I also have had Vonage for the past six months. I am pleased with the service and would recommend it with some caveats.
First, the voice quality and connectivity drop off with any major IO traffic. If I'm downloading a large file, the voice sounds choppy. Useable but choppy. Consider what bandwidth usage the system will have while she is at work.
All my local calls are now long distance calls. Just a hassle remembering to dial long distance to talk to my neighbor.
There is a very slight delay in the system. It takes a while to get the rhythm of a conversation down using VOIP. Expect the other party to pause before replying. Try and make your sentences deliberate so the other party will expect a pause. You get use to it pretty quickly.
Sometimes my DTMF tones get attenuated through the system. I can dial to a anywhere without issue, but on some calls, if I need to "Press 1 for domestic travel", on occassion pressing 1 doesn't do a thing. I have to either wait for the operator or redial, and sometimes redial several times.
I also had to wait 30+ days to get my number transferred, but it was worth the wait.
Remember, no power, no phone, so have an emergency comm backup arrangement.
I found Vonage customer service to be as good as any ILEC. They turned me on to PingPlotter to monitor my Cable IP connectivity.
My bills went from $85/ month down to $30 per month. Sweet.
I wouldn't be overly concerned with the RF interference being generated at the site, but you should review the matter.
First, I would suggest that you have the site tested for RF levels. The tests should be fairly inexpensive. From the results you can decide if precautions are required.
You still need to consider future RF issues in case the cellular company decides to upgrade. It would be prudent to have some RF grounding brought into the server room and extend the ground to the racks and cable runs. Well grounded equipment will minimize any RF issues.
Multiple grounding might actually cause issues if there is stray AC from the high voltage. You can check for stray AC by having some ground rods placed at the site and check for AC potentials between the rods. A single low impedance ground is the best solution, but some electrical contractors don't understand the requirements.
Also, the cell tower could easily cause interference with WiFi or other RF equipment. If your new plant is going to depend on low power radio IT connectivity for either the plant or for IT, you should have an interference study done.
This isn't really a fix, but it is a way around your problem. Set up a script using WMI to change all your permissions, shares and registry entries. Place the script in the startup folder and forget about it.
Download the script samples and modify as necessary from: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/community/ scriptc enter/sampscr.mspx
The spec for the RamSan 320 says it will do 3GB/sec random sustainable bandwidth. To achieve this they have 8 each 2Gbyte/sec FC ports per unit. Since they can max out at 250,000 IO/sec, this implies a block size of 12K.
Most databases work in 4k blocks or smaller. The IO spec here is also full duplex. We can expect half that for writes. So the system can suck up data (100 percent random writes of 4k blocks) at 125000 IOs per unit with 40 units for a input bandwidth of 20GB/s per second.
Assuming that the system can read from multiple databases at anywhere near this speed it would take 125 seconds to fill the entire 2.5TBs.
Amazing.
Specs can be found at: http://www.storageflex.com/download/Storagefl ex%20 RAMSAN%20320%20Spec%20Sheet.pdf
Physicians aren't the only ones joining this scam (although I consider them the most money grubbing of the lot). My insurance company (UHC) regularly (like +50 percent of my bills) get it wrong. They don't pay the correct amount or they don't take the proper percentage for my co-pay. Their reasonable and customary fees (unpublished) are some rude percentage of the amount several outsourced services haved billed me. (My facility is in a network plan, but some services aren't (radiology).) On several occassions, I have to contest their reasonable and customary payments via a snail mail exchange.
This is intentional and possibly criminal, but my only recourse is to take them to court some 300 miles away. Yeah right.
Some of these bills are just too small to complain about (hidden tax). Others are outrageous errors (criminal intent). With all, I have to call and complain about my bill and wait months for it to get corrected. (I've had bill sent to collection agencies on a number of occassions due to my insurer's performance.) I'm sure there are plenty of people out there paying the bills and not checking, because they can't figure it out.
It stuns me how much my company pays for this coverage. For me any time spent correcting "Explanation of Benefits" I consider to be on my employer's time as this is their insurer. If I add my lost man-hours to the cost of the insurance and then add the incorrect bills I've paid, I can only conclude that my insurer is making a bundle and my employer is getting reamed.
Clearly a fine example of a capitalist conspiracy!!!
I haven't worked through all the ramifications but Windows 2000 does respond to "shutdown now". I ran it from a prompt and it started a 30 second timer to a software shutdown. Yeah.
Good luck.
Exercise, Yoga, Medication are all fine, but consider a different solution. Stand up.
If you are in control of your working environment, especially those who telecommute, consider making a high desk to work from. I use the high desk whenever my back really bothers me (I do exercise and I also have a regular desk). Standing up keeps me alert and eases the pain in my back.
I got the idea from a visit to Goethe's home in Frankfurt Germany years ago. Goethe, worked standing at a desk all day long. If he could, why can't you.
Rob's calculations are a little flawed. The horizon for RF signals is not the same horizon for a laser beam.
McGraw Hill's "Electronics Engineers' Handbook" gives and effective earth radius factor "k" as 4/3 for frequencies greater than 30 MHz. This would extend the distance of Rob's calculations significantly.
When doing path calculations, there are a number of other factors that affect reception such as conductiviity, permittitivity, roughness and curvature. Reflected signals which also change the receptive strength are dependant on polarization, grazing angle and ground constants.
In general, creating RF paths can be considered black magic, based on the FM principle (magic). The 25 mile figure is really a best case scenerio, where only atmospheric attenuation is hampering the signal. Still, with some adequate hieght, RF communications can be established near 25 miles if the system is set up properly (ie minimizing signal loss at every stage as was pointed out earlier).
It should also be noted that the system discussed is only point to point and would have little value in reaching a mobile user. Mobile use is severly limited by the type and directionality of the antenna and the amount of RF power on the mobile computer. My own 801.11b link is good for 150 feet and most of that is due to the 10mW on an omni antenna sticking out of my laptop.
This BIOS bug was developed before 1997. My MicroQ, Pentium 75, circa 1996, with Award BIOS v4.50PG, played Beethoven for me on the tinny little computer speaker in early 1997. I had no idea what was going on. It freaked me out.
I wasn't running any anti-virus software back then and I figured my machine was hosed. A search, at the time, of Norton and McAfee web sites mentioned a Beethoven virus with little more than a title. They had no idea who designed it or what the cure was. As expected, I bought and installed a commercial anti-virus package to clean my machine.During the Y2K brew-ha-ha, I went to Award's web site to research if my BIOS was Y2K compliant. There was no mention of this musical madness on their web site. This is the first I've heard about it.
Since then, I have inadvertently ripped out my original computer speaker. I'm definitely going to go to the trouble of replacing it now. Wow!
As all the other posts note, the term cluster is too vague. If your plant needs clustering for High Availability and you're using Netware for file and print sharing, then you might want to check out Novell's Netware Clustering Services.
The Novell cluster works via NDS. Novell has designed a new directory object called a cluster. Servers in the cluster are mapped via NDS. The cluster object runs on any one of the servers in the cluster.
Data is shared via a Fibre Channel SAN. The cluster knows who has what LUN's mounted, what applications are running, and where they are in cache.
A LAN link is required for heartbeats and there is a special white board in the shared storage to monitor server stats.
If one of the servers goes down, then the cluster migrates the applications that were running on the server to the other servers on the system. The whole process takes less than a minute. The NCS also has some elaborate algorithms to decide if a server is down, and applies a poison pill to insure non-duplicity of processes.
It is not for the faint of heart to set up but once it is running, the HA is great. If, via the Novell management software, you take the server down, the applications migrate without a hitch. Maintenance on the machines (new NIC cards, drives, or processors) can be accomplished without any downtime. Backups still require server processing but they can be done without impinging on the LAN. The heartbeat also adds very little overhead to the LAN.
Sinclair has for the past nine months been asking every broadcaster to consider that 8-VSB doesn't work in urban areas and more importantly, it doesn't work with indoor antennas. They weren't the first. In 1998, the ATSC test results in Washington DC were announced at the National Association of Broadcasters. These tests indicated that 8-VSB didn't work in our capital. Broadcast engineers knew it didn't work in urban areas with alot of multipath long before the executives of Sinclair figured this out.
Some basic facts:
DTV is broadcast in a fully digital format. The up side to DTV is that the picture is usually perfect. No noise. No snow in an ATSC 8-VSB signal. The down side is that when the signal gets weak it reaches a "Cliff Edge Effect". At this point the signal goes to black or freezes.
Most new 8-VSB frequencies given to broadcasters in 1997 by the FCC were in the UHF band. If anyone has every had an indoor UHF antenna you know just how tough it is to get a reliable signal. If your significant other should walk in the room, the old NTSC picture goes all ghosty. With DTV, when someone walks in the room, your picture goes away! Not many people are going to put up with a picture that goes to black without warning.
In the 1998 ATSC report on reception trials in Washington DC, they gave pictures of indoor antennas. These guys were pros. They had the antenna on a small tripod, hooked to a spectrum analyzer and pointed in the optimum direction (usually about 10 o'clock in the air and away from the transmitter). Still they had difficulties receiving DTV indoors. The jist of the matter is that DTV won't be received in urban areas by indoor antennas. The report indicated that outdoor antennas work as well as expected. So What gives?
It has been pointed out earlier that Cable isn't prepared to carry DTV signals, neither technically nor economically. The FCC is also going to be hard pressed to demand cable companies carry local DTV broadcasts. Consumers will be very upset when some of their cable niche shows are removed so we can have two local broadcast.
The result is that DTV is going to be an over the air terrestrially broadcast medium. Generally, less that 35 percent of the country receive their television over the air. These people might be construed as not constituting an early adopter demographic, and they probably wouldn't be characterized as the upper layer of American affluence. Regardless of their social class, they will be just as upset to see their favorite shows go to black.
So where does this leave broadcasters? All these people, Sinclair included, have been instructed by the Federal Government to spend millions of dollars creating infrastructure. These guys aren't dummies. They are asking themselves "Who's going to pay for it? When will they get a return on investment?". Nobody has a viable business plan for data broadcasting and there can't be much in the way of DTV ad revenues.
So what is Sinclair doing? Delay, and obfustication. They don't want to spend the money. They want the FCC to delay more DTV timetables.
The important thing to remember about broadcasters is that they are only distributors of media product and not creators. The only local programs you see from Channel 4,5,6, etc is local news. The rest of the product is owned by the media creators who are investigating new distribution methods (ie. internet, satellite or direct cable). Broadcasting is a dying industry with an expensive mandate from the FCC. I would imagine that Sinclair is putting their funds into.com IPO's and just trying to stave off the government from pulling the plug.
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I also have had Vonage for the past six months. I am pleased with the service and would recommend it with some caveats.
First, the voice quality and connectivity drop off with any major IO traffic. If I'm downloading a large file, the voice sounds choppy. Useable but choppy. Consider what bandwidth usage the system will have while she is at work.
All my local calls are now long distance calls. Just a hassle remembering to dial long distance to talk to my neighbor.
There is a very slight delay in the system. It takes a while to get the rhythm of a conversation down using VOIP. Expect the other party to pause before replying. Try and make your sentences deliberate so the other party will expect a pause. You get use to it pretty quickly.
Sometimes my DTMF tones get attenuated through the system. I can dial to a anywhere without issue, but on some calls, if I need to "Press 1 for domestic travel", on occassion pressing 1 doesn't do a thing. I have to either wait for the operator or redial, and sometimes redial several times.
I also had to wait 30+ days to get my number transferred, but it was worth the wait.
Remember, no power, no phone, so have an emergency comm backup arrangement.
I found Vonage customer service to be as good as any ILEC. They turned me on to PingPlotter to monitor my Cable IP connectivity.
My bills went from $85/ month down to $30 per month. Sweet.
I wouldn't be overly concerned with the RF interference being generated at the site, but you should review the matter.
First, I would suggest that you have the site tested for RF levels. The tests should be fairly inexpensive. From the results you can decide if precautions are required.
You still need to consider future RF issues in case the cellular company decides to upgrade. It would be prudent to have some RF grounding brought into the server room and extend the ground to the racks and cable runs. Well grounded equipment will minimize any RF issues.
Multiple grounding might actually cause issues if there is stray AC from the high voltage. You can check for stray AC by having some ground rods placed at the site and check for AC potentials between the rods. A single low impedance ground is the best solution, but some electrical contractors don't understand the requirements.
Also, the cell tower could easily cause interference with WiFi or other RF equipment. If your new plant is going to depend on low power radio IT connectivity for either the plant or for IT, you should have an interference study done.
This isn't really a fix, but it is a way around your problem. Set up a script using WMI to change all your permissions, shares and registry entries. Place the script in the startup folder and forget about it.
/ scriptc enter/sampscr.mspx
Download the script samples and modify as necessary from:
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/community
Comments are needed:
The spec for the RamSan 320 says it will do 3GB/sec random sustainable bandwidth. To achieve this they have 8 each 2Gbyte/sec FC ports per unit. Since they can max out at 250,000 IO /sec, this implies a block size of 12K.
Most databases work in 4k blocks or smaller. The IO spec here is also full duplex. We can expect half that for writes. So the system can suck up data (100 percent random writes of 4k blocks) at 125000 IOs per unit with 40 units for a input bandwidth of 20GB/s per second.
Assuming that the system can read from multiple databases at anywhere near this speed it would take 125 seconds to fill the entire 2.5TBs.
Amazing.
Specs can be found at:l ex%20 RAMSAN%20320%20Spec%20Sheet.pdf
http://www.storageflex.com/download/Storagef
Bondo the puppy and get a bungy loop to keep it closed.
For the life of the laptop, you should never have a reason to remove the bezel again. If the LCD breaks then you'll need to get a new bezel anyways.
I don't know the dielectric properties of Bondo, so make sure you have some plastic insulation around the LCD HV supply and connections.
Physicians aren't the only ones joining this scam (although I consider them the most money grubbing of the lot). My insurance company (UHC) regularly (like +50 percent of my bills) get it wrong. They don't pay the correct amount or they don't take the proper percentage for my co-pay. Their reasonable and customary fees (unpublished) are some rude percentage of the amount several outsourced services haved billed me. (My facility is in a network plan, but some services aren't (radiology).) On several occassions, I have to contest their reasonable and customary payments via a snail mail exchange.
This is intentional and possibly criminal, but my only recourse is to take them to court some 300 miles away. Yeah right.
Some of these bills are just too small to complain about (hidden tax). Others are outrageous errors (criminal intent). With all, I have to call and complain about my bill and wait months for it to get corrected. (I've had bill sent to collection agencies on a number of occassions due to my insurer's performance.) I'm sure there are plenty of people out there paying the bills and not checking, because they can't figure it out.
It stuns me how much my company pays for this coverage. For me any time spent correcting "Explanation of Benefits" I consider to be on my employer's time as this is their insurer. If I add my lost man-hours to the cost of the insurance and then add the incorrect bills I've paid, I can only conclude that my insurer is making a bundle and my employer is getting reamed.
Clearly a fine example of a capitalist conspiracy!!!
Great reading. Now, fiction becomes reality.
We're all going to die.
I haven't worked through all the ramifications but Windows 2000 does respond to "shutdown now". I ran it from a prompt and it started a 30 second timer to a software shutdown. Yeah. Good luck.
Exercise, Yoga, Medication are all fine, but consider a different solution. Stand up.
If you are in control of your working environment, especially those who telecommute, consider making a high desk to work from. I use the high desk whenever my back really bothers me (I do exercise and I also have a regular desk). Standing up keeps me alert and eases the pain in my back.I got the idea from a visit to Goethe's home in Frankfurt Germany years ago. Goethe, worked standing at a desk all day long. If he could, why can't you.
Rob's calculations are a little flawed. The horizon for RF signals is not the same horizon for a laser beam.
McGraw Hill's "Electronics Engineers' Handbook" gives and effective earth radius factor "k" as 4/3 for frequencies greater than 30 MHz. This would extend the distance of Rob's calculations significantly.
When doing path calculations, there are a number of other factors that affect reception such as conductiviity, permittitivity, roughness and curvature. Reflected signals which also change the receptive strength are dependant on polarization, grazing angle and ground constants.
In general, creating RF paths can be considered black magic, based on the FM principle (magic). The 25 mile figure is really a best case scenerio, where only atmospheric attenuation is hampering the signal. Still, with some adequate hieght, RF communications can be established near 25 miles if the system is set up properly (ie minimizing signal loss at every stage as was pointed out earlier).
It should also be noted that the system discussed is only point to point and would have little value in reaching a mobile user. Mobile use is severly limited by the type and directionality of the antenna and the amount of RF power on the mobile computer. My own 801.11b link is good for 150 feet and most of that is due to the 10mW on an omni antenna sticking out of my laptop.
I'm floored.
This BIOS bug was developed before 1997. My MicroQ, Pentium 75, circa 1996, with Award BIOS v4.50PG, played Beethoven for me on the tinny little computer speaker in early 1997. I had no idea what was going on. It freaked me out.
I wasn't running any anti-virus software back then and I figured my machine was hosed. A search, at the time, of Norton and McAfee web sites mentioned a Beethoven virus with little more than a title. They had no idea who designed it or what the cure was. As expected, I bought and installed a commercial anti-virus package to clean my machine.During the Y2K brew-ha-ha, I went to Award's web site to research if my BIOS was Y2K compliant. There was no mention of this musical madness on their web site. This is the first I've heard about it.
Since then, I have inadvertently ripped out my original computer speaker. I'm definitely going to go to the trouble of replacing it now. Wow!
As all the other posts note, the term cluster is too vague. If your plant needs clustering for High Availability and you're using Netware for file and print sharing, then you might want to check out Novell's Netware Clustering Services.
The Novell cluster works via NDS. Novell has designed a new directory object called a cluster. Servers in the cluster are mapped via NDS. The cluster object runs on any one of the servers in the cluster.
Data is shared via a Fibre Channel SAN. The cluster knows who has what LUN's mounted, what applications are running, and where they are in cache.
A LAN link is required for heartbeats and there is a special white board in the shared storage to monitor server stats.
If one of the servers goes down, then the cluster migrates the applications that were running on the server to the other servers on the system. The whole process takes less than a minute. The NCS also has some elaborate algorithms to decide if a server is down, and applies a poison pill to insure non-duplicity of processes.
It is not for the faint of heart to set up but once it is running, the HA is great. If, via the Novell management software, you take the server down, the applications migrate without a hitch. Maintenance on the machines (new NIC cards, drives, or processors) can be accomplished without any downtime. Backups still require server processing but they can be done without impinging on the LAN. The heartbeat also adds very little overhead to the LAN.
Sinclair has for the past nine months been asking every broadcaster to consider that 8-VSB doesn't work in urban areas and more importantly, it doesn't work with indoor antennas. They weren't the first. In 1998, the ATSC test results in Washington DC were announced at the National Association of Broadcasters. These tests indicated that 8-VSB didn't work in our capital. Broadcast engineers knew it didn't work in urban areas with alot of multipath long before the executives of Sinclair figured this out.
Some basic facts:
DTV is broadcast in a fully digital format. The up side to DTV is that the picture is usually perfect. No noise. No snow in an ATSC 8-VSB signal. The down side is that when the signal gets weak it reaches a "Cliff Edge Effect". At this point the signal goes to black or freezes.
Most new 8-VSB frequencies given to broadcasters in 1997 by the FCC were in the UHF band. If anyone has every had an indoor UHF antenna you know just how tough it is to get a reliable signal. If your significant other should walk in the room, the old NTSC picture goes all ghosty. With DTV, when someone walks in the room, your picture goes away! Not many people are going to put up with a picture that goes to black without warning.
In the 1998 ATSC report on reception trials in Washington DC, they gave pictures of indoor antennas. These guys were pros. They had the antenna on a small tripod, hooked to a spectrum analyzer and pointed in the optimum direction (usually about 10 o'clock in the air and away from the transmitter). Still they had difficulties receiving DTV indoors. The jist of the matter is that DTV won't be received in urban areas by indoor antennas. The report indicated that outdoor antennas work as well as expected. So What gives?
It has been pointed out earlier that Cable isn't prepared to carry DTV signals, neither technically nor economically. The FCC is also going to be hard pressed to demand cable companies carry local DTV broadcasts. Consumers will be very upset when some of their cable niche shows are removed so we can have two local broadcast.
The result is that DTV is going to be an over the air terrestrially broadcast medium. Generally, less that 35 percent of the country receive their television over the air. These people might be construed as not constituting an early adopter demographic, and they probably wouldn't be characterized as the upper layer of American affluence. Regardless of their social class, they will be just as upset to see their favorite shows go to black.
So where does this leave broadcasters? All these people, Sinclair included, have been instructed by the Federal Government to spend millions of dollars creating infrastructure. These guys aren't dummies. They are asking themselves "Who's going to pay for it? When will they get a return on investment?". Nobody has a viable business plan for data broadcasting and there can't be much in the way of DTV ad revenues.
So what is Sinclair doing? Delay, and obfustication. They don't want to spend the money. They want the FCC to delay more DTV timetables.
The important thing to remember about broadcasters is that they are only distributors of media product and not creators. The only local programs you see from Channel 4,5,6, etc is local news. The rest of the product is owned by the media creators who are investigating new distribution methods (ie. internet, satellite or direct cable). Broadcasting is a dying industry with an expensive mandate from the FCC. I would imagine that Sinclair is putting their funds into .com IPO's and just trying to stave off the government from pulling the plug.