I'm opposed to price-oriented non-neutral networks, your ISP charging Google for your high speed access to them. But a non-neutral network that does proper QOS by throttling bandwidth-heavy protocols that don't behave themselves on the network is acceptable. As long as the QOS only moves the throttled protocols down when needed.
Thank You!
I work for an ISP, and net neutrality scares the hell out of me. We do not want to, and will not throttle back certain sites who won't pay us for premium access, or create a tiered pricing structure for our customers. What I want, is the right to manage my network to give my customers the best performance by de-prioritizing badly written, and poorly behaving protocols, AKA: 99% of all p2p stuff.
We also don't want to see content providers shift their bandwidth costs onto the ISP networks via the use of p2p. Why pay for expensive backbone links when you can shove 50% or more of your bandwidth onto your customers, and their provider's network? Either let us ISPs manage our networks, or we will start charging for upload bandwidth on a usage basis. I really don't want to do this, but if net neutrality becomes a reality, I see this becoming a very popular way to save on bandwidth costs. Blizzard already does it, patches for World of Warcraft are distributed via bittorrent. Why they think it is appropriate for their service to be offloaded onto my network is beyond me, but they do. When I can't rate limit bittorrent, and it becomes a huge bandwidth hog, my customers that patronize services that are the source of the problem will see their bills go up.
Thank you, I finally read a post from someone who gets it. I didn't think that would ever happen.
Oh, and any replies to the effect of, "well, its your own fault for not having enough bandwidth" can just go eat a dick. I have bandwidth, and that is not the point. The point is content providers should provide their own bandwidth, not leach it from the ISPs in the name of the heavenly, super great, don't ever question it, p2p software demi-god.
You're wrong. Sometimes you do. For example, bipolar disorder sufferers, and those who suffer repeated relapses when taken off of antidepressants.
Hi! I'm a bi-polar sufferer. I'm doing very well for myself, off meds.
The pills were designed as a crutch, sure someone si going to need that crutch for the rest of their lives, but with proper therapy, most people could recover. The problem is, a lot of people don't want to go to therapy, they just want a pill to make it all better, that is not how they work. For me, the pills leveled me off, the therapy got me thinking about what I needed to change about myself to deal with my own extreme personality shifts. I got off the pills, had a few relapses, but I came out clean on the other side. Been off meds for 5 years now. My father bit the dust, and I just dealt with it, I learned how to escape the relapse cycle, and I was once described as an extreme case.
Don't believe me? Ask any older shrink, they will agree with me, "they were never designed for lifelong consumption." The design hasn't changed, but the marketing sure has.
I think part of the problem is, these pills are being used as permanent fixes for depression. They are not happy pills, they are 'anti sad' pills. Taking anti-depressants is not like taking insulin, you do not need to be on them for the rest of your life. They are a crutch to be combined with cognitive therapy, they get you on your feet just enough to respond to other forms of therapy. When you are ready, you go off the meds, and stay with the shrink for a while. Learn your triggers, learn how to adjust your thought patterns, learn to avoid that deep black hole. The pills will not get you out of that hole, but they will turn your head upwards, and let you see the light.
Unfortunately, the pharmaceuticals have discovered there is a huge land of money in marketing these pills as life long necessities. There is almost no one with a chronic case of depression, given proper treatment, that cannot recover. The pills aren't even designed for long term consumption. No one ever stays on one pill for long, the side effects become unbearable, or you get used to the positive effects, and your doctor recommends a new one. Each switch brings a new painful cycle, because none of them work at all until they "build up in your system." This article makes me wonder if they do anything good, except of course "headache, nausea, fatigue, sexual side effects, oily discharge and vomiting."
Yes, you are correct on all points, my frustration is with the belief that a T1 is a lot of things it is not. Most people believe 100mbit Ethernet is slower than a T1, that it is somehow this amazingly fast ultimate god of connections. In today's market, a T1 is a slow, over priced relic of a by-gone era. For the same money, you could order an ethernet loop at 5mbit up and down. You get the guaranteed bandwidth, the reliability of a commercial circuit, the 100% balls to the wall control over how the bandwidth is shaped, all the stuff you just said, probably save a few bucks a month in the end, or at least break even.
Unless you live in some backwater little berg, you should almost never be caught dead ordering a T1 loop. Modern technology can deliver more capacity and reliability, at a lower cost.
Of course, clients get nowhere near this performance in everyday usage.
Of course not, high bandwidth does not mean that every connection you make will be fast, it is more about capacity. The fastest download you will get from any given host on the internet is determined by the slowest link between those two points. If you have a 10 mbit connection, but the file you want sits on a server behind a T1 line, you will receive that file at a maximum of 1.5 mbit, probably less, as congestion has to come into account as well.
(This can be quite annoying when trying to determine whether a client needs to switch over to a T1 or if their current ISP will suffice.)
1) You do realize that a T1 is a fairly slow connection by modern standards right? It caps out at a flat 1.5 mbit down/up, no burst (which I will come to in a second) If they are getting _anything_ over 1.5 mbit down, it is not in their interests to switch.
2) you have heard of MRTG right, graph their asctual usage, see what they actually use/need.
Upon further investigation, it appears that Comcast is delivering this bandwidth only for a few seconds after any new request and it is immediately throttled down.
This is not some dark hidden secret of Comcast, this is called burstable bandwidth. Almost all last mile technology supports this, and most networks use it. It is great for sending that message with the big attachment, or downloading a decent sized file.
Is there any valid reason why Comcast would front-load transfers in this way, or is it merely an effort to prevent end-users from being able to assess their bandwidth accurately?
God you are paranoid. Burstable bandwidth also has the happy side effect of making sure that no one connection will saturate the link. Connections that take too long are slowed down, freeing up bandwidth on the customer's circuit so they still have nice and fast browsing. This is about improving the quality of service, you have put such a spin on it in your own head, you just cannot see it.
Does anybody know of other ISPs using similar practices?
Yes, mine, your precious speakeasy, time warner, verizon, sprint, earthlink, mom and pop ISP 1, mom and pop ISP 2, mom and pop ISP N. We all do this! It says very clearly in most ISP contracts what your actual service is is rated at. So much down sustained bandwidth, so much burstable for X number of seconds.
Vendors assume you are ignorant of their products, especially as how it pertains to your own environment. Try it sometime, call a vendor and say, "I'd like to order 2 _vendor_ _model_, with X numbers of these add-ons, can I get a quote?" You won't get a quote for anything you ordered if the price tag is over a couple hundred bucks. They will happily sell you the little stuff, but the minute you order a large product, you become an idiot to them, who has to be walked through a slow and tedious process of "carefully examining your situation to ensure we find the right fit." yeah, shutup asshole. I researched this a ton, I know what this product will do, what I need it to do, I have found your 'right fit,' just quote me a price and lets get on with this. I do not need a four way phone conversation between you, the manufacturer's sales guy, and two techs explaining me a pile of stuff I already know. You are not going to sell me a product that is 10 times my expected price, I am not an idiot, when I said I wanted model Y, I meant "I want model Y!" not, "I am an idiot, and if you sweet talk me hard enough, I'll by the YY2000eleventyOverpoweredDontNeedItonlyMoronsBUyThis model"
So yeah, fuck Vendors, we do 99% of our stuff in house, we are a FreeBSD shop with a ton of custom code. I like it this way, it keeps me off the phone with sales guys and snobby support techs. When it breaks, I fix it, not pick up the phone and pray they aren't having a high call volume.
The morons definitely, the 24/7 leechers just get a phone call asking them to tame it down a little, and they usually do. We don't mind some, but leaving limewire run 24/7, especially when it is just sitting idle, still effects the network, as the gnutella protocol is very noisy.
Very rare is the day where we actually have to enforce our bandwidth rules on anyone. We do our bandwidth backwards, guaranteed minimum of what we will provide, and burst above that, to whatever the device is actually capable of. I run a Canopy WISP, it is just easier to say, "Our service is guaranteed to provide 1.5 mbit down, but don't be surprised if you end up getting 4 or 5 mbit down."
In the event that we cannot get a person to tame down their file sharing habits, we enforce the actual bandwidth provided, where you were getting high burst pretty much all the time, you are now getting exactly what you paid for, and no more. Usually, people get the message.
Leechers might take 5 minutes out of our day to deal with, increase our bandwidth bills, and force us to upgrade network infrastructure at a fairly aggressive pace, but morons cause tumors to grow in your head. Doctors ain't cheap!
...5% who use 50% of the resources (if that's a real number)...
Um, I'd say that is accurate, I run an ISP, and without getting out my graphs and doing some basic math, I am tempted to say that is a _conservative_ estimate.
It is the same in tech support, 5% of my customers are the morons I hear from on a weekly basis. They account for about 75% of my total time spent on the phone.
I've said this a dozen times in related articles, but I'll say it again.
802.11 is the flat out, 100%, god awful, worst solution for last mile delivery. I work for a wisp that uses Canopy products, and we just laugh at the 802.11 competition. 802.11 performance degrades the more people you stuff on an access point. The limited channels, and the fact that they scream over each other forces competing networks to get into AMP powered frequency wars. The fact that only channels 1, 6 and 11 are clear from each other makes splitting an access tower to more than three 120 degree sectors pretty much impossible. And neighboring towers will interfere with each other. Oh, and because of how 802.11 does time sharing, essentially Ethernet collision detection with a few hacks on top, one nasty user can monopolize 95% of the available bandwidth for himself without much effort. And this is just my experience in the countryside, where we have few competitors to the last remnants of 802.11 we still have deployed. The reason no one can make money deploying 802.11 on a massive scale is because operationally speaking, it costs a bloody fortune to maintain.
Just because Moto's canopy is proprietary doesn't make it bad. They have been very good to us, old client radios work with newer access points, whenever a new generation of access points comes out, they have an awesome trade up deal that lasts for months, giving us plenty of time to give our customers the best speed available, without breaking the bank in one mass upgrade. There is an active 3rd party mailing list, that Moto monitors and responds to, an entire community of support from end ISPs, and mountains of documentation.
Do wireless right, make money, do it 802.11, and spend hours on the phone with irritated users who want to switch back to dialup.
Find a 900mhz Motorola Canopy provider. Their canopy line is far superior to any 802.11 offering for last mile delivery, and the 900mhz spectrum radios are ideally suited for non line of site situations.
All the knee-jerk comments about 'do your job, be a parent' miss the point, and serve only to gratify the poster's ego and holier-than-thou self-image. So, it is not the parent's job to police their children's activities? So, if the kid comes over to my yard and vandelizes my car, is it my fault for putting my car in a place where someone else's child can destroy it? Way to pass blame, you are the modern parent, if your children are so perfect and angelic, why do you expect the rest of the world to police their activities when you have demonstrated that you will not do so? They are your kids, this is your rule, why do I have to enforce it?
This is a real problem, and it is criminal there is no good solution, such as an xxx domain. Define porn, define porn in an international sense. From place to place, you will get a widely different answer. The xxx domain is purely pointless, will solve nothing, and is just another example of, "the world should police my children for me" attitude of the modern breeder. If created, _some_ porno sites will be on the xxx domain, some won't, and you people will whine and bitch, and moan that the precious, and always right, and never evil U.S. government didn't pass yet another wonderful law that limits personal freedom is some small way that was good enough for you. Guess what? Some of us don't want to be regulated by other peoples' rules.
Why can't I buy internet service from some provider that blocks at least 99.9% if not 100% of porn? Why hasnt the 'free market' given me that choice? The, and re is something wrong here. There is a market for this type of service yet it doesnt exist. Why not? Is it because Comcast relies on porn for their profits? It would seem to be so, judging by their cable line-up. I run an ISP and no there isn't. For every 1 subscriber call I get wanting us to filter this or that, I have 300 who don't give a shit, and another 25 who are vehemently (not to mention vocally) aware of their rights and responsibilities as consumers, and do not want me, their service provider, playing big brother. I deliver internet service, I want to deliver internet service, my customers do not want filtered access, nor do I want to deliver filtered access. The market has spoken.
I actually ran across a reasonable solution some 3 years ago where a router mfr had bundled a proxy server in there router so all web page loads were checked at a remote server first before being served to the client browser. It worked pretty good. But this service went away, and is apparently no longer available. If you found it effective, then your kids were probably laughing at you behind your back. No technological solution is going to cure what is a social issue. If your children want to look at porn, they will find a way. If you actively try to stop them, they will try harder. The social problem isn't the porn, rather our societies puritanical view of sex. These children are growing up, they are asserting their independence for the first time, and they need to explore their sexuality. Your solution is to say, "no, you aren't ready to have independence, and you aren't allowed to be a sexual creature. Someone else, make sure that stays true until I am ready to admit that my child has grown up!" Great solution bub, every chance they get to defy you, they will do so. No technology is going to save your children from the dangerous boobies.
I can see this method being very valuable for a private network, or a corporate network when the IT gods have ultimate say over network operations. But I run an ISP, I am in the business of giving people choices, not telling them what to do. Occasionally, I try to poke them with a stick in one direction or another, which is the end goal of my idea. But if I just grabbed all ntp traffic at my core, and forced it to my own time servers, someone would eventually have a cow about it.
Customers make no sense, you send them email, they want the spam gone. You filter the spam, they hate the increased wait time between send and receipt. They get virus mails, they bitch, you install clamav, they get mad when it catches a zip file full of their daughter's baby pictures and the peacomm virus. You DNS blackhole a certain truly lame social networking site for 4 hours as an April fools day joke..... I guess they had the right to bitch about that. Then you turn around and offer to upgrade them to a faster, cheaper service for no install fee, and they drag their heels for six months. They make no sense, and when it comes to network changes that they were clueless about five minutes prior to it happening. They will bitch for the sake of bitching.
Unlike a partnership with Akamai, there's no compelling monetary reason for an ISP to offer their own NTP server. Therefore, the easiest (least costly) solution -- at the ISP end -- is probably the most likely to win. Adding a line to dhcpd.conf is probably easier than configuring BIND to issue lies.
Actually, having some local source of consistent time is pretty much a no brainer on any network that wants logs to be sane, NFS to work correctly, or has any services that require more than one server to run. I really don't mind running them, and letting my customers know. Oh, customer computers that have an accurate clock are far less likely to be obnoxious as all hell when they get email from the future, or way in the past. No, I am not kidding, time.microsoft.com is a good thing in that it got rid of one kind of very pathetic support call.
But I guess the most glaring problem to me is that, surprisingly often, the ISP's own DNS servers are slow and/or broken, and overridden. Much of Roadrunner's network is, for instance, assigned DNS servers which are so slow that when browsing the web, more time is spent on simple DNS lookups than on downloading and rendering content.
This, in turn, causes people like me to use a different DNS server on a different network. In my case, I use Level3's DNS at 4.2.2.1 because it is easy to remember and quite fast. Your suggestion ties together DNS and NTP inextricably, such that I'd also be using L3's NTP server by default, when all I really wanted was different DNS.
Wow, that is just pathetic. DNS is not hard to run, and 4.2.2.1 _is_ a slow name server that drops traffic from non level3 customers whenever it gets overloaded. I had a T1 customer who had some moron for a consultant who didn't think we _had_ our own DNS servers. Case and Point, he never asked.... checked our webpage, or used whois on our domain name. I was over there to upgrade them to a Metro Ethernet link, and nothing was working due to DNS failing. Consultants are stupid. If their DNS sucks, you can probably bet they skimped out on the NTP server budget, or didn't bother. Read on for my solution.
Remember, the whole point of this is to eliminate end-user manual NTP client configuration, and reduce network load, while offering the useful service of providing accurate time. And I can only hope that, after all of this, network-attached devices of all types will use this mechanism (whatever it is) to automatically derive time from a nearby NTP server.
You are missing the key point of my suggestion, which is that we set aside a DNS name space for anyone who wants to use it, but also leave aside the existing space for those who do not.
Some of these devices will be reconfigurable to use whatever NTP server the user wants (certainly, my Linux box is), but hopefully some simpler devices will not be (think print server, networked DVR, WiFi LCD picture frame, or other minimally-configured box).
Good lord, I hope that is never the case. I hate it when they cut config options out of end user devices. You go on and on about choice, then hope simple device don't grant you choice? Please pick a side. What if your ISP does provide a DHCP configured NTP that server that is off by 12 minutes. Do you want that lack of choice now?
If a standard method for propogating NTP server names to end-users ever does get implemented, I shouldn't have to run a local copy of BIND and my own regimine of poison, just to allow independant settings for both DNS and NTP servers.
So, hear me out, because you have missed what I have tried to infer.
Currently, ntp.org has 0.pool.ntp.org, 1.pool.ntp.org and 2.pool.ntp.org. I propose that those remain in their current form. I also propose that 3 new ones be created: 0.overload.ntp.org, 1.overload.ntp.org, and 2.overload.ntp.org. ntp.org answers queries to this zone with the exact same answers it would give for the original pool. Any ISP that wishes to send over
Because the number one rule of infrastructure is, "never trust the client." Peer to peer networks are full of malware/trojans/assholes, and generally far too easy to infiltrate with unwanteds.
And while I agree with your sentiment that I can live time being off by a little, I also run a lot of UNIX servers that use NFS heavily. I am far more concerned with all of my network machines agreeing on what time it is on my network, than being correct with the world. I sync two dedicated time servers to the ntp.org pools (soon to be three), and all my internal hosts sync to those two. Being synced with the world is very handy, and generally I would prefer it. But being in agreement with myself is non-negotiable, I just need it.
Is it really poisoning when it is done by a bunch of networks intentionally agreeing on a set policy that is expected by the authoritative source?
Akamai does something weird that allows them to spread their subscribers' sites over a variety of networks that may or may not qualify as DNS poisoning, I suppose I could come up with something better based off their ideas. I've never looked into how the nitty gritty of their service works (we were already using it successfully when I came on board), but customers on my network going to yahoo.com will prefer the Akamai boxes on my network over the true source, or any other Akamai boxes on other networks. Which is basically what I am saying we should aim for, as opposed to the current shotgun approach.
My issues with your DHCP suggestions are twofold. For starters, not all DHCP clients honor the extra fields for ntp servers, among other things. Secondly, not everyone uses DHCP, plenty of other ways to get an IP address in this world. But everyone uses DNS.
But I do agree that we cannot just arbitrarily poison DNS. Needs some thought, but almost anything could be better than the current shotgun approach.
Oh, I understand that completely. But if the pool was a series of generic entries that individual carriers could overload in DNS if they wanted to, then all those netgear routers could default to the pool, and would take advantage of this on the networks by people who care (like me), and still have the defaults to fall back on for less helpful networks. This would allow zero configuration for the end user, unless they had a specific time server they wanted to query.
I think that a better method could be used to encourage diversity. They should take a page from the root DNS servers, or Akamai. Either use BGP anycast, which is what most of the root dns servers do now, which will probably never happen. Or, have a zone that network carriers should use on their local DNS servers, and by way of DNS lookups, encourage their customers to use. ntp.org has a default set of values for say time.overload.ntp.org that reflects the current pool. But I, as an ISP make my DNS servers directly answer queries for overload.ntp.org, and make entires such as:
time IN A 1.2.3.4 time IN A 1.2.3.5
where 1.2.3.4 and 1.2.3.5 are ntp servers on my local network. I don't allow people off my network to query my DNS servers for recursive queries, and the ntp.org DNS servers never tell anyone to use my name servers for this space anyways. This would mean that only my customers that use my DNS servers (about 99%) of them, would ever get answers for my time servers, and they would definitely be close.
And anyone whose network carrier doesn't bother to set this up, still gets generic answers from ntp.org. This works much better than just a big pool full of 1000 servers worldwide, even if you bother to use the country code dns regions, you still aren't always getting an ntp server anywhere near you.
Great beer drinking game, I wish they would make games along those lines. Two player cooperative puzzle/action. It was a great idea that never attracted more than a cult following.
My girlfriend was one of the number's stolen, the state has graciously offered to buy her a year of ID protection. Cause yeah, after a year, this problem goes away. She is going to have to pay for the service for years after this, just for peace of mind. Thanks you so much, we didn't need this stress. You know how much beer I can buy with a year's worth of ID theft prevention? Enough to get me drunk _several_ times buddy, yeah, you are killing my buzz already!
You know what they say, "if an intern triples your workload, consider yourself lucky."
A was leery of those at first, but several of my techie friends at a recent tech show raved about them, so we have started recommending them. We try not to endorse a certain brand, but some people balk at our, "Anything but Linksys" attitude, so we have to tell them something.
You don't actually think I talk to my customers this way do you? I'm ranting and being sarcastic because no matter how nice and courteous we are to new subscribers asking about routers, they go to Bets Buy, and end up walking out with the Linksys we told them not to buy. That, and this is slashdot, not some customer of mine, I can say whatever I want, and it will not effect my sales. I wouldn't be in business another day if I was this rude and crude on the phone.
Anymore, I think I have a pretty good pitch for people who ask, we don't like to endorse any particular brand, so simply saying, "Anything but a Linksys" isn't all that effective, I may call my customers idiots, but if you explain why they used to be good routers, and are now notorious for instability now, they do tend to understand.
The best thing I see coming from this, there will longer be a Linksys WRT54G. After revision 5, it has to be the single crappiest router in history, amplified by the fact that all the chums at Best Buy own pre-version 5 routers, which are rock solid, and have no idea why I insist that any recent release is pure shit. They constantly tell my customers that it is the finest router money can buy, and my customers, being the idiots they are, listen to the minimum wage dumbass patrol at Best Buy instead of their ISP. Why people think a sales monkey knows more about networking than a networking guy, I'll never know. The end result is always the same, their service is fine, the router I told them not to buy locks up every damned day, and this is somehow my fault.
Even if Cisco releases the same router with a new brand name, there is a good chance that the sales drones won't recognize it, and I can stop saying, "I told you so," to my customers.
Okay, I will grant you that some of the discussions that spawned as a result of this article were fairly useful, but the original article itself was a pointless bit of geeky paranoia without any real evidence to back any of the ludicrous claims the write made.
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I'm opposed to price-oriented non-neutral networks, your ISP charging Google for your high speed access to them. But a non-neutral network that does proper QOS by throttling bandwidth-heavy protocols that don't behave themselves on the network is acceptable. As long as the QOS only moves the throttled protocols down when needed.
Thank You!I work for an ISP, and net neutrality scares the hell out of me. We do not want to, and will not throttle back certain sites who won't pay us for premium access, or create a tiered pricing structure for our customers. What I want, is the right to manage my network to give my customers the best performance by de-prioritizing badly written, and poorly behaving protocols, AKA: 99% of all p2p stuff.
We also don't want to see content providers shift their bandwidth costs onto the ISP networks via the use of p2p. Why pay for expensive backbone links when you can shove 50% or more of your bandwidth onto your customers, and their provider's network? Either let us ISPs manage our networks, or we will start charging for upload bandwidth on a usage basis. I really don't want to do this, but if net neutrality becomes a reality, I see this becoming a very popular way to save on bandwidth costs. Blizzard already does it, patches for World of Warcraft are distributed via bittorrent. Why they think it is appropriate for their service to be offloaded onto my network is beyond me, but they do. When I can't rate limit bittorrent, and it becomes a huge bandwidth hog, my customers that patronize services that are the source of the problem will see their bills go up.
Thank you, I finally read a post from someone who gets it. I didn't think that would ever happen.
Oh, and any replies to the effect of, "well, its your own fault for not having enough bandwidth" can just go eat a dick. I have bandwidth, and that is not the point. The point is content providers should provide their own bandwidth, not leach it from the ISPs in the name of the heavenly, super great, don't ever question it, p2p software demi-god.
Man, I got way off target there.
Hi! I'm a bi-polar sufferer. I'm doing very well for myself, off meds.
The pills were designed as a crutch, sure someone si going to need that crutch for the rest of their lives, but with proper therapy, most people could recover. The problem is, a lot of people don't want to go to therapy, they just want a pill to make it all better, that is not how they work. For me, the pills leveled me off, the therapy got me thinking about what I needed to change about myself to deal with my own extreme personality shifts. I got off the pills, had a few relapses, but I came out clean on the other side. Been off meds for 5 years now. My father bit the dust, and I just dealt with it, I learned how to escape the relapse cycle, and I was once described as an extreme case.
Don't believe me? Ask any older shrink, they will agree with me, "they were never designed for lifelong consumption." The design hasn't changed, but the marketing sure has.
I think part of the problem is, these pills are being used as permanent fixes for depression. They are not happy pills, they are 'anti sad' pills. Taking anti-depressants is not like taking insulin, you do not need to be on them for the rest of your life. They are a crutch to be combined with cognitive therapy, they get you on your feet just enough to respond to other forms of therapy. When you are ready, you go off the meds, and stay with the shrink for a while. Learn your triggers, learn how to adjust your thought patterns, learn to avoid that deep black hole. The pills will not get you out of that hole, but they will turn your head upwards, and let you see the light.
Unfortunately, the pharmaceuticals have discovered there is a huge land of money in marketing these pills as life long necessities. There is almost no one with a chronic case of depression, given proper treatment, that cannot recover. The pills aren't even designed for long term consumption. No one ever stays on one pill for long, the side effects become unbearable, or you get used to the positive effects, and your doctor recommends a new one. Each switch brings a new painful cycle, because none of them work at all until they "build up in your system." This article makes me wonder if they do anything good, except of course "headache, nausea, fatigue, sexual side effects, oily discharge and vomiting."
And WTF is oily discharge?
Yes, you are correct on all points, my frustration is with the belief that a T1 is a lot of things it is not. Most people believe 100mbit Ethernet is slower than a T1, that it is somehow this amazingly fast ultimate god of connections. In today's market, a T1 is a slow, over priced relic of a by-gone era. For the same money, you could order an ethernet loop at 5mbit up and down. You get the guaranteed bandwidth, the reliability of a commercial circuit, the 100% balls to the wall control over how the bandwidth is shaped, all the stuff you just said, probably save a few bucks a month in the end, or at least break even.
Unless you live in some backwater little berg, you should almost never be caught dead ordering a T1 loop. Modern technology can deliver more capacity and reliability, at a lower cost.
Of course not, high bandwidth does not mean that every connection you make will be fast, it is more about capacity. The fastest download you will get from any given host on the internet is determined by the slowest link between those two points. If you have a 10 mbit connection, but the file you want sits on a server behind a T1 line, you will receive that file at a maximum of 1.5 mbit, probably less, as congestion has to come into account as well.
1) You do realize that a T1 is a fairly slow connection by modern standards right? It caps out at a flat 1.5 mbit down/up, no burst (which I will come to in a second) If they are getting _anything_ over 1.5 mbit down, it is not in their interests to switch.
2) you have heard of MRTG right, graph their asctual usage, see what they actually use/need.
This is not some dark hidden secret of Comcast, this is called burstable bandwidth. Almost all last mile technology supports this, and most networks use it. It is great for sending that message with the big attachment, or downloading a decent sized file.
God you are paranoid. Burstable bandwidth also has the happy side effect of making sure that no one connection will saturate the link. Connections that take too long are slowed down, freeing up bandwidth on the customer's circuit so they still have nice and fast browsing. This is about improving the quality of service, you have put such a spin on it in your own head, you just cannot see it.
Yes, mine, your precious speakeasy, time warner, verizon, sprint, earthlink, mom and pop ISP 1, mom and pop ISP 2, mom and pop ISP N. We all do this! It says very clearly in most ISP contracts what your actual service is is rated at. So much down sustained bandwidth, so much burstable for X number of seconds.
Vendors assume you are ignorant of their products, especially as how it pertains to your own environment. Try it sometime, call a vendor and say, "I'd like to order 2 _vendor_ _model_, with X numbers of these add-ons, can I get a quote?" You won't get a quote for anything you ordered if the price tag is over a couple hundred bucks. They will happily sell you the little stuff, but the minute you order a large product, you become an idiot to them, who has to be walked through a slow and tedious process of "carefully examining your situation to ensure we find the right fit." yeah, shutup asshole. I researched this a ton, I know what this product will do, what I need it to do, I have found your 'right fit,' just quote me a price and lets get on with this. I do not need a four way phone conversation between you, the manufacturer's sales guy, and two techs explaining me a pile of stuff I already know. You are not going to sell me a product that is 10 times my expected price, I am not an idiot, when I said I wanted model Y, I meant "I want model Y!" not, "I am an idiot, and if you sweet talk me hard enough, I'll by the YY2000eleventyOverpoweredDontNeedItonlyMoronsBUyThis model"
So yeah, fuck Vendors, we do 99% of our stuff in house, we are a FreeBSD shop with a ton of custom code. I like it this way, it keeps me off the phone with sales guys and snobby support techs. When it breaks, I fix it, not pick up the phone and pray they aren't having a high call volume.
The morons definitely, the 24/7 leechers just get a phone call asking them to tame it down a little, and they usually do. We don't mind some, but leaving limewire run 24/7, especially when it is just sitting idle, still effects the network, as the gnutella protocol is very noisy.
Very rare is the day where we actually have to enforce our bandwidth rules on anyone. We do our bandwidth backwards, guaranteed minimum of what we will provide, and burst above that, to whatever the device is actually capable of. I run a Canopy WISP, it is just easier to say, "Our service is guaranteed to provide 1.5 mbit down, but don't be surprised if you end up getting 4 or 5 mbit down."
In the event that we cannot get a person to tame down their file sharing habits, we enforce the actual bandwidth provided, where you were getting high burst pretty much all the time, you are now getting exactly what you paid for, and no more. Usually, people get the message.
Leechers might take 5 minutes out of our day to deal with, increase our bandwidth bills, and force us to upgrade network infrastructure at a fairly aggressive pace, but morons cause tumors to grow in your head. Doctors ain't cheap!
Um, I'd say that is accurate, I run an ISP, and without getting out my graphs and doing some basic math, I am tempted to say that is a _conservative_ estimate.
It is the same in tech support, 5% of my customers are the morons I hear from on a weekly basis. They account for about 75% of my total time spent on the phone.
I've said this a dozen times in related articles, but I'll say it again.
802.11 is the flat out, 100%, god awful, worst solution for last mile delivery. I work for a wisp that uses Canopy products, and we just laugh at the 802.11 competition. 802.11 performance degrades the more people you stuff on an access point. The limited channels, and the fact that they scream over each other forces competing networks to get into AMP powered frequency wars. The fact that only channels 1, 6 and 11 are clear from each other makes splitting an access tower to more than three 120 degree sectors pretty much impossible. And neighboring towers will interfere with each other. Oh, and because of how 802.11 does time sharing, essentially Ethernet collision detection with a few hacks on top, one nasty user can monopolize 95% of the available bandwidth for himself without much effort. And this is just my experience in the countryside, where we have few competitors to the last remnants of 802.11 we still have deployed. The reason no one can make money deploying 802.11 on a massive scale is because operationally speaking, it costs a bloody fortune to maintain.
Just because Moto's canopy is proprietary doesn't make it bad. They have been very good to us, old client radios work with newer access points, whenever a new generation of access points comes out, they have an awesome trade up deal that lasts for months, giving us plenty of time to give our customers the best speed available, without breaking the bank in one mass upgrade. There is an active 3rd party mailing list, that Moto monitors and responds to, an entire community of support from end ISPs, and mountains of documentation.
Do wireless right, make money, do it 802.11, and spend hours on the phone with irritated users who want to switch back to dialup.
#1. More terrorists?
#2. More crooked cops? #3. More people in a position of power who think they are above some laws because they know best.
Find a 900mhz Motorola Canopy provider. Their canopy line is far superior to any 802.11 offering for last mile delivery, and the 900mhz spectrum radios are ideally suited for non line of site situations.
I can see this method being very valuable for a private network, or a corporate network when the IT gods have ultimate say over network operations. But I run an ISP, I am in the business of giving people choices, not telling them what to do. Occasionally, I try to poke them with a stick in one direction or another, which is the end goal of my idea. But if I just grabbed all ntp traffic at my core, and forced it to my own time servers, someone would eventually have a cow about it.
Customers make no sense, you send them email, they want the spam gone. You filter the spam, they hate the increased wait time between send and receipt. They get virus mails, they bitch, you install clamav, they get mad when it catches a zip file full of their daughter's baby pictures and the peacomm virus. You DNS blackhole a certain truly lame social networking site for 4 hours as an April fools day joke..... I guess they had the right to bitch about that. Then you turn around and offer to upgrade them to a faster, cheaper service for no install fee, and they drag their heels for six months. They make no sense, and when it comes to network changes that they were clueless about five minutes prior to it happening. They will bitch for the sake of bitching.
Unlike a partnership with Akamai, there's no compelling monetary reason for an ISP to offer their own NTP server. Therefore, the easiest (least costly) solution -- at the ISP end -- is probably the most likely to win. Adding a line to dhcpd.conf is probably easier than configuring BIND to issue lies.
Actually, having some local source of consistent time is pretty much a no brainer on any network that wants logs to be sane, NFS to work correctly, or has any services that require more than one server to run. I really don't mind running them, and letting my customers know. Oh, customer computers that have an accurate clock are far less likely to be obnoxious as all hell when they get email from the future, or way in the past. No, I am not kidding, time.microsoft.com is a good thing in that it got rid of one kind of very pathetic support call.
But I guess the most glaring problem to me is that, surprisingly often, the ISP's own DNS servers are slow and/or broken, and overridden. Much of Roadrunner's network is, for instance, assigned DNS servers which are so slow that when browsing the web, more time is spent on simple DNS lookups than on downloading and rendering content.
This, in turn, causes people like me to use a different DNS server on a different network. In my case, I use Level3's DNS at 4.2.2.1 because it is easy to remember and quite fast. Your suggestion ties together DNS and NTP inextricably, such that I'd also be using L3's NTP server by default, when all I really wanted was different DNS.
Wow, that is just pathetic. DNS is not hard to run, and 4.2.2.1 _is_ a slow name server that drops traffic from non level3 customers whenever it gets overloaded. I had a T1 customer who had some moron for a consultant who didn't think we _had_ our own DNS servers. Case and Point, he never asked.... checked our webpage, or used whois on our domain name. I was over there to upgrade them to a Metro Ethernet link, and nothing was working due to DNS failing. Consultants are stupid. If their DNS sucks, you can probably bet they skimped out on the NTP server budget, or didn't bother. Read on for my solution.
Remember, the whole point of this is to eliminate end-user manual NTP client configuration, and reduce network load, while offering the useful service of providing accurate time. And I can only hope that, after all of this, network-attached devices of all types will use this mechanism (whatever it is) to automatically derive time from a nearby NTP server.
You are missing the key point of my suggestion, which is that we set aside a DNS name space for anyone who wants to use it, but also leave aside the existing space for those who do not.
Some of these devices will be reconfigurable to use whatever NTP server the user wants (certainly, my Linux box is), but hopefully some simpler devices will not be (think print server, networked DVR, WiFi LCD picture frame, or other minimally-configured box).
Good lord, I hope that is never the case. I hate it when they cut config options out of end user devices. You go on and on about choice, then hope simple device don't grant you choice? Please pick a side. What if your ISP does provide a DHCP configured NTP that server that is off by 12 minutes. Do you want that lack of choice now?
If a standard method for propogating NTP server names to end-users ever does get implemented, I shouldn't have to run a local copy of BIND and my own regimine of poison, just to allow independant settings for both DNS and NTP servers.
So, hear me out, because you have missed what I have tried to infer.
Currently, ntp.org has 0.pool.ntp.org, 1.pool.ntp.org and 2.pool.ntp.org. I propose that those remain in their current form. I also propose that 3 new ones be created: 0.overload.ntp.org, 1.overload.ntp.org, and 2.overload.ntp.org. ntp.org answers queries to this zone with the exact same answers it would give for the original pool. Any ISP that wishes to send over
Because the number one rule of infrastructure is, "never trust the client." Peer to peer networks are full of malware/trojans/assholes, and generally far too easy to infiltrate with unwanteds.
And while I agree with your sentiment that I can live time being off by a little, I also run a lot of UNIX servers that use NFS heavily. I am far more concerned with all of my network machines agreeing on what time it is on my network, than being correct with the world. I sync two dedicated time servers to the ntp.org pools (soon to be three), and all my internal hosts sync to those two. Being synced with the world is very handy, and generally I would prefer it. But being in agreement with myself is non-negotiable, I just need it.
Is it really poisoning when it is done by a bunch of networks intentionally agreeing on a set policy that is expected by the authoritative source?
Akamai does something weird that allows them to spread their subscribers' sites over a variety of networks that may or may not qualify as DNS poisoning, I suppose I could come up with something better based off their ideas. I've never looked into how the nitty gritty of their service works (we were already using it successfully when I came on board), but customers on my network going to yahoo.com will prefer the Akamai boxes on my network over the true source, or any other Akamai boxes on other networks. Which is basically what I am saying we should aim for, as opposed to the current shotgun approach.
My issues with your DHCP suggestions are twofold. For starters, not all DHCP clients honor the extra fields for ntp servers, among other things. Secondly, not everyone uses DHCP, plenty of other ways to get an IP address in this world. But everyone uses DNS.
But I do agree that we cannot just arbitrarily poison DNS. Needs some thought, but almost anything could be better than the current shotgun approach.
Oh, I understand that completely. But if the pool was a series of generic entries that individual carriers could overload in DNS if they wanted to, then all those netgear routers could default to the pool, and would take advantage of this on the networks by people who care (like me), and still have the defaults to fall back on for less helpful networks. This would allow zero configuration for the end user, unless they had a specific time server they wanted to query.
I think that a better method could be used to encourage diversity. They should take a page from the root DNS servers, or Akamai. Either use BGP anycast, which is what most of the root dns servers do now, which will probably never happen. Or, have a zone that network carriers should use on their local DNS servers, and by way of DNS lookups, encourage their customers to use. ntp.org has a default set of values for say time.overload.ntp.org that reflects the current pool. But I, as an ISP make my DNS servers directly answer queries for overload.ntp.org, and make entires such as:
time IN A 1.2.3.4
time IN A 1.2.3.5
where 1.2.3.4 and 1.2.3.5 are ntp servers on my local network. I don't allow people off my network to query my DNS servers for recursive queries, and the ntp.org DNS servers never tell anyone to use my name servers for this space anyways. This would mean that only my customers that use my DNS servers (about 99%) of them, would ever get answers for my time servers, and they would definitely be close.
And anyone whose network carrier doesn't bother to set this up, still gets generic answers from ntp.org. This works much better than just a big pool full of 1000 servers worldwide, even if you bother to use the country code dns regions, you still aren't always getting an ntp server anywhere near you.
Great beer drinking game, I wish they would make games along those lines. Two player cooperative puzzle/action. It was a great idea that never attracted more than a cult following.
We are looking into that, I think the state should front all the cash to pay for that pile of horse shit.
My girlfriend was one of the number's stolen, the state has graciously offered to buy her a year of ID protection. Cause yeah, after a year, this problem goes away. She is going to have to pay for the service for years after this, just for peace of mind. Thanks you so much, we didn't need this stress. You know how much beer I can buy with a year's worth of ID theft prevention? Enough to get me drunk _several_ times buddy, yeah, you are killing my buzz already!
You know what they say, "if an intern triples your workload, consider yourself lucky."
A was leery of those at first, but several of my techie friends at a recent tech show raved about them, so we have started recommending them. We try not to endorse a certain brand, but some people balk at our, "Anything but Linksys" attitude, so we have to tell them something.
You don't actually think I talk to my customers this way do you? I'm ranting and being sarcastic because no matter how nice and courteous we are to new subscribers asking about routers, they go to Bets Buy, and end up walking out with the Linksys we told them not to buy. That, and this is slashdot, not some customer of mine, I can say whatever I want, and it will not effect my sales. I wouldn't be in business another day if I was this rude and crude on the phone.
Anymore, I think I have a pretty good pitch for people who ask, we don't like to endorse any particular brand, so simply saying, "Anything but a Linksys" isn't all that effective, I may call my customers idiots, but if you explain why they used to be good routers, and are now notorious for instability now, they do tend to understand.
The best thing I see coming from this, there will longer be a Linksys WRT54G. After revision 5, it has to be the single crappiest router in history, amplified by the fact that all the chums at Best Buy own pre-version 5 routers, which are rock solid, and have no idea why I insist that any recent release is pure shit. They constantly tell my customers that it is the finest router money can buy, and my customers, being the idiots they are, listen to the minimum wage dumbass patrol at Best Buy instead of their ISP. Why people think a sales monkey knows more about networking than a networking guy, I'll never know. The end result is always the same, their service is fine, the router I told them not to buy locks up every damned day, and this is somehow my fault.
Even if Cisco releases the same router with a new brand name, there is a good chance that the sales drones won't recognize it, and I can stop saying, "I told you so," to my customers.
Okay, I will grant you that some of the discussions that spawned as a result of this article were fairly useful, but the original article itself was a pointless bit of geeky paranoia without any real evidence to back any of the ludicrous claims the write made.