The support was limited to "here's the init string our documents say you'll need, but you'll need to figure out which file to edit to set it" since bluetooth tethering is 'pair device, send plan-specific (but not user-specific) init string, dial #99*' for anything GPRS.
It's kinda sad when it's simpler to tether a cell phone to a laptop for internet access in the middle of the Pacific ocean on an island than it is to set up most printers...
But yeah, didn't blink when I said I just needed the init strings and I was working under Linux so I couldn't follow their prompts for how to get to the spot to enter stuff. They were willing to skim through their scripts to the juicy bits instead of just hanging up on me.
Oookay, if T-Mobile bans tethering their phones, why have they helped me and my mom seperately to configure their phones to tether over bluetooth to our laptops? Hell, I'm running Linux, that didn't even phase them, they still helped me find the command-strings I needed!
*waves* Hi, running Gentoo GNU/Linux on an Athlon-64 in native 64-bit mode, including a Broadcom 802.11 driver, Bluetooth being used to get on-line via GPRS w T-Mobile. I think it's safe to call myself a geek, yes? I buy the maximum accidental-damage-protection warranty on any laptop I purchase, simply because I'm so highly mobile I'm much more likely to break stuff.
So far on my current laptop I've had to replace:
The screen module due to cracked hinges.
The keyboard (about to get sent in for a second time for this).
The hard drive (thudBOOM).
The battery (they forgot to ship me my old battery back the first time I sent the laptop in for the screen).
The motherboard (thudBOOM).
And I have a backpack-style extra-padded carrying case, so it's not because I lug the thing around naked all the time. But daily trips between job sites takes it's toll on the machine, and accidents do happen. I may put the laptop down, run to grab something, and someone else is carrying a large table through the room and biffs the counter I put the laptop on. ThudBOOM! Crud happens.
Heck, just in shipping charges to punt my laptop back and forth to HP, my extended warranty has more than payed for itself already.
At the same time, they still have pulled all warranty offerings from their website for Ubuntu-powered machines. So while this individual's case apparently has been resolved, for the time being the lack of warranty coverage at any price still exists.
Oh, I picked the headline mostly to be cute/amusing/eyecatching. I'll fully admit that.
But considering they include a seperate FreeDOS partition on the Ubuntu machines full of diagnostic tools[1], your argument doesn't really hold water. They use the same diagnostic tools as before, just apparently have you reboot to do all the tests instead of opening a command-prompt. And all of the hardware available for Ubuntu machines is available for Windows machines as well. So, again, no extra training needed besides an Ubuntu-specific prefix of 'please reboot into the diagnostic software' as far as I can see.
All this fuss over 'modern' Hybrid cars and their wonderful gas mileage... when there is a non-hybrid car over 20 years old that can break 50mpg.
I just don't get it. Hybrid cars are a non-starter to me. Just build the damn cars with simple to maintain, fuel-efficient engines, IMHO. I've worked on a CRX HF before, the engines are bone-simple, elegant, and a well-maintained and well-adjusted one can pass even 'modern' smog standards in California, so emissions aren't an issue either.
So... why pay $15-$20k for a fancy hybrid, when I can buy a car for $2k (assuming $1k for car, another $1k to get it up to snuff and pass smog) that gets even better mileage than almost any hybrid out there, and has fewer things that can go wrong, and is about 20% as expensive to repair, and has even cheaper insurance?
I just don't get it... it's already been proven that a decently-performing, fuel-effecient vehicle can be built without hybrid technology. So until they can match the CRX HF in every feasable stat except weight of vehicle, hybrids just seem like the auto makers (yes, even the Honda of today) playing smoke-and-mirrors games with the general public, claiming to make more fuel-effecient vehicles when the modern ones can't come close to a car from two decades ago.
For those that have, say, a TNT2, GF2, or ATI Rage 128 card, but are running an Athlon-XP 2800, the CPU is far faster than anything the graphics card can accomplish. I've seen that happen when someone just buys a new MBoard+CPU+Memory combo for $150 or so somewhere, slaps their old video card, network card, and hard drive in, and reinstalls Windows as needed.
So, no, comparing the tricks of floating-point or (for 88-bit) process-status data-moves to the memory bandwidth of a 9800XT($350 roughly on PriceWatch right now) isn't a remotely valid comparison. Someone that can afford $350 on the VIDEO CARD that only helps game-playing for the most part isn't going to have a slow enough computer that the program linked to (Hare) would even be an interest to them. A water-cooling system to overclock with would be more their speed and price range, most likely.
However, if you're building a budget computer (say an Athlon-XP 3200, add an extra 1024MB of RAM and you're still looking at less than the price of a single 9800XT) it's very likely that the CPU is capable of more than the on-board video card for most older games (Counter-Strike, anyone?) for example.
And to be more precise, SOME video cards made after 1994 support stuff like font acceleration. Most don't, especially the ones built into most motherboard. There's a lot more video cards out there than just those running NVidia and ATI chipsets, hon.
What they mean by 88-bit kernel isn't what most Linux users mean by kernel. They're referring to the programming style of the graphics kernel.
In this case, they're using floating-point registers for data moves, and other 'demo-scene' tricks to gain much higher memory bandwidth than simple 'mov eax, [screen]' assembly would normally generate, which is what the stock Windows graphics kernels use. In practice, it actually works quite well, and hand-tuned assembly-language memory-twiddling routines (which are all graphics kernels are) will be 2-4x faster than equivilant C/C++ code would be, so the speedups for some operations (like redrawing the windows, which is all the program is really claiming to speed up) are true.
And I hate to point this out...
on
Metal Velcro
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· Score: -1, Insightful
TWI says 20 aerospace and automotive companies are now examining its sculpting technology, for which it has recently filed world patent applications. It expects products using the technique to be on the market within a couple of years.
So basically... they're going to file a patent for dragging your finger through clay to make a lump somewhere by pushing a semi-fluid substance around, the same way that any pottery enthusiast does hundreds of times a day?
That's all this is, is using an electron-beam welder to slide a little metal around, instead of a finger to move a little clay around.
Of course... I'm willing to bet a patent examiner won't see the obvious similarity, but will be gobsmacked by the legalease, especially if it's British legalease. So the patent will pass, despite how simple and obvious this is.
And yes, I realize I'm about to lose a LOT of Karma. =^.^=
I would say yes. If you're not dealing with all the connections needing to be encrypted or something else that requires every single packet to be fully modified by the CPU of the router in question, a medium-low-end ($200-$500 bought piecemeal at Fry's or similair) PC should do the job just fine.
Second, that depends on what you define by professional. We can and have been called with travel-time notice only (as in, under 2 hours), and provided a 2Mbit link when a T1 went down.
Pretty? No. Tidying up for another hour? Yup. Did it work? Hell yes. Was the client happy? Yes. Does anything else matter to me, a field grunt that doesn't deal with marketing or any other aspect of the company except making the tech work on-site? No.
But thanks, I passed along the typo to the person that does care about that part of the company. And she thanks you for the notification. =^.^=
I'd pull up proper terms, but we don't actually deal with physical T1's from the Telco often enough for me to have bothered memorizing the correct terms, manufacturers, or anything else about them. Even in phone work we usually find ourselves dealing with PRI at the fanciest.
The T1's were all used for combined bandwidth, as the event organizers dropped their order for a fractional T3 and got eight T1's at the last moment. We had no say in that aspect. And each T1 was plugged directly from the box-with-a-card-in-it from the Telco directly into the Netopia box, which had two other ports on it. One for power, and one for 10/100 Ethernet. As far as we were concerned, using the Netopia box was the same as using a 10/100 fiber-optic converter for extending an ethernet run, hence the terminology I've been using here.
And the T1-side didn't need any security. They were all going to the same ISP (that didn't support equalizing or banding or any other form of merging multiple T1's, yes, we asked) so it made sense to simply use a high-speed switch as a concentrator to our router.
Internally, the room was wired in a two-level switch tree for the main 'pool' of 500+ laptops. One 32-port switch feeding seperate 32-port switches for every eight tables of three laptops. Those laptops were fully locked down unless you went out of your way to blatantly physically tamper with the laptop. Since this was a private sub-event just for PHB's, we weren't too concerned about aggressive network intrusion from the pool of laptops, and didn't roll out a fully-secured solution.
The remaining subnets were small single-switch affairs for the 'master control' and presenter areas, respectively. Each of those subnets were free to crosstalk internally, for obvious reasons.
The 't1 to 10/100 converters' are just common T1 interface boxes that output ethernet instead of 24 voice/data jacks. Data-only T1 interfaces, essentially. Unfortunately, that was one aspect I had zero to do with, the site provided them and I haven't had a reason to use them since (we usually do satellite T1 links for remote sites, or use sDSL for medium-term fixed emplacements), so other than saying Netopia was branded all over the boxes, I can't help further than a Google search would.
And the direct copying can change the addresses, so MASQ can still function as I understand it. To be honest, the direct copying of packets didn't drop the CPU load anywhere NEAR as much as simply having the cards seperated across seperate PCI busses, so the CPU could talk to each of the groups at the same time, instead of having to shout down the same piece of tin-can-and-string to everyone at once.
We did do what you described though, all the firewalling/IPsec/what-have-you was a seperate set of rules between a pair of virtual ethernet devices.
The overall layout was this:
Arbitrary subnet gets VPNed/MASQed/etc to a virtual ethernet address. Virtual ethernet gets firewalled to another virtual ethernet. Second virtual ethernet gets dynamically MASQed with connection-tracking to the 8 T1's to send the traffic to the lowest-usage T1 over the last minute or so using QoS rules.
Most of that's just shuffling headers around, which are tiny, and the final copy boiled down to a single MASQ and either getting passed on or dropped on the floor, which still works with fastcopy.
And yes, tracking a couple thousand concurrent connections did eat up the memory. (2-4 per laptop, LONG story, client was using multiple bidirectional realmedia streams to push an IRC-like live QA session at the Detroid Auto Show one year for vendors, so the presenter could ask questions and get realtime answers back without having to resort to a 'show of hands' count. Yes, we told them it was a bad design.)
As for cooling... At detroit we had plenty of space, plenty of cooling, etc, etc. But to be quite honest we've literally shown up at a site, and been informed they 'repurposed' our space for storage, and found we can barely squeeze a folding chair and a laptop into the space left for us, even with setting things on shipping crates. We gave up complaining and learned to expect (and equip ourselves) to be crammed in the equivilant of a furnace room with zero ventilation and space for one person to stand unseen as our minimal requirements for getting a live press event running for up to 12 hours at a stretch. Live press-style events are a bitch, but we do fairly well at supporting them.
The T110/100 was supposed to be "T1 to/from 10/100" with arrows pointing both ways. Slashdot ate the greater-than/less-than signs, along with the hyphen.
First off, the case itself was one of the 'all in one' deals, simple one-5.25 bay, one-HD bay, one-floppy, half-height PCI cards only, etc.
The P2 was a typo, and one I appologize for. P3 would be much more accurate, and overlooking the typo is inexcusable as I was simply typing quietly before I hit post, and didn't read the entire post from the beginning before hitting post.
As for the T1's, we didn't use any PCI T1 cards. We used an external 10/100/1000 switch with all 8 T1's plugged into it via normal T110/100 converters as a concentrator, with the uplink port plugged into the computer. Four 10/100 PCI half-height network cards + onboard, three + onboard used. Onboard led to the switch with the T1's on it, the individual network cards all led to individual subnets.
As for the downclocking, yes, we had to throw jumpers. And as I said, it was policy at the time, and one I didn't completely agree with but it did noticably lower the heat output on the CPU's, which was often a problem when we had to install these things under bleachers or in other areas with absolutely zero ventilation and little access. In one case, we had to repurpose a bathroom actually, speaking of those. For that specific reason, the downclocking made sense.
The configuration of the multiple T1's on one ethernet port was fairly simple, using the Aliasing features of Linux to pretend to be 8 seperate ethernet cards plugged into that one switch, leading to each of the 8 T1 cards.
And yes, the CPU had little cache, and slow cache to boot, but lots of memory, and with that configuration it wasn't dealing with much data, barely a fraction of the actual network traffic, because all the network cards we'd installed could copy data directly from their own buffers to other network cards. The fastcopy option under Linux Networking in the kernel IIRC.
If you have any more questions, feel free to post again though.:-)
And for said couple-hundred, you're looking to pick a secondary network card, along with a 2Ghz or so Athlon or P4 of your choice with a motherboard with a built-in network card. The built-in network card is important for a router.
An Athlon-64 or above would be ideal, simply because you'd be able to mount ludicrous amounts of memory on the box, which is pretty much all that could ever matter for a router/firewall app, as Linux can easilly support logging anything you want to a remote boxen.
Realistically though, I've routed 8 T1's at 80+% capacity in both directions among 650 laptops before, including 3 seperated subnets, all routed through one box.
The box was a Celeron (P2) 800Mhz we'd downclocked to 633Mhz (standard practice at my company, downclock everything for live events for stability) and it used around 10% of the CPU at peak once configured correctly.
By 'correctly' I mean having the T1's all coming in on a seperate PCI bus from the actual network cards for the subnets. Specifically, the built-in ethernet turned out to be on a seperate PCI bus from the actual PCI slots in the case. Configuring the box to take advantage of this dropped CPU load from 80+% to ~10%.
So... for a T3 fully loaded? I'd say get a 2.0Ghz machine just for breathing room, and give it at least 2GB of memory, as neither is that expensive and will leave plenty of breathing room for things like IPSec or other fancier options down the road without any problems.
Not tested on a given game? So what?
on
The Return of S3
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· Score: 1
At worst, that means you'll have to adjust options to possibly 'dumb down' the card a little to get the game in question working. So long as the game doesn't use pixel shaders or require hardware T&L as a runtime check instead of letting DirectX emulate it, the Kyro2 runs the game fine, especially OpenGL games.
And even the most problematic games can be forced to run correctly, though that involves effectively turning the Kyro2 into a 64MB TNT2 by disabling the tile buffer entirely, an option which isn't hard to enable when it's needed.
The cards are still fully supported.
on
The Return of S3
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· Score: 1
In fact, they've been updated fairly recently in fact.
They're fairly well supported, the Kyro2 I'm still using runs everything from Natural Selection under WineX to Enemy Territory natively under Linux without a hitch.
Your post is correct, except for a couple of minor facts.
It USED to matter what your client-side frame-rate was, because the server only processed your physics every time your client sent it an update packet.
A revision of the code made the server always update at a fixed rate, pmove_fixed in fact, and made the default lock everyone to 125Hz.
This removes the only reason for having VSync off, as it DOES induce a visual artifact that anyone that's used to VSync being on will notice, but someone that's used to playing with VSync off will have a hard time spotting as they're used to it.
These days, it's better to lock your framerate to whatever your refresh rate is.
Been there, done that, two or three years ago.
on
Color Ascii Art Library
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· Score: 5, Interesting
Should I bother releasing my patch to AALib? Replaces the monochrome buffer with a 32bpp RGB- buffer, uses a much more tuned colour-selection system than libCACA appears to.
A screenshot of the BattleToads title screen, linked out of Archive.org as I don't have a current website for the TextNES emulator worth pointing too at the moment, unfortunately.
But yeah... been there, did that, didn't think anyone would be interested so I never released the patch.
Actually, that Emulator would be my doing. I developed it for a while, but nobody ever seemed interested, so I took the website down.:-)
I have a much more up-to-date version I'm working on for Win32 Console actually. I'm sorely tempted to use it, and an NES ROM, to build a demo for this Compo now.
How about a RPG from 1989?
ShadowRun, first edition.
Every transaction you make in that universe is done with a variant on credit cards that are electronically verified over thier version of the internet, and payment confirmed with the same system, before you can even buy a candy bar.
Slashdot Mirror
...but it's purely minimalistic contact info.
> What is so hard about WASD?
For those of us that learned on AZShiftX, about a half-inch of muscle memory.
The support was limited to "here's the init string our documents say you'll need, but you'll need to figure out which file to edit to set it" since bluetooth tethering is 'pair device, send plan-specific (but not user-specific) init string, dial #99*' for anything GPRS.
It's kinda sad when it's simpler to tether a cell phone to a laptop for internet access in the middle of the Pacific ocean on an island than it is to set up most printers...
But yeah, didn't blink when I said I just needed the init strings and I was working under Linux so I couldn't follow their prompts for how to get to the spot to enter stuff. They were willing to skim through their scripts to the juicy bits instead of just hanging up on me.
Oookay, if T-Mobile bans tethering their phones, why have they helped me and my mom seperately to configure their phones to tether over bluetooth to our laptops? Hell, I'm running Linux, that didn't even phase them, they still helped me find the command-strings I needed!
*waves* Hi, running Gentoo GNU/Linux on an Athlon-64 in native 64-bit mode, including a Broadcom 802.11 driver, Bluetooth being used to get on-line via GPRS w T-Mobile. I think it's safe to call myself a geek, yes? I buy the maximum accidental-damage-protection warranty on any laptop I purchase, simply because I'm so highly mobile I'm much more likely to break stuff.
And I have a backpack-style extra-padded carrying case, so it's not because I lug the thing around naked all the time. But daily trips between job sites takes it's toll on the machine, and accidents do happen. I may put the laptop down, run to grab something, and someone else is carrying a large table through the room and biffs the counter I put the laptop on. ThudBOOM! Crud happens.
Heck, just in shipping charges to punt my laptop back and forth to HP, my extended warranty has more than payed for itself already.
At the same time, they still have pulled all warranty offerings from their website for Ubuntu-powered machines. So while this individual's case apparently has been resolved, for the time being the lack of warranty coverage at any price still exists.
Oh, I picked the headline mostly to be cute/amusing/eyecatching. I'll fully admit that.
But considering they include a seperate FreeDOS partition on the Ubuntu machines full of diagnostic tools[1], your argument doesn't really hold water. They use the same diagnostic tools as before, just apparently have you reboot to do all the tests instead of opening a command-prompt. And all of the hardware available for Ubuntu machines is available for Windows machines as well. So, again, no extra training needed besides an Ubuntu-specific prefix of 'please reboot into the diagnostic software' as far as I can see.
It would still take about a minute total, you'd just be charging 13 seperate batteries at once, would be the most likely design.
So the original poster is roughly accurate, 30 amps for a minute and you're good to go for 4 hours.
All this fuss over 'modern' Hybrid cars and their wonderful gas mileage... when there is a non-hybrid car over 20 years old that can break 50mpg.
I just don't get it. Hybrid cars are a non-starter to me. Just build the damn cars with simple to maintain, fuel-efficient engines, IMHO. I've worked on a CRX HF before, the engines are bone-simple, elegant, and a well-maintained and well-adjusted one can pass even 'modern' smog standards in California, so emissions aren't an issue either.
So... why pay $15-$20k for a fancy hybrid, when I can buy a car for $2k (assuming $1k for car, another $1k to get it up to snuff and pass smog) that gets even better mileage than almost any hybrid out there, and has fewer things that can go wrong, and is about 20% as expensive to repair, and has even cheaper insurance?
I just don't get it... it's already been proven that a decently-performing, fuel-effecient vehicle can be built without hybrid technology. So until they can match the CRX HF in every feasable stat except weight of vehicle, hybrids just seem like the auto makers (yes, even the Honda of today) playing smoke-and-mirrors games with the general public, claiming to make more fuel-effecient vehicles when the modern ones can't come close to a car from two decades ago.
For those that have, say, a TNT2, GF2, or ATI Rage 128 card, but are running an Athlon-XP 2800, the CPU is far faster than anything the graphics card can accomplish. I've seen that happen when someone just buys a new MBoard+CPU+Memory combo for $150 or so somewhere, slaps their old video card, network card, and hard drive in, and reinstalls Windows as needed.
So, no, comparing the tricks of floating-point or (for 88-bit) process-status data-moves to the memory bandwidth of a 9800XT($350 roughly on PriceWatch right now) isn't a remotely valid comparison. Someone that can afford $350 on the VIDEO CARD that only helps game-playing for the most part isn't going to have a slow enough computer that the program linked to (Hare) would even be an interest to them. A water-cooling system to overclock with would be more their speed and price range, most likely.
However, if you're building a budget computer (say an Athlon-XP 3200, add an extra 1024MB of RAM and you're still looking at less than the price of a single 9800XT) it's very likely that the CPU is capable of more than the on-board video card for most older games (Counter-Strike, anyone?) for example.
And to be more precise, SOME video cards made after 1994 support stuff like font acceleration. Most don't, especially the ones built into most motherboard. There's a lot more video cards out there than just those running NVidia and ATI chipsets, hon.
Actually, they seem to be accurate.
What they mean by 88-bit kernel isn't what most Linux users mean by kernel. They're referring to the programming style of the graphics kernel.
In this case, they're using floating-point registers for data moves, and other 'demo-scene' tricks to gain much higher memory bandwidth than simple 'mov eax, [screen]' assembly would normally generate, which is what the stock Windows graphics kernels use. In practice, it actually works quite well, and hand-tuned assembly-language memory-twiddling routines (which are all graphics kernels are) will be 2-4x faster than equivilant C/C++ code would be, so the speedups for some operations (like redrawing the windows, which is all the program is really claiming to speed up) are true.
So basically... they're going to file a patent for dragging your finger through clay to make a lump somewhere by pushing a semi-fluid substance around, the same way that any pottery enthusiast does hundreds of times a day?
That's all this is, is using an electron-beam welder to slide a little metal around, instead of a finger to move a little clay around.
Of course... I'm willing to bet a patent examiner won't see the obvious similarity, but will be gobsmacked by the legalease, especially if it's British legalease. So the patent will pass, despite how simple and obvious this is.
And yes, I realize I'm about to lose a LOT of Karma. =^.^=
I would say yes. If you're not dealing with all the connections needing to be encrypted or something else that requires every single packet to be fully modified by the CPU of the router in question, a medium-low-end ($200-$500 bought piecemeal at Fry's or similair) PC should do the job just fine.
:-)
And good luck to you.
First off, thanks for pointing out the typo.
Second, that depends on what you define by professional. We can and have been called with travel-time notice only (as in, under 2 hours), and provided a 2Mbit link when a T1 went down.
Pretty? No.
Tidying up for another hour? Yup.
Did it work? Hell yes.
Was the client happy? Yes.
Does anything else matter to me, a field grunt that doesn't deal with marketing or any other aspect of the company except making the tech work on-site? No.
But thanks, I passed along the typo to the person that does care about that part of the company. And she thanks you for the notification. =^.^=
I'd pull up proper terms, but we don't actually deal with physical T1's from the Telco often enough for me to have bothered memorizing the correct terms, manufacturers, or anything else about them. Even in phone work we usually find ourselves dealing with PRI at the fanciest.
The T1's were all used for combined bandwidth, as the event organizers dropped their order for a fractional T3 and got eight T1's at the last moment. We had no say in that aspect. And each T1 was plugged directly from the box-with-a-card-in-it from the Telco directly into the Netopia box, which had two other ports on it. One for power, and one for 10/100 Ethernet. As far as we were concerned, using the Netopia box was the same as using a 10/100 fiber-optic converter for extending an ethernet run, hence the terminology I've been using here.
And the T1-side didn't need any security. They were all going to the same ISP (that didn't support equalizing or banding or any other form of merging multiple T1's, yes, we asked) so it made sense to simply use a high-speed switch as a concentrator to our router.
Internally, the room was wired in a two-level switch tree for the main 'pool' of 500+ laptops. One 32-port switch feeding seperate 32-port switches for every eight tables of three laptops. Those laptops were fully locked down unless you went out of your way to blatantly physically tamper with the laptop. Since this was a private sub-event just for PHB's, we weren't too concerned about aggressive network intrusion from the pool of laptops, and didn't roll out a fully-secured solution.
The remaining subnets were small single-switch affairs for the 'master control' and presenter areas, respectively. Each of those subnets were free to crosstalk internally, for obvious reasons.
Okay, point-by-point again.
The 't1 to 10/100 converters' are just common T1 interface boxes that output ethernet instead of 24 voice/data jacks. Data-only T1 interfaces, essentially. Unfortunately, that was one aspect I had zero to do with, the site provided them and I haven't had a reason to use them since (we usually do satellite T1 links for remote sites, or use sDSL for medium-term fixed emplacements), so other than saying Netopia was branded all over the boxes, I can't help further than a Google search would.
And the direct copying can change the addresses, so MASQ can still function as I understand it. To be honest, the direct copying of packets didn't drop the CPU load anywhere NEAR as much as simply having the cards seperated across seperate PCI busses, so the CPU could talk to each of the groups at the same time, instead of having to shout down the same piece of tin-can-and-string to everyone at once.
We did do what you described though, all the firewalling/IPsec/what-have-you was a seperate set of rules between a pair of virtual ethernet devices.
The overall layout was this:
Arbitrary subnet gets VPNed/MASQed/etc to a virtual ethernet address. Virtual ethernet gets firewalled to another virtual ethernet. Second virtual ethernet gets dynamically MASQed with connection-tracking to the 8 T1's to send the traffic to the lowest-usage T1 over the last minute or so using QoS rules.
Most of that's just shuffling headers around, which are tiny, and the final copy boiled down to a single MASQ and either getting passed on or dropped on the floor, which still works with fastcopy.
And yes, tracking a couple thousand concurrent connections did eat up the memory. (2-4 per laptop, LONG story, client was using multiple bidirectional realmedia streams to push an IRC-like live QA session at the Detroid Auto Show one year for vendors, so the presenter could ask questions and get realtime answers back without having to resort to a 'show of hands' count. Yes, we told them it was a bad design.)
As for cooling... At detroit we had plenty of space, plenty of cooling, etc, etc. But to be quite honest we've literally shown up at a site, and been informed they 'repurposed' our space for storage, and found we can barely squeeze a folding chair and a laptop into the space left for us, even with setting things on shipping crates. We gave up complaining and learned to expect (and equip ourselves) to be crammed in the equivilant of a furnace room with zero ventilation and space for one person to stand unseen as our minimal requirements for getting a live press event running for up to 12 hours at a stretch. Live press-style events are a bitch, but we do fairly well at supporting them.
The T110/100 was supposed to be "T1 to/from 10/100" with arrows pointing both ways. Slashdot ate the greater-than/less-than signs, along with the hyphen.
First off, the case itself was one of the 'all in one' deals, simple one-5.25 bay, one-HD bay, one-floppy, half-height PCI cards only, etc.
:-)
The P2 was a typo, and one I appologize for. P3 would be much more accurate, and overlooking the typo is inexcusable as I was simply typing quietly before I hit post, and didn't read the entire post from the beginning before hitting post.
As for the T1's, we didn't use any PCI T1 cards. We used an external 10/100/1000 switch with all 8 T1's plugged into it via normal T110/100 converters as a concentrator, with the uplink port plugged into the computer. Four 10/100 PCI half-height network cards + onboard, three + onboard used. Onboard led to the switch with the T1's on it, the individual network cards all led to individual subnets.
As for the downclocking, yes, we had to throw jumpers. And as I said, it was policy at the time, and one I didn't completely agree with but it did noticably lower the heat output on the CPU's, which was often a problem when we had to install these things under bleachers or in other areas with absolutely zero ventilation and little access. In one case, we had to repurpose a bathroom actually, speaking of those. For that specific reason, the downclocking made sense.
The configuration of the multiple T1's on one ethernet port was fairly simple, using the Aliasing features of Linux to pretend to be 8 seperate ethernet cards plugged into that one switch, leading to each of the 8 T1 cards.
And yes, the CPU had little cache, and slow cache to boot, but lots of memory, and with that configuration it wasn't dealing with much data, barely a fraction of the actual network traffic, because all the network cards we'd installed could copy data directly from their own buffers to other network cards. The fastcopy option under Linux Networking in the kernel IIRC.
If you have any more questions, feel free to post again though.
And for said couple-hundred, you're looking to pick a secondary network card, along with a 2Ghz or so Athlon or P4 of your choice with a motherboard with a built-in network card. The built-in network card is important for a router.
An Athlon-64 or above would be ideal, simply because you'd be able to mount ludicrous amounts of memory on the box, which is pretty much all that could ever matter for a router/firewall app, as Linux can easilly support logging anything you want to a remote boxen.
Realistically though, I've routed 8 T1's at 80+% capacity in both directions among 650 laptops before, including 3 seperated subnets, all routed through one box.
The box was a Celeron (P2) 800Mhz we'd downclocked to 633Mhz (standard practice at my company, downclock everything for live events for stability) and it used around 10% of the CPU at peak once configured correctly.
By 'correctly' I mean having the T1's all coming in on a seperate PCI bus from the actual network cards for the subnets. Specifically, the built-in ethernet turned out to be on a seperate PCI bus from the actual PCI slots in the case. Configuring the box to take advantage of this dropped CPU load from 80+% to ~10%.
So... for a T3 fully loaded? I'd say get a 2.0Ghz machine just for breathing room, and give it at least 2GB of memory, as neither is that expensive and will leave plenty of breathing room for things like IPSec or other fancier options down the road without any problems.
At worst, that means you'll have to adjust options to possibly 'dumb down' the card a little to get the game in question working. So long as the game doesn't use pixel shaders or require hardware T&L as a runtime check instead of letting DirectX emulate it, the Kyro2 runs the game fine, especially OpenGL games.
And even the most problematic games can be forced to run correctly, though that involves effectively turning the Kyro2 into a 64MB TNT2 by disabling the tile buffer entirely, an option which isn't hard to enable when it's needed.
In fact, they've been updated fairly recently in fact.
They're fairly well supported, the Kyro2 I'm still using runs everything from Natural Selection under WineX to Enemy Territory natively under Linux without a hitch.
Unsupported? Hardly.
Your post is correct, except for a couple of minor facts.
It USED to matter what your client-side frame-rate was, because the server only processed your physics every time your client sent it an update packet.
A revision of the code made the server always update at a fixed rate, pmove_fixed in fact, and made the default lock everyone to 125Hz.
This removes the only reason for having VSync off, as it DOES induce a visual artifact that anyone that's used to VSync being on will notice, but someone that's used to playing with VSync off will have a hard time spotting as they're used to it.
These days, it's better to lock your framerate to whatever your refresh rate is.
Should I bother releasing my patch to AALib? Replaces the monochrome buffer with a 32bpp RGB- buffer, uses a much more tuned colour-selection system than libCACA appears to.
A screenshot of the BattleToads title screen, linked out of Archive.org as I don't have a current website for the TextNES emulator worth pointing too at the moment, unfortunately.
But yeah... been there, did that, didn't think anyone would be interested so I never released the patch.
Actually, that Emulator would be my doing. I developed it for a while, but nobody ever seemed interested, so I took the website down. :-)
I have a much more up-to-date version I'm working on for Win32 Console actually. I'm sorely tempted to use it, and an NES ROM, to build a demo for this Compo now.
How about a RPG from 1989?
ShadowRun, first edition.
Every transaction you make in that universe is done with a variant on credit cards that are electronically verified over thier version of the internet, and payment confirmed with the same system, before you can even buy a candy bar.