Bounce? Maybe.:) I've read a lot about people bouncing signals and using hills (the signal will bend a little going over a hill), but it won't be anywhere near as good as a direct signal.
Search the web for your N-Connectors.. Try fab-corp.com too. They have pigtails.. One of my friends got all his connectors and stuff from E-Bay. If there's a shop that deals with microwave communications stuff, they may have 'em.. One guy I work with regularly doesn't do computer work, but he did a lot of Microwave communications with the US Gov't.. When I started rattling off frequencies, and showing him my equipment, he was amazed. Pretty much we're using microwave frequencies, and similiar hardware to theirs..
If you really want to find out what you can do at these frequencies, check out The ARRL UHF/Microwave Experementer's Manual - Antennas, Components, and Design.. It's really neat to see what the ham radio geeks have been doing for years.. Like, pg 1-10 fg 14 is "The San Bernardino Microwave Society's beer can polaplexer". It's a tall beer can (like a Fosters, I think), pointing into a parabolic dish. Looks just like what we've reinvented with the pringles cans. I made mine out of a section of dryer vent pipe (Home Depot sells it in 6' lengths at even in inch sizes (2", 3", 4", etc)). Just the pipe by itself at the right measurements helps signficantly.
They go into bouncing similiar frequencies to ours off the moon, with rather large dishes.. But, if you happened to have an old satellite dish (like one of those 15' ones) with holes less than 1/4", you'd be exceeding the power required to bounce off the moon, even with a little network card. A 1W amp would definately make it stronger.:)
**WARNING**
Don't use a 15' dish. Don't use a 1W amp. Don't point it at your little sisters hamster. The FCC may get a little pissy about that. If you do, I didn't suggest. If you say I did, my name is Guadalupe, and I live in Istanbul. I raise goats on a hill, and don't even own a computer.
500K is better than a cablemodem.:) Both my cablemodem with Time Warner in Tampa Fl, and Charter in Los Angles CA are pathetic.. Something on the order of 100K down, 28K up..
I've had times where it was faster to burn my data to a CD and drive to the office, than to upload it on their "high speed" service. I can't blame the office bandwidth either. That's graphed with 0% downtime and low latency. I can see when that gets peaked out..
I'm now setting up MRTG to monitor my house bandwidth (through my Linux firewall and a little script to convert/proc/net/dev to MRTG's fields. I want to show them a graph of where I peak out at next time I call to bitch..
I really want to direct say 600Mb/s of generated traffic towards them one day and say "Look, my cablemodem never goes over 20K!" Of course, that may have a subtle impact on Charter's ability to serve any customers in Southern California for a little while.:)
Some days, I'm an obnoxious customer.. Most of the time I'm a nice guy..
I haven't been *TO* the capital since I was a kid. But, if he's anywhere near Tallahassee he probably has hills to contend with (or work with) too..
Last time I was there, I was driving a moving van through there at a whopping 50mph.. Warning, never over-load the really big U-Haul's and try to get them to go fast. They won't. {sigh} Tampa to Los Angeles took us almost a week. It took 3 days in a normal car. I saw more speed traps there than anywhere else along I-10.. One trooper was sitting in a Cadillac under an overpass. I didn't realize he was a speed trap, til we came by (full throttle, 50mph) and saw him hanging out the window with radar gun in hand.. Go ahead, clock me. I can't speed.:)
I just took a look at the site.. It appears he can go up to 200 feet without permits, unless he's near an airport.. But, they have the handy-dandy "do I need a permit" calculator to figure it out for him.:)
A quick search found that Microsoft has a way to find your coordinates.
"
1. Go to Microsoft's terra server
2. Click on 'Advanced Find'
3. Click on 'Address Search'
4. Enter the address and click 'go'
5. Click on the 'USGS arieal photograph' link
6. Verify where on the photo the house or address is
7. Click on the 'Image Info' link
8. The page will have the latitude and longitude of the borders of each photo labeled. Use these to estimate the latitude and longitude of that address. "
Pretty much, bounce over to Terraserver, put in your address, find your coordinates, then punch them it the FCC's converter, and then put those results into their check page, and it'll tell you what you can do.
Searching my old address in suburban Tampa (approx 10 miles North of TIA), with a 200 foot freestanding tower (tower and guywires), I could be ok.
Of course, I doubt the homeowners group or planning and zoning would approve of a 200' tower in the back yard.:) If that 200' tower fell over, probably land on 3 houses there.:) One guy did have a flimsy 50' antenna on his roof with guywires to the extreme corners of his roof, next door, which probably gave him an overall height of 65'. It was more than enough to clear the trees.. Some cable company was broadcasting cable over it.. I never did find out who though. $25/mo for all the stations with the antenna. They must save an absolute fortune on physical cables.
We tried to do wireless service for a temporary location once. It was a one-night event. Time Warner wouldn't provide a cablemodem, even though they were nice enough to tell me, "if you were across the street, we'd service you." {sigh} We couldn't do it though, because the tall downtown Tampa buildings were in the way, and we didn't have any additional hardware to bounce around (or over) them.
We ended up with 2 56k dialup connections directo to our office to do live webcams over. That really sucked. Even the phone lines sucked there.
I was just looking into this too, for my area.:) A while back, I bought a Nextel cellular modem.. It's a PCMCIA card with a little antenna on it, that doesn't use my phone to work.. After I found my IP, I started going through whois's.. It turns out that they're using American Tower. Even the little town of Crystal River (probably no one here has even heard of it), has 4 American Tower towers. Here's the search results
If our building management doesn't get back to us with a good answer (like, we can put antennas on the roof), I'm going to call American Tower.. They have 5 towers on one hill, and one on a rooftop, not far from my office. I hadn't even noticed the 5 towers til I looked it up on their map. Then I was like "Hey, there they are!":)
I'm sure there are other providers too, I just don't know any.. I just got lucky when I ran across this one..
If your customers already have TV towers (like those ugly 50' masts), that would really help.. Put your wireless antenna up on those, and (hopefully) you'll see over the trees.. In Central Florida (where I used to live), we had our TV antenna on a 50' tower to get TV reception.. We could see television from Tampa, Orlando, and Gainesville, depending on which way the antenna was pointing. Sometimes, if atmospheric conditions were right, we'd get the odd signal from Texas or Louisana.
Oh, the good old days of spinning the antenna around to get the best reception. I almost forgot about having the rotor control in the house.
If your main antenna is really high, it should help you clear the trees.
Funny that you just posted this to Slashdot.. We've been trying to figure out how to connect several locations (houses, apartments, and offices) in an urban part of Los Angeles, without having to pay outragous fees for bandwidth and even simply the wiring. We have an office in a centralized location that already has a T1, going back to one of our colo's with real bandwidth...
You could do copper, but you're limited to 300m for Cat5. Anything longer, and you'll have to do some sort of modem. I don't know if you can put ?DSL modems back to back..
You could do fiber, but that'll probably end up costing you some bucks, and you'll have to be sure that the lines are safe (like, no one will accidently dig through them).
You don't say exactly where in N. Florida you are, but knowing Florida you're probably in a relatively flat area with lots of pine trees. You said several hundred acres, so I put that in an area calculator and found 1000 acres = 1.56sq miles, so none of your points are really very far from each other.. I think you're definately a candidate for wireless, if the trees stay out of the way.
Check out fab-corp.com for antennas.. No, not an advertisment. I just bought some stuff from them last week, and they were easy to deal with. They're also located in Florida, so your order will be there quick. My order got to California in about 3 days. If you were to put a sector antenna (like, the first one in the sector antennas section) in the center of the property, you should have good coverage to the whole property. I'd recommend for the best connection, get a good antenna for the receiving ends also, such as a 24db parabolic antenna.. Make sure when you mount them, you bolt them down tight, and be *VERY* sure you do good lightning supression.. I lived in Florida for years, and survived the hurricanes, and daily thunderstorms.:)
To give an idea of what kind of range you can expect, I bought a "24 dBi Mag Grid Antenna" (bottom of the parabolic antenna list), and attached it to a "Senao SL-2511CD PLUS EXT2" card. From an upper story of an office building, I started sweeping around with this antenna just listening (to estimate range. honest.) With a 4.5db blade antenna, I could hear 6 AP's, but only had a workable signal to one. With the 24db antenna I could hear over 2 dozen AP's. None of them were named for what they were, except one that said "YMCA"..
I asked some of the people who know the area well, "Is there a YMCA in that direction"? I know there's one closer, but it was about 60 degrees from where I was pointing. Turns out the YMCA I heard was a few miles away. So, with my 24db antenna talking to something resembling a normal AP (I doubt they had a directional antenna pointed at my office), I had a workable signal.
Before you start buying cards, I strongly recommend you check out Seattle Wireless. They have a *GREAT* page comparing wireless cards.. I highly recommend the Senao SL-2511CD PLUS EXT2.. It has two external antenna jacks (external antennas are required on this one). They also show an AP with the same card built in.. The Seano cards are suppose to put out 200mw, as opposed to most cards and AP's that are only around 30mw (check their chart), so you'll get much better range with them.
I was investigating anonymous proxy servers that were abusing our system, and was setting my browser to random proxies to see how they were working (most of them did pretty well). I forgot to change back off of the proxies to come to/. , and got a big message about how I couldn't access from there, because of abuses.. Perfectly reasonable, since I found them through abuses on my network.:)
So, consider the timeout a good thing. At least you haven't been banned by the gods.:)
So the studio's will be putting out "DRM-only" videos, which can only be played in the DRM friendly PC DVD player with accompanied DRM friendly video card, or your new DRM friendly home DVD player.
The rest of us poor souls, who don't want to play the DRM game are completely locked out of seeing/using their content.
Since M$ is controlling this game, I'm sure they'll make the extra effort to ensure the non-M$ crowd can't play with their toys..
Hadn't they already made a push towards that by getting regular home DVD players to play Windows Media format video?
I wish they'd work on their real security problems, and not working on more "features" to lock in big business. I guess this is the result of their big security initiative.
I don't quite understand this one. I can't say that I've ever heard of a virus or anything resembling a security issue that used video memory to pull off anything..
Only a few things, like BO and the viruses/worms that installed VNC, did much of anything with reading the video, but at that point, they were well past getting control of the system.
It sounds like M$ is trying to push a bunch of video hardware manufacturers out of the business too.. Not nice...
C64's have a cult following. I can't say I've seen much for the Vic20, the Apple II series (IIe/II+/IIc), TRS-80's, TI-99/4a, or the whole myriad of "PC"'s.. Lots of business people trusted that the TRS-80's were the end-all of business equipment, and all it ended with was buying an IBM PC later.
I did find an Apple IIe emulator a year or so ago, but there was yet again a serious problem. All the software was on 5 1/4" disks, and I couldn't find a working 5 1/4" drive. I'm not even sure Linux or Windows can read an Apple IIe disk, but without a drive it really doesn't matter.
Think back 20 years.. In 1983 you may have had an Apple IIe, TRS-80 Model III, or C64.. If you did save video then for that platform on a media that would oxidize over time (DVD's have a shelf life too), what are the chances of having working hardware to view it with? The last of any of the above that I've seen were headed for a trash can about a year ago when I cleaned my garage.
In 20 years, more than likely FreeBSD and Linux will both be dinosaurs that no one will have a clue how to work, except for a few of us geeks with perfect memories that say "Ya, I used that 20 years ago!". I wouldn't place bets on a continued existance of Microsoft either. There'll be some bigger, better, faster that comes along and everyone will switch to. (I have inside information that says BeOS and OS/2 are making a comeback, hehe)
Definately, I'd see problems trying to get your movie from the DivX format to a new format intact. You may not have any similiar connections to use. Serial and Parallel may already be dead (they're close to it), and USB version 2020 may not be compatable with what we're using now.
I don't have a good solution for him either. In 20 years you may not be able to get a working VHS player, or the TV's may not support them. Do regular VCR's work with HDTV? Isn't the US Gov't doing some manditory change over?
Maybe he can keep copying between formats, for as long as he remembers to.. Are those family memories worth it? That's a question he'd have to ask..
Maybe he's already taken it from an old film movie camera to Beta to VHS, so the trend can continue.. At least with digital formats (as long as they survive), you shouldn't have too much degregation between generations. But, compressing and recompressing video will make it look worse over time too..
Re:Who didn't see this coming?
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· Score: 1
I can send you pictures if you'd like..:)
I just shot some of our cabinets at Switch&Data Los Angeles.. We have a nice happy little Cisco 3508 with 1 1Gb uplink to Level3, and 4 downlinks to other switches.. Sometimes 100Mb/s just isn't enough.:)
Re:Who didn't see this coming?
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· Score: 2, Informative
They may have been running BGP with two T3's.:)
As for them having their own datacenter, don't be surprised if they don't.. Having your own datacenter is cool -n- all, but really overkill for many situations. We don't use our own, we use other providers for that. That way, we have the luxury of living in a datacenter, without actually having to run the facility. If you go somewhere like Switch&Data, you already have major providers with available bandwidth in the facility. It takes longer to do the paperwork than to actually get your connection wired up.:)
Don't be surprised to find out many companies don't have their own datacenters.. They may just be a cabinet or a cage in another companies datacenter. Take Akamai for example.. Read through all their stuff. Sounds really impressive.. In 3 colo facilities that I know of, they have an individual rack in each with a bunch of servers. They're easy to spot. Scan the room for a rack full of identical machines with pretty blue lights.:) It works well for them though, they're putting servers as close as you can get to the clients. Their's spiffy NOC is an office where their guys watch their stuff from.. My NOC is wherever I happen to be.:)
Someone once asked me "where's your NOC?".. I held up my phone. He asked, "Should I call them?".
"No. BoT pages 4 people if there are problems. He'll repeat the pages every 30 minutes until it's resolved."
"What about your network administration?"
"Four people can run any of the servers. Two of us do most of the work, another takes all the easier work (he's still learning), and the fourth plays boss sometimes."
"What if a server goes down at 4am?"
"Someone wakes up to the incessent ring of their pager, and fixes it. If it's one of many (like most of our servers), it doesn't really matter. If it means someone driving out to a colo, we're all within 20 minutes of our respective colo's."
"What if it's a hardware problem?"
"Then we fix it.":)
We thought about doing the 24/7 shifts, and crap like that. Honestly, the network runs itself, the machines maintain themselves, and normally we don't have to mess with anything. The only problems we've had lately are stupid people beating up on stupid free-hosting machines, but we just add or modify things to stop them from breaking things. For a while particular IP's would flood requests for movies, so now they're throttled, and if they try too hard they're blocked at the firewall. Last week some twits were hitting a CGI too hard, so I lowered it's threshold for abuse. Now if it thinks someone is trying, it'll slow them down. I don't see why places like SCO bitch that someone's doing a DoS against them. That's all part of the game. If they worked in porn, they'd be used to it by now.:)
I did get a kick out of seeing the Toys-R-Us Christmas online sales cluster-fuck a few years ago. I guess I shouldn't say which facility it was at, but it was in Manhattan.:) Rows and rows of WinNT (or Win2k, I don't remember now) DELL's. The machines were like 6u tall sitting on shelves in open racks, all inside a huge cage.. All I could keep thinking to myself was, "I could do all that with one Linux machine".. hehehee. I think I still have the unauthorized pictures stashed somewhere..
Speaking of colo's. Pihana Pacific on 7th ave in LA has a new rule. no recording devices, no cameras.. So I went in there with my laptop bag, with my laptop, digital camera, a few hard drives, and a rats nest of cables (I just threw them in from the last colo I was at).. They "inspected" my bag, asking me what brand my laptop was, and looked at the wires. They didn't notice the camera sitting right on top of everything else.
That day, I was there to pull a bad hard drive that we had transfered data off of a fe
Re:Who didn't see this coming?
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Some people have that kind of bandwidth available. Hell, I have 3 different places with 1Gb connections to OC192's.. Of course, we're busy serving up porn sites, and I'm not really that interested in the SCO thing..
I do wonder if it's an irate employee of IBM, or even someone at Microsoft playing around.. Either of them probably have sufficent bandwidth to pull this off. They'd be caught pretty quickly though. It's kinda obvious when you have 10 machines on the same network doing ping -f sco.com..:) A few hundred slaves on cablemodems would accomplish the same thing pretty easily.
I hit our networks between each other occasionally with that kind of traffic, just to see the bandwidth jump up. I'm surprised they can't handle it. I guess that's the difference between handling big porn sites, and handling SCO's needs (tee-hee).
It looks like they've changed providers since this happened, or maybe they just stopped.. Watching a DoS is kinda boring..
13 0.so-3-0-0.XL2.SLT4.ALTER.NET (152.63.102.13) 86.413 ms 49.691 ms 41.490 ms 14 186.ATM6-0.GW4.SLT4.ALTER.NET (152.63.91.249) 36.255 ms 169.646 ms 88.828
ms 15 center7-gw.customer.alter.net (157.130.166.198) 56.096 ms 88.057 ms 58.52 3 ms 16 c7pub-216-250-136-74.center7.com (216.250.136.74) 169.640 ms 73.178 ms 12 4.894 ms 17 * * *
They really should do something more creative than just flooding them with traffic. How about a good syn flood, or hammering one of their CGI's. Maybe finding a nice mail-to script on their own site, and filling the support boxes with bogus script-generated messages..
Flooding them with traffic just isn't nice to the rest of the customers on that network. What if someone else is hosted there? Or you completely mangle the ISP for that part of the country? If someone flooded a few different major networks in Florida with about 45Mb/s traffic, it would kill all of their customers in the state. I'd have customers calling from down there all the time asking why everything seemed slow, so I'd do traceroutes from around the country, and realize no one had decent ping times to them.:) Well, unless you consider >300ms and >10% packet loss good.
I'll quietly snicker while they do their evil deeds, and still say "that's not nice". I know it's annoying when people do 'em to us (it's a daily occurance).
I think that's the biggest problem with geek girls.. Us geek guys snatch them up too quick. I've never met one that complains about not being able to find a date.:(
At which point, you have to steal her away by impressing her with the size of your network, or the fact that your PDA can automatically steer the two of you to her favorite restraunt with connectivity, and check her mail for her.:)
(sometimes they get upset that you've already sniffed her network and got her passwords, but that's another story).
I dated one for years.. She's probably the greatest woman I was ever with.. Honestly, we spent more time together than I ever have with anyone else.
She's a programmer, and I'm a programmer and admin. We worked in the same office for a while, but jobs change and people change companies..
But, after we weren't at the same job, we'd still hang out, and do work at home. We'd both sit in the same office at home, get work type stuff done. ICQ was most useful to get URL's tossed between our computers quickly. "Hey, check this out!" [ICQ Uh-oh].
She's the only woman who dragged *ME* to a programmers group meeting..:)
She always just dressed comfortably, which I thought was adorable.. But it made it a lot easier to go out.. She'd throw something on, and we'd go. It usually consisted of a girlie-shirt, jeans, and a sweater..
It was always nice knowing she knew most of her shit about computers too.. She'd play innocent "I'm a girl, I don't know anything" sometimes, but if I made her do it, she can do almost anything like a pro.. There are times we'll be in seperate places, and she'll ask how to do something on a Unix machine. I'll throw her a couple hints, then she'll call me back a half hour later, explain exactly what she did just to be sure it was all correct.
Of course, playing the innocent defenseless girl, she'd ask something silly like, "How do I change a CPU fan", but the next day I'd come over and she'd have a new server sitting on a desk that she mysteriously built out of spare parts and already installed the OS, web server, and all her customizations on..
She called me the other day. She was installing a chat software for a client, and wasn't sure she was doing it right. So, I logged into the machine, went over the whole thing, went step by step through the INSTALL file, and she had it perfect..
You've never drank a drop of alcohol, nor smoked a cigarette, but you're going to tell us, through your own experience, how much better you are than those who do.
{sigh}
I was 25 before I tried a lot of things. You'd be absolutely amazed at the possibilities that are out there. I won't even begin to make a list of the illegal, immoral, or fattening things I've done.:)
I've seen a lot of people have their first experiences with lots of things, and ask out loud, "Why didn't I ever do this before?"
The answer is simple. They never tried it before, because some morally self rightous person told them that it was wrong.
I am the sum of my experiences. I've experienced both alcohol and tobacco.
You are the sum of your experiences. You have experienced neither.
I seriously hope the tannic acid reference was a joke.
----- Tannic acid. (Chem.) (a) An acid obtained from nutgalls as a yellow amorphous substance, C14H10O9, having an astringent taste, and forming with ferric salts a bluish-black compound, which is the basis of common ink. Called also tannin, and gallotannic acid. (b) By extension, any one of a series of astringent substances resembling tannin proper, widely diffused through the vegetable kingdom, as in oak bark, willow, catechu, tea, coffee, etc. -----
As for the evil chemicals in tobacco, you missed a really dangerous one, used in both tobacco and alcohol. dihydrogen monoxide.
BAN DIHYDROGEN MONOXIDE!
Dihydrogen monoxide is colorless, odorless, tasteless, and kills uncounted thousands of people every year. Most of these deaths are caused by accidental inhalation of DHMO, but the dangers of dihydrogen monoxide do not end there. Prolonged Ban me! exposure to its solid form causes severe tissue damage. Symptoms of DHMO ingestion can include excessive sweating and urination, and possibly a bloated feeling, nausea, vomiting and body electrolyte imbalance. For those who have become dependent, DHMO withdrawal means certain death.
Dihydrogen monoxide:
* is also known as hydroxl acid, and is the major component of acid rain.
* contributes to the "greenhouse effect."
* may cause severe burns.
* contributes to the erosion of our natural landscape.
* accelerates corrosion and rusting of many metals.
* may cause electrical failures and decreased effectiveness of automobile brakes.
* has been found in excised tumors of terminal cancer patients.
Despite the danger, dihydrogen monoxide is often used:
# as an industrial solvent and coolant. # in nuclear power plants. # in the production of styrofoam. # as a fire retardant. # in many forms of cruel animal research. # in the distribution of pesticides. Even after washing, produce remains contaminated by this chemical. # as an additive in certain "junk-foods" and other food products.
I'm sure there must be one out there, I just haven't seen one..
After I get my office done, I may put up a how-to, or a script that sets up for people, to make it easy.
I'm very wary of floppies.. I guess if you keep an image around somewhere, it's ok, when the media fails, you can just make another. I've never experemented with doing the bootable NIC stuff.
NFS is better than the performance of a Win2k file share, that's for sure.:) We use SMB for a lot of things. I set up a quick share between a Win2k web server, and a Linux machine, to get quick access to some files, and the performance was pathetic. I guess MS did some more "optimization" which hurt Samba again.. Luckly, it was just temporary, so I don't really care about it.
I wonder if there is a Linux distribution where you stick in a boot floppy, have the workstation contact a server to [SNIP]
Sure, anyone can do this.:) It all depends on your creativity. Years ago, before we got a CD burner at my office, we used to do all our Slackware installs over NFS. It's not exactly documented, but doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out how. A few subtle adjustments to the technique would give you machines that boot up and use NFS to mount up their filesystems.
I'd strongly recommend that you do install a CDRom drive, even if it's a cheap one (doable for $20) for your boot media.. Floppys simply suck. Most of them, even the name brand, have such thin cheap media on them, they fail rather quickly.
Hmmmm.. You've given me a really great idea.. We've been trying to convince the office people that they want to start using Linux.. But when it's time to format their machines, they freak the fuck out.. I'll just set up a server to let them mount to in the office, so they can just boot from a CD, and still access their old files on their hard drive. Thanks for the idea!:)
Slashdot Mirror
Bounce? Maybe. :) I've read a lot about people bouncing signals and using hills (the signal will bend a little going over a hill), but it won't be anywhere near as good as a direct signal.
:)
:)
Search the web for your N-Connectors.. Try fab-corp.com too. They have pigtails.. One of my friends got all his connectors and stuff from E-Bay. If there's a shop that deals with microwave communications stuff, they may have 'em.. One guy I work with regularly doesn't do computer work, but he did a lot of Microwave communications with the US Gov't.. When I started rattling off frequencies, and showing him my equipment, he was amazed. Pretty much we're using microwave frequencies, and similiar hardware to theirs..
If you really want to find out what you can do at these frequencies, check out
The ARRL UHF/Microwave Experementer's Manual - Antennas, Components, and Design.. It's really neat to see what the ham radio geeks have been doing for years.. Like, pg 1-10 fg 14 is "The San Bernardino Microwave Society's beer can polaplexer". It's a tall beer can (like a Fosters, I think), pointing into a parabolic dish. Looks just like what we've reinvented with the pringles cans. I made mine out of a section of dryer vent pipe (Home Depot sells it in 6' lengths at even in inch sizes (2", 3", 4", etc)). Just the pipe by itself at the right measurements helps signficantly.
They go into bouncing similiar frequencies to ours off the moon, with rather large dishes.. But, if you happened to have an old satellite dish (like one of those 15' ones) with holes less than 1/4", you'd be exceeding the power required to bounce off the moon, even with a little network card. A 1W amp would definately make it stronger.
**WARNING**
Don't use a 15' dish. Don't use a 1W amp. Don't point it at your little sisters hamster. The FCC may get a little pissy about that. If you do, I didn't suggest. If you say I did, my name is Guadalupe, and I live in Istanbul. I raise goats on a hill, and don't even own a computer.
But if you do it, let me know how it works.
500K is better than a cablemodem. :) Both my cablemodem with Time Warner in Tampa Fl, and Charter in Los Angles CA are pathetic.. Something on the order of 100K down, 28K up..
/proc/net/dev to MRTG's fields. I want to show them a graph of where I peak out at next time I call to bitch..
:)
I've had times where it was faster to burn my data to a CD and drive to the office, than to upload it on their "high speed" service. I can't blame the office bandwidth either. That's graphed with 0% downtime and low latency. I can see when that gets peaked out..
I'm now setting up MRTG to monitor my house bandwidth (through my Linux firewall and a little script to convert
I really want to direct say 600Mb/s of generated traffic towards them one day and say "Look, my cablemodem never goes over 20K!" Of course, that may have a subtle impact on Charter's ability to serve any customers in Southern California for a little while.
Some days, I'm an obnoxious customer.. Most of the time I'm a nice guy..
I haven't been *TO* the capital since I was a kid. But, if he's anywhere near Tallahassee he probably has hills to contend with (or work with) too..
:)
Last time I was there, I was driving a moving van through there at a whopping 50mph.. Warning, never over-load the really big U-Haul's and try to get them to go fast. They won't. {sigh} Tampa to Los Angeles took us almost a week. It took 3 days in a normal car. I saw more speed traps there than anywhere else along I-10.. One trooper was sitting in a Cadillac under an overpass. I didn't realize he was a speed trap, til we came by (full throttle, 50mph) and saw him hanging out the window with radar gun in hand.. Go ahead, clock me. I can't speed.
I just took a look at the site.. It appears he can go up to 200 feet without permits, unless he's near an airport.. But, they have the handy-dandy "do I need a permit" calculator to figure it out for him. :)
:) If that 200' tower fell over, probably land on 3 houses there. :) One guy did have a flimsy 50' antenna on his roof with guywires to the extreme corners of his roof, next door, which probably gave him an overall height of 65'. It was more than enough to clear the trees.. Some cable company was broadcasting cable over it.. I never did find out who though. $25/mo for all the stations with the antenna. They must save an absolute fortune on physical cables.
A quick search found that Microsoft has a way to find your coordinates.
"
1. Go to Microsoft's terra server
2. Click on 'Advanced Find'
3. Click on 'Address Search'
4. Enter the address and click 'go'
5. Click on the 'USGS arieal photograph' link
6. Verify where on the photo the house or address is
7. Click on the 'Image Info' link
8. The page will have the latitude and longitude of the borders of each photo labeled. Use these to estimate the latitude and longitude of that address.
"
Pretty much, bounce over to Terraserver, put in your address, find your coordinates, then punch them it the FCC's converter, and then put those results into their check page, and it'll tell you what you can do.
Searching my old address in suburban Tampa (approx 10 miles North of TIA), with a 200 foot freestanding tower (tower and guywires), I could be ok.
Of course, I doubt the homeowners group or planning and zoning would approve of a 200' tower in the back yard.
We tried to do wireless service for a temporary location once. It was a one-night event. Time Warner wouldn't provide a cablemodem, even though they were nice enough to tell me, "if you were across the street, we'd service you." {sigh} We couldn't do it though, because the tall downtown Tampa buildings were in the way, and we didn't have any additional hardware to bounce around (or over) them.
We ended up with 2 56k dialup connections directo to our office to do live webcams over. That really sucked. Even the phone lines sucked there.
I was just looking into this too, for my area. :) A while back, I bought a Nextel cellular modem.. It's a PCMCIA card with a little antenna on it, that doesn't use my phone to work.. After I found my IP, I started going through whois's.. It turns out that they're using American Tower. Even the little town of Crystal River (probably no one here has even heard of it), has 4 American Tower towers. Here's the search results
:)
If our building management doesn't get back to us with a good answer (like, we can put antennas on the roof), I'm going to call American Tower.. They have 5 towers on one hill, and one on a rooftop, not far from my office. I hadn't even noticed the 5 towers til I looked it up on their map. Then I was like "Hey, there they are!"
I'm sure there are other providers too, I just don't know any.. I just got lucky when I ran across this one..
Oops.. I forgot one part. :)
If your customers already have TV towers (like those ugly 50' masts), that would really help.. Put your wireless antenna up on those, and (hopefully) you'll see over the trees.. In Central Florida (where I used to live), we had our TV antenna on a 50' tower to get TV reception.. We could see television from Tampa, Orlando, and Gainesville, depending on which way the antenna was pointing. Sometimes, if atmospheric conditions were right, we'd get the odd signal from Texas or Louisana.
Oh, the good old days of spinning the antenna around to get the best reception. I almost forgot about having the rotor control in the house.
If your main antenna is really high, it should help you clear the trees.
Funny that you just posted this to Slashdot.. We've been trying to figure out how to connect several locations (houses, apartments, and offices) in an urban part of Los Angeles, without having to pay outragous fees for bandwidth and even simply the wiring. We have an office in a centralized location that already has a T1, going back to one of our colo's with real bandwidth...
:)
You could do copper, but you're limited to 300m for Cat5. Anything longer, and you'll have to do some sort of modem. I don't know if you can put ?DSL modems back to back..
You could do fiber, but that'll probably end up costing you some bucks, and you'll have to be sure that the lines are safe (like, no one will accidently dig through them).
You don't say exactly where in N. Florida you are, but knowing Florida you're probably in a relatively flat area with lots of pine trees. You said several hundred acres, so I put that in an area calculator and found 1000 acres = 1.56sq miles, so none of your points are really very far from each other.. I think you're definately a candidate for wireless, if the trees stay out of the way.
Check out fab-corp.com for antennas.. No, not an advertisment. I just bought some stuff from them last week, and they were easy to deal with. They're also located in Florida, so your order will be there quick. My order got to California in about 3 days. If you were to put a sector antenna (like, the first one in the sector antennas section) in the center of the property, you should have good coverage to the whole property. I'd recommend for the best connection, get a good antenna for the receiving ends also, such as a 24db parabolic antenna.. Make sure when you mount them, you bolt them down tight, and be *VERY* sure you do good lightning supression.. I lived in Florida for years, and survived the hurricanes, and daily thunderstorms.
To give an idea of what kind of range you can expect, I bought a "24 dBi Mag Grid Antenna" (bottom of the parabolic antenna list), and attached it to a "Senao SL-2511CD PLUS EXT2" card. From an upper story of an office building, I started sweeping around with this antenna just listening (to estimate range. honest.) With a 4.5db blade antenna, I could hear 6 AP's, but only had a workable signal to one. With the 24db antenna I could hear over 2 dozen AP's. None of them were named for what they were, except one that said "YMCA"..
I asked some of the people who know the area well, "Is there a YMCA in that direction"? I know there's one closer, but it was about 60 degrees from where I was pointing. Turns out the YMCA I heard was a few miles away. So, with my 24db antenna talking to something resembling a normal AP (I doubt they had a directional antenna pointed at my office), I had a workable signal.
Before you start buying cards, I strongly recommend you check out Seattle Wireless. They have a *GREAT* page comparing wireless cards.. I highly recommend the Senao SL-2511CD PLUS EXT2.. It has two external antenna jacks (external antennas are required on this one). They also show an AP with the same card built in.. The Seano cards are suppose to put out 200mw, as opposed to most cards and AP's that are only around 30mw (check their chart), so you'll get much better range with them.
I hope this helps.
I was investigating anonymous proxy servers that were abusing our system, and was setting my browser to random proxies to see how they were working (most of them did pretty well). I forgot to change back off of the proxies to come to /. , and got a big message about how I couldn't access from there, because of abuses.. Perfectly reasonable, since I found them through abuses on my network. :)
:)
So, consider the timeout a good thing. At least you haven't been banned by the gods.
Ahhhh, that makes much more sense..
So the studio's will be putting out "DRM-only" videos, which can only be played in the DRM friendly PC DVD player with accompanied DRM friendly video card, or your new DRM friendly home DVD player.
The rest of us poor souls, who don't want to play the DRM game are completely locked out of seeing/using their content.
Since M$ is controlling this game, I'm sure they'll make the extra effort to ensure the non-M$ crowd can't play with their toys..
Hadn't they already made a push towards that by getting regular home DVD players to play Windows Media format video?
I wish they'd work on their real security problems, and not working on more "features" to lock in big business. I guess this is the result of their big security initiative.
I don't quite understand this one. I can't say that I've ever heard of a virus or anything resembling a security issue that used video memory to pull off anything..
Only a few things, like BO and the viruses/worms that installed VNC, did much of anything with reading the video, but at that point, they were well past getting control of the system.
It sounds like M$ is trying to push a bunch of video hardware manufacturers out of the business too.. Not nice...
Ya, the PDP-11 is older than that. On the other hand, I've never seen or used one..
*nix has a good following, so it may survive another 20 years.. Things do change though.
C64's have a cult following. I can't say I've seen much for the Vic20, the Apple II series (IIe/II+/IIc), TRS-80's, TI-99/4a, or the whole myriad of "PC"'s.. Lots of business people trusted that the TRS-80's were the end-all of business equipment, and all it ended with was buying an IBM PC later.
I did find an Apple IIe emulator a year or so ago, but there was yet again a serious problem. All the software was on 5 1/4" disks, and I couldn't find a working 5 1/4" drive. I'm not even sure Linux or Windows can read an Apple IIe disk, but without a drive it really doesn't matter.
It sounds like a wonderful idea, but....
Think back 20 years.. In 1983 you may have had an Apple IIe, TRS-80 Model III, or C64.. If you did save video then for that platform on a media that would oxidize over time (DVD's have a shelf life too), what are the chances of having working hardware to view it with? The last of any of the above that I've seen were headed for a trash can about a year ago when I cleaned my garage.
In 20 years, more than likely FreeBSD and Linux will both be dinosaurs that no one will have a clue how to work, except for a few of us geeks with perfect memories that say "Ya, I used that 20 years ago!". I wouldn't place bets on a continued existance of Microsoft either. There'll be some bigger, better, faster that comes along and everyone will switch to. (I have inside information that says BeOS and OS/2 are making a comeback, hehe)
Definately, I'd see problems trying to get your movie from the DivX format to a new format intact. You may not have any similiar connections to use. Serial and Parallel may already be dead (they're close to it), and USB version 2020 may not be compatable with what we're using now.
I don't have a good solution for him either. In 20 years you may not be able to get a working VHS player, or the TV's may not support them. Do regular VCR's work with HDTV? Isn't the US Gov't doing some manditory change over?
Maybe he can keep copying between formats, for as long as he remembers to.. Are those family memories worth it? That's a question he'd have to ask..
Maybe he's already taken it from an old film movie camera to Beta to VHS, so the trend can continue.. At least with digital formats (as long as they survive), you shouldn't have too much degregation between generations. But, compressing and recompressing video will make it look worse over time too..
I can send you pictures if you'd like..
I just shot some of our cabinets at Switch&Data Los Angeles.. We have a nice happy little Cisco 3508 with 1 1Gb uplink to Level3, and 4 downlinks to other switches.. Sometimes 100Mb/s just isn't enough.
They may have been running BGP with two T3's. :)
:)
:) It works well for them though, they're putting servers as close as you can get to the clients. Their's spiffy NOC is an office where their guys watch their stuff from.. My NOC is wherever I happen to be. :)
:)
:)
:) Rows and rows of WinNT (or Win2k, I don't remember now) DELL's. The machines were like 6u tall sitting on shelves in open racks, all inside a huge cage.. All I could keep thinking to myself was, "I could do all that with one Linux machine".. hehehee. I think I still have the unauthorized pictures stashed somewhere..
As for them having their own datacenter, don't be surprised if they don't.. Having your own datacenter is cool -n- all, but really overkill for many situations. We don't use our own, we use other providers for that. That way, we have the luxury of living in a datacenter, without actually having to run the facility. If you go somewhere like Switch&Data, you already have major providers with available bandwidth in the facility. It takes longer to do the paperwork than to actually get your connection wired up.
Don't be surprised to find out many companies don't have their own datacenters.. They may just be a cabinet or a cage in another companies datacenter. Take Akamai for example.. Read through all their stuff. Sounds really impressive.. In 3 colo facilities that I know of, they have an individual rack in each with a bunch of servers. They're easy to spot. Scan the room for a rack full of identical machines with pretty blue lights.
Someone once asked me "where's your NOC?".. I held up my phone. He asked, "Should I call them?".
"No. BoT pages 4 people if there are problems. He'll repeat the pages every 30 minutes until it's resolved."
"What about your network administration?"
"Four people can run any of the servers. Two of us do most of the work, another takes all the easier work (he's still learning), and the fourth plays boss sometimes."
"What if a server goes down at 4am?"
"Someone wakes up to the incessent ring of their pager, and fixes it. If it's one of many (like most of our servers), it doesn't really matter. If it means someone driving out to a colo, we're all within 20 minutes of our respective colo's."
"What if it's a hardware problem?"
"Then we fix it."
We thought about doing the 24/7 shifts, and crap like that. Honestly, the network runs itself, the machines maintain themselves, and normally we don't have to mess with anything. The only problems we've had lately are stupid people beating up on stupid free-hosting machines, but we just add or modify things to stop them from breaking things. For a while particular IP's would flood requests for movies, so now they're throttled, and if they try too hard they're blocked at the firewall. Last week some twits were hitting a CGI too hard, so I lowered it's threshold for abuse. Now if it thinks someone is trying, it'll slow them down. I don't see why places like SCO bitch that someone's doing a DoS against them. That's all part of the game. If they worked in porn, they'd be used to it by now.
I did get a kick out of seeing the Toys-R-Us Christmas online sales cluster-fuck a few years ago. I guess I shouldn't say which facility it was at, but it was in Manhattan.
Speaking of colo's. Pihana Pacific on 7th ave in LA has a new rule. no recording devices, no cameras.. So I went in there with my laptop bag, with my laptop, digital camera, a few hard drives, and a rats nest of cables (I just threw them in from the last colo I was at).. They "inspected" my bag, asking me what brand my laptop was, and looked at the wires. They didn't notice the camera sitting right on top of everything else.
That day, I was there to pull a bad hard drive that we had transfered data off of a fe
Some people have that kind of bandwidth available. Hell, I have 3 different places with 1Gb connections to OC192's.. Of course, we're busy serving up porn sites, and I'm not really that interested in the SCO thing..
:) A few hundred slaves on cablemodems would accomplish the same thing pretty easily.
:) Well, unless you consider >300ms and >10% packet loss good.
I do wonder if it's an irate employee of IBM, or even someone at Microsoft playing around.. Either of them probably have sufficent bandwidth to pull this off. They'd be caught pretty quickly though. It's kinda obvious when you have 10 machines on the same network doing ping -f sco.com..
I hit our networks between each other occasionally with that kind of traffic, just to see the bandwidth jump up. I'm surprised they can't handle it. I guess that's the difference between handling big porn sites, and handling SCO's needs (tee-hee).
It looks like they've changed providers since this happened, or maybe they just stopped.. Watching a DoS is kinda boring..
13 0.so-3-0-0.XL2.SLT4.ALTER.NET (152.63.102.13) 86.413 ms 49.691 ms 41.490
ms
14 186.ATM6-0.GW4.SLT4.ALTER.NET (152.63.91.249) 36.255 ms 169.646 ms 88.828
ms
15 center7-gw.customer.alter.net (157.130.166.198) 56.096 ms 88.057 ms 58.52
3 ms
16 c7pub-216-250-136-74.center7.com (216.250.136.74) 169.640 ms 73.178 ms 12
4.894 ms
17 * * *
They really should do something more creative than just flooding them with traffic. How about a good syn flood, or hammering one of their CGI's. Maybe finding a nice mail-to script on their own site, and filling the support boxes with bogus script-generated messages..
Flooding them with traffic just isn't nice to the rest of the customers on that network. What if someone else is hosted there? Or you completely mangle the ISP for that part of the country? If someone flooded a few different major networks in Florida with about 45Mb/s traffic, it would kill all of their customers in the state. I'd have customers calling from down there all the time asking why everything seemed slow, so I'd do traceroutes from around the country, and realize no one had decent ping times to them.
I'll quietly snicker while they do their evil deeds, and still say "that's not nice". I know it's annoying when people do 'em to us (it's a daily occurance).
I think that's the biggest problem with geek girls.. Us geek guys snatch them up too quick. I've never met one that complains about not being able to find a date.
At which point, you have to steal her away by impressing her with the size of your network, or the fact that your PDA can automatically steer the two of you to her favorite restraunt with connectivity, and check her mail for her.
(sometimes they get upset that you've already sniffed her network and got her passwords, but that's another story).
I'll take options 2,3,and 4..
Some of us guys are into those women.. But since you don't like them, just forward 'em over to me. hehe
Hell'z ya, geek girls exist.
:)
:)
I dated one for years.. She's probably the greatest woman I was ever with.. Honestly, we spent more time together than I ever have with anyone else.
She's a programmer, and I'm a programmer and admin. We worked in the same office for a while, but jobs change and people change companies..
But, after we weren't at the same job, we'd still hang out, and do work at home. We'd both sit in the same office at home, get work type stuff done. ICQ was most useful to get URL's tossed between our computers quickly. "Hey, check this out!" [ICQ Uh-oh].
She's the only woman who dragged *ME* to a programmers group meeting..
She always just dressed comfortably, which I thought was adorable.. But it made it a lot easier to go out.. She'd throw something on, and we'd go. It usually consisted of a girlie-shirt, jeans, and a sweater..
It was always nice knowing she knew most of her shit about computers too.. She'd play innocent "I'm a girl, I don't know anything" sometimes, but if I made her do it, she can do almost anything like a pro.. There are times we'll be in seperate places, and she'll ask how to do something on a Unix machine. I'll throw her a couple hints, then she'll call me back a half hour later, explain exactly what she did just to be sure it was all correct.
Of course, playing the innocent defenseless girl, she'd ask something silly like, "How do I change a CPU fan", but the next day I'd come over and she'd have a new server sitting on a desk that she mysteriously built out of spare parts and already installed the OS, web server, and all her customizations on..
She called me the other day. She was installing a chat software for a client, and wasn't sure she was doing it right. So, I logged into the machine, went over the whole thing, went step by step through the INSTALL file, and she had it perfect..
{sigh} She was my perfect woman..
Oh ya, and she's hot too.
Some people are hard to get over...
HELP!
The Gnomes are coming! The Gnomes are coming!
The colo just called. They're coming through the raised floors, and just appearing inside cages and cabinets! They're overrunning us!!!!
I've thrown CD's at the walls inside, at over 20 stories up.. Didn't do much but relieve stress.
"JW, What are you doing with those CD's?"
"It's ok, they're original Windows CD's. Well, they were. Now they're frisbee's! Wheeee!"
"Redbull gives you wings, eh?"
So, by using Linux, what's that make me? A terrorist?
:)
Hmmm, it's 2am, I wonder who could be knocking at my door. Two men in black suits and sunglasses. Funny.
Well, gotta run.
You've never drank a drop of alcohol, nor smoked a cigarette, but you're going to tell us, through your own experience, how much better you are than those who do.
:)
{sigh}
I was 25 before I tried a lot of things. You'd be absolutely amazed at the possibilities that are out there. I won't even begin to make a list of the illegal, immoral, or fattening things I've done.
I've seen a lot of people have their first experiences with lots of things, and ask out loud, "Why didn't I ever do this before?"
The answer is simple. They never tried it before, because some morally self rightous person told them that it was wrong.
I am the sum of my experiences. I've experienced both alcohol and tobacco.
You are the sum of your experiences. You have experienced neither.
I seriously hope the tannic acid reference was a joke.
-----
Tannic acid. (Chem.) (a) An acid obtained from nutgalls as a yellow amorphous substance, C14H10O9, having an astringent taste, and forming with ferric salts a bluish-black compound, which is the basis of common ink. Called also tannin, and gallotannic acid. (b) By extension, any one of a series of astringent substances resembling tannin proper, widely diffused through the vegetable kingdom, as in oak bark, willow, catechu, tea, coffee, etc.
-----
As for the evil chemicals in tobacco, you missed a really dangerous one, used in both tobacco and alcohol. dihydrogen monoxide.
BAN DIHYDROGEN MONOXIDE!
Dihydrogen monoxide is colorless, odorless, tasteless, and kills uncounted thousands of people every year. Most of these deaths are caused by accidental inhalation of DHMO, but the dangers of dihydrogen monoxide do not end there. Prolonged Ban me! exposure to its solid form causes severe tissue damage. Symptoms of DHMO ingestion can include excessive sweating and urination, and possibly a bloated feeling, nausea, vomiting and body electrolyte imbalance. For those who have become dependent, DHMO withdrawal means certain death.
Dihydrogen monoxide:
* is also known as hydroxl acid, and is the major component of acid rain.
* contributes to the "greenhouse effect."
* may cause severe burns.
* contributes to the erosion of our natural landscape.
* accelerates corrosion and rusting of many metals.
* may cause electrical failures and decreased effectiveness of automobile brakes.
* has been found in excised tumors of terminal cancer patients.
Despite the danger, dihydrogen monoxide is often used:
# as an industrial solvent and coolant.
# in nuclear power plants.
# in the production of styrofoam.
# as a fire retardant.
# in many forms of cruel animal research.
# in the distribution of pesticides. Even after washing, produce remains contaminated by this chemical.
# as an additive in certain "junk-foods" and other food products.
I'm sure there must be one out there, I just haven't seen one..
:) We use SMB for a lot of things. I set up a quick share between a Win2k web server, and a Linux machine, to get quick access to some files, and the performance was pathetic. I guess MS did some more "optimization" which hurt Samba again.. Luckly, it was just temporary, so I don't really care about it.
After I get my office done, I may put up a how-to, or a script that sets up for people, to make it easy.
I'm very wary of floppies.. I guess if you keep an image around somewhere, it's ok, when the media fails, you can just make another. I've never experemented with doing the bootable NIC stuff.
NFS is better than the performance of a Win2k file share, that's for sure.
I wonder if there is a Linux distribution where you stick in a boot floppy, have the workstation contact a server to
[SNIP]
Sure, anyone can do this.
I'd strongly recommend that you do install a CDRom drive, even if it's a cheap one (doable for $20) for your boot media.. Floppys simply suck. Most of them, even the name brand, have such thin cheap media on them, they fail rather quickly.
Hmmmm.. You've given me a really great idea.. We've been trying to convince the office people that they want to start using Linux.. But when it's time to format their machines, they freak the fuck out.. I'll just set up a server to let them mount to in the office, so they can just boot from a CD, and still access their old files on their hard drive. Thanks for the idea!