Back a few years ago when I was building out for an ISP we decided to roll DSL. The LEC is SBC in this area, and they were JUST getting to where they understood what needed to be done for a reseller to use their ground copper, DSLAMs and Redbacks. We basically beta tested this for SBC in this area and for a while they coundn't get the lines conditioned right so they would deploy an unbundled loop (a pair with no tone) at every install for DSL to ride on. They still required a working SBC phone number to provision the loop, but once it was installed you could cancel the phone service. I had a working unbundled loop at my house untill 6 months ago when I switched to cable. Now they no longer allow it....I think McLeod still rolls this way and Speakeasy used to allow it too I think. Most require a working phone # to provision, which can be canceled at a later date. Of course, this could all be changed now.
Several years ago I did work on checkpoint fw-1 and vpn-1, it was alwaya a nightmare. I could never get the vpn-1 stuff to work the way I needed it to......suppsedly it's been improved, however, I have since ditched all ties to checkpoint (thank god).
Nice. I have an old IPX too. Like you said it runs fine, I have 2.6 on mine. I also had a Mac se/30 running netbsd for a while. I really should dig through that old stack of macs I have in the basement. I had a few Sparc IPX boxes running production apache webservers until about 2.5 years ago. They did a fine job, the pages were low traffic and static and I never had an issue. Each one had about 25 or so domains on it. At that previous employer we also had a "Sparcintosh" the one piece Sun with the display....it was very odd.
My mother still uses the Tandy 1000 286 that she got for me when I was younger. I've built PCs for my brothers and my fathers business, as well as for her (which she ended up not using and giving to my brother) and even offered to get a Mac for her (she really liked my powerbook and the MacOS X interface) but she's content using the old DOS machine with Tandys "Deskmate" Window manager. She even went and found someplace that had "vintage" hardware when the hard drive failed (I think it was like 20meg) and replaced it hersef......I really should just get her an imac or something....
On a similar note, I just posted a blurb on a similar subject over at SecurityDrop. Basically, I've seen a large jump in the use of Macs (primarily powerbooks) within the Networking and Network research fields. More than half of my peers at other facilities as well as at my own facility have switched or have been using Macs for a while. It's not enterprise (thank god) but it is a decent footprint. Virginia tech also has a large cluster of G5s, which I'll bet will make the top 10 in the top 500 supercomputer challenge. Are there any more network engineers or researchers using or switching to macs? Why or why not?
Once upon a time apple was king in the schools. They were edged out by (I believe) compaq. I think networking a large number of macs is substantially easier than a bunch or XP boxes, throw an xserve in there for full control of the boxes like you would a windws DC. Got a AD infrastructure in place already? Great, the macs should integrate right in. For the most bang for your buck I'd go with the macs, I am however a longtime mac user, so I don't fear the OS, in fact I'd wager that given the right setup they could run pretty seamlessly (of course the dells could too in the same circumstance). I guess it all comes down to what the admins prefer and are comfortable with. For my money and time I'll always choose a unix based OS. I really hope that they go with apple, it would certainly help bolster the platform in the long run.
There is a company that is doing some pretty cool last mile wireless stuff which may or may not work for you. It's non line of sight (900mhz I believe) the company is waverider http://www.waverider.com/ I've met with them a few years ago, they were pretty knowledgable and had a cool product. I've seen their networks deployed in a nearby town and it works great.
A future use for FW800, poor performance with IP
on
IP over Firewire Updated
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· Score: 2, Informative
Something that cluster guys may want to think about is the use of Firewire 800 as a cluster media (like a control net) for a group of n xserves (or any other mac). This would be an alternative (since the FW800 is already there) buying a load of Cisco 4000 or 6500 switches to run the control net. I'm actually not sure how many nodes it can handle, but I assume it would be enough to run a small to medium mac cluster. Along those same lines, when testing the performance of FW400 between nodes using iperf ( http://dast.nlanr.net/Projects/Iperf/ ) which will test raw throughput and give very good results, FW400 performance was very poor. The GigE was pretty good (unfortunately I do not have the numbers in front ot me) but if I'm not mistaken, FW400 was a bit better than 100mb E and the GigE was pushing over 800mb UDP back to back with another MAC. Performance was degraded when adding a GigE switch between the 2 macs (due to backplane).
You're main problem will be gaining access to the copper for a DSL or a LRE solution. I saw a similar project that did the same thing, the LEC was qwest, who if I'm not mistaken, had to be sued to finally allow the access.
We are working on rolling out a v6 test bed, granted I work at a research facility. There are many ways toi actually use v6 today, in fact it's much more widely adopted in asia. ipv6 is something that will eventually come in my opinion, at least in the university/scientific world. The benefits are many, the only drawback is that engineers may have to (dare I even say it?!?) **learn something**. After the initial rollouts and transition periods network engineers jobs *should* be much easier, due to all the built in features. Those that are scared of change, not security conscious, complaining about telnet, come on, get with the flow, I mean telnet is fine for internal wired communication, but the use of it over wireless and or public networks is just not a good idea.
I've had Nextel for about a year and a half, before that sprint (horrible), before that cingulair (also horrible). I've never had a problem at all with my nextel (other than the fact that I'm hard on phones, which they replaced no questions asked). I can always get through, their customer service is GREAT, and their cellular phone service (not to mention the direct connect) sounds better than any others that I've used. Only 1 downside, you can't roam off their network, but unless you live in a podunk town nowhere near an interstate you're probably fine. Yeah, they may cost a bit more, and they may not have all the wacky little phones, but they own their own towers (not like ANY other provider) which allows for greater scaleability, and their service seems to work well.
I agree, nice job over there. It's nice to see someone who actually gives a crap. Afterall, I'm sure that the network is something that they are proud of, even if it isn't technically owned by them, it's still "theirs". Maybe I'm a workaholic, but I feel the same way. I can get drunk any time.
I find myself on call 24x7x365. I'd of course rather have "the holidays" off to spend with friends and family.
I've had to work on new years eve before, as well as thinnksgivung. Fortunately I've never had to work on X-mas. That is one day I insist on having off (although I am on call).
As the one in charge of a decent sized ISP network I can say that it is hard to make money on residential broadband. In fact, I've suggested that we no longer do it on many occasions. The residential users are:
1. The one that want to pay the least
2. Complain the loudest and most frequently
3. Abuse the network more than any others
4. Use the most bandwidth
I've had to throttle ports on my Residential DSL interfaces before due to abuse of bandwidth, adn yes, I blocked port 80 incoming during the nimda scare. I don't leave the restrictions on, but I have ABSOLUTELY no problem doing so for residential subscribers. The days of sub $50 a month broadband are coming to a painfull end.
Don't get me wrong, I abused my verizon DSL years ago when I was part of the initial rollout, I abused it like nobodys buisness. Now that I manage the network and am on the other side of the fence I can appreciate the people that don't.
I had a Sun Box doing that for my home for a while. 3 ethernet interfaces 1 to the DSL, one to the Cable modem, and 1 to the internal LAN. I ran IPF/IPNAT on it to do the NATing/firewalling adn used static routes to distribute traffic. It was klunky and kinda a hack to use static routes, and it was by no means "redundancy" but it worked like a charm.
I run the network at a small ISP that provides DSL over Ameritech copper. Ameritech is pretty noncooperative in my area about pretty much everything, especially DSL. I've run into the same problem and under the suggestion of my ameritech rep I had an "all copper" POTS line provisioned to several customers then run the DSL over that. This does add about $15 to the cost, and had not worked every time. Worth a shot to ask Verizion though I bet.
OK, point taken, I misunderstood the "gorilla net" thing. I can say this though, when I came into the ISP that I'm working at now there was a bunch of the Pairgain on each end DSL. It was ordered with the same idea, except that it was a gateway to the internet instead of another LAN. Admittedly I know almost nothing about setting it up or maintaining it, all I can say is that 99% of it was extremely unreliable (possibly due to the former network admin not doing something right, I don't know) and that any problems with the lines were *my* problem, ie, the telco didn't care. I can see how this would be OK for a personal WAN between friends, but it was poor practive for an ISP. Now, I do offer ADSL over the Telco ATM mesh now, which is much more reliable AND supported by the telco, so if a line goes down I can get them to fix it. I wasn't slamming anyones ideas, just relaying my experience with the technology.
This is true, but then you have to pay for bandwidth, the $15 is just the line charge. I don't know of any ISP that will give bandwidth away, especially a t1's worth of it. Another thing, I work for an ISP that used to do "RADSL" (the shitty dry pair dsl that you are talking about) and let me just say that the first thing I did when I came in was to get rid of all of that crap. It's unspported by the telco, and extremely flakey. it either works fantastic (10%)or doesn't work at all (90%). If you can't get anything else I'd say do it, but I'd never get it for myself. I too have several dsl modems/routers from moving around. I was a beta tester for GTEi (now Verizon) and have an old as hell Orckitt DSL router, I now have ADSL through the ISP that I work at as well as cable. We sell mainly to Buisnesses using the Speedstream 5861 http://www.provantage.com/scripts/go.dll/-s/fp_583 54
While these seem to be used only by Ameritech (I could be wrong) and their resellers, they are quite powerfull (although not worth the money in my opinion)
These patches should be applied as soon as they are evaluated for relevancy, and since you pay for service, I'd think they'd do that for you. I work at an ISP and we are millitant about patching, I personally don't want my name associated with ANY security related failures or screw ups. We provide that service to our customers, and indirectly to ourselves. I'd look for a new provider.
Slashdot Mirror
Back a few years ago when I was building out for an ISP we decided to roll DSL. The LEC is SBC in this area, and they were JUST getting to where they understood what needed to be done for a reseller to use their ground copper, DSLAMs and Redbacks. We basically beta tested this for SBC in this area and for a while they coundn't get the lines conditioned right so they would deploy an unbundled loop (a pair with no tone) at every install for DSL to ride on. They still required a working SBC phone number to provision the loop, but once it was installed you could cancel the phone service. I had a working unbundled loop at my house untill 6 months ago when I switched to cable. Now they no longer allow it....I think McLeod still rolls this way and Speakeasy used to allow it too I think. Most require a working phone # to provision, which can be canceled at a later date. Of course, this could all be changed now.
nb
Several years ago I did work on checkpoint fw-1 and vpn-1, it was alwaya a nightmare. I could never get the vpn-1 stuff to work the way I needed it to......suppsedly it's been improved, however, I have since ditched all ties to checkpoint (thank god).
Nice. I have an old IPX too. Like you said it runs fine, I have 2.6 on mine. I also had a Mac se/30 running netbsd for a while. I really should dig through that old stack of macs I have in the basement. I had a few Sparc IPX boxes running production apache webservers until about 2.5 years ago. They did a fine job, the pages were low traffic and static and I never had an issue. Each one had about 25 or so domains on it. At that previous employer we also had a "Sparcintosh" the one piece Sun with the display....it was very odd.
My mother still uses the Tandy 1000 286 that she got for me when I was younger. I've built PCs for my brothers and my fathers business, as well as for her (which she ended up not using and giving to my brother) and even offered to get a Mac for her (she really liked my powerbook and the MacOS X interface) but she's content using the old DOS machine with Tandys "Deskmate" Window manager. She even went and found someplace that had "vintage" hardware when the hard drive failed (I think it was like 20meg) and replaced it hersef. .....I really should just get her an imac or something....
Hemi is being a hater.....don't diss his mopar though.....
sad, really just sad. so much anger.
Wow, I totally missed that. Nice....
On a similar note, I just posted a blurb on a similar subject over at SecurityDrop. Basically, I've seen a large jump in the use of Macs (primarily powerbooks) within the Networking and Network research fields. More than half of my peers at other facilities as well as at my own facility have switched or have been using Macs for a while. It's not enterprise (thank god) but it is a decent footprint. Virginia tech also has a large cluster of G5s, which I'll bet will make the top 10 in the top 500 supercomputer challenge. Are there any more network engineers or researchers using or switching to macs? Why or why not?
Agreed.
"Windows XP (or 2000) can be made rock solid with proper administration."
Loaded statement. This can be said of almost any commercial OS.
Once upon a time apple was king in the schools. They were edged out by (I believe) compaq. I think networking a large number of macs is substantially easier than a bunch or XP boxes, throw an xserve in there for full control of the boxes like you would a windws DC. Got a AD infrastructure in place already? Great, the macs should integrate right in. For the most bang for your buck I'd go with the macs, I am however a longtime mac user, so I don't fear the OS, in fact I'd wager that given the right setup they could run pretty seamlessly (of course the dells could too in the same circumstance). I guess it all comes down to what the admins prefer and are comfortable with. For my money and time I'll always choose a unix based OS. I really hope that they go with apple, it would certainly help bolster the platform in the long run.
There is a company that is doing some pretty cool last mile wireless stuff which may or may not work for you. It's non line of sight (900mhz I believe) the company is waverider http://www.waverider.com/
I've met with them a few years ago, they were pretty knowledgable and had a cool product. I've seen their networks deployed in a nearby town and it works great.
Something that cluster guys may want to think about is the use of Firewire 800 as a cluster media (like a control net) for a group of n xserves (or any other mac). This would be an alternative (since the FW800 is already there) buying a load of Cisco 4000 or 6500 switches to run the control net. I'm actually not sure how many nodes it can handle, but I assume it would be enough to run a small to medium mac cluster. Along those same lines, when testing the performance of FW400 between nodes using iperf ( http://dast.nlanr.net/Projects/Iperf/ ) which will test raw throughput and give very good results, FW400 performance was very poor. The GigE was pretty good (unfortunately I do not have the numbers in front ot me) but if I'm not mistaken, FW400 was a bit better than 100mb E and the GigE was pushing over 800mb UDP back to back with another MAC. Performance was degraded when adding a GigE switch between the 2 macs (due to backplane).
You're main problem will be gaining access to the copper for a DSL or a LRE solution. I saw a similar project that did the same thing, the LEC was qwest, who if I'm not mistaken, had to be sued to finally allow the access.
We are working on rolling out a v6 test bed, granted I work at a research facility. There are many ways toi actually use v6 today, in fact it's much more widely adopted in asia. ipv6 is something that will eventually come in my opinion, at least in the university/scientific world. The benefits are many, the only drawback is that engineers may have to (dare I even say it?!?) **learn something**. After the initial rollouts and transition periods network engineers jobs *should* be much easier, due to all the built in features.
Those that are scared of change, not security conscious, complaining about telnet, come on, get with the flow, I mean telnet is fine for internal wired communication, but the use of it over wireless and or public networks is just not a good idea.
I've had Nextel for about a year and a half, before that sprint (horrible), before that cingulair (also horrible). I've never had a problem at all with my nextel (other than the fact that I'm hard on phones, which they replaced no questions asked). I can always get through, their customer service is GREAT, and their cellular phone service (not to mention the direct connect) sounds better than any others that I've used. Only 1 downside, you can't roam off their network, but unless you live in a podunk town nowhere near an interstate you're probably fine. Yeah, they may cost a bit more, and they may not have all the wacky little phones, but they own their own towers (not like ANY other provider) which allows for greater scaleability, and their service seems to work well.
I agree, nice job over there. It's nice to see someone who actually gives a crap. Afterall, I'm sure that the network is something that they are proud of, even if it isn't technically owned by them, it's still "theirs". Maybe I'm a workaholic, but I feel the same way. I can get drunk any time.
I find myself on call 24x7x365. I'd of course rather have "the holidays" off to spend with friends and family.
I've had to work on new years eve before, as well as thinnksgivung. Fortunately I've never had to work on X-mas. That is one day I insist on having off (although I am on call).
As the one in charge of a decent sized ISP network I can say that it is hard to make money on residential broadband. In fact, I've suggested that we no longer do it on many occasions. The residential users are:
1. The one that want to pay the least
2. Complain the loudest and most frequently
3. Abuse the network more than any others
4. Use the most bandwidth
I've had to throttle ports on my Residential DSL interfaces before due to abuse of bandwidth, adn yes, I blocked port 80 incoming during the nimda scare. I don't leave the restrictions on, but I have ABSOLUTELY no problem doing so for residential subscribers. The days of sub $50 a month broadband are coming to a painfull end.
Don't get me wrong, I abused my verizon DSL years ago when I was part of the initial rollout, I abused it like nobodys buisness. Now that I manage the network and am on the other side of the fence I can appreciate the people that don't.
I had a Sun Box doing that for my home for a while. 3 ethernet interfaces 1 to the DSL, one to the Cable modem, and 1 to the internal LAN. I ran IPF/IPNAT on it to do the NATing/firewalling adn used static routes to distribute traffic. It was klunky and kinda a hack to use static routes, and it was by no means "redundancy" but it worked like a charm.
I run the network at a small ISP that provides DSL over Ameritech copper. Ameritech is pretty noncooperative in my area about pretty much everything, especially DSL. I've run into the same problem and under the suggestion of my ameritech rep I had an "all copper" POTS line provisioned to several customers then run the DSL over that. This does add about $15 to the cost, and had not worked every time. Worth a shot to ask Verizion though I bet.
OK, point taken, I misunderstood the "gorilla net" thing. I can say this though, when I came into the ISP that I'm working at now there was a bunch of the Pairgain on each end DSL. It was ordered with the same idea, except that it was a gateway to the internet instead of another LAN. Admittedly I know almost nothing about setting it up or maintaining it, all I can say is that 99% of it was extremely unreliable (possibly due to the former network admin not doing something right, I don't know) and that any problems with the lines were *my* problem, ie, the telco didn't care. I can see how this would be OK for a personal WAN between friends, but it was poor practive for an ISP. Now, I do offer ADSL over the Telco ATM mesh now, which is much more reliable AND supported by the telco, so if a line goes down I can get them to fix it. I wasn't slamming anyones ideas, just relaying my experience with the technology.
This is true, but then you have to pay for bandwidth, the $15 is just the line charge. I don't know of any ISP that will give bandwidth away, especially a t1's worth of it. Another thing, I work for an ISP that used to do "RADSL" (the shitty dry pair dsl that you are talking about) and let me just say that the first thing I did when I came in was to get rid of all of that crap. It's unspported by the telco, and extremely flakey. it either works fantastic (10%)or doesn't work at all (90%). If you can't get anything else I'd say do it, but I'd never get it for myself. I too have several dsl modems/routers from moving around. I was a beta tester for GTEi (now Verizon) and have an old as hell Orckitt DSL router, I now have ADSL through the ISP that I work at as well as cable. We sell mainly to Buisnesses using the Speedstream 5861 http://www.provantage.com/scripts/go.dll/-s/fp_583 54
While these seem to be used only by Ameritech (I could be wrong) and their resellers, they are quite powerfull (although not worth the money in my opinion)
These patches should be applied as soon as they are evaluated for relevancy, and since you pay for service, I'd think they'd do that for you. I work at an ISP and we are millitant about patching, I personally don't want my name associated with ANY security related failures or screw ups. We provide that service to our customers, and indirectly to ourselves. I'd look for a new provider.
Amen.