The ISP I used to work for in the UK ran/runs a satellite service ( up to 2Mb down, either modem or ISDN up ), and I thought about getting a dish installed at home. The main problem seemed to be drivers for either Linux or FreeBSD ( I didn't fancy an NT router ), in the end we discovered some beta drivers for an Adaptec board ( very well hidden away on their ftp site ). This was some time ago, so I don't know if they're supported now, or even if they dropped the whole idea.
The service as a whole had some problems.. when it worked properly it was beautiful for downloads, but when it didn't work ( about 50% of the time, seemingly ) it was a nightmare. Interestingly the box we had connected to the uplink ran a really hideously cut down version of Linux.
Er, because they were constructed mainly by americans? Actually american spellings are closer to Middle-English than UK ones: UK english spelling was affected by French around the 18th century.. so you US types can rejoice in the fact that you have the "correct" spellings:) now move with the times, colonial-type persons:P ( yeah yeah, I'm joking:P )
Not always true: if you make yourself invaluable enough in whatever time you have, then there's always a way. My last company ( 60 people ) got work permits for two South Africans ( despite the commonwealth connection, they don't get any advantages ) because it was easier than replacing them.
Admittedly it's harder for US citizens apparently, seemingly because the US is so restrictive with it's immigration policies! my Canadian housemate had a much easier ride compared to the americans she met over here.
Scandinavia is notoriously expensive inside Europe.. I've met quite a few scandinavians in the UK, and their reaction was similar ( a lot of them end up staying here ). I live with a Canadian who's finding it much easier going here, coz she just couldn't get a decent IT job in Toronto: despite the cost of living being higher, IT jobs pay proportionately more.
Re:Install... am I just weird?
on
Which BSD?
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· Score: 1
Hmm.. the wonderful 3.2 release. The ISP I used to work for used FreeBSD for just about everything, and boy did we have a fun time with 3.2.. it was simply broken. 3.3 seems lovely though.
NetBSD.. urgh. We ditched NetBSD as soon as we could, it was broken beyond belief ( the VM subsystem just didn't work properly ). I hope things have changed since, but I'll stick to FreeBSD unless I get a VAX or something:) I've certainly yet to find something that doesn't work, which makes a change from 6 years of messing with linux..
On the other hand.. I have to flip between FreeBSD, Linux and Solaris all day and I get annoyed that linux tools have *so many* options.. when you're trying to remember what options are supported on that platform having to plough through an extra 20 or so is a serious pain.
Well, I saw this on the BBC site when it appeared, and my heart sank.. In our situation, a user has to inform the already-busy abuse desk, the abuse desk ( who really hates doing abuse duties ) has to inform the MD ( who actually has a fairly major role in content issues in the UK ), who has to decide if the content is libellous, who then has to inform whoever's responsible for the service the content is on to remove the content. Thus we've involved at least three people, all busy, in a matter that they have had no direct influence over *at all*. I don't buy the isp-as-publisher line: however despite being in the industry for several years I've yet to decide quite what our role is. I'm more inclined to take the view that the individual is the publisher, and the one who should be the target of a libel action, and the ISP is the mechanism.. after all, do we sue printing presses for libellous newspaper articles?
Thankfully the UK has resisted a lawsuit culture to some extent, but if this takes off stand by for a decrease in service while everyone's tied up dealing with the fallout:( I have little hope in any government legislation: the current incumbents have shown a spectacularily random approach to internet matters.
o) Demon are the biggest independent ISP in the UK, with the staff who made it that way. o) Demon get bought by a large corporation ( Scottish telecom ) o) Large corporation sets about corporatising Demon's work environment o) Most of the technical staff object and leave o) Demon hires contractors who don't really care about anything more than their next invoice. o) Demon's service goes downhill.
This seem at all reasonable? ( I've never worked for Demon, BTW, just one of their competitors, but there's no secrets in this industry. Luckily we went through the cottage-to-corporate change some time back, and have since re-educated the new management:) )
There's lots of advantages to being an ISP with telco licenses ( massively cheap bandwidth is one ) so maybe Demon will improve again: however if they can't attract staff ( and the damage has been done ) then they're going nowhere. Good ISP techies generally get that way with experience, and there aren't many of them..
This is the average response to a question to an ISP about linux support:
"We don't support linux owing to the cost of training the support staff to a sufficient level to be able to deal with any users configuration."
By the time the support staff have been trained enough to deal with a hacked-about linux box, they've got enough knowledge to go and get jobs as sysadmins.. and who would want to stay in a tech support job then?
The systems team where I work generally answer newsgroup support queries that the tech support team can't answer: we do our best to get unix users ( we've had just about every type of unix at some point ) online, but we can't provide official support otherwise we'd never get time to do what we're supposed to be doing.. and none of us would want to work ( or go back to ) support anyway.
OFTEL have said they're not going to change anything for now. Originally there were complaints from BT which basically amounted to "we're subsidising other people's businesses", and they wanted to be able to set their own rate to pay telcos for terminating calls from them.
The free ISPs aren't running as competition to the telcos: the telco gets money for terminating the call ( usually from BT, it depends who they interconnect with ) and shares it with the free ISP for generating the call in the first place. Thus the ISP survives by living off the telco industries profits ( mostly BT, hence the complaints ) and revenue from support calls ( also telco profits ). Some of them may get further income from selling ad space, although as there's loads of them ( you can buy a free ISP "off the shelf".. I know, we sell them ), the ones who forgo this are going to gain more customers and hence more call revenue. The few ISPs who are also telcos in their own right generally don't want to bother providing phone service to end-users, other than specialised services like international calls or peak-rate 0898 numbers.
Actually the phone numbers aren't cheaper: they're fixed-rate national numbers like 0845, which can work out as slightly more expensive given that most telcos do deals for local calls. We keep our old national POP system in place for customers who want to use the Cable&Wireless 50p weekend deal, after much pressure from them.
BT are in a strange position: they own the national telephone network, are forced to provide services to new telcos now the network is deregulated, and have to answer to their shareholders: but they're only in the position they are because they were handed a monopoly on a plate. I'm just waiting for Railtrack ( who also have a large private telco network ) to join in.. given their level of service to the train companies, I can't imagine how bad their phone service would be.
FreeBSD was doing so well, too.. 2.2.2->3.0 all our servers were as solid as rocks. 3.1-RELEASE was a helluva shock.. 3.1-STABLE seems to be business as usual, however.
So, yeah, it runs on NT, but there are reasons for that. (even though that may be unthinkable to some/.ers, who obviously have never had to do a professional site on a tight budget and deadline)
Funny.. would you call a site that constantly saturates a 10Mb Full-duplex ethernet connection, built on a 2k machine an amateur effort? We can't plug it in a 100Mb port, we'd have no external bandwidth.. Usual load average, 0.03
I work for A.N ISP: we were recently used in some Intel ad campaign because at the time we were pretty much using Intel boxes everywhere ( we hid the Suns while they were round:)). Of course we weren't running NT.. Actually way back at the start the 2 machines were running NT, but that didn't last. The company's progression has been Sunos4->NetBSD&BSDi->FreeBSD. Why don't we have any Linux boxes? back when the company was first expanding, Linux simply wasn't good enough. BSD 4.4 based systems are far more mature than Linux: we simply could not have run the systems we did on the Linux of the time. I don't think we've seen parity of performance/maturity until the 2.2 kernels arrived, and now we've got so many BSD systems ( and an increasing number of Solaris systems ) we simply don't want to learn a new OS. I'd imagine many BSD shops wanting to move OS might feel the same.
We have had our share of OS bigotry too.. one character of the UK ISP scene is quite vocal in his opposition to Linux, although he left some time ago. I find this sort of prejudice intolerable, especially in a commercial environment: pick the tool that is going to suit the job best for you, be it Solaris, NT, Linux, *BSD, AIX, whatever. Each of them has their strengths and weaknesses ( in our case, Linux is an outsider, and so gets dropped. If the company had started two years later, maybe BSD systems would be the outsiders ). GNU tools have made the user interface on free unices pretty much homogenous, so the argument generally comes down to the kernel. Personally I find FreeBSD has a coherence lacking in Linux, which for single-purpose systems is a major plus: for workstation or general purpose use it's a limitation, as FreeBSD lacks most of Linux's bells and whistles. The BSD kernel is also very well-documented, another major plus when you're hacking it.. this isn't to say the Linux kernel's not hackable, it just takes more time if you're not familiar with it.
Performance wise, if you ignore the strange anomaly that is FreeBSD 3.1 ( how many bugs? ) FreeBSD is absolutely solid. Web servers, mail servers, routers, proxy servers, whatever, all have continually proved themselves under extreme loads, which makes a change from the old days of 3am taxi rides to push reset buttons.. This isn't to say Linux can't do the same, however I don't think it'd have coped quite as well a year ago. Today I think the preference comes down to personal choice as much as anything else ( if you factor out support ). We choose FreeBSD because it fits the way we work.. but we can choose.
The future is something else: we've reached scalability limits for Intel-based systems for quite a few services.. our core network uses Cisco routers, and we're going to Solaris/SPARC for a lot of other stuff. Bit of a shame, and a bit of a pain when you're trying to do something different, but it gets us nice big blue Suns to play with at least:)
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The service as a whole had some problems.. when it worked properly it was beautiful for downloads, but when it didn't work ( about 50% of the time, seemingly ) it was a nightmare. Interestingly the box we had connected to the uplink ran a really hideously cut down version of Linux.
Er, because they were constructed mainly by americans? :) now move with the times, colonial-type persons :P ( yeah yeah, I'm joking :P )
Actually american spellings are closer to Middle-English than UK ones: UK english spelling was affected by French around the 18th century.. so you US types can rejoice in the fact that you have the "correct" spellings
Admittedly it's harder for US citizens apparently, seemingly because the US is so restrictive with it's immigration policies! my Canadian housemate had a much easier ride compared to the americans she met over here.
Scandinavia is notoriously expensive inside Europe.. I've met quite a few scandinavians in the UK, and their reaction was similar ( a lot of them end up staying here ). I live with a Canadian who's finding it much easier going here, coz she just couldn't get a decent IT job in Toronto: despite the cost of living being higher, IT jobs pay proportionately more.
NetBSD.. urgh. We ditched NetBSD as soon as we could, it was broken beyond belief ( the VM subsystem just didn't work properly ). I hope things have changed since, but I'll stick to FreeBSD unless I get a VAX or something :) I've certainly yet to find something that doesn't work, which makes a change from 6 years of messing with linux..
Be nice if FreeBSD supported "cp -a" tho..
Well, I saw this on the BBC site when it appeared, and my heart sank.. In our situation, a user has to inform the already-busy abuse desk, the abuse desk ( who really hates doing abuse duties ) has to inform the MD ( who actually has a fairly major role in content issues in the UK ), who has to decide if the content is libellous, who then has to inform whoever's responsible for the service the content is on to remove the content. Thus we've involved at least three people, all busy, in a matter that they have had no direct influence over *at all*. I don't buy the isp-as-publisher line: however despite being in the industry for several years I've yet to decide quite what our role is. I'm more inclined to take the view that the individual is the publisher, and the one who should be the target of a libel action, and the ISP is the mechanism.. after all, do we sue printing presses for libellous newspaper articles?
:( I have little hope in any government legislation: the current incumbents have shown a spectacularily random approach to internet matters.
Thankfully the UK has resisted a lawsuit culture to some extent, but if this takes off stand by for a decrease in service while everyone's tied up dealing with the fallout
Hmm.. follow this chain of events.
:) )
o) Demon are the biggest independent ISP in the UK, with the staff who made it that way.
o) Demon get bought by a large corporation ( Scottish telecom )
o) Large corporation sets about corporatising Demon's work environment
o) Most of the technical staff object and leave
o) Demon hires contractors who don't really care about anything more than their next invoice.
o) Demon's service goes downhill.
This seem at all reasonable?
( I've never worked for Demon, BTW, just one of their competitors, but there's no secrets in this industry. Luckily we went through the cottage-to-corporate change some time back, and have since re-educated the new management
There's lots of advantages to being an ISP with telco licenses ( massively cheap bandwidth is one ) so maybe Demon will improve again: however if they can't attract staff ( and the damage has been done ) then they're going nowhere. Good ISP techies generally get that way with experience, and there aren't many of them..
This is the average response to a question to an ISP about linux support:
"We don't support linux owing to the cost of training the support staff to a sufficient level to be able to deal with any users configuration."
By the time the support staff have been trained enough to deal with a hacked-about linux box, they've got enough knowledge to go and get jobs as sysadmins.. and who would want to stay in a tech support job then?
The systems team where I work generally answer newsgroup support queries that the tech support team can't answer: we do our best to get unix users ( we've had just about every type of unix at some point ) online, but we can't provide official support otherwise we'd never get time to do what we're supposed to be doing.. and none of us would want to work ( or go back to ) support anyway.
OFTEL have said they're not going to change anything for now. Originally there were complaints from BT which basically amounted to "we're subsidising other people's businesses", and they wanted to be able to set their own rate to pay telcos for terminating calls from them.
The free ISPs aren't running as competition to the telcos: the telco gets money for terminating the call ( usually from BT, it depends who they interconnect with ) and shares it with the free ISP for generating the call in the first place. Thus the ISP survives by living off the telco industries profits ( mostly BT, hence the complaints ) and revenue from support calls ( also telco profits ). Some of them may get further income from selling ad space, although as there's loads of them ( you can buy a free ISP "off the shelf".. I know, we sell them ), the ones who forgo this are going to gain more customers and hence more call revenue. The few ISPs who are also telcos in their own right generally don't want to bother providing phone service to end-users, other than specialised services like international calls or peak-rate 0898 numbers.
Actually the phone numbers aren't cheaper: they're fixed-rate national numbers like 0845, which can work out as slightly more expensive given that most telcos do deals for local calls. We keep our old national POP system in place for customers who want to use the Cable&Wireless 50p weekend deal, after much pressure from them.
BT are in a strange position: they own the national telephone network, are forced to provide services to new telcos now the network is deregulated, and have to answer to their shareholders: but they're only in the position they are because they were handed a monopoly on a plate. I'm just waiting for Railtrack ( who also have a large private telco network ) to join in.. given their level of service to the train companies, I can't imagine how bad their phone service would be.
FreeBSD was doing so well, too.. 2.2.2->3.0 all our servers were as solid as rocks. 3.1-RELEASE was a helluva shock.. 3.1-STABLE seems to be business as usual, however.
Funny.. would you call a site that constantly saturates a 10Mb Full-duplex ethernet connection, built on a 2k machine an amateur effort? We can't plug it in a 100Mb port, we'd have no external bandwidth..
Usual load average, 0.03
Surely a Pilot is the nearest thing we've got to The Book at the moment? :) Anyone tried it?
Wonder if we can get special edition Pilots with "Don't Panic" on the cover..
Oh.. and I'll add that with one exception the technical staff are all under 30.. :) and none of us have beards.
I work for A.N ISP: we were recently used in some Intel ad campaign because at the time we were pretty much using Intel boxes everywhere ( we hid the Suns while they were round :)). Of course we weren't running NT.. Actually way back at the start the 2 machines were running NT, but that didn't last. The company's progression has been Sunos4->NetBSD&BSDi->FreeBSD. Why don't we have any Linux boxes? back when the company was first expanding, Linux simply wasn't good enough. BSD 4.4 based systems are far more mature than Linux: we simply could not have run the systems we did on the Linux of the time. I don't think we've seen parity of performance/maturity until the 2.2 kernels arrived, and now we've got so many BSD systems ( and an increasing number of Solaris systems ) we simply don't want to learn a new OS. I'd imagine many BSD shops wanting to move OS might feel the same.
We have had our share of OS bigotry too.. one character of the UK ISP scene is quite vocal in his opposition to Linux, although he left some time ago. I find this sort of prejudice intolerable, especially in a commercial environment: pick the tool that is going to suit the job best for you, be it Solaris, NT, Linux, *BSD, AIX, whatever. Each of them has their strengths and weaknesses ( in our case, Linux is an outsider, and so gets dropped. If the company had started two years later, maybe BSD systems would be the outsiders ).
GNU tools have made the user interface on free unices pretty much homogenous, so the argument generally comes down to the kernel. Personally I find FreeBSD has a coherence lacking in Linux, which for single-purpose systems is a major plus: for workstation or general purpose use it's a limitation, as FreeBSD lacks most of Linux's bells and whistles. The BSD kernel is also very well-documented, another major plus when you're hacking it.. this isn't to say the Linux kernel's not hackable, it just takes more time if you're not familiar with it.
Performance wise, if you ignore the strange anomaly that is FreeBSD 3.1 ( how many bugs? ) FreeBSD is absolutely solid. Web servers, mail servers, routers, proxy servers, whatever, all have continually proved themselves under extreme loads, which makes a change from the old days of 3am taxi rides to push reset buttons.. This isn't to say Linux can't do the same, however I don't think it'd have coped quite as well a year ago. Today I think the preference comes down to personal choice as much as anything else ( if you factor out support ). We choose FreeBSD because it fits the way we work.. but we can choose.
The future is something else: we've reached scalability limits for Intel-based systems for quite a few services.. our core network uses Cisco routers, and we're going to Solaris/SPARC for a lot of other stuff. Bit of a shame, and a bit of a pain when you're trying to do something different, but it gets us nice big blue Suns to play with at least:)