It's actually pretty easy to ignore the content of an email if you're focused on the email delivery process (mail server logs, the headers of forged/spam mails, things like that). Similarly, if you're doing FTP hosting or file drops for customers, you rarely need to dig into the content of the files themselves to troubleshoot upload/download problems. There are rarely reasons to dig into the content of whatever you're working on. It does come up, if (for instance) some piece of email has wacky malformed content that keep crashing the mail client, but IME those situations are uncommon.
I used to work at a mom-and-pop ISP, in a small town. Our customers included the local police and fire departments, City Hall, and most of the larger law offices and accountants' offices. Since we provided email and Web hosting (among other services), I certainly could have made some locals' lives very interesting. Hell, I had access to the email of everyone in my company, including that of the owners to whom I reported. I'll admit to having been tempted once or twice, but I'm proud to say I never abused my privilege.
Nothing beats hands-on experience, so get some on the cheap. Get an MSDN Technet subscription; for $199 a year, you'll get free personal/learning licenses of SQL Server, Exchange, and just about every other big Microsoft program. Play with them. Set them up. Try to break them, then fix them.
Many people assume their options are "cable," "DSL," and "cell." In a lot of places, especially more rural ones, there's a fourth option: fixed-wireless/WISP service. WISPA, a trade association for fixed-wireless ISPs (think wi-fi with bigger antennas), would be glad to point you towards a local WISP. (Disclaimers: I used to work for a WISP for several years, and the WISPA Web site is fairly US-centric.)
Never underestimate the patience of the dial-up user. My mother refuses to move past dial-up (mostly because I've got her a free account, whereas she'd have to pay a whoppin' ten bucks a month for DSL), and does in fact watch YouTube videos. Yes, it takes two or three hours for the video to download, but it can be done apparently.
Next to that, an extra few seconds for jQuery is nothin'.
If you're one of those rare souls interested in discussion, sign up at individual.net. It's ten Euro a year (twelve US dollars or so), decent spam filtering. No binaries groups, but some of us view this as a bonus, rather than a shortcoming.
I work for an ISP that's probably comparable (wireless, so each connection is slower than a cable connection, but there's more of them). If you want to roll your own stuff, a juicy PC with two network cards and some layer-7 rules should be doable for under $1000.
You can also buy one of these, and configure it to do the shaping for about $1500, if you want a sexy rackmount unit and support.
They work quite well for basically everything except encrypted BitTorrent (and I'm sure that's just a matter of time).
It takes a decent amount of electricity to run that much hardware. That may not be the kind of "donation" the OP had in mind - donating to the local power utility.
Start competing with your employer. If they can afford to do whatever it is they do, and still just give away thousands of dollars in gear, there's obviously room for improvement.
I assure you, the 2003 USDA funding wasn't that bad. The real problem is that nobody else, generally, cared. The telecoms applied for grant money because they always apply for grant money; in most areas, they were only given grants when nobody else bothered to apply.
(Voice of experience. The USDA RUS grant is basically the only reason I still have a job. The wireless ISP I work for was given about $70k to broadband the hell out of a small town, population 800 or so. The penetration rate is still just under 50%, but those are the people that don't even OWN a computer.)
I have a few customers with T1s, and they're paying about six times what they'd pay for my company's wireless service (which would be a faster connection to boot). Part of that is the fact that I have to pay the telco for that T1, obviously, but even without that they're still paying a LOT more than they would otherwise.
However, it's a dedicated connection from us to them. It's not a shared connection at any point (as most cable modem and wireless networks, and some weird DSL networks, are). Until it leaves my network entirely, I do my darnedest to ensure their traffic gets high priority within my network (with QOS and other similar voodoo). There's a dedicated router here, just for them, with a spare ready to be swapped over in about five minutes if the hardware should fail. (Cisco 2500s are down to about twenty bucks on eBay, why NOT have spares?)
As an aside, every T1 comes with my cell number, which means you get pretty much the best service I'm able to provide. Because I really don't want to be bugged after hours.
It's not the upload capacity, at least for my customers; they follow normal "small-business" traffic patterns where uploads are about 10% or so of their traffic.
Maybe some of it is just the novelty/prestige of saying "I have a T1," which sounds impressive because, hey, a lot of folks don't even know what that means. But most of it, I'd wager, is the fact that it's a dedicated, reliable connection (my customers' T1s have about two hours of downtime in the last four years), and sometimes that extra nine is worth it.
Given that many cell phones out there already have GPS features built-in (for E911), why can't I just pop open my phone and get MY location via GPS? If I want to know where I am, I have to go buy a Garmin or similar GPS unit, which is a hundred bucks or more, and another gadget I have to carry around.
That's seriously all my business cards say, and it's close enough to accurate for my needs.
There are systems. I operate them.
The term also has some nice BBS connotations, even though I was never a BBS sysop back in the day.
I'm about due to have some new cards printed up, and I'm thinking of putting "BOFH" after my name, like it's a professional certification. Like what some folks do with MCSE, only not.
The problem, at least at the small ISP I work for, isn't with out upstream connection; we've got bandwidth to spare in the NOC. For me, the problem is actually in the last mile. This would only work if I could buy about fifty of these caches, and deploy them at or near my POPs. I'm gonna take a wild guess and say that's not cost-effective for me.
True, but the third-party link I provided integrates all the patches directly into the installation process. Instead of installing Windows, then installing patches, you just install Windows and all the patches are already there. It's a bit quicker. If you're not doing this sort of thing very often, it's probably okay, but if you're wiping machines more than once a week, I'd say the integration is worthwhile.
If your network were bigger, you could use WSUS to keep a local repository of all the updates, so you're just downloading them once, and the WSUS server hands them out to all your local computers.
Amusingly, that's (give or take some indirection) a big part of what I'm trying to do.
We're actually trying to port our phone numbers to GlobalPOPS, which in this area is basically rebranded Level 3. The local Level 3 POP doesn't have enough lines to support my request for them to add on another 250 customers, so they're trying to get a new DS3 from Nowheresville to Major Citytown. The DS3 order has to go through... drumroll... SBC.
(There are other moves going on at the same time, and dealing with SBC directly is proving more and more annoying by the day.)
So far, this DS3 is about a month and a half behind their original estimate. Note, this whole torturous process started in December, the plan being "this'll give us four months before our existing contracts expire, so we can avoid getting bent over with month-to-month pricing on a DS3 and 300-ish phone lines." This plan has failed miserably.
I'm in exactly this kind of situation right now. I'm trying to set up a new DS3 for dialup Internet customers (lol, I know, but there are still a lot of 'em and they pay my salary), and get some numbers ported, and it's a nightmare. Our SBC sales rep of almost ten years isn't allowed to place orders, our new AT&T salesman is a nincompoop, and these processes that would have been trivial this time last year are turning into a trainwreck.
The Routerboard 200 series might work for you - they are CPU-limited like the Soekris boards, but have onboard USB and IDE (though it's the 44-pin laptop-style IDE port). If you're going for crazy paranoid reliability, you can boot from a CompactFlash drive. The 230s also have a couple of PCMCIA slots, so you could even conceivably go wireless with it. There's one SO-DIMM RAM slot on the bottom, miniPCI, and even a "regular" PCI slot (though you can't use both at once). Aside from the lack of monitor and keyboard ports, it's damn near a full-blown usable computer (and between the serial and USB ports, you can work around most of those problems).
If you're really only planning to use it as a Samba server, CPU won't be the limiting factor in all likelihood. Hard drive speed will probably be the big choke point. For power consumption, it's the same deal - the hard drive will probably use more juice than the rest of the system put together. Using a slower laptop-style drive will help that, but not too much.
You can order them in the States from WISP-Router. Make sure to get the 200 series, not the 500 series, which has more CPU but almost none of the other extras (it has a miniPCI slot and that's basically it).
Does this mean we'll finally get some decent drivers for x64?
I recently bought a new computer, and installed Windows XP x64 Edition. Out of the box, so to speak, basically none of my hardware was supported. I've found drivers for most things, but I'm presently using the lousy onboard audio because I couldn't get Audigy drivers (this seems to have been since remedied), and my Lexmark printer/scanner is still a paperweight, some six months after the OS was released.
I'd probably have better luck getting everything to work in Linux, which is an odd statement, but probably a true one.
When a user you've referred to Firefox plus Google Toolbar runs Firefox for the first time, you'll receive up to $1 in your account, depending on the user's location.
Emphasis mine.
This implies that if a user's computer has ever had Firefox installed before, it's ineligible for a referral. Also note "up to" a buck, which implies many users (I'd guess users outside of the United States, but it's not stated anywhere I can readily find) will yield less.
Edit: Found some fine print, where it explicity states the PC must never have had Firefox installed before, regardless of the presence or absence of the Google Toolbar. I imagine a LOT of folks have downloaded Firefox, played with it, then uninstalled it, which means AdSense users don't get kickbacks.
I've put up a link on my site regardless, but I'm not expecting BIG CASH PRIZES.
Slashdot Mirror
Read the System Administrators' Code of Ethics and take it to heart. Even if your job title doesn't include the words "system" or "administrator."
It's actually pretty easy to ignore the content of an email if you're focused on the email delivery process (mail server logs, the headers of forged/spam mails, things like that). Similarly, if you're doing FTP hosting or file drops for customers, you rarely need to dig into the content of the files themselves to troubleshoot upload/download problems. There are rarely reasons to dig into the content of whatever you're working on. It does come up, if (for instance) some piece of email has wacky malformed content that keep crashing the mail client, but IME those situations are uncommon.
I used to work at a mom-and-pop ISP, in a small town. Our customers included the local police and fire departments, City Hall, and most of the larger law offices and accountants' offices. Since we provided email and Web hosting (among other services), I certainly could have made some locals' lives very interesting. Hell, I had access to the email of everyone in my company, including that of the owners to whom I reported. I'll admit to having been tempted once or twice, but I'm proud to say I never abused my privilege.
As soon as they said Accelerando was "one of the best sci-fi novels of all time" I tuned out. The author clearly knows nothing about anything.
Nothing beats hands-on experience, so get some on the cheap. Get an MSDN Technet subscription; for $199 a year, you'll get free personal/learning licenses of SQL Server, Exchange, and just about every other big Microsoft program. Play with them. Set them up. Try to break them, then fix them.
Many people assume their options are "cable," "DSL," and "cell." In a lot of places, especially more rural ones, there's a fourth option: fixed-wireless/WISP service. WISPA, a trade association for fixed-wireless ISPs (think wi-fi with bigger antennas), would be glad to point you towards a local WISP. (Disclaimers: I used to work for a WISP for several years, and the WISPA Web site is fairly US-centric.)
Never underestimate the patience of the dial-up user. My mother refuses to move past dial-up (mostly because I've got her a free account, whereas she'd have to pay a whoppin' ten bucks a month for DSL), and does in fact watch YouTube videos. Yes, it takes two or three hours for the video to download, but it can be done apparently.
Next to that, an extra few seconds for jQuery is nothin'.
If you're one of those rare souls interested in discussion, sign up at individual.net. It's ten Euro a year (twelve US dollars or so), decent spam filtering. No binaries groups, but some of us view this as a bonus, rather than a shortcoming.
Throttling is dirt-cheap.
I work for an ISP that's probably comparable (wireless, so each connection is slower than a cable connection, but there's more of them). If you want to roll your own stuff, a juicy PC with two network cards and some layer-7 rules should be doable for under $1000.
You can also buy one of these, and configure it to do the shaping for about $1500, if you want a sexy rackmount unit and support.
They work quite well for basically everything except encrypted BitTorrent (and I'm sure that's just a matter of time).
It takes a decent amount of electricity to run that much hardware. That may not be the kind of "donation" the OP had in mind - donating to the local power utility.
Start competing with your employer. If they can afford to do whatever it is they do, and still just give away thousands of dollars in gear, there's obviously room for improvement.
I assure you, the 2003 USDA funding wasn't that bad. The real problem is that nobody else, generally, cared. The telecoms applied for grant money because they always apply for grant money; in most areas, they were only given grants when nobody else bothered to apply.
(Voice of experience. The USDA RUS grant is basically the only reason I still have a job. The wireless ISP I work for was given about $70k to broadband the hell out of a small town, population 800 or so. The penetration rate is still just under 50%, but those are the people that don't even OWN a computer.)
I have a few customers with T1s, and they're paying about six times what they'd pay for my company's wireless service (which would be a faster connection to boot). Part of that is the fact that I have to pay the telco for that T1, obviously, but even without that they're still paying a LOT more than they would otherwise.
However, it's a dedicated connection from us to them. It's not a shared connection at any point (as most cable modem and wireless networks, and some weird DSL networks, are). Until it leaves my network entirely, I do my darnedest to ensure their traffic gets high priority within my network (with QOS and other similar voodoo). There's a dedicated router here, just for them, with a spare ready to be swapped over in about five minutes if the hardware should fail. (Cisco 2500s are down to about twenty bucks on eBay, why NOT have spares?)
As an aside, every T1 comes with my cell number, which means you get pretty much the best service I'm able to provide. Because I really don't want to be bugged after hours.
It's not the upload capacity, at least for my customers; they follow normal "small-business" traffic patterns where uploads are about 10% or so of their traffic.
Maybe some of it is just the novelty/prestige of saying "I have a T1," which sounds impressive because, hey, a lot of folks don't even know what that means. But most of it, I'd wager, is the fact that it's a dedicated, reliable connection (my customers' T1s have about two hours of downtime in the last four years), and sometimes that extra nine is worth it.
I'm about fifty miles from the nearest EB or GameStop or whatever the hell they call themselves this week. :(
In that case, there will likely be an abundance of solar energy. At least until the hypercanes start swirling around.
Given that many cell phones out there already have GPS features built-in (for E911), why can't I just pop open my phone and get MY location via GPS? If I want to know where I am, I have to go buy a Garmin or similar GPS unit, which is a hundred bucks or more, and another gadget I have to carry around.
That's seriously all my business cards say, and it's close enough to accurate for my needs.
There are systems. I operate them.
The term also has some nice BBS connotations, even though I was never a BBS sysop back in the day.
I'm about due to have some new cards printed up, and I'm thinking of putting "BOFH" after my name, like it's a professional certification. Like what some folks do with MCSE, only not.
The problem, at least at the small ISP I work for, isn't with out upstream connection; we've got bandwidth to spare in the NOC. For me, the problem is actually in the last mile. This would only work if I could buy about fifty of these caches, and deploy them at or near my POPs. I'm gonna take a wild guess and say that's not cost-effective for me.
True, but the third-party link I provided integrates all the patches directly into the installation process. Instead of installing Windows, then installing patches, you just install Windows and all the patches are already there. It's a bit quicker. If you're not doing this sort of thing very often, it's probably okay, but if you're wiping machines more than once a week, I'd say the integration is worthwhile.
There are a multitude of ways around this.
Ghost the machines, and keep your images updated every couple of months.
Make a slipstreamed CD that includes all the current updates. This is a dead-simple way to do so..
If your network were bigger, you could use WSUS to keep a local repository of all the updates, so you're just downloading them once, and the WSUS server hands them out to all your local computers.
I always thought IT stood for "Internet Technique," until Chiyo-chan corrected me.
Amusingly, that's (give or take some indirection) a big part of what I'm trying to do.
We're actually trying to port our phone numbers to GlobalPOPS, which in this area is basically rebranded Level 3. The local Level 3 POP doesn't have enough lines to support my request for them to add on another 250 customers, so they're trying to get a new DS3 from Nowheresville to Major Citytown. The DS3 order has to go through... drumroll... SBC.
(There are other moves going on at the same time, and dealing with SBC directly is proving more and more annoying by the day.)
So far, this DS3 is about a month and a half behind their original estimate. Note, this whole torturous process started in December, the plan being "this'll give us four months before our existing contracts expire, so we can avoid getting bent over with month-to-month pricing on a DS3 and 300-ish phone lines." This plan has failed miserably.
I'm in exactly this kind of situation right now. I'm trying to set up a new DS3 for dialup Internet customers (lol, I know, but there are still a lot of 'em and they pay my salary), and get some numbers ported, and it's a nightmare. Our SBC sales rep of almost ten years isn't allowed to place orders, our new AT&T salesman is a nincompoop, and these processes that would have been trivial this time last year are turning into a trainwreck.
The Routerboard 200 series might work for you - they are CPU-limited like the Soekris boards, but have onboard USB and IDE (though it's the 44-pin laptop-style IDE port). If you're going for crazy paranoid reliability, you can boot from a CompactFlash drive. The 230s also have a couple of PCMCIA slots, so you could even conceivably go wireless with it. There's one SO-DIMM RAM slot on the bottom, miniPCI, and even a "regular" PCI slot (though you can't use both at once). Aside from the lack of monitor and keyboard ports, it's damn near a full-blown usable computer (and between the serial and USB ports, you can work around most of those problems).
If you're really only planning to use it as a Samba server, CPU won't be the limiting factor in all likelihood. Hard drive speed will probably be the big choke point. For power consumption, it's the same deal - the hard drive will probably use more juice than the rest of the system put together. Using a slower laptop-style drive will help that, but not too much.
You can order them in the States from WISP-Router. Make sure to get the 200 series, not the 500 series, which has more CPU but almost none of the other extras (it has a miniPCI slot and that's basically it).
Granted, I'm testing with IE 64-bit edition, but sheesh. Microsoft could at least pretend to support their own OS.
Does this mean we'll finally get some decent drivers for x64?
I recently bought a new computer, and installed Windows XP x64 Edition. Out of the box, so to speak, basically none of my hardware was supported. I've found drivers for most things, but I'm presently using the lousy onboard audio because I couldn't get Audigy drivers (this seems to have been since remedied), and my Lexmark printer/scanner is still a paperweight, some six months after the OS was released.
I'd probably have better luck getting everything to work in Linux, which is an odd statement, but probably a true one.
Emphasis mine.
This implies that if a user's computer has ever had Firefox installed before, it's ineligible for a referral. Also note "up to" a buck, which implies many users (I'd guess users outside of the United States, but it's not stated anywhere I can readily find) will yield less.
Edit: Found some fine print, where it explicity states the PC must never have had Firefox installed before, regardless of the presence or absence of the Google Toolbar. I imagine a LOT of folks have downloaded Firefox, played with it, then uninstalled it, which means AdSense users don't get kickbacks.
I've put up a link on my site regardless, but I'm not expecting BIG CASH PRIZES.