Uhm, if SCO is suing everyone, then I've got to suggest a few more people who are infringing on their IP:
http://www.google.com/search?q=sco
Results in 3,480,000 possible people to sue, and it only took 0.21 seconds to find. At those expensive legal rates, I just made $1200 - who do I send the bill to?
At the end of the third day, we're camped in Tennant Creek after driving for the first half of the day and then trailering for ~170km. Satellite connection is live, and we're getting lots more people here. We got a good charge this morning, used only 6Ah out of the batteries while driving today (leaving ~4Ah in the batteries). Between this evenings charge and tomorrow morning, we should be able to start tomorrow with about 21Ah in the batteries, and spend almost all day driving. We think the steering's out of alignment, as we're getting performance 20-30% worse than track testing before the race.
We've just discovered that while we can receive SMS's on the Iridium phones (for free) we can't actually SEND SMS's - Onno has just downloaded the user manual. We're getting your SMS's, and appreciate them, but don't be offended when you don't get a reply...
Tomorrow the plan is to get maximum distance on our almost full batteries, driving at a nice steady speed all day then trailering forward if necessary to a good campsite, probably the same place Sungroper stayed last race, past Barrow Creek (we've been told Ti Tree is a dump).
We've done a total of 480km under solar power, and 506 trailered. Needing to trailer during during race time (before 5pm, and getting to control stops by 5:10pm) really cuts down our available driving time, as we need to stop and put the car in the trailer really early. We need to choose a spot with room to put the car in the trailer (often tens of km apart) with enough time to spare to guarantee worst-case time to the control point. Partial (at best) to full cloud for all of the first two days didn't help either...
We hope to put lots more solar km on the clock tomorrow, we've left the clouds behind and it's completely clear.
We got up in the morning in total darkness at 4am and headed out to 58km short of Katherine. There we set up the array and waited for the sun which never arrived. A grand total of.08Ah was put into our 26Ah batteries. We now had 2.08Ah to start the day.
After deliberation, we trailered to the control point in Katherine where we were welcomed with open arms. Apparently reports overnight varied between - we'd given up, gone back to Darwin, gone bush or went camping - no-one seems to read this list, or/.
During and after our half hour control stop we tried to charge until 10:29 we trailered until 11 looking for the sub. At 11:12, Doug started driving, with a total charge of 4.08Ah. We started driving and drove for 80km on sunlight alone - no battery charge was used.
It should be noted that nothing was wrong with Sungroper, just that the weather gods had decided to share a serious cloud-base with us - including later rain.
We put Sungroper into the trailer at Mataranka and headed for the hills. We drove all the way to Dunmarra control point where we arrived at 16:20 and achieved a charge until sunset of another 6Ah, total charge is now 10Ah.
Bevan is updating the web-site and you should see data arriving there shortly.
Want more updates:
Send an email to: sungroper-announce-subscribe@yahoogroups.com
As a member of the sungroper team, I speak from driving on the road, it's all bitumen, but of course there are road-works, so some is technically not:-)
The road is mostly single lane, not a highway by any real stretch of the imagination, given that there are generally no sides, the lane stops on a white line on the edge with about 10-20cm of bitumen overhang.
The wild life does start moving at dusk, and is not limited to relatively small animals, but donkeys, camels and the regular cows and bulls (often Brahmen (sp?) in this area - really big buggers) make emus and kangaroos look tame. Where a kangaroo is unpredictable, the cow stands on the road in the dark, waiting for a car to hit it.
Indeed - swerving is bad because you might roll the car as stated, but the animal is likely to swerve in the direction of your swerve. Best remedy, stop driving.
The sungroper team from Western Australia is 258km out of Darwin, 61km from the Katherine control stop, and all are well.
We've set-up the mobile internet dish in the dark and we're merrily typing away at our camp kitchen table, sending messages to the world. The sungroper website is being updated as we speak, but I'll leave it to you to find it, so we have a chance to upload before you swamp it:-)
The car performed as expected, but the weather had a bonus cloud base - not a lot of charging happened. While we're happy, and ahead of several other teams at the moment, we've got a tough day ahead with some trailering by the look of things. I guess that if a nuclear device were to be set off that might boost our charge a little more than the sun;-)
You might recall a post a week or so ago, about the mobile internet satellite guy down under, we'll it's me again and as promised we're live and kicking with the dish!
While I understand your initial idea of multiple servers with a single service, not only are you increasing your management load, you're also increasing your failure rate...
Let me explain.
Imagine that the hardware on all the machines is identical and that hardware failures will statistically happen over time, with one machine, you get one failure per time, but with two, you get double the failures, and of course with 15 you get 15 times the failure rate.
Now this is true for hardware, but its also true for software. If you have to restart your server once a week, then you'll need to do that 15 times, thus having outages and user problems for 15 times longer than a single reboot.
So, both hardware and software failures are now causing you more grief because you've spread the load around.
Now in the scheme of things a hardware failure is waaay less likely than a software failure, so you could put all your services on one machine and reboot it once a week to take care of software failures.
Some might argue that you could run multiple virtual machines on one big hardware box, say run 15 copies of VMware, which would allow you to separate out your services, but your software failure rate remains the same - actually it's increased, by at least one, because you're running software underneath VMware - but that's getting picky.
You made another argument about hackability and more servers being more of an open door. This is only true if you leave the default services on on all 15 machines, but you wouldn't do that - right?
My suggestion - without having a clue what kind of load you're subjecting this to, is to setup a system that is a live backup. You run all your services in one place - one place to maintain, one place to reboot, one place to secure, one place to fix, etc. - Then mirror the hardware and software and data on another machine.
If you want to be paranoid, you could run two different OS's on those two machines, even different service providers, just the same data-set, but then you're getting seriously paranoid IMHO.
Finally, you asked about OS and Architecture as well as services and their impact on your implementation.
In my opinion, this is not an issue.
If you need to run Windows services as well as for example Linux services, you can run a copy of VMware on either with the other OS inside.
For a really cool idea, you could run only copies of VMware inside (I would use) a Linux box that has no services open at all. The Linux box monitors the VMware sessions, by poking at the ports on the VMware machines and restarts them if they died. You could even use one VMware box to serve as a file-system server, so the VMware boxes running the services would not have any modifiable bits at all. You could then monitor the integrity of the data from the lower Linux level...
If the last bit didn't make any sense, but you're intrigued about what I'm trying to describe, post here and I'll see if I can draw a picture - worth a thousand words.
Anyway, this post is waay to long already, hope it helps...
Einstein:The wireless telegraph is not difficult to understand. The ordinary telegraph is like a very long cat. You pull the tail in New York, and it meows in Los Angeles. The wireless is the same, only without the cat.
It could just be my mind - just fell down in the bath and hit my head falling over the edge...
I looked at MotoSAT, liked it and sent them an email on October 2, 2002. I'm still awaiting - though I confess no longer with baited breath - a response.
Sure. The challenge for me is to stay within the support boundaries that Optus provides. Imagine the conversation with the BOC if I cannot connect and I'm not using their supplied dish.
So to bypass that I'd need to carry it anyway - which sort of begins to defeat the purpose of the exercise.
Having said that, I'm on the lookout for other dishes that Optus supplies and supports for exactly that reason.
One slashdotter suggested I look at wire dishes and even building my own.
Given that it works and that I make a living from writing software and not from building dishes, I'm likely to stay with the current setup until something waay better comes along (next month;-).
We did look at that and Optus even offered to sell me one for $12,000 - sans wireless. Still need to run big RF cables inside.
The main decider against this was that it looked mobile and easy to "borrow". The second reason against it was that it precludes us from towing anything else - like say a caravan.
I've spent many hours attempting to eliminate manhandling the dish, this is the best I've got so-far. As stated elsewhere in these comments, I left a crane behind because it was too heavy - dangerously so - lifting 50kg above your head is an accident waiting to happen - but now I'm looking at other lifting contraptions.
One kind reader pointed me to the spitzlift crane and it looks promising.
I'm guessing that you meant to write "second lnb", and I'll respond accordingly.
The transmitter and the receiver are two separate devices, one receiving with vertical polarisation, the other sending horizontally. They're both attached to a t-piece adapter that makes this possible.
We investigated installing a universal adapter on the receiver, but short of making my own T-piece, it doesn't work.
While I'm happy to pull electronics from cases and void my warranty, I'm not so keen to have the satellite provider turn the switch because I'm transmitting out of spec.:-)
I've not yet investigated adding another offset arm, because the dish is asymetrical and that would not be a trivial task.
If you have any suggestions, I'm open to any contribution you may have, drop me an email and we'll talk.
The dish I use has to be both for receive and transmit. Receive antennas can be what ever shape works, eg. a wire mesh, but transmit antennas are specifically built to a standard - apparently certified by the builder of the satellite itself, thus a wire-mesh dish is unfortunately not an option AFAIK.
If you know different, send me an email and I'd be happy to check it out.
They're in the crate with the crockery, which generally travels on the floor nearest the sliding door, so you can make a cuppa when you pull over on the side of the road or at some lovely billabong along the way.
Thanks for your comments, but while the combination is correct, the suggestion isn't because the camera uses memory stick.
The card reader is a 7-in-1 TrendUSA reader, and according to their support staff I should be able to add a scsi_luns command into modules.conf and it should just all work - but of course it doesn't - hence it's on the todo list.
The reference to the camera is that I need to login as root to be able to run gphoto2 --get-all-files, but then need to change the ownership back of all the images and generally stuff around - I'd much rather just stick the camera in, and everything just downloads - another todo list item:-)
When that happens I find a phone line and talk to someone. Last time it happened the BOC kindly went out of their way to gather the frequency table, which I then manually entered into the modem.
It should be pointed out that this normally isn't an issue, but Optus just recently replaced their B3 satellite with C1. Initially I moved to C1 - no change the frequencies came in over the link - but then over time all the SatWeb users were migrated back to B3 - now in a different location, that's when the fun started, because someone forgot to tell me and send me the update file.
At the time I had been assured that it would just work, but unfortunately that wasn't the case. However an hour or two after arriving on site and having aligned my dish first to B3 and then to C1 and back to B3, I got the new frequencies over the phone and was good to go.
That was a question that I was unable to answer before it actually got delivered because not only do they not know, they change suppliers every 10 seconds.
The dish is oval in shape, 1.8m x 2.0m (give or take a mm) It's about 30cm deep, but I keep the back frame bolted to it in transit, which makes it more like 1m deep.
This is without the mount and all the other bits.
The dish I was supplied with is a ChannelMaster Type 183, their specs on the website are poor, but send me an email and I can forward the PDF's I gathered.
Not really, for one the roof isn't strong enough. The other issue is that the roof is two and a half meters above the ground.
The original design called for the dish to be mounted on the back of a truck as you suggest, but if you need to go shopping for milk or eggs, you need to take the dish down.
We briefly looked at putting it all on a trailer, but voted against it because it would look portable and someone was likely to "borrow" it and we were thinking of towing a caravan at the time, which sort of ruled that out.
The wireless base-station is the very least of my problems. It is plugged in and switched on most of the time when the dish is online. Of all my equipment it's so far been the most reliable.
I left a crane behind in Perth that was capable of lifting the dish from the van because it was too heavy - and I'm looking at alternatives at the moment.
That's why I currently need two guys to lift the dish from the van.
The line-up isn't really worth the extra motor-gear, even though I'm now missing out on some satellite TV:-)
An extra dish for TV is being looked at, it'll be lighter than all the motor gear and I won't loose Internet connectivity and have to re-do a cross-poll everytime I want to watch TV.
I'm safely behind an Optus firewall and my IP is private. Not because I don't want people to ping me, but because I'd rather not deal with SoBIG and other rubbish over my paid link...
Satellite internet is wonderful, but I'm really glad I'm on a private network away from the rough and tumble of the 'net:-)
One day I made the tactical error of telling the guy on the phone that I was actually running Debian and that I was running Win98/WinNT, whatever he wanted, in a VMware box.
He immediately assumed that the problem lay there...
(Suffice to say it wasn't)
The Gilat software seems to work OK under VMware, but there are some tricks like needing to disconnect the transmitter from the modem so the software can talk to the modem, because otherwise it ignores the ethernet port - go figure.
My biggest fear was that Gilat had done some funky IP/Ethernet stuff and that it required an actual ethernet port, but my fears luckily proved unfounded.
At one stage I was looking at bolting a Windows PC under the dish as well - gladly that didn't need to happen!
Slashdot Mirror
Uhm, if SCO is suing everyone, then I've got to suggest a few more people who are infringing on their IP:
http://www.google.com/search?q=sco
Results in 3,480,000 possible people to sue, and it only took 0.21 seconds to find. At those expensive legal rates, I just made $1200 - who do I send the bill to?
Gotta love linux:
/usr/src/linux
$ cd
$ grep -riE "break;|}" * | wc
368665 1011575 14615858
At a dollar per violation, that's a better return than my lotto investments...
At the end of the third day, we're camped in Tennant Creek after driving for the first half of the day and then trailering for ~170km. Satellite connection is live, and we're getting lots more people here. We got a good charge this morning, used only 6Ah out of the batteries while driving today (leaving ~4Ah in the batteries). Between this evenings charge and tomorrow morning, we should be able to start tomorrow with about 21Ah in the batteries, and spend almost all day driving. We think the steering's out of alignment, as we're getting performance 20-30% worse than track testing before the race.
We've just discovered that while we can receive SMS's on the Iridium phones (for free) we can't actually SEND SMS's - Onno has just downloaded the user manual. We're getting your SMS's, and appreciate them, but don't be offended when you don't get a reply...
Tomorrow the plan is to get maximum distance on our almost full batteries, driving at a nice steady speed all day then trailering forward if necessary to a good campsite, probably the same place Sungroper stayed last race, past Barrow Creek (we've been told Ti Tree is a dump).
We've done a total of 480km under solar power, and 506 trailered. Needing to trailer during during race time (before 5pm, and getting to control stops by 5:10pm) really cuts down our available driving time, as we need to stop and put the car in the trailer really early. We need to choose a spot with room to put the car in the trailer (often tens of km apart) with enough time to spare to guarantee worst-case time to the control point. Partial (at best) to full cloud for all of the first two days didn't help either...
We hope to put lots more solar km on the clock tomorrow, we've left the clouds behind and it's completely clear.
Photos and info will be up on the website soon.
--Andrew
Hi all,
.08Ah was put into our 26Ah batteries. We now had 2.08Ah to start the day.
/.
We got up in the morning in total darkness at 4am and headed out to 58km short of Katherine. There we set up the array and waited for the sun which never arrived. A grand total of
After deliberation, we trailered to the control point in Katherine where we were welcomed with open arms. Apparently reports overnight varied between - we'd given up, gone back to Darwin, gone bush or went camping - no-one seems to read this list, or
During and after our half hour control stop we tried to charge until 10:29 we trailered until 11 looking for the sub. At 11:12, Doug started driving, with a total charge of 4.08Ah. We started driving and drove for 80km on sunlight alone - no battery charge was used.
It should be noted that nothing was wrong with Sungroper, just that the weather gods had decided to share a serious cloud-base with us - including later rain.
We put Sungroper into the trailer at Mataranka and headed for the hills. We drove all the way to Dunmarra control point where we arrived at 16:20 and achieved a charge until sunset of another 6Ah, total charge is now 10Ah.
Bevan is updating the web-site and you should see data arriving there shortly.
Want more updates:
Send an email to: sungroper-announce-subscribe@yahoogroups.com
As a member of the sungroper team, I speak from driving on the road, it's all bitumen, but of course there are road-works, so some is technically not :-)
The road is mostly single lane, not a highway by any real stretch of the imagination, given that there are generally no sides, the lane stops on a white line on the edge with about 10-20cm of bitumen overhang.
The wild life does start moving at dusk, and is not limited to relatively small animals, but donkeys, camels and the regular cows and bulls (often Brahmen (sp?) in this area - really big buggers) make emus and kangaroos look tame. Where a kangaroo is unpredictable, the cow stands on the road in the dark, waiting for a car to hit it.
Indeed - swerving is bad because you might roll the car as stated, but the animal is likely to swerve in the direction of your swerve. Best remedy, stop driving.
The sungroper team from Western Australia is 258km out of Darwin, 61km from the Katherine control stop, and all are well.
:-)
We've set-up the mobile internet dish in the dark and we're merrily typing away at our camp kitchen table, sending messages to the world. The sungroper website is being updated as we speak, but I'll leave it to you to find it, so we have a chance to upload before you swamp it
The car performed as expected, but the weather had a bonus cloud base - not a lot of charging happened. While we're happy, and ahead of several other teams at the moment, we've got a tough day ahead with some trailering by the look of things. I guess that if a nuclear device were to be set off that might boost our charge a little more than the sun;-)
You might recall a post a week or so ago, about the mobile internet satellite guy down under, we'll it's me again and as promised we're live and kicking with the dish!
Please be kind to the sungroper web-site!
Let me explain.
Imagine that the hardware on all the machines is identical and that hardware failures will statistically happen over time, with one machine, you get one failure per time, but with two, you get double the failures, and of course with 15 you get 15 times the failure rate.
Now this is true for hardware, but its also true for software. If you have to restart your server once a week, then you'll need to do that 15 times, thus having outages and user problems for 15 times longer than a single reboot.
So, both hardware and software failures are now causing you more grief because you've spread the load around.
Now in the scheme of things a hardware failure is waaay less likely than a software failure, so you could put all your services on one machine and reboot it once a week to take care of software failures.
Some might argue that you could run multiple virtual machines on one big hardware box, say run 15 copies of VMware, which would allow you to separate out your services, but your software failure rate remains the same - actually it's increased, by at least one, because you're running software underneath VMware - but that's getting picky.
You made another argument about hackability and more servers being more of an open door. This is only true if you leave the default services on on all 15 machines, but you wouldn't do that - right?
My suggestion - without having a clue what kind of load you're subjecting this to, is to setup a system that is a live backup. You run all your services in one place - one place to maintain, one place to reboot, one place to secure, one place to fix, etc. - Then mirror the hardware and software and data on another machine.
If you want to be paranoid, you could run two different OS's on those two machines, even different service providers, just the same data-set, but then you're getting seriously paranoid IMHO.
Finally, you asked about OS and Architecture as well as services and their impact on your implementation.
In my opinion, this is not an issue.
If you need to run Windows services as well as for example Linux services, you can run a copy of VMware on either with the other OS inside.
For a really cool idea, you could run only copies of VMware inside (I would use) a Linux box that has no services open at all. The Linux box monitors the VMware sessions, by poking at the ports on the VMware machines and restarts them if they died. You could even use one VMware box to serve as a file-system server, so the VMware boxes running the services would not have any modifiable bits at all. You could then monitor the integrity of the data from the lower Linux level...
If the last bit didn't make any sense, but you're intrigued about what I'm trying to describe, post here and I'll see if I can draw a picture - worth a thousand words.
Anyway, this post is waay to long already, hope it helps...
which to my mind refers to:It could just be my mind - just fell down in the bath and hit my head falling over the edge...
Cool, finally got a moment to do this, and another item in my to-do list bites the dust ... thanks!
An interesting notion, but what time are we talking about? Nowhere does it say that the ISP has to synchronise their clock to that of the RIAA.
I looked at MotoSAT, liked it and sent them an email on October 2, 2002. I'm still awaiting - though I confess no longer with baited breath - a response.
They must have enough customers...
Sure. The challenge for me is to stay within the support boundaries that Optus provides. Imagine the conversation with the BOC if I cannot connect and I'm not using their supplied dish.
;-).
So to bypass that I'd need to carry it anyway - which sort of begins to defeat the purpose of the exercise.
Having said that, I'm on the lookout for other dishes that Optus supplies and supports for exactly that reason.
One slashdotter suggested I look at wire dishes and even building my own.
Given that it works and that I make a living from writing software and not from building dishes, I'm likely to stay with the current setup until something waay better comes along (next month
Thanks for that reference it looks promising.
Cool, anytime - put my radio announcer skills back to good use :-)
We did look at that and Optus even offered to sell me one for $12,000 - sans wireless. Still need to run big RF cables inside.
The main decider against this was that it looked mobile and easy to "borrow". The second reason against it was that it precludes us from towing anything else - like say a caravan.
I've spent many hours attempting to eliminate manhandling the dish, this is the best I've got so-far. As stated elsewhere in these comments, I left a crane behind because it was too heavy - dangerously so - lifting 50kg above your head is an accident waiting to happen - but now I'm looking at other lifting contraptions.
One kind reader pointed me to the spitzlift crane and it looks promising.
I'm guessing that you meant to write "second lnb", and I'll respond accordingly.
:-)
The transmitter and the receiver are two separate devices, one receiving with vertical polarisation, the other sending horizontally. They're both attached to a t-piece adapter that makes this possible.
We investigated installing a universal adapter on the receiver, but short of making my own T-piece, it doesn't work.
While I'm happy to pull electronics from cases and void my warranty, I'm not so keen to have the satellite provider turn the switch because I'm transmitting out of spec.
I've not yet investigated adding another offset arm, because the dish is asymetrical and that would not be a trivial task.
If you have any suggestions, I'm open to any contribution you may have, drop me an email and we'll talk.
The dish I use has to be both for receive and transmit. Receive antennas can be what ever shape works, eg. a wire mesh, but transmit antennas are specifically built to a standard - apparently certified by the builder of the satellite itself, thus a wire-mesh dish is unfortunately not an option AFAIK.
If you know different, send me an email and I'd be happy to check it out.
They're in the crate with the crockery, which generally travels on the floor nearest the sliding door, so you can make a cuppa when you pull over on the side of the road or at some lovely billabong along the way.
Thanks for your comments, but while the combination is correct, the suggestion isn't because the camera uses memory stick.
:-)
The card reader is a 7-in-1 TrendUSA reader, and according to their support staff I should be able to add a scsi_luns command into modules.conf and it should just all work - but of course it doesn't - hence it's on the todo list.
The reference to the camera is that I need to login as root to be able to run gphoto2 --get-all-files, but then need to change the ownership back of all the images and generally stuff around - I'd much rather just stick the camera in, and everything just downloads - another todo list item
When that happens I find a phone line and talk to someone. Last time it happened the BOC kindly went out of their way to gather the frequency table, which I then manually entered into the modem.
:-)
It should be pointed out that this normally isn't an issue, but Optus just recently replaced their B3 satellite with C1. Initially I moved to C1 - no change the frequencies came in over the link - but then over time all the SatWeb users were migrated back to B3 - now in a different location, that's when the fun started, because someone forgot to tell me and send me the update file.
At the time I had been assured that it would just work, but unfortunately that wasn't the case. However an hour or two after arriving on site and having aligned my dish first to B3 and then to C1 and back to B3, I got the new frequencies over the phone and was good to go.
I'm told it won't happen again.
I'm crossing my fingers
That was a question that I was unable to answer before it actually got delivered because not only do they not know, they change suppliers every 10 seconds.
The dish is oval in shape, 1.8m x 2.0m (give or take a mm) It's about 30cm deep, but I keep the back frame bolted to it in transit, which makes it more like 1m deep.
This is without the mount and all the other bits.
The dish I was supplied with is a ChannelMaster Type 183, their specs on the website are poor, but send me an email and I can forward the PDF's I gathered.
Not really, for one the roof isn't strong enough. The other issue is that the roof is two and a half meters above the ground.
The original design called for the dish to be mounted on the back of a truck as you suggest, but if you need to go shopping for milk or eggs, you need to take the dish down.
We briefly looked at putting it all on a trailer, but voted against it because it would look portable and someone was likely to "borrow" it and we were thinking of towing a caravan at the time, which sort of ruled that out.
The wireless base-station is the very least of my problems. It is plugged in and switched on most of the time when the dish is online. Of all my equipment it's so far been the most reliable.
Back braking is the word.
:-)
I left a crane behind in Perth that was capable of lifting the dish from the van because it was too heavy - and I'm looking at alternatives at the moment.
That's why I currently need two guys to lift the dish from the van.
The line-up isn't really worth the extra motor-gear, even though I'm now missing out on some satellite TV
An extra dish for TV is being looked at, it'll be lighter than all the motor gear and I won't loose Internet connectivity and have to re-do a cross-poll everytime I want to watch TV.
ROTFL
:-)
I'm safely behind an Optus firewall and my IP is private. Not because I don't want people to ping me, but because I'd rather not deal with SoBIG and other rubbish over my paid link...
Satellite internet is wonderful, but I'm really glad I'm on a private network away from the rough and tumble of the 'net
One day I made the tactical error of telling the guy on the phone that I was actually running Debian and that I was running Win98/WinNT, whatever he wanted, in a VMware box.
He immediately assumed that the problem lay there...
(Suffice to say it wasn't)
The Gilat software seems to work OK under VMware, but there are some tricks like needing to disconnect the transmitter from the modem so the software can talk to the modem, because otherwise it ignores the ethernet port - go figure.
My biggest fear was that Gilat had done some funky IP/Ethernet stuff and that it required an actual ethernet port, but my fears luckily proved unfounded.
At one stage I was looking at bolting a Windows PC under the dish as well - gladly that didn't need to happen!