Correct. However the usage patterns are that such that the time of activity is the same for all. They could be only using their connection 10% of the time, but everyone is doing it at the same time, you still have those problems.
I'm also assuming equality, which isn't the case. In the ISP world, 90% of the bandwidth is used by the top 10% of the people. One person could easily saturate the t1 and make it utterly miserable for anyone else (we have t1s into apt buildings and we see this exact thing). Again, now you have worst service than a 56k modem can provide.
I like companies that have security problems. Then they hire me at an extraordinarly high consultant's rate, and pay me to fix it.
What I really mean when i say that, is that 99.9% of security issues is from people at home, who i really don't want to deal with, because they pay some incredibly small amount of money each month to leech extraordinarly more bandwidth than they should. And when i said redhat, i really shouldn't have, i'm not dissing redhat or linux in particular, i get the exact same problems with IIS/W2K.
There is a large large large difference between an office and a home. The problem is out of those 40 ppl in the office, 3 or 4 can do that internet radio thing w/o a problem.
The problem is we're comparing apples and oranges. Consider who would pay $125/mo for internet access, it's not going to be your typical light user who checks their aol mail once a night, it's going to be the heavy users who are going to tax the connection.
That's probably the largest problem with the do-it-your-self thing, if you do it like this, short of becoming an ISP, you don't have the ability sell to the "light users" which will allow yourself to either a) be profitable if that's your goal, or b) keep your costs down.
We have many offices that have 2ch isdn (that's a rocking 128kbit!) that have 50 people in it and do quite well, but if you went up to each one of them and asked if they'd pay $125/mo for an internet connection, you'd see some pretty funny facial expressions.
Re:I've read my TOS and it sucks.
on
Broadband Crackdown
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· Score: 3, Informative
> If anyone can explain a good reason for banning
> servers rather than limiting data volumes, I'm
> all ears.
Because 99.9% of security issues comes from someone running an unpatched redhat box at home.
This is not something tier1 tech support can handle, a real sysadmin has to look at it, figure out where it's coming from, and figure out what is going on. That costs money. Say it took collectively 30mins of peoples time to figure it out, already that has costed more than what you've paid for this month's service.
The AUP would not be this stupid or strict if these things weren't a real problem. But they are. Until people (not necessarily you), get the brains to keep their computer up to date and know what's going on, the ISPs will have to keep these stupid provisions just to protect their ass.
Re:Servers were never allowed out on cable
on
Broadband Crackdown
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· Score: 4, Insightful
As an ISP, we have a very similar and equally stupid "no servers" statement in our AUP. And I like it.
@Home and others had the exact same philosophy that we did, "we really don't care, unless it starts to become a problem." We (as in the ISPs), were quite lenient (yes, i have a webserver running at home) because we believe in the exact same things you do, we're geeks too.
But frankly, you guys failed. If everyone had just patched their servers regularly, and knew the least bit about their computer, and wtf it was doing, then this would never have been a problem, and we wouldn't have to do such rediculous measures such as this. Yes, i think this is a rediculous measure, but so is leaving your computer unpatched for any decent amount of time. So please, stop deflecting the blame when really you yourselves (or your friends who don't patch) are at fault.
No offense, but this is quite possibly the worst idea i've ever heard. Hopefully i can convince you that this is the worst idea you've ever thought of.
> Granted I don't know how much one costs but I
> figure at around $40 a month a group of about
> 20-30 should be able to gets something way
> faster that DSL/Cable and without the bullshit.
We have an LADC line (which while only rated for 9600baud, but can do 768k unreliably via HDSL), that runs 4 blocks. It has a heavy distance limitation. It costs $80/mo. This does not include bandwidth charges. Distance matters. A lot. Too far away? Too bad, you'll either need to 56k lease line (haha), or frame relay, or ptp t1. None of these (well except 56k) are in your pricerange.
> around $40 a month a group of about 20-30
> should be able to gets something way faster
> that DSL/Cable and without the bullshit.
Ok, let's say 25 people @ 40bucks, not including the line charge. that's $1k. Call up qwest, or maybe sprint, or maybe a tier 2-N (because that's all you can afford), and if you live near a POP and you're lucky, maybe you can get a full T1.
Ok, now we have a shared T1, for 25 people (who i'm assuming will all be geeks, and will be downloading stuff late at night...) Assume a T1 can get maybe 160k/s throughput (you can't get 100% util on a T1 w/o severe latency problems), you get 6.4k/s.
Congrats, you've gotten isdn speeds, for the cost of approximately $120/mo/person. This doesn't include startup costs. xDSL equipment costs a few hundred dollars on each end, and 802.11b accesspoints are a lot more expensive than the cards (no, airports don't count, their distance sucks) and the costs of outdoor antennas are horrendous, not to mention you'd have to find/hire someone to do the professional antenna install for you. You'd need a router for your shared T1, add another $600 in startup there.
> What happens when the network / connection goes
> down. Either we set up some sort of rotation
> but we need an admin to fix stuff and that can
> be expensive.
Expensive is right. You can get a crappy consultant for $75/hr. Say something significant happens once a month for two hours (that's not too unreasonable, given the current codered/sircam problems, and general maintainence, mailserver/dns crap).
Your cost is now $125/mo for slightlyhigherthan isdn speeds. See why this idea isn't that great?
I'm not a big fan of the quality of service of @home or Roadrunner. But at $40/mo, what can you really expect? Does your cable modem/dsl occasionally do over 200k/s? It does? Guess what, just that bandwidth capability alone, would cost you $1.5k/mo to do.
Why hasn't anybody mentioned any good photoshop books? i sure as hell wish i knew photoshop in highschool, i may not have owned it, but my computer lab had it. In my experience, having photoshop experience is way way way more pratical on a widescale than say, what you learn from the dragon book. Books on popular programs, like Photoshop don't only appeal to the geeks, but also the artsy people, and even just random people who say, have to design a small advertisement at work or something.
I'm sure every book that every person has suggested is a good book. I own a lot of them as well. I do not think my public library necessarily should though, in the grand scheme of things how many people really care about compiler
design?
It's not like these books are entirely inaccessible, that's what your local state college/university's library is for, because they already have these things. Imho the goal of a public library should be to cater to mass appeal, and not very many of these suggested books do this. Mass appeal is introductory and intermediate books on HTML and javascript, not on compiler design and BGPv4.
While this book is probably entirely not about computers (ok except for the part about the punchcards going faster), i think you're brings up a really good point.
I think the goal of libraries should be to drum up interest for the topic in question, not necessarilty provide hardcore reference books.
Extrapolating to physics Six Easy Pieces and the two Feynman pseudoautobiographies do a fantastic job at getting people interested in science, while his berkley lectures have a lot less appeal, even though they're probably better for your local physics majors.
Consider this. Say you're interested in physics. Would you want to read Six not so easy pieces, a relatively easy book that deals with relativity, or the chapter on relativity in Classical dynamics of particles and systems, which i can barely understand, even after using it in class for a year?
This is exactly what we're doing when we recommend things like Halabi or mostrandomO'Reillybooks. Why do we like O'Reilly? because when i need to know the name of the object that controls blabla, then I can look it up. Quickly. Having a book that tells you that ListCellRenderer has 1 method called getListCellRendererComponent really has limited value to most people.
Learning Perl is great, because it's an introductory book (but even that is a lot easier to read if you already know C). O'Reilly does have a lot of good books that cover introductory topics (incidentally, i own none of them), but just because it's on your bookshelf and probably is the most kickass book on it's topic, that doesn't mean it's entirely suitable for your public library.
> The only problem with the "For Dummies" books
> is that they are tailored for one version of
> any particular subject without really
> explaining the fundamentals of what's happening
Yes. But imho, that's exactly what we want for libraries. I think the idea should be to drum up interest for different things, and the "For dummies" books do these things quite well. They are (or at least try to be) mildly entertaining (in contrast you cannot read Java in a Nutshell as evening reading material.
While we shouldn't just limit ourselves to shallow books, we do not need the most expert books either. Someone earlier suggested Halabi (which i treat as my bible), but it really has limited use in a public library, anyone who needs the book will purchase it because they need it 24/7. A more reasonable book would be TCP/IP Network Adminstration which allows people to learn the basics, and points them in the right direction if they desire to learn more. I even think the Cricket book is inappropriate because although it really explains dns well, it also explains why you cannot point an MX to a CNAME (and if i didn't administer a couple DNS servers, i wouldn't care in the least why this was), when a book on how the general internet works could supply so much more pertinent information for the money.
> In a couple of years they will be out of date, > and you'll have to buy a new set.
Probably true, but i don't think they go out of date any faster than any other programming book (especially html/javascript variants). Also "For dummies" books are comparitively cheap. Last I checked Dummies books went for $20, now they're going for anywhere from $25~40. With the notable exception of O'rielly, most books now go for ~$50~60, so you are able to get a broader scope of things with the Dummies books.
My personal library is almost exclusively O'Rielly and Cisco Press, i don't think there is very much of a debate that these are probably the best reference books out there, but imho it's not what my local public library needs.
Hmm yah you're eaxctly right i didn't think about that when formulating my argument...
But at the same time, your local Joe isn't going to have a/29, so we're still looking at businesses, just a lot smaller than i've orginally said.
If you're a home customer (ie @home comes to mind, but i would be terrribly surprised if others don't do it as well), it's more than likely that if you have multiple IPs they're assigned as seperate/32's, rather than a larger aggregate block, just because of subnetting assignment issues (ie they'd be wasting 7/8 or 15/16 or whatever of their ips by saving it for people for subnets.)
> *Rwhois reassignment information
> for this block is availible at:
> *rwhois.exodus.net 4321
I know what point you're trying to get across. however it's wrong. Look at the bottom, it has information for the exodus rwhoisd server. Just because exodus has chosen to use rwhoisd instead of SWIP'ing (the normal method for IP registration for IP suballocations).
Take the time to do a whois query on the exodus rwhois server. It gives you exactly the same information that you would get if exodus had used SWIP instead. This is not because exodus does this out of the kindness of their hearts (well maybe it partially is), but it is a requirement of ARIN that you run an rwhois server if you do not want to use SWIP.
>What is ARIN
ARIN is responsible for allocating IPs for people/businesses on a large scale (in north america). If you're a big corporation, or even a medium sized ISP, you apply to ARIN to get IP blocks. (The smallers just use the ipblocks of their upstream provider.)
ARIN provides a database of every routeable IP that it has given out, so at any given time, i can, from a person's IP, look up his provider and instantly get their (as in their ISP's, necessarily the user's themselves) name/address/phone number. This is incredibly useful for spamcontrol and/or scriptkiddiecontrol.
Contrast this with the domainname registry, which holds the registration information for like who owns 'foo.com'. As long as i'm not planning to buy foo.com (and my pocketbook says i'm not), i have no reason to need this information. If there is a problem originating in the foo.com domain, that's great, but i'm getting the contact info from the ARIN registry, because 1) it's probably more correct, and 2) reverse dns isn't necessarily authoritative, ie i could make my machine reverse lookup to foo.com, even though i don't own the foo.com itself. Granted my forward/reverse wouldn't match, but when was the last time you've seen an apache setup that required them to.
Again, there are two different registries as you have sort of alluded to, but haven't quite said outloud. From the sysadmin point of view, ARIN is the important one, the domain name one isn't.
I don't see the problem with the current ARIN database. You need at least a/22 (or something like that...can't remember offhand) to even apply PI-space... so it's a rather good assumption that only ISPs and other businesses and educational institutions will be listed in it.
This needs to be kept public. An email address is not sufficient. Good luck trying to email a person telling them that their mailserver is down, or that their mailserver has gone nuts and is inadvertantly DOS'ing your mailserver. Maybe their BGP is farked up and you can't even get to their network... a lot of good an email address is going to do.
For 99% of the slashdot people that are whining about their privacy on here, it's about the domain registry. Everyone who has their own domain name is in this one... not just big corporations. Being able to 'opt-out' of this one is a fantastic idea, let's just not confuse the two registries.
>The only way we can have any sort of order is
> to have responsibility. Having the ability to,
> with one command, get a email addres, phone
> number, and snail mail address of someone > responsible for every IP and domain on the > internet is invaluable.
I was initially thinking the exact same thing you did... then i changed my mind. We don't need the contact info for every domain.. just every IP. Remember (for us machines at least), there's two different whois registries, the ARIN registries (important), and the general one for domain names (not important for anyone other than domain squatters).
For hack attempts/openrelays/general troublemakers, we don't need the contact info from the general domain database... we get it from ARIN database.
Imho, being able to be 'unlisted' from the domain registry database is just fine... because it doesn't really serve any particular purpose, hell half the time it's not even correct info. With ARIN's database, the information *has* to be correct, because ARIN *has* to be sending them a hugeass (multi thousands of dollars) bill every year.
why can't this be built in full gravity?
on
Hotel on the Moon
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· Score: 5
> It's an insane cantilevered design that
> couldn't be built in full-gravity
Ok i'll bite. This seems entirely wrong.
To acheive equilibrium, there must be equal torques around the pivot... now give that both sides of the pivot are subject to the same gravitational force (both sides are on the moon, not one on the moon, one on earth), there is no reason why if this is indeed sustainable at any gravitational force, that it wouldn't be at full force.
> They had a real opportunity to be as successful
> as Palm, but somehow, being a British company,
> managed to cock it up.
I didn't know being a company that had a loss of $0.63/share, is at 8% of it's 52week high, and is being the target of nummerous shareholder is being lawsuits is a very sucessful company.
Palm is losing money hand over foot, so it's (sadly) no surprise that a company with less money/resources (palm has a $3B market cap) can't make money either, given the incredible economies of scale in the technology industry, not to mention palm also has the licensing fees on the PalmOS as revenue.
I can't believe i'm wasting my time responding to this, but i'm bored, so...
1) People do not buy cisco brand hardware just for the hardware. I buy cisco hardware because if there's a bug with it, i can call cisco and they'll build a new copy of the IOS for me. I buy cisco because if it malfunctions, they'll overnight me a replaecment. I buy cisco so i can use their website (which by the way is friggen useful, compared to say, MSKnowledgeBase). Try compare that with your $75 dvd drive from compusa.
2) The chip on your videocard is much different from the chip on your local cisco (well since cisco has shifted from that 68000 chip to a decent asic). With a much smaller market for say, 7200 series routers versus the market for video cards, a cisco mainboard/processor costing significantly more than your video card isn't an insane idea. Not only fab costs, but the R&D costs aren't spread across 10million units like they can be for video cards, or even x86 cpus.
3) You know how much a local point to point T1 costs? roughly $100-$200/mo dependent on cost. Not thousands of dollars like you think it is.
And I will contend that a dsl line is more like a ladc line than a point-to-point t1, so the cost is about half that. Hell telcos are happy they can make $30/line or whatever for a bundled loop, because that's $30 extra bucks, without using another pair. You can't do that with a ptpT1 or ladc.
4) I don't see how you can call it overcharging when 90% of these companies don't make profits. You need to recoup R&D expenses, as well as the actual production expenses. In my world, chipset designs don't grow on trees. See the above argument on production volume on why your pc hardware is cheaper.
5) Repeaters blow. There's really no difference between putting a repeater in somewhere, and putting a miniDSLAM in a lobsterpot on a telephone pole, both suck to do, require additional provisioning and manpower.
I don't see how this helps any. All it is doing more or less asking your upstream to put a bgp filter to prevent propagation anyways. I also see a problem that it'll create huge routing loops during mid-convergence, something that bgp more or less is unaffected by, because rarely do you have two routes pointing in different directions.
And the core routers do care, they need to have more or less a NEXT_BEST that points to the other provider of the downstream AS in question.
Regional routing allocation. Then your router only needs to know the routes to the nearby supernets, and your own subnets, and the router upstream from you will know it's own subnets, and it's neighboring supernets, and routing is a lot more aggregated, unlike know where there's morons out there advertising/18's as 64/24s
Except DNS is entirely unrelated to routing. have a nice day. DNS would be a problem if it sent a NOTIFY to every DNS server on earth like routing does, but that's why DNS has caching and TTL's.
who cares? no decent internet provider is going to run their core router as a linux box. Running a MS box for routing is unheard of. When Cisco (with the basic enterprise IOS, i don't want to buy a module for it when i can still use BGP w/o a problem) AND my upstream provider will do it with me (haha yah right), then i'll even think about considering it.
MS is not repsonsible for the IPv6 not catching on, the reason is because I (the ISP) have absolutely no incentive to go to IPv6. ARIN will give me more IPv6 ips than Ipv4. woohoo, who cares, the difference in cost for me upgrading my/18 to a/17 is $0. My CPU usage is at 40%, my memory usage is at 60%, but at current memory prices, who cares?
>the fact here is that a multihomed router taking >full BGP routes from their upstreams today needs >atleast 256 megs of RAM and a big cpu (example >
>cisco 7500 MINUMUM) in order to handle it..
Nah. not really. we got full routes from one provider plus partialrouters from uunet and are easily under 128mb. CPU usage of a 7200 is hovering around 30%.
I really don't see this as a problem. Memory is dirt cheap, (yes, even Ciscos use sdram) the cpu usage isn't that high at all, BGP updates don't occur THAT often, if someone is fucking their routes up badly, that's what route flapping is for.
No one ever said you had to pick up the/24 routes, a lot of people don't. If this became more frequent then those morons who advertise their/21 as 8/24's would get a clue and maybe fix it.
Actaully yah, i've seen the sheet too that says it's possible to order 3mbit and 6mbit dsl, but i don't think it's in PUI for us to order.
I think the upstream cap is rediculous too, i wish we could do something over ladc like hdsl, which we could do reliably if ameritech gave us a cir above 9600baud on ladc...
Slashdot Mirror
I'm also assuming equality, which isn't the case. In the ISP world, 90% of the bandwidth is used by the top 10% of the people. One person could easily saturate the t1 and make it utterly miserable for anyone else (we have t1s into apt buildings and we see this exact thing). Again, now you have worst service than a 56k modem can provide.
What i really meant is that 99.9% of security problems from home are stuff i don't want to deal with. blah. sleep time for me.
I like companies that have security problems. Then they hire me at an extraordinarly high consultant's rate, and pay me to fix it.
What I really mean when i say that, is that 99.9% of security issues is from people at home, who i really don't want to deal with, because they pay some incredibly small amount of money each month to leech extraordinarly more bandwidth than they should. And when i said redhat, i really shouldn't have, i'm not dissing redhat or linux in particular, i get the exact same problems with IIS/W2K.
There is a large large large difference between an office and a home. The problem is out of those 40 ppl in the office, 3 or 4 can do that internet radio thing w/o a problem.
The problem is we're comparing apples and oranges. Consider who would pay $125/mo for internet access, it's not going to be your typical light user who checks their aol mail once a night, it's going to be the heavy users who are going to tax the connection.
That's probably the largest problem with the do-it-your-self thing, if you do it like this, short of becoming an ISP, you don't have the ability sell to the "light users" which will allow yourself to either a) be profitable if that's your goal, or b) keep your costs down.
We have many offices that have 2ch isdn (that's a rocking 128kbit!) that have 50 people in it and do quite well, but if you went up to each one of them and asked if they'd pay $125/mo for an internet connection, you'd see some pretty funny facial expressions.
> servers rather than limiting data volumes, I'm
> all ears.
Because 99.9% of security issues comes from someone running an unpatched redhat box at home.
This is not something tier1 tech support can handle, a real sysadmin has to look at it, figure out where it's coming from, and figure out what is going on. That costs money. Say it took collectively 30mins of peoples time to figure it out, already that has costed more than what you've paid for this month's service.
The AUP would not be this stupid or strict if these things weren't a real problem. But they are. Until people (not necessarily you), get the brains to keep their computer up to date and know what's going on, the ISPs will have to keep these stupid provisions just to protect their ass.
@Home and others had the exact same philosophy that we did, "we really don't care, unless it starts to become a problem." We (as in the ISPs), were quite lenient (yes, i have a webserver running at home) because we believe in the exact same things you do, we're geeks too.
But frankly, you guys failed. If everyone had just patched their servers regularly, and knew the least bit about their computer, and wtf it was doing, then this would never have been a problem, and we wouldn't have to do such rediculous measures such as this. Yes, i think this is a rediculous measure, but so is leaving your computer unpatched for any decent amount of time. So please, stop deflecting the blame when really you yourselves (or your friends who don't patch) are at fault.
> Granted I don't know how much one costs but I
> figure at around $40 a month a group of about
> 20-30 should be able to gets something way
> faster that DSL/Cable and without the bullshit.
We have an LADC line (which while only rated for 9600baud, but can do 768k unreliably via HDSL), that runs 4 blocks. It has a heavy distance limitation. It costs $80/mo. This does not include bandwidth charges. Distance matters. A lot. Too far away? Too bad, you'll either need to 56k lease line (haha), or frame relay, or ptp t1. None of these (well except 56k) are in your pricerange.
> around $40 a month a group of about 20-30
> should be able to gets something way faster
> that DSL/Cable and without the bullshit.
Ok, let's say 25 people @ 40bucks, not including the line charge. that's $1k. Call up qwest, or maybe sprint, or maybe a tier 2-N (because that's all you can afford), and if you live near a POP and you're lucky, maybe you can get a full T1.
Ok, now we have a shared T1, for 25 people (who i'm assuming will all be geeks, and will be downloading stuff late at night...) Assume a T1 can get maybe 160k/s throughput (you can't get 100% util on a T1 w/o severe latency problems), you get 6.4k/s. Congrats, you've gotten isdn speeds, for the cost of approximately $120/mo/person. This doesn't include startup costs. xDSL equipment costs a few hundred dollars on each end, and 802.11b accesspoints are a lot more expensive than the cards (no, airports don't count, their distance sucks) and the costs of outdoor antennas are horrendous, not to mention you'd have to find/hire someone to do the professional antenna install for you. You'd need a router for your shared T1, add another $600 in startup there.
> What happens when the network / connection goes
> down. Either we set up some sort of rotation
> but we need an admin to fix stuff and that can
> be expensive.
Expensive is right. You can get a crappy consultant for $75/hr. Say something significant happens once a month for two hours (that's not too unreasonable, given the current codered/sircam problems, and general maintainence, mailserver/dns crap).
Your cost is now $125/mo for slightlyhigherthan isdn speeds. See why this idea isn't that great?
I'm not a big fan of the quality of service of @home or Roadrunner. But at $40/mo, what can you really expect? Does your cable modem/dsl occasionally do over 200k/s? It does? Guess what, just that bandwidth capability alone, would cost you $1.5k/mo to do.
Why hasn't anybody mentioned any good photoshop books? i sure as hell wish i knew photoshop in highschool, i may not have owned it, but my computer lab had it. In my experience, having photoshop experience is way way way more pratical on a widescale than say, what you learn from the dragon book. Books on popular programs, like Photoshop don't only appeal to the geeks, but also the artsy people, and even just random people who say, have to design a small advertisement at work or something.
I'm sure every book that every person has suggested is a good book. I own a lot of them as well. I do not think my public library necessarily should though, in the grand scheme of things how many people really care about compiler design?
It's not like these books are entirely inaccessible, that's what your local state college/university's library is for, because they already have these things. Imho the goal of a public library should be to cater to mass appeal, and not very many of these suggested books do this. Mass appeal is introductory and intermediate books on HTML and javascript, not on compiler design and BGPv4.
I think the goal of libraries should be to drum up interest for the topic in question, not necessarilty provide hardcore reference books. Extrapolating to physics Six Easy Pieces and the two Feynman pseudoautobiographies do a fantastic job at getting people interested in science, while his berkley lectures have a lot less appeal, even though they're probably better for your local physics majors.
Consider this. Say you're interested in physics. Would you want to read Six not so easy pieces , a relatively easy book that deals with relativity, or the chapter on relativity in Classical dynamics of particles and systems , which i can barely understand, even after using it in class for a year?
This is exactly what we're doing when we recommend things like Halabi or most random O'Reilly books. Why do we like O'Reilly? because when i need to know the name of the object that controls blabla, then I can look it up. Quickly. Having a book that tells you that ListCellRenderer has 1 method called getListCellRendererComponent really has limited value to most people.
Learning Perl is great, because it's an introductory book (but even that is a lot easier to read if you already know C). O'Reilly does have a lot of good books that cover introductory topics (incidentally, i own none of them), but just because it's on your bookshelf and probably is the most kickass book on it's topic, that doesn't mean it's entirely suitable for your public library.
> is that they are tailored for one version of
> any particular subject without really
> explaining the fundamentals of what's happening
Yes. But imho, that's exactly what we want for libraries. I think the idea should be to drum up interest for different things, and the "For dummies" books do these things quite well. They are (or at least try to be) mildly entertaining (in contrast you cannot read Java in a Nutshell as evening reading material.
While we shouldn't just limit ourselves to shallow books, we do not need the most expert books either. Someone earlier suggested Halabi (which i treat as my bible), but it really has limited use in a public library, anyone who needs the book will purchase it because they need it 24/7. A more reasonable book would be TCP/IP Network Adminstration which allows people to learn the basics, and points them in the right direction if they desire to learn more. I even think the Cricket book is inappropriate because although it really explains dns well, it also explains why you cannot point an MX to a CNAME (and if i didn't administer a couple DNS servers, i wouldn't care in the least why this was), when a book on how the general internet works could supply so much more pertinent information for the money.
> In a couple of years they will be out of date,
> and you'll have to buy a new set.
Probably true, but i don't think they go out of date any faster than any other programming book (especially html/javascript variants). Also "For dummies" books are comparitively cheap. Last I checked Dummies books went for $20, now they're going for anywhere from $25~40. With the notable exception of O'rielly, most books now go for ~$50~60, so you are able to get a broader scope of things with the Dummies books.
My personal library is almost exclusively O'Rielly and Cisco Press, i don't think there is very much of a debate that these are probably the best reference books out there, but imho it's not what my local public library needs.
But at the same time, your local Joe isn't going to have a /29, so we're still looking at businesses, just a lot smaller than i've orginally said.
If you're a home customer (ie @home comes to mind, but i would be terrribly surprised if others don't do it as well), it's more than likely that if you have multiple IPs they're assigned as seperate /32's, rather than a larger aggregate block, just because of subnetting assignment issues (ie they'd be wasting 7/8 or 15/16 or whatever of their ips by saving it for people for subnets.)
> for this block is availible at:
> *rwhois.exodus.net 4321
I know what point you're trying to get across. however it's wrong. Look at the bottom, it has information for the exodus rwhoisd server. Just because exodus has chosen to use rwhoisd instead of SWIP'ing (the normal method for IP registration for IP suballocations).
Take the time to do a whois query on the exodus rwhois server. It gives you exactly the same information that you would get if exodus had used SWIP instead. This is not because exodus does this out of the kindness of their hearts (well maybe it partially is), but it is a requirement of ARIN that you run an rwhois server if you do not want to use SWIP.
ARIN is responsible for allocating IPs for people/businesses on a large scale (in north america). If you're a big corporation, or even a medium sized ISP, you apply to ARIN to get IP blocks. (The smallers just use the ipblocks of their upstream provider.)
ARIN provides a database of every routeable IP that it has given out, so at any given time, i can, from a person's IP, look up his provider and instantly get their (as in their ISP's, necessarily the user's themselves) name/address/phone number. This is incredibly useful for spamcontrol and/or scriptkiddiecontrol.
Contrast this with the domainname registry, which holds the registration information for like who owns 'foo.com'. As long as i'm not planning to buy foo.com (and my pocketbook says i'm not), i have no reason to need this information. If there is a problem originating in the foo.com domain, that's great, but i'm getting the contact info from the ARIN registry, because 1) it's probably more correct, and 2) reverse dns isn't necessarily authoritative, ie i could make my machine reverse lookup to foo.com, even though i don't own the foo.com itself. Granted my forward/reverse wouldn't match, but when was the last time you've seen an apache setup that required them to.
I don't see the problem with the current ARIN database. You need at least a /22 (or something like that...can't remember offhand) to even apply PI-space... so it's a rather good assumption that only ISPs and other businesses and educational institutions will be listed in it.
This needs to be kept public. An email address is not sufficient. Good luck trying to email a person telling them that their mailserver is down, or that their mailserver has gone nuts and is inadvertantly DOS'ing your mailserver. Maybe their BGP is farked up and you can't even get to their network... a lot of good an email address is going to do.
For 99% of the slashdot people that are whining about their privacy on here, it's about the domain registry. Everyone who has their own domain name is in this one... not just big corporations. Being able to 'opt-out' of this one is a fantastic idea, let's just not confuse the two registries.
> to have responsibility. Having the ability to,
> with one command, get a email addres, phone
> number, and snail mail address of someone
> responsible for every IP and domain on the
> internet is invaluable.
I was initially thinking the exact same thing you did... then i changed my mind. We don't need the contact info for every domain.. just every IP. Remember (for us machines at least), there's two different whois registries, the ARIN registries (important), and the general one for domain names (not important for anyone other than domain squatters).
For hack attempts/openrelays/general troublemakers, we don't need the contact info from the general domain database... we get it from ARIN database.
Imho, being able to be 'unlisted' from the domain registry database is just fine... because it doesn't really serve any particular purpose, hell half the time it's not even correct info. With ARIN's database, the information *has* to be correct, because ARIN *has* to be sending them a hugeass (multi thousands of dollars) bill every year.
> couldn't be built in full-gravity
Ok i'll bite. This seems entirely wrong.
To acheive equilibrium, there must be equal torques around the pivot... now give that both sides of the pivot are subject to the same gravitational force (both sides are on the moon, not one on the moon, one on earth), there is no reason why if this is indeed sustainable at any gravitational force, that it wouldn't be at full force.
> as Palm, but somehow, being a British company,
> managed to cock it up.
I didn't know being a company that had a loss of $0.63/share, is at 8% of it's 52week high, and is being the target of nummerous shareholder is being lawsuits is a very sucessful company.
Palm is losing money hand over foot, so it's (sadly) no surprise that a company with less money/resources (palm has a $3B market cap) can't make money either, given the incredible economies of scale in the technology industry, not to mention palm also has the licensing fees on the PalmOS as revenue.
I can't believe i'm wasting my time responding to this, but i'm bored, so...
1) People do not buy cisco brand hardware just for the hardware. I buy cisco hardware because if there's a bug with it, i can call cisco and they'll build a new copy of the IOS for me. I buy cisco because if it malfunctions, they'll overnight me a replaecment. I buy cisco so i can use their website (which by the way is friggen useful, compared to say, MSKnowledgeBase). Try compare that with your $75 dvd drive from compusa.
2) The chip on your videocard is much different from the chip on your local cisco (well since cisco has shifted from that 68000 chip to a decent asic). With a much smaller market for say, 7200 series routers versus the market for video cards, a cisco mainboard/processor costing significantly more than your video card isn't an insane idea. Not only fab costs, but the R&D costs aren't spread across 10million units like they can be for video cards, or even x86 cpus.
3) You know how much a local point to point T1 costs? roughly $100-$200/mo dependent on cost. Not thousands of dollars like you think it is.
And I will contend that a dsl line is more like a ladc line than a point-to-point t1, so the cost is about half that. Hell telcos are happy they can make $30/line or whatever for a bundled loop, because that's $30 extra bucks, without using another pair. You can't do that with a ptpT1 or ladc.
4) I don't see how you can call it overcharging when 90% of these companies don't make profits. You need to recoup R&D expenses, as well as the actual production expenses. In my world, chipset designs don't grow on trees. See the above argument on production volume on why your pc hardware is cheaper.
5) Repeaters blow. There's really no difference between putting a repeater in somewhere, and putting a miniDSLAM in a lobsterpot on a telephone pole, both suck to do, require additional provisioning and manpower.
And the core routers do care, they need to have more or less a NEXT_BEST that points to the other provider of the downstream AS in question.
> IP addr's aren't sacred. They should be chosen
> for the convenience of the routers -- that's
> the idea behind Class A, B & C arrd blocks
Well they weren't. This is one of the many things IPv6 is supposed to solve... though i'm still not entirely sure that a problem even exists...
Regional routing allocation. Then your router only needs to know the routes to the nearby supernets, and your own subnets, and the router upstream from you will know it's own subnets, and it's neighboring supernets, and routing is a lot more aggregated, unlike know where there's morons out there advertising /18's as 64 /24s
Except DNS is entirely unrelated to routing. have a nice day. DNS would be a problem if it sent a NOTIFY to every DNS server on earth like routing does, but that's why DNS has caching and TTL's.
who cares? no decent internet provider is going to run their core router as a linux box. Running a MS box for routing is unheard of. When Cisco (with the basic enterprise IOS, i don't want to buy a module for it when i can still use BGP w/o a problem) AND my upstream provider will do it with me (haha yah right), then i'll even think about considering it.
MS is not repsonsible for the IPv6 not catching on, the reason is because I (the ISP) have absolutely no incentive to go to IPv6. ARIN will give me more IPv6 ips than Ipv4. woohoo, who cares, the difference in cost for me upgrading my /18 to a /17 is $0. My CPU usage is at 40%, my memory usage is at 60%, but at current memory prices, who cares?
>the fact here is that a multihomed router taking >full BGP routes from their upstreams today needs >atleast 256 megs of RAM and a big cpu (example >
/24 routes, a lot of people don't. If this became more frequent then those morons who advertise their /21 as 8 /24's would get a clue and maybe fix it.
>cisco 7500 MINUMUM) in order to handle it..
Nah. not really. we got full routes from one provider plus partialrouters from uunet and are easily under 128mb. CPU usage of a 7200 is hovering around 30%.
I really don't see this as a problem. Memory is dirt cheap, (yes, even Ciscos use sdram) the cpu usage isn't that high at all, BGP updates don't occur THAT often, if someone is fucking their routes up badly, that's what route flapping is for.
No one ever said you had to pick up the
I think the upstream cap is rediculous too, i wish we could do something over ladc like hdsl, which we could do reliably if ameritech gave us a cir above 9600baud on ladc...