Unfortunately it seems as though most ISPs are downright hostile against their users these days. After all, some of their users have been hostile towards their systems. If the ISP can not take care of it's security, someone will take care of their systems.
I am a network engineer by trade. I am tired of ISPs not doing their job. Most large ISPs these days are acting more like cable TV providers than Internet Service Providers. What is your typical ADSL and cable Internet service good for these days anyway? You get a decent downstream rate, but your upstream rate is horrible, server ports get blocked, and too many "service" providers try to pass their customer a data link layer connection instead of a network layer connection -- there is a big service difference.
NANOG is just not doing it's job these days. NANOG represents the big corporate interests in North America for ISPs, but nobody is there fighting for the users of these services. I think it time for the service providers to be reminded what the Internet is about.
I am paying for the bandwidth. Let me do what I want with it!
Providing an asymmetrical Internet connection is okay, as long as the user has symmetrical options available to them, and they receive a discount for the fact that they are saving bandwidth. Furthermore, providing high download rates to customers has no value to ISPs that entirely serve the residential market. If you do not have business customers in your collocation facilities who are also using the upstream bandwidth, then you are inefficiently allocating bandwidth.
Prohibiting servers is blasphemous. This is the Internet, not cable television.
Bandwidth providers are being like Intel and the clock cycle issue. Stop pushing these higher downstream rates as a marketing ploy when you can not provide any kind of Service Level Agreement (SLA). Having a 1.2Mbps downstream rate is worthless if you can not actually use it. 512Kbps is enough for the vast majority of home users. Oversubscription is a necessary evil, but do not abuse it.
File sharing networks are not bad. People who are sharing copyrighted material and performing illegal acts are bad. Make a clear differentiation between the two. Blocking a service is bad in most cases -- when Code Red worm broke out, that was a good reason. I have no sympathy for customers having their circuits shut down for trading copyrighted material that they do not own -- stop being a voyeur and start being a player on the Internet, or else go back to watching TV.
Start providing real services to your users. If ISPs had provided the NTP option in their DHCP lease messages and provided this information publicly, Microsoft would not have to include a client with their X operating system to synch the time to a clock that could be far too many hops away. Tell your users where your servers and what you offer!
Providing a data link layer connection is typically bad. If you are an ISP and provide only a data link layer connection to your customers (bridged DSL, all cable Internet that I know of, some wireless services) then you are responsible for their entire network, which really sucks for you. This should be provided as an addition service, not the status quo. On Cisco devices, use commands like "spanning-tree rootguard", "port protected", and most importantly, place each customer into their own individual VLAN and terminate their layer two connection at a layer three trunking interface -- this is what most DSL circuits that use Frame Relay or ATM do, they terminate at a trunking interface somewhere.
I feel that ICANN and the NICs (ARIN, RIPE, APNIC) need to hit service providers over the head with a markup percentage cap for IP allocations. Charging me $45 a month for a/29 network block (8 IPs) is unacceptable (Qwest Communications). If you calculate the cost that a U.S. ISP pays ARIN for a net block annually in it's most inefficient form, an ISP pays no more than 65 cents per IP address. In it's most efficient form, your ISP may be paying less than 7 cents per IP address. In my case, that is somewhere between a 900% to 7300% markup.
And you thought IP addresses were expensive. Nope.
On that note, not allowing your customers to receive a static IP allocation is horrible. It forces customers away from your service at to someone else for no technical reason. The reasoning is entirely political/social.
I would suggest that ISPs knock off the antics and start providing service to the last mile if they want to stay in business. This is what got them into the debt problem in the first place. Where were the customers going to come from if they do not have any network access? That fat core is doing you nothing now Global Crossing.
I am willing to pay $200 a month for a 512Kbps bidirectional layer three network connection with a first hop latency of less than 40ms, a/29 IP allocation with reverse DNS file control, permitting me to run servers in their terms of service agreement and to not block any port or IP protocol, and there is nobody who even comes close to providing service. I live in an apartment complex in the metro Orlando Florida area. The only option that I have is an oversubscribed Time Warner Road Runner cable Internet connection.
I get most of my access by collocating a box in Denver at a friend's house and doing work that I need to do their. I had to send my box to another state just to get the access that I wanted.
Screw you ISPs and the no demand excuse. The customers are demanding better service -- you just aren't providing it.
As a consumer, I am very distressed with the state of broadband. I just can not find broadband providers that meet the needs that I desire. The only option that I seem to have is getting a DS1 or fractional DS1 at extreme cost to get what I want.
What do I want?
Broadband is made up of two things -- latency and capacity. Low latency is important. Anything over 100ms is high and can cause problems with time sensitive applications such as voice communications, shell usage, and action game playing. In regards to capacity, this is the pipe width of your circuit, be it 128Kbps or 1.5Mbps.
But it is also made up of other things. Does your service provider allow you to use servers? Will their mirror your reverse DNS files since they hold the masters? What about in and out port and protocol filtering? What about quality of service? Uplink costs are about $1000 per 1Mbps -- that is $1 per Kb! In order to make money and provide a good service to their customers, they need to oversubscribe, and also deal out the bandwidth fairly.
I have no sympathy for the P2P copywrited material sharing fools out there who are upset that they can not pirate software -- that is not what the Internet is for. The Internet is not TV -- you do not just watch things. The Internet lets you publish, touch, interact, and exchange information on an International scale.
Companies who do not let you run servers on ANY connection, be it dialup or DSL, are NOT providing Internet connectivity. They are providing browse-only-Internet, Read-Only Internet, or just plain TV-like crap.
Companies that do not provide quality of service mechanisms are also doing a poor job. Implementing a QOS scheme with modern equipment is very easy and works, but nobody wants to rock their big dumb ISP boat and say that they need to do something like that.
Offering only an OSI layer 2 (bridged) network connection is NOT acceptable. This means cable providers, LRE (long range Ethernet), and PPPoE/PPPoATM providers that do not provide point to point circuits. If you want to provide this kind of service, then that is okay, but not as an only option.
Any ISP that does not provide for IP allocations is no ISP at all, period.
I do not need a 1.5Mbps upstream and 128Kbps upstream DSL line. I would much rather have a 384Kbps bidirectional ADSL or SDSL line (yes, you can have a balanced line with ADSL, there is no technical excuse) and be able to use it.
I do not mind paying a little more for these services, but overcharging me for things like a small IP allocation, or reverse DNS on the allocation, or using servers, is unacceptable. How much work does it take to do a SWIP and enter a configuration line in your RDNS pull system? I KNOW how much work it takes because I used to do it -- about two minutes AT MOST, almost zero resources, does not have to be done by an engineer, and is easily automated.
AHhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I hate modern broadband providers, and I hate the people who use them blindly. Why does nobody care?
In Denver I was paying $150 a month for a 640Kbps PPPoATM ADSL line with a/29 IP allocation from Qwest. They permitted me to request and return IP allocations from a web based system, and I could do my reverse DNS from this web based system (not as good as pulling from my DNS server, but acceptable). I almost always got the full 640Kbps if I needed it and my line had uptime of months between occasional DSLAM reset. My first hop out was 45ms, which was kind of high, but consistent and acceptable.
I have recently moved to the Orlando Florida metro area, and while looking for apartments have found that I am really screwed. I just can not get what I need. Almost all of the apartment complexes here used digital line compression on their phone lines, which kills DSL. There is nothing wireless, and only RoadRunner cable modem service is available, and I hear very oversubscribed.
I have owned everything Moby at one point or another, minus 18.
Sucky Moby release = Fewer Sales
The only Moby CD that I still have is the 1992 Moby title release, all techno. None of his other releases really come to be anything like it was. Moby went through fundamental change several times with different releases until Play was releasedm which was noticed by the popular music listeners. Play was indeed mostly good, with a few tracks reminiscent of the sounds of releases like Everything Is Wrong and Early Ambient, but also new stuff that was smart and had a great sound.
It may be that there were fewer sales for this release because people were able to sample it before they actually bought the CD. What they found out was that nothing in the new release was to their liking, much like I did. It sucked.
Moby went from being and Early Undergrounder to being a Pop Play-er. This has changed his audience scene dramatically. If he wants to maintain that popularity, he is going to have to come to the conclusion that other artists make -- he will have to whore himself out and move with the audience, trying to keep himself in their face. Otherwise they will just move on to something else, like the way people forgot about Ticke Me Elmo, Tamagotchi, Cabbage Patch kids, and those damn Pogo-Ball things.
Moby should be very thankful for the sales that he has had and had better keep in mind that he too can pull an M.C. Hammer. Top of the charts can be bankrupt and forgotten in a short time. If he wants to be true to his own nature, then that is fine. What has he to complain about? If he wants to be a pop whore, then he failed this time around because his last release, 18, failed to capture the attention of either the popular audience or the underground-techno audience. He is complaining because that release was not for himself. Or at least not for something other than his pocketbook.
Back to that lone Moby CD in my carrying case. It has a place along with my Orb, Tetsu Inoue, collection. I kept it because it because I liked it. The same reason that I bought it. The reason that I bought other Moby CDs is because I had heard them on places like Netradio.com and SomaFM Drone Zone (R.I.P). I will not waste my money on guessing about what CDs are good, and I will not waste my time to go into a CD shop and put the greasy headphones on. I sample my music online. I had no interest in any music before it's devellopment of being shared within the online world.
Example of full write access over Kazza network
on
Kazaa Usability Study
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· Score: 0, Redundant
Last April of this year a former coworker of mine called me and asked me to come over in a plea of help. He had downloaded Kazza and installed it onto his computer. Four days later he discovered that his second hard drive that he had been keeping all of his most valuable data upon had suddenly lost a lot of data. His most important files were gone, deleted from his hard drive. He had turned on this file sharing utility without knowing what it was actually doing to his computer. Users over the Kazza network had randomly gone and deleted files across his shared drives over the course of the four days that he had first used Kazza.
This was a case of failure to design a product which requires the user to know what they are doing before they can use the product.
It was also a failure of the user to understand what the product was doing to his computer.
I blame the user more than the software in this case because I had previously warned him that Kazza sucked, included spyware, and to use Gnucleus instead of Kazza to perform file sharing. The Win32 version of Gnucleus is currently read only, and does not allow write access to user's systems, which is ideal for the design of the network. He listened to someone else instead.
Bad him.
He made dinner for me while I used a hard drive sector scanning utility to undeleted some of the lost data. Not all of his data was restored. A good portion of it was permanently deleted. This included business and personal contact lists, his most prized data.
About a year ago I started looking for a new computer case to replace my old computer case. My old computer case was an AOpen HX08, which is a huge full tower beige case. It was too big for what I needed -- IDE cables were too short to reach from the top most 5.25 inch drive bay to the IDE ports. The case had poor cooling, was terribly heavy, was an ugly yellow-beige color, and had poor noise isolation. In general, the HX08 was not a good case for me.
I looked at cases from AOpen, Enlight, generic mystery websites and eBay auctions, Elan Vital, In-Win, ATop, and others.
My two PCs that use this case employ Windows 2000 and Debian Linux as their operating systems, named Aspiration (Windows) and Anxiety (Debian). Both systems now use the AOpen H600A.
Anxiety has a single IDE DVD drive, a 1.4MB floppy disk drive, an Asus K7V motherboard, an AMD Athlon 650 Slot A processor, some RAM, NIC, sound card, AGP video card, and a single IDE hard disk drive. Anxiety is a Linux desktop and provides your typical Linux desktop functions. I have two separate unixy servers.
Aspiration has an IDE DVD drive, an IDE CDRW drive, a 1.4MB floppy drive, a 3.5 inch smart card reader and USB port bay, uses the Soyo K7V Dragon Plus motherboard, Athlon processor, RAM, sound card, video card, network card, TV card, and a single IDE hard disk drive.
I chose the AOpen H600A mini tower case for a number of reasons. I am happy with this purchase. Here are my reasons for buying this case, and what I think of it now that I own two of them.
The AOpen H600A is a modern case. It was first released sometime in the late summer of 2001.
The AOpen website provided satisfactory pictures and information about the case to help me make an informed purchase -- something that the majority of case manufactures do not do.
The case supports full sized ATX motherboards. In addition, it also supports AT motherboards, and Pentium 4 motherboards.
The case supports four 5.25 inch drive bays -- more than many other mini tower cases of similar size.
The case supports two 3.5 inch drive bays.
The case supports three internal 3.5 inch hard disk drive mount points, plus the other two 3.5 inch disk drive bays which can be used.
All hard disk drive mount points are near the bottom of the case, where cooler air comes in.
Seven expansion slot bays in th rear of the case.
Comes default with a very good power supply, though I exchanged one of mine with an Enermax, which required some hacking to get in.
Requires only two screws to be removed in order to access each side panel. Some other's have screwless entry, but this is okay.
A nice beige color face with minimal "stupid look". Looks plain and nice. Not like some kind of freak box.
Good front panel LED lights, which are unfortunately biased for left of monitor placement of computer case.
Good cooling design, though not the best. Two large vertical vents near the front sides of the case. Air inlet from the front bottom of case. Two optional fans can be mounted in the rear of the case, and two in the front.
Some bad things about this case;
Cost is a little high. I think that myopen.com had the lowest price, along with newegg.com, last time I checked.
The front panel accessible USB and sound ports is an option and does not come default with the case.
The feet as shown with most case pictures do not come default with the case. Instead they supply short round feet, which work just as well. This case has few tipping problems.
Enermax power supplies will not normally fit into the case due to their dust filter found on the external bottom of the power supplies. In order to make these power supplies fit into the case, you must remove this dust filter and put it on the inside of the power supply, requiring some hacking, or just removing it entirely, which also requires hacking and some washers. See here; http://opendreams.net/jesse/images/20011221.comput er.upgrade/28.empty.chassis.4.jpg
Overall, I am happy with this case. It is not something that I think about a lot, but that is the idea. It is not too noisy, it does not get too hot. I keep doing my work and it does it's own.
Here is the AOpen product page for this case; http://www.aopen.com/products/housing/h600a.htm
Data and phone on passenger planes has no utility
on
64kbps @ 40,000 ft.
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· Score: 2
In March, I was flying from Denver to San Diego in an American Airlines DC80. They had those AT&T phones in them, one per row attached to the back of the center seat headrest. They all had a sticker on them that stated they would be out of service at the end of the month.
I can believe this. How much utility is there in using a phone on an air plane? Almost none. Who wants to talk on a phone when the plane is crowded? How much do you want to pay to use the thing? Nobody that I see ever uses them. It must have cost a lot of money to install those phones, one in every seat. I bet that AT&T lost a lot of money on that one.
Flying on an airplane is sitting back and relaxing for a few hours. If you are on an international flight, then you are going to drug yourself before hand too, else the monotony of sitting there doing nothing for hours.
It would be cool to be able to plug in my laptop on an air plane, if I could get power and data. But how much of the populous will also want to do that? I doubt enough to make it worth the costs.
In business planes, this might be okay. So, who here is going to be flying in a business plane?
This technology application matters not.
In a side note...
AHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!! ! Giant Jon Katz banners! AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!
This is not a problem for Time Warner's Road Runner at all -- this is an opportunity for them to make more money.
If they have the ability to determine bandwidth utilization by means of MAC address, then they have the ability to control that access, assuming that this feature is supported by their cable router vendor's software. This would provide them with a method for providing quality of service, or actual per MAC address metering. With a Cisco, this would be easy.
Furthermore, this is not going to be prevent illegitimate bandwidth users. MAC address spoofing is easy and does not affect the switching mechanism because it is a physically shared medium -- you were getting those other systems data anyway.
Time Warner just wants to bill people more. They could make an attempt at providing quality of service for their users very easily. If they can track down the bill to a house, then they can meter it too. Do you think that Norel, Cisco, or whoever their equipment provider is would not build in that feature if they asked for it? Hell yes they would -- they are a source of revenue in hard times, and a threat can really shake a vendor. It would get done, if they asked.
Time Warner wants your money. Time to bail or move.
For DSL ISPs, this issue exists no more significantly than it does for standard modem users. They oversubscribe in order to make profit, but if their oversubscription ratio is too high then they have the issue of users bailing and negative publicity. Individual DSL circuits can be metered by two methods. They being by the ATM VPI/VCI address, or by the individual DSL layer two protocol (DMT or CAP) negotiation speed. Most DSL providers that I know of simply use the default VPI/VCI of 0/32 and simply set the DSLAM port to negotiate at a given maximum speed. This prevents any user from being able to use more bandwidth than they have paid for.
Given a choice between DSL or cable, I take DSL all of the time. I pay about $200 a month for a 640/640Kbps ADSL line with Qwest Communications and a/29 network. The cost for the/29 is rape, but the bandwidth costs are very reasonable. I consistently get that 640Kbps bidirectional, peaking up at about 740Kbps even, so says my Cisco 2621 and the MRTG meters. On average, per month, my upload rate exceeds my download rate by about three hundred percent. I could just not live off of cable with my little website, DNS servers, eMail server, etc. The problems of other users capturing traffic, the shared medium bandwidth problem and lack of quality of service, the inability to get a static IP allocation, and foolish actions of the television cable company trying to act like an ISP make it impossible for a computing professional like myself to live off of a cable line. I have the choice of a phone line at 17000 feet to the nearest Qwest DSLAM or a cable line with AT&T Broadband, and DSL -- cable does not have a chance. Until wireless or cable can positively differentiate traffic sources through encryption or key exchanges, there is no way that I will use them for anything other that guerilla networking.
My vote; Sharp sucks. What a way to meet my enthusiasm when going to look at their product. I guess I will just see it some other time instead.
I can only hope that the Sharp webmaster's superiors are somehow informed of this incident. It makes their company look stupid in front of the technical crowd.
Some time ago I was searching for a good file trading/searching network access program, and I could not really find one for the win32 platform. I found Gnucleus and it was fairly good, but had some issues. It still does. Now I have something new to try. Thank you for sharing this and not simply adding to the typical post babel. And, thanks for it being moderated properly, as I am interested. Because it sticks out, I am more easily able to find this new resource and try it out myself.
I live in Littleton Colorado, hopefully soon moving to Orlando Florida. I ordered a 640Kbps bidirectional ADSL line with Qwest Communications in August of 2001. Qwest is based here in Denver. I have noticed that AT&T has a serious strangle hold here for internet cable access, and in their home city, it almost looks like Qwest is loosing that battle. After speaking with other Denver residents, I can understand why.
I am off the Kipling and Ken Carl CO, about 17,000 feet away. My DSL line sits with about a 21.5bD signal to noise ratio and has not been offline since sometime in early November -- not for a second.
Before that though, the line was horrendous. The line would randomly loose quality, with a dropping SNR to about 4.5, and the line would randomly retrain because of complete signal loss.
I am a network engineer for a living, and so I have half a clue. I have no bridge taps, and the symptoms pointed more to something like noise injection or a loose wire punch.
I called Qwest, and three different times a technician was sent out. My line runs me about $140 every month at these speeds, with a/29 network block, which is rape. Anyway, three times they found nothing. They tested from the apartment complex wiring block (Qwest facing side) to their CO and everything was great! They then left and told me that it was my problem.
Some time in early November, I got tired of this and begged the apartment staff to let me into the phone room. I convinced them that I knew what I was doing and got in. This complex is absolutely new -- me being one of the first dozen residents. That wiring closet was a mess. I had to tone my line from my apartment to figure out which line was being used, and when I did, I found a loose punch facing towards my apartment. The Qwest technicians never bothered to even look. The thing was making intermittent contact and had been punched badly. I cut the line, stripped it, and repunched it. No more problems.
When the phone company is incompetent, do it yourself. In my experience, if the line works at all and still has problems, it is usually close to the customer prem, unless it is a bad line card or patch panel or something at the CO. In any event, the people at the CO usually have a clue. Outside of that though, you are talking to paid monkeys who know nothing.
Do not ask what they can do for you, break in to the wiring closet and do it yourself. Just do not screw up your neighbor's line.
woops, I meant RAID0, stripping. Not RAID1, mirroring.
My bad.
Re:Desktop applications requiring lots of RAM
on
It's (Almost) Hammer Time
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
More RAM will not matter if you can not access the data which you desire from the permanent storage device. ATA and SCSI just can not deliver, mostly due to individual disk drive IO. Fiber Channel is close, but not practical, and is no different than something like RAID1 when it comes to performance. It is all stored on disks. That is going to have to change or something. Disks are a mechanical device and are not going to scale. Something is going to have to give. Something new needs to be made to accelerate this IO from the permanent storage into the temporary manipulation space (RAM).
Right now, I do not want a faster processor, because that will not improve the speed of disk IO. I do not need more RAM, because I really do not use it (today). Faster network speed? That would be nice, but the 11MB across my LAN is okay for now.
I just wish that moving that data around was faster, not necessarily being able to hold more of it. And in this case of speed, the processor has nothing to do with it.
Now what this all has to do with this new AMD processor, I do not know. Nothing. Mod me down.
That is all that there is to it. That is natural selection. If you are encouraged to not care, then do it, or go elsewhere.
That hurts, but it is what I have had to do in many instances. Even if it is temporary while you can find a new job, it is necessary. Otherwise, you are just going to end up hurting instead of the project that is being badly mismanaged.
I was just laid off two weeks ago, in Denver Colorado. Entire company went down! About 30 people. Maximum Charisma Studios, www.maximumcharisma.com, and www.mcszone.com. I think website and stuff are still there. Some systems property is being sold to a company in Asia, so our "product" (maybe byproduct) is still kind of going. The public is not really aware of what is going on.
At the mere mention of AOL buying Red Hat, and them doing similar to what they did to Netscape, I can just hear Red Hat users looking at other distributions suddenly to get away from anything associated with AOL.
Red Hat should sue for slander. They just had their audience offended. Heh
My company recently purchased a Dell Insperion 8100 at my request. I like it. It is a large laptop, designed for power, and it does that well. It is pretty much a desktop replacement.
This is good timing. I was looking for a good Win32 based Gnutella client to use at work and so started looking around at what was available. I was pretty much unimpressed with everything that I tried. It was either addware, spyware, or just bad.
Limewire did not really impress me. It is Java based. On Windows, that means slow, unresponsive, and buggy. For functionality, I was unimpressed.
What is the Winamp/xmms of Win32 for Gnutella?
A lot of people at work seem to use Kazza, but from the NT logs that I see I can tell that it crashes -- a LOT. I do not know much about Morphus.
This black faceplate 1U servers that you see are Intel SRM2K servers. I tested one out for production use about two months ago. They are a very cheap chassis -- cheap cost, and cheap quality. About the only good thing of them is that they allow for both a full size PCI card and a low profile PCI card -- one of the few 1U height systems that support more than one PCI card.
The big switches that I see are either Cisco Catalyst 6009s or 6509s.
Yellow cables are plain old Cat5. Orange cables are multimode fiber, for Gigabit Ethernet.
Slashdot Mirror
OpenGM X stands for
Open My Groin
And X marks the spot where they are going to shove it in.
Unfortunately it seems as though most ISPs are downright hostile against their users these days. After all, some of their users have been hostile towards their systems. If the ISP can not take care of it's security, someone will take care of their systems.
I am a network engineer by trade. I am tired of ISPs not doing their job. Most large ISPs these days are acting more like cable TV providers than Internet Service Providers. What is your typical ADSL and cable Internet service good for these days anyway? You get a decent downstream rate, but your upstream rate is horrible, server ports get blocked, and too many "service" providers try to pass their customer a data link layer connection instead of a network layer connection -- there is a big service difference.
NANOG is just not doing it's job these days. NANOG represents the big corporate interests in North America for ISPs, but nobody is there fighting for the users of these services. I think it time for the service providers to be reminded what the Internet is about.
I am paying for the bandwidth. Let me do what I want with it!
Providing an asymmetrical Internet connection is okay, as long as the user has symmetrical options available to them, and they receive a discount for the fact that they are saving bandwidth. Furthermore, providing high download rates to customers has no value to ISPs that entirely serve the residential market. If you do not have business customers in your collocation facilities who are also using the upstream bandwidth, then you are inefficiently allocating bandwidth.
Prohibiting servers is blasphemous. This is the Internet, not cable television.
Bandwidth providers are being like Intel and the clock cycle issue. Stop pushing these higher downstream rates as a marketing ploy when you can not provide any kind of Service Level Agreement (SLA). Having a 1.2Mbps downstream rate is worthless if you can not actually use it. 512Kbps is enough for the vast majority of home users. Oversubscription is a necessary evil, but do not abuse it.
File sharing networks are not bad. People who are sharing copyrighted material and performing illegal acts are bad. Make a clear differentiation between the two. Blocking a service is bad in most cases -- when Code Red worm broke out, that was a good reason. I have no sympathy for customers having their circuits shut down for trading copyrighted material that they do not own -- stop being a voyeur and start being a player on the Internet, or else go back to watching TV.
Start providing real services to your users. If ISPs had provided the NTP option in their DHCP lease messages and provided this information publicly, Microsoft would not have to include a client with their X operating system to synch the time to a clock that could be far too many hops away. Tell your users where your servers and what you offer!
Providing a data link layer connection is typically bad. If you are an ISP and provide only a data link layer connection to your customers (bridged DSL, all cable Internet that I know of, some wireless services) then you are responsible for their entire network, which really sucks for you. This should be provided as an addition service, not the status quo. On Cisco devices, use commands like "spanning-tree rootguard", "port protected", and most importantly, place each customer into their own individual VLAN and terminate their layer two connection at a layer three trunking interface -- this is what most DSL circuits that use Frame Relay or ATM do, they terminate at a trunking interface somewhere.
I feel that ICANN and the NICs (ARIN, RIPE, APNIC) need to hit service providers over the head with a markup percentage cap for IP allocations. Charging me $45 a month for a
And you thought IP addresses were expensive. Nope.
Reference http://www.arin.net/registration/fee_schedule.htm
On that note, not allowing your customers to receive a static IP allocation is horrible. It forces customers away from your service at to someone else for no technical reason. The reasoning is entirely political/social.
I would suggest that ISPs knock off the antics and start providing service to the last mile if they want to stay in business. This is what got them into the debt problem in the first place. Where were the customers going to come from if they do not have any network access? That fat core is doing you nothing now Global Crossing.
I am willing to pay $200 a month for a 512Kbps bidirectional layer three network connection with a first hop latency of less than 40ms, a
I get most of my access by collocating a box in Denver at a friend's house and doing work that I need to do their. I had to send my box to another state just to get the access that I wanted.
Screw you ISPs and the no demand excuse. The customers are demanding better service -- you just aren't providing it.
I am a network engineer and sysadmin by trade.
As a consumer, I am very distressed with the state of broadband. I just can not find broadband providers that meet the needs that I desire. The only option that I seem to have is getting a DS1 or fractional DS1 at extreme cost to get what I want.
What do I want?
Broadband is made up of two things -- latency and capacity. Low latency is important. Anything over 100ms is high and can cause problems with time sensitive applications such as voice communications, shell usage, and action game playing. In regards to capacity, this is the pipe width of your circuit, be it 128Kbps or 1.5Mbps.
But it is also made up of other things. Does your service provider allow you to use servers? Will their mirror your reverse DNS files since they hold the masters? What about in and out port and protocol filtering? What about quality of service? Uplink costs are about $1000 per 1Mbps -- that is $1 per Kb! In order to make money and provide a good service to their customers, they need to oversubscribe, and also deal out the bandwidth fairly.
I have no sympathy for the P2P copywrited material sharing fools out there who are upset that they can not pirate software -- that is not what the Internet is for. The Internet is not TV -- you do not just watch things. The Internet lets you publish, touch, interact, and exchange information on an International scale.
Companies who do not let you run servers on ANY connection, be it dialup or DSL, are NOT providing Internet connectivity. They are providing browse-only-Internet, Read-Only Internet, or just plain TV-like crap.
Companies that do not provide quality of service mechanisms are also doing a poor job. Implementing a QOS scheme with modern equipment is very easy and works, but nobody wants to rock their big dumb ISP boat and say that they need to do something like that.
Offering only an OSI layer 2 (bridged) network connection is NOT acceptable. This means cable providers, LRE (long range Ethernet), and PPPoE/PPPoATM providers that do not provide point to point circuits. If you want to provide this kind of service, then that is okay, but not as an only option.
Any ISP that does not provide for IP allocations is no ISP at all, period.
I do not need a 1.5Mbps upstream and 128Kbps upstream DSL line. I would much rather have a 384Kbps bidirectional ADSL or SDSL line (yes, you can have a balanced line with ADSL, there is no technical excuse) and be able to use it.
I do not mind paying a little more for these services, but overcharging me for things like a small IP allocation, or reverse DNS on the allocation, or using servers, is unacceptable. How much work does it take to do a SWIP and enter a configuration line in your RDNS pull system? I KNOW how much work it takes because I used to do it -- about two minutes AT MOST, almost zero resources, does not have to be done by an engineer, and is easily automated.
AHhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I hate modern broadband providers, and I hate the people who use them blindly. Why does nobody care?
In Denver I was paying $150 a month for a 640Kbps PPPoATM ADSL line with a
I have recently moved to the Orlando Florida metro area, and while looking for apartments have found that I am really screwed. I just can not get what I need. Almost all of the apartment complexes here used digital line compression on their phone lines, which kills DSL. There is nothing wireless, and only RoadRunner cable modem service is available, and I hear very oversubscribed.
I hate everybody! Die.
I have owned everything Moby at one point or another, minus 18.
Sucky Moby release = Fewer Sales
The only Moby CD that I still have is the 1992 Moby title release, all techno. None of his other releases really come to be anything like it was. Moby went through fundamental change several times with different releases until Play was releasedm which was noticed by the popular music listeners. Play was indeed mostly good, with a few tracks reminiscent of the sounds of releases like Everything Is Wrong and Early Ambient, but also new stuff that was smart and had a great sound.
It may be that there were fewer sales for this release because people were able to sample it before they actually bought the CD. What they found out was that nothing in the new release was to their liking, much like I did. It sucked.
Moby went from being and Early Undergrounder to being a Pop Play-er. This has changed his audience scene dramatically. If he wants to maintain that popularity, he is going to have to come to the conclusion that other artists make -- he will have to whore himself out and move with the audience, trying to keep himself in their face. Otherwise they will just move on to something else, like the way people forgot about Ticke Me Elmo, Tamagotchi, Cabbage Patch kids, and those damn Pogo-Ball things.
Moby should be very thankful for the sales that he has had and had better keep in mind that he too can pull an M.C. Hammer. Top of the charts can be bankrupt and forgotten in a short time. If he wants to be true to his own nature, then that is fine. What has he to complain about? If he wants to be a pop whore, then he failed this time around because his last release, 18, failed to capture the attention of either the popular audience or the underground-techno audience. He is complaining because that release was not for himself. Or at least not for something other than his pocketbook.
Back to that lone Moby CD in my carrying case. It has a place along with my Orb, Tetsu Inoue, collection. I kept it because it because I liked it. The same reason that I bought it. The reason that I bought other Moby CDs is because I had heard them on places like Netradio.com and SomaFM Drone Zone (R.I.P). I will not waste my money on guessing about what CDs are good, and I will not waste my time to go into a CD shop and put the greasy headphones on. I sample my music online. I had no interest in any music before it's devellopment of being shared within the online world.
Last April of this year a former coworker of mine called me and asked me to come over in a plea of help. He had downloaded Kazza and installed it onto his computer. Four days later he discovered that his second hard drive that he had been keeping all of his most valuable data upon had suddenly lost a lot of data. His most important files were gone, deleted from his hard drive. He had turned on this file sharing utility without knowing what it was actually doing to his computer. Users over the Kazza network had randomly gone and deleted files across his shared drives over the course of the four days that he had first used Kazza.
This was a case of failure to design a product which requires the user to know what they are doing before they can use the product.
It was also a failure of the user to understand what the product was doing to his computer.
I blame the user more than the software in this case because I had previously warned him that Kazza sucked, included spyware, and to use Gnucleus instead of Kazza to perform file sharing. The Win32 version of Gnucleus is currently read only, and does not allow write access to user's systems, which is ideal for the design of the network. He listened to someone else instead.
Bad him.
He made dinner for me while I used a hard drive sector scanning utility to undeleted some of the lost data. Not all of his data was restored. A good portion of it was permanently deleted. This included business and personal contact lists, his most prized data.
I will buy any damn player that will play a DVD and allow me to fast forward through the damn Disney previews that they force you to watch.
They need a "Just play the f***ing movie" button on their remote controls.
About a year ago I started looking for a new computer case to replace my old computer case. My old computer case was an AOpen HX08, which is a huge full tower beige case. It was too big for what I needed -- IDE cables were too short to reach from the top most 5.25 inch drive bay to the IDE ports. The case had poor cooling, was terribly heavy, was an ugly yellow-beige color, and had poor noise isolation. In general, the HX08 was not a good case for me.
I looked at cases from AOpen, Enlight, generic mystery websites and eBay auctions, Elan Vital, In-Win, ATop, and others.
My two PCs that use this case employ Windows 2000 and Debian Linux as their operating systems, named Aspiration (Windows) and Anxiety (Debian). Both systems now use the AOpen H600A.
Anxiety has a single IDE DVD drive, a 1.4MB floppy disk drive, an Asus K7V motherboard, an AMD Athlon 650 Slot A processor, some RAM, NIC, sound card, AGP video card, and a single IDE hard disk drive. Anxiety is a Linux desktop and provides your typical Linux desktop functions. I have two separate unixy servers.
Aspiration has an IDE DVD drive, an IDE CDRW drive, a 1.4MB floppy drive, a 3.5 inch smart card reader and USB port bay, uses the Soyo K7V Dragon Plus motherboard, Athlon processor, RAM, sound card, video card, network card, TV card, and a single IDE hard disk drive.
I chose the AOpen H600A mini tower case for a number of reasons. I am happy with this purchase. Here are my reasons for buying this case, and what I think of it now that I own two of them.
The AOpen H600A is a modern case. It was first released sometime in the late summer of 2001.
The AOpen website provided satisfactory pictures and information about the case to help me make an informed purchase -- something that the majority of case manufactures do not do.
The case supports full sized ATX motherboards. In addition, it also supports AT motherboards, and Pentium 4 motherboards.
The case supports four 5.25 inch drive bays -- more than many other mini tower cases of similar size.
The case supports two 3.5 inch drive bays.
The case supports three internal 3.5 inch hard disk drive mount points, plus the other two 3.5 inch disk drive bays which can be used.
All hard disk drive mount points are near the bottom of the case, where cooler air comes in.
Seven expansion slot bays in th rear of the case.
Comes default with a very good power supply, though I exchanged one of mine with an Enermax, which required some hacking to get in.
Requires only two screws to be removed in order to access each side panel. Some other's have screwless entry, but this is okay.
A nice beige color face with minimal "stupid look". Looks plain and nice. Not like some kind of freak box.
Good front panel LED lights, which are unfortunately biased for left of monitor placement of computer case.
Good cooling design, though not the best. Two large vertical vents near the front sides of the case. Air inlet from the front bottom of case. Two optional fans can be mounted in the rear of the case, and two in the front.
Some bad things about this case;
Cost is a little high. I think that myopen.com had the lowest price, along with newegg.com, last time I checked.
The front panel accessible USB and sound ports is an option and does not come default with the case.
The feet as shown with most case pictures do not come default with the case. Instead they supply short round feet, which work just as well. This case has few tipping problems.
Enermax power supplies will not normally fit into the case due to their dust filter found on the external bottom of the power supplies. In order to make these power supplies fit into the case, you must remove this dust filter and put it on the inside of the power supply, requiring some hacking, or just removing it entirely, which also requires hacking and some washers. See here; http://opendreams.net/jesse/images/20011221.comput er.upgrade/28.empty.chassis.4.jpg
Overall, I am happy with this case. It is not something that I think about a lot, but that is the idea. It is not too noisy, it does not get too hot. I keep doing my work and it does it's own. Here is the AOpen product page for this case;
http://www.aopen.com/products/housing/h600a.htm
You can see pictures of this case in use during my last computer upgrade. Find images here;t er.upgrade/
http://opendreams.net/jesse/images/20011221.compu
In March, I was flying from Denver to San Diego in an American Airlines DC80. They had those AT&T phones in them, one per row attached to the back of the center seat headrest. They all had a sticker on them that stated they would be out of service at the end of the month.
I can believe this. How much utility is there in using a phone on an air plane? Almost none. Who wants to talk on a phone when the plane is crowded? How much do you want to pay to use the thing? Nobody that I see ever uses them. It must have cost a lot of money to install those phones, one in every seat. I bet that AT&T lost a lot of money on that one.
Flying on an airplane is sitting back and relaxing for a few hours. If you are on an international flight, then you are going to drug yourself before hand too, else the monotony of sitting there doing nothing for hours.
It would be cool to be able to plug in my laptop on an air plane, if I could get power and data. But how much of the populous will also want to do that? I doubt enough to make it worth the costs.
In business planes, this might be okay. So, who here is going to be flying in a business plane?
This technology application matters not.
In a side note...
AHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!! ! Giant Jon Katz banners! AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!
This is not a problem for Time Warner's Road Runner at all -- this is an opportunity for them to make more money.
If they have the ability to determine bandwidth utilization by means of MAC address, then they have the ability to control that access, assuming that this feature is supported by their cable router vendor's software. This would provide them with a method for providing quality of service, or actual per MAC address metering. With a Cisco, this would be easy.
Furthermore, this is not going to be prevent illegitimate bandwidth users. MAC address spoofing is easy and does not affect the switching mechanism because it is a physically shared medium -- you were getting those other systems data anyway.
Time Warner just wants to bill people more. They could make an attempt at providing quality of service for their users very easily. If they can track down the bill to a house, then they can meter it too. Do you think that Norel, Cisco, or whoever their equipment provider is would not build in that feature if they asked for it? Hell yes they would -- they are a source of revenue in hard times, and a threat can really shake a vendor. It would get done, if they asked.
Time Warner wants your money. Time to bail or move.
For DSL ISPs, this issue exists no more significantly than it does for standard modem users. They oversubscribe in order to make profit, but if their oversubscription ratio is too high then they have the issue of users bailing and negative publicity. Individual DSL circuits can be metered by two methods. They being by the ATM VPI/VCI address, or by the individual DSL layer two protocol (DMT or CAP) negotiation speed. Most DSL providers that I know of simply use the default VPI/VCI of 0/32 and simply set the DSLAM port to negotiate at a given maximum speed. This prevents any user from being able to use more bandwidth than they have paid for.
Given a choice between DSL or cable, I take DSL all of the time. I pay about $200 a month for a 640/640Kbps ADSL line with Qwest Communications and a
My vote; Sharp sucks. What a way to meet my enthusiasm when going to look at their product. I guess I will just see it some other time instead.
I can only hope that the Sharp webmaster's superiors are somehow informed of this incident. It makes their company look stupid in front of the technical crowd.
Blow Microsoft away. Why not?
Some time ago I was searching for a good file trading/searching network access program, and I could not really find one for the win32 platform. I found Gnucleus and it was fairly good, but had some issues. It still does. Now I have something new to try. Thank you for sharing this and not simply adding to the typical post babel. And, thanks for it being moderated properly, as I am interested. Because it sticks out, I am more easily able to find this new resource and try it out myself.
That is the way it is supposed to work.
I live in Littleton Colorado, hopefully soon moving to Orlando Florida. I ordered a 640Kbps bidirectional ADSL line with Qwest Communications in August of 2001. Qwest is based here in Denver. I have noticed that AT&T has a serious strangle hold here for internet cable access, and in their home city, it almost looks like Qwest is loosing that battle. After speaking with other Denver residents, I can understand why.
I am off the Kipling and Ken Carl CO, about 17,000 feet away. My DSL line sits with about a 21.5bD signal to noise ratio and has not been offline since sometime in early November -- not for a second.
Before that though, the line was horrendous. The line would randomly loose quality, with a dropping SNR to about 4.5, and the line would randomly retrain because of complete signal loss.
I am a network engineer for a living, and so I have half a clue. I have no bridge taps, and the symptoms pointed more to something like noise injection or a loose wire punch.
I called Qwest, and three different times a technician was sent out. My line runs me about $140 every month at these speeds, with a
Some time in early November, I got tired of this and begged the apartment staff to let me into the phone room. I convinced them that I knew what I was doing and got in. This complex is absolutely new -- me being one of the first dozen residents. That wiring closet was a mess. I had to tone my line from my apartment to figure out which line was being used, and when I did, I found a loose punch facing towards my apartment. The Qwest technicians never bothered to even look. The thing was making intermittent contact and had been punched badly. I cut the line, stripped it, and repunched it. No more problems.
When the phone company is incompetent, do it yourself. In my experience, if the line works at all and still has problems, it is usually close to the customer prem, unless it is a bad line card or patch panel or something at the CO. In any event, the people at the CO usually have a clue. Outside of that though, you are talking to paid monkeys who know nothing.
Do not ask what they can do for you, break in to the wiring closet and do it yourself. Just do not screw up your neighbor's line.
woops, I meant RAID0, stripping. Not RAID1, mirroring.
My bad.
More RAM will not matter if you can not access the data which you desire from the permanent storage device. ATA and SCSI just can not deliver, mostly due to individual disk drive IO. Fiber Channel is close, but not practical, and is no different than something like RAID1 when it comes to performance. It is all stored on disks. That is going to have to change or something. Disks are a mechanical device and are not going to scale. Something is going to have to give. Something new needs to be made to accelerate this IO from the permanent storage into the temporary manipulation space (RAM).
Right now, I do not want a faster processor, because that will not improve the speed of disk IO. I do not need more RAM, because I really do not use it (today). Faster network speed? That would be nice, but the 11MB across my LAN is okay for now.
I just wish that moving that data around was faster, not necessarily being able to hold more of it. And in this case of speed, the processor has nothing to do with it.
Now what this all has to do with this new AMD processor, I do not know. Nothing. Mod me down.
http://www.despair.com/consulting.html
That is all that there is to it. That is natural selection. If you are encouraged to not care, then do it, or go elsewhere.
That hurts, but it is what I have had to do in many instances. Even if it is temporary while you can find a new job, it is necessary. Otherwise, you are just going to end up hurting instead of the project that is being badly mismanaged.
You are not being paid to be a martyr, are you?
I was just laid off two weeks ago, in Denver Colorado. Entire company went down! About 30 people. Maximum Charisma Studios, www.maximumcharisma.com, and www.mcszone.com. I think website and stuff are still there. Some systems property is being sold to a company in Asia, so our "product" (maybe byproduct) is still kind of going. The public is not really aware of what is going on.
Need me a J-O-B, in the gaming industry!
At the mere mention of AOL buying Red Hat, and them doing similar to what they did to Netscape, I can just hear Red Hat users looking at other distributions suddenly to get away from anything associated with AOL.
Red Hat should sue for slander. They just had their audience offended. Heh
If they are all on .sucks then that is a really easy way to fitler traffic sourced and destined to those domains.
These may help you;
http://www.pcworld.com/reviews/article/0,aid,65
http://www.computerworld.com/storyba/0,4125,NAV
My company recently purchased a Dell Insperion 8100 at my request. I like it. It is a large laptop, designed for power, and it does that well. It is pretty much a desktop replacement.
eMail for details.
This is good timing. I was looking for a good Win32 based Gnutella client to use at work and so started looking around at what was available. I was pretty much unimpressed with everything that I tried. It was either addware, spyware, or just bad.
Limewire did not really impress me. It is Java based. On Windows, that means slow, unresponsive, and buggy. For functionality, I was unimpressed.
What is the Winamp/xmms of Win32 for Gnutella?
A lot of people at work seem to use Kazza, but from the NT logs that I see I can tell that it crashes -- a LOT. I do not know much about Morphus.
This black faceplate 1U servers that you see are Intel SRM2K servers. I tested one out for production use about two months ago. They are a very cheap chassis -- cheap cost, and cheap quality. About the only good thing of them is that they allow for both a full size PCI card and a low profile PCI card -- one of the few 1U height systems that support more than one PCI card.
The big switches that I see are either Cisco Catalyst 6009s or 6509s.
Yellow cables are plain old Cat5. Orange cables are multimode fiber, for Gigabit Ethernet.
That is about all that I can tell.
Very cool! I was not aware of this.
Hey, it is forum. You learn stuff from other people.
The "access-class" command goes under the "line vty 0 4" subsection.
"term mon" and "term no mon" are enable command line options, not configuration command options.
I missed a lot of quotes in various places. Oh well.