's odd since there's an ATM network between the router and remote DSLAM and the only reasons to screw with that is that its either broken or increasing capacity. That's pretty amazing since there were outages (no notification) and HarvardNet claimed ignorance of the whole thing except for one engineer who was surprised that anyone noticed. And there are something like 5 customers on the DSLAM I'm on. I was sickened that I had my girlfriend get a cable modem instead (I work from their a lot so she sees that I'm at least alive). It's uptime is vastly superior as is its performance. I don't particularly like it because it saturates easily but, hey, its $40, not $400.
We gotta catch Carmen. I saw the Chief for the tv show last night as the Judge on "Law and Order". But I don't think I trust her since she was the DJ in "The Warriors" that kept informing all the bad gangs where the poor white "good gang" was in the City. I ask you, would you trust the Chief?