If ADSL is avilable, then SDSL is available too, it will shoot a further distance over copper than ADSL. Unless there isn't SDSL service out of the central office, but there is usually both.
Oh, and barring either of those, you might still be able to get IDSL, slow but fairly reliable (once you get it working), and barring that, order a freaking T1.
Of course, if you cannot get a T1 delivered, expensive as it may be, move your business, because you are working in an area where rodents should have sex, and that's about it.
DSL always runs over the ILEC lines. So if you buy 2 different ADSL circuits from two CLECs, you are getting two different ISPs, sure. But it is arriving at your location over the same copper. If one breaks, you can guess the other one has a good chance of dying too.
While SDSL is pretty reliable, just remember, when it comes to anything that runs over the phone lines, the phone company is involved, and they will slow down a repair time. Usually if its down for an hour, expect it to stay down for 23 more.
Direct answer to your question: Our T1 line is beyond essential to the daily operation of the organization. It's absolutely mission critical that we're connected at all times, without interruption or major packet loss.
Then you are expecting the impossible. If you need to be that reliably connected, then you need to be multihomed. You need at the very least, two T1's to two different ISPs, carried by two different telcos, over different fiber/copper. If this isn't possible due to your location, you might be SOL. But expecting a single circuit to never fail is just foolish. Ideally, you shouldn't order T1's from single homed ISP's either, you don't need to get your bandwidth from a tier-1 carrier, in fact, for a T1, its probably cheaper to find a smaller ISP that gets their bandwidth from 2 or more tier-1 carriers. Just remember, backhoes happen.
If being multihomed isn't an option, perhaps you don't have a large enough chunk of IP space enough to qualify for an ASN, you don't have the knowlage/willingness to run BGP, or whatever, there are many steps you can take to avoid the T1 going down being a pure nightmare.
For starters, get some DNS outside your network. Colocate a server on a some multihomed ISPs network, perhaps you can get a deal with your current ISP. Run DNS inside your network, and outside. So you're MX records are available even if you get kicked offline.
Have a MX backup outside of your network. One way is to use your colo'd box as your primary MX, and have it relay mail to your Exchange server. Or have another MX record pointing directly to the exchange server, so law of averages says half of it gets delivered to your external server, then to the exchange server, and the other half comes directly in. And if one of those server's goes offline.... any sending mail server will just try the other one.
If you need to stay online no matter what, the key is to eliminate single points of failure, and make outtages as painless as possible.
I believe I just said that, "Doesn't mean it happens, any smart ISP noc shuts anything down as soon as they get a complaint." Albeit, with a great deal less detail. That's my less fancy way of saying, "Just do what the law tells you to do, and you will have no problems."
Basically, you are liable if you don't do anything, or don't do it fast enough, or it happens a lot.Which is why I wish somedays, it was my decision to send some customer's right into the complaintant's waiting hands, but I am not the POC for DMCA and Copyright violations, someone else here recieves them directly, and usually, they are forwarded to me for immediate action. But I have no say in the decision of whether or not a customer should have their address sent to the authority making the complaint.... but some days, I really wish I could.
We have never had to hand anyone over, we have always shut stuff down promptly. But we do have repeat offenders, and I have one in mind that I simply _loathe_. But I guess letting your personal opinions into your work is a bad way to run a business, so I simply complain about this person all the bloody time.
I work for an ISP, and no, you are incorrect. ISP's are not Telco's and are therefore, not covered by common carrier status. You share illegal files, your ISP is just as liable as you are. If the copyright holder files a complaint with the ISP, and the ISP doesn't deal with the issue to the holder's satisfaction, the ISP can be sued as if they were directly responsable.
Doesn't mean it happens, any smart ISP noc shuts anything down as soon as they get a complaint. Frequent offenders might just find themselves being contacted by the copyright holder directly.
As for server's at my core network caching bit torrent, and sending it out all over the place, no thank you. Bandwidth costs money people. I'd rather the customer saturate the hell out of his own connection, encourage to throttle it back a little, than have 10 mbit of zero revenue generating bandwidth flying out over my upstreams.
Oh, and that's CISCO Discovery Protocol, get your own acronym.
That's a good point I probably could have made more clear. One of the key skills in a lot of job feilds is when to leave something well enough alone. If it is a bad memory stick, tweaking the code will only make things worse. You have to know when to do something, and when not to.
I took 3 years of CS classes, dropped out, with disgust and contempt for the department I might add. Later I returned to finish college, this time as a history major. I swore I'd never take another CS class as long as I lived, and settled for the minor. I've currently got about 20 hours left for the BA. Which will take forever, since I work full time as a Network Admin, and I love my job far more than I ever loved college. I still maintain that all college did for me was network me with some great friends, the degree has become a matter of pride for me, and little else.
So, I have no credentials to speak of, other than a self built business, mostly consulting work, and a load of time spent learning anything that sparked my interest, and certifcations are a waste of money IMHO. But I can code, a good admin has to be able to write, read, and alter code. A good admin has to be able to make programs accross the network work together, and shoe horn stuff together when need be, all while keeping the whole thing secure and stable. You might find yourself reading C one day, figureing out why the billing system suspends accounts for 24 hours after successfully proccessing credit cards, if the credit card was ran on the last day before the account would have gone deliquent(true story), and the nexy day, you are manually patching a hacked phpBB because the owner customized so much of it that you can't just upgrade their forum....
I tend to ramble, but my point is, you won't make it very high up the ladder in the CS/CE world without the ability to code, it is a fundemental skill.
Wow, consider yourself very fortunate. So far I have celebrated this day by explaining that email is not instant communication, nor is it a good way to send massive files, to a guy whose every response has been, "how is that _my_ problem?"
Oh yeah, and some bitch yelled at me for suspending her account for _extremely_ late payment. Six months of service, has never even paid the install fee. I said if we didn't see money by the end of the month, I would dispatch someone to grab the equipment, and send their bill to a collections agency.
Oh, and my _most_ bested buddy of a customer, who is oh so intelligent and amazingly resouceful just called. So I better cut this short.
The problem, this demonstrates that today's modern, young hipster _still_ has no clue how the internet works. We had a happy deluge of calls, people asking, "when is MySpace going to be fixed?" As if I fucking work for MySpace, I can't fix it, and if I could, I sure as hell wouldn't. I'm just your ISP, no it is not my fault that you can't get to MySpace, I'm sorry, but they blew something up, I can't do anything about it.
What in the fuck do people do on myspace all day long anyways? Its like crack, but I can't figure out for the life of me why it is fun. All those awful homepages, playing shitty music, forcefeeding you loads of animations, leaves me with a desire to shove pencils in my eyeballs and cover my ears with duct tape. I don't get it. I have customers who don't call to complain that they have lost internet connectivity, its to complain that their daughter can't get on MySpace and she won't shut up about it.
Years ago, when I worked phone support for a decent sized dialup isp in Ohio, we had this woman, she was utter hell to deal with. She was a neat freak, vaccuumed almost everyday, and would knock the power cable for her pc out of the wall. Now, for some reason, when people can't turn their computer on, they call their internet service provider and complain..... don't get me started on that. But she would call almost everyday, and some unfortunate SOB (usually 3-4 of us in the office) would have to convince this woman to plug her PC back in, and she was stubborn as hell. The conversations almost invariably went like this:
HER: My computer is broken again, I need it fixed now! TECH: Ma'am, could you please check and make sure that the power chord is plugged in? HER: Why do you always have me check that, that's not the problem. TECH: Ma'am, we are just going down the checklist, and this is very easy to check for, so it makes a lot fo sense to check it first. HER (usually pisssed off at that last remark): I'm tired of your stupid checklist, I want someone out here to fix my PC right now. TECH: Ma'am, we are an ISP, not a computer repair shop, if you PC is in need of repaits, you should take it to one of the many local computer stores to have it serviced, but I am sure that is not nessesary, if will just please check all the power cables, I am sure we can resolve this quickly and easily. (now, this would go on for at least 3-4 minutes, at which time it would turn better.) HER: Oh, I found a chord that was unplugged, guess I knocked it loose while I was cleaning. (hangs up) TECH: *sobs*
Now, like I said, this happened almost everyday for nearly two weeks. She signed up, and the calls started. About the 4th time I was unlucky enough to get her on the phone, I'd had enough. I cannot handle it when people refuse to learn. So when she got angry about us asking her to plug it in yet again, and it never being that (yeah right), I blew up. I'd do remember what I said, but I screamed it loud, and long, it was a five minute verbal onslaught that made me realize three things: I hate people, I'm about to be fired, and I'm glad.
My supervisor hugged me, the entire staff clapped, and I was fired on the spot. I'm told she called back an hour later, in tears, and closed her account. I hope she boxed up her PC, and sent it back to wherever she got it from.
This rives me fucking crazy. I work for an ISP, we have plenty of bandwidth, our service is nice and peppy(I have it at home, and our main office uses it for bandwidth as well). Yet, we get customers constantly calling, "why am I only getting so much speed from this ?" I got news for you, they don't fucking work.
1) When you access a speed test, it is not very likely that the webserver running said speed test is directly on the other side of your link to your ISP. It far more likely that you accessed a test running on a web server on a different network than your ISP's. SO, you are not testing the speed of your line, you are testing the speed of the slowest/most congested link between you, and the speed test site. Or, to put it a better way, you are testing your connection speed to a speedtest. If a speedtest's feed to the internet is only a T1 line, got news for ya, it will never show anyone's speed as anything faster than 1.5 mbit, even if they have 3 mbit dsl.
2) Speedtest enthusiasts (and yes, some people click them like mad, it must be fun, I dunno), seem to believe that just because they have a 7 mbit download, that every web server on the planet is willing to send 7 mbit at you, just because you can potenially see it. Got news for you, that web server is busy servicing god knows what else, and if you get 1.5 mbit, consider yourself lucky. a 7mbit connection is not about having 7mbit to any _one_ site, because it is just not going to happen. It is about having 7mbit capacity TOTAL.
You want a decently (and not good mind you) acceptable speed test, go to freebsd.org, select four different ftp mirrors, and download four different isos at once. A better method is simple, "let the merits of the service speak for themselves." If you can do many things at once, without any noticable speed hit, you have a nice fast connection, with a lot of capacity, be happy. If you can slug it out with little to no effort, you're hitting your upper limit, whip out a calculator, and do some actual math, because a speedtest will not tell you your connection speed.
The question is ignorant, moronic, and doesn't belong here.
A few days ago, I was parking my car out front of a small philly cheese steak place (Mr Spots, BG Ohio for anyone who cares, they also have one in Ann Arbor, MI, I suggest you try it sometime). It was a tight spot, I was between a Scion, and some Sedan, both at the edges of their spaces. What did I do? I backed in, I pulled forward, and was perfectly parked. Some college student watched me do my flawless execution of the mythical ordeal, and was shocked. He actually congratulated me on a job well done when I exited my vehicle. I have had a license for ten years now, and I have never been trained in any way whatsoever to parellel park a car. My dad explained it to me once when I was 17 over dinner (I am 27 now), and I followed his instructions to great results. It is not hard.
I don't need a gadget to park my car for me, I need the government to stop dumbing down the country for the growing class of people who fail to meet even the lowest grade. Hell, they stopped teaching parellel parking a year before I took driver's ed, didn't stop me from learning.
I work for a medium sized ISP, and as a consequence, I have had to do tech support. One of the biggest problems in tech support is establishing what the person on the other end is seeing. The question, "are you running windows XP, or 98? or Me?" Never works, end users have no fucking clue, I get answers like, "yeah, I'm using Microsoft Navigator..." or, "American Online 7.0." So, I have to ask the person ot describe what he/she is seeing, and I can usually figure what I need to do from there. This just makes that worse....
Fuck you microsoft, fuck your useless software, fuck your lame brained security, fuck your belief of, "well, we have so much money, must be because we can do no wrong!" Just fuck you.
While it is great that these do exist, and they are starting to dot the landscape with a higher and higher frequency, they are a drop in the pond compared to the total traffic of the internet. They also are truely difficult to justify in a budget for smaller AS's. Each AS (autonomous system) needs to establish pressence in the IX, which means, either already have a POP there, or run a line in, be it T1/T3, ethernet, whatever. The gain is of course, traffic directly into a target network, without the need to go over your transit links. And the social issues involved, you'd think it'd be a no brainer, but bear with me.
The problem starts when the IX hits a certain popularity, and peering with any sizable number of its members requires you to turn up the capacity on the line you have to the IX. The money saved on transit bandwidth has to exceed the cost of the cableing into the IX, or it becomes a fincancial burden, despite beign a technical asset.
Then there is the issue of peering arrangements going sour. Because you have to expend money to get to the IX, you expect to gain a certain amount from it. When a neighbor gains more from the agreement for lower investment, peering agreements can go south quickly.
The Tier 1's have peering issues all the time, remember cogent and level3, was an argument over cogent gaining far more, than it was contributing to the agreement(to cover the real reason, which was, level3 and most other tier ones, _hate_ cogent).
And let us not forget the jerks, you get the AS's that abuse their position in the IX, do BGP tricks to favor only outbound traffic to certains peers, and trudge all the back traffic in over a backbone provider. This makes the peer far more valuable to one side than it does the other, depending on the content of the networks involved, and almost always, leads to angry, angry admins and bean counters. And no, you don't see jerks go away just because your all trying to do a cooperative effort together, there is alwaysa rotten apple in the bunch.
This is not to say I do not applaud their efforts, hell, I'd help start one with my resources in NW ohio if anyone wanted to chip in (I run a multihomed ISP), but the cost involved, and the politics that will emerge from any sizable collection of AS's makes me believe it'll be a long time before we see the end of the tier 1 backbone.
I work for an ISP, and my answer to each of them is as follows:
45% of Americans say it's simply too expensive
Boo hoo, cry me a river, you want better service, it costs more. These are the same people who own gigundo screen tv's, and have dish network's "super-deluxe premium, all the porno channels, and hbo too" service for 109.95 a month, and they balk at another 40 bucks.... then they call in and bitch because dialup is too slow.
30% say that they just don't want it.
Well, I can't sell you something you don't want, but I'll bet you are the same person that calls the 3rd monday of every month, right on my lunchbreak, and gripes that our service is too slow. Ya know what else is slow? DIALUP! Seriously, some people simply believe that dialup should be "allowed" to go faster. No I am not kidding, some people actually believe that their phone line DS0 should go faster than 64k (that's 56k data, + 8k signalling channel for you non telco types). When people say this, I interpret it as, "I don't feel I should pay for broadband for faster service when its the government's fault that dialup is so slow." Got news for ya, for once in life, it is not the government's fault that something is slow and annoying!
14% say they feel dial-up is adequate for their needs. Good for you, you are obviously very patient, I admire patient people, I am also very fond of selling them dialup. Patient people a) never call in with a problem because b) they seem to be more than happy to learn things on their own! Heaven forbid people realize that 99% of all PC issues are end user error. These people know it, I know it, why can't the rest of the world know it?
Less than 10% are not able to get broadband access in their area.
That number should be around 2%. My ISP branched into wireless a few years back (I do not consider us a wisp, we existed for years before wisps came out), but wisps are fucking everywhere. They are also, not hard to find, they really go out of their way to make themselves known, gotta get your voice heard over the cable and dsl providers, and they usually do so very well. Do the unamerican thing, ask your neighbor what that dish facing east on his roof is for.... I know americans don't talk to neighbors anymore, but come on people, at the worst, they look at you funny, at the best, you make a new friend, and find a broadband provider. Now you people who bought those huge mansions in the copse of trees? Yeah, your fucked, wireless doesn't like trees.... what's it gonna be? House in the woods? Or broadband, pick ONE.
Five percent insist broadband is "too complicated".
WTF are you, retarded, or just a standard issue human, for which, everything that you don't understand right away, is obviously too hard, beyond your abilities, and therefore worthless. Broadband makes connecting to the net easier, but you are too set in your ways, cannot be moved, no amount of talk can change that. You are obviously right, as opposed to just a stubborn bastard who feels no need to learn anything new.
Another 5% aren't even sure why they don't have it...
I'd wager this means you don't really care, and shouldn't waste any more time thinking about it. If your reading this, you have already wasted too much time thinking about it.
Uhh, yeah, my only argument is that people are a) stubborn, b) lazy, c) ignorant, and d) all of the above. Or, they really don't give a shit.
I work for an ISP that gives me a lot of freedom to do things as I see fit, and I am very proud of the work I have done, and the machines I maintain. However, I am bound by compatability issues with previous design decisions I don't always agree with. That sort of entrenched policy is impossible to quickly erradicate. Hence, I opted to maintain my own trio of machines that do my bidding.
I do make extensive use of my work servers as well, but for my personal use, I wanted it to be 100% all mine. I have prior design decisions of my own that I regret that have become entrenched, but at least they are "My" mistakes, and mine alone to fix. But I am an insatiable individualist, to the point of obsessiveness.
Just how badly do you want to run a sys your own way? If the answer isn't, "I wanna run a server for myself and possibly a few friends as if I were a demon from hell, sent to restore order to the entire interweb, one puny server at a time." Its probably not worth the effort. If that _is_ your answer, medication?
This is why I hate Gnome and KDE. Both of them are just windows cloners, and they are dragging Linux down with them. More and more, you can't install linux without either a pile of kde or gnome libs along with it, or you end up neutering the system. I don't get it, I've read things Miguel de Icaza has said, and the man is unbelieveably in love with Microsoft, to the point that he thinks gnome and Linux need to be more like microsoft products. So, why doesn't he just run Microsoft's stuff, and stop tainting an otherwise fine OS with crap like Mono?
My god, gnome and kde have managed, over the years, to eliminate anything goo about the average linux distro, simplicity, elegance, ability to run on super old hardware, and replaced them with bloat, complexity, and insecurity, all in the name of "user friendliness." And the distro's have gone along with it, tying themselves more closely to whichever camp they deicided to align themselves to in the old gnome/kde flame wars. I got news for ya, the only people who came out clean on the other side of that shit storm were debian, slack, and the bsd's.
Sorry, if I wanted user friendly, I would run Windows. But I never expected the Linux crowd to turn their backs on their strengths in this mad quest to be more like what all you zealots claim to hate. Desktop Linux may very well end up being a Windows killer some day, and it will be just as bad in the end, if not worse.
Glad I ran off to BSD land, where I have karma to burn slamming why I went from loving, to hating linux almost overnight. Go ahead, mod me down, I said something critical.
Laptop and home users also have the right to run an insecure PC.
Sure, you do have the right to run an insecure PC, run an adware ridden piece of crap to your heart's content, most people seem to think those fifty billion popups and 14 minute boot times are normal. Doesn't mean you should do it....
Its when I start getting spamcop complaints, and reports of intrusion attempts on other people's pc's that we start to have a problem. Then I have to cut you off from the internet (I work for an ISP), acceptable use policy says nothing in it about infesting the internet just because you aren't smart enough to keep your pc a little more secure.
If you owned a house next to mine, and you let it fall into disrepair, and become a huge fire hazard, sure, I guess that is your right to do so. If it actually catches fire, and spreads to my house, then we have a problem, because now, your neglect has caused damage to somone else's property. Same on the internet, if you become a threat to your neighbors, I will simply isolate you until you are no longer a problem.
I can assure, anything you saw in enemy of the state is pure bullshit. sweeping the room with an AM radio,while switching channels.... hello? other frequency ranges? Sticking strange decies in your spent potatoe chips bags won't do squat either, Mylar is just sooo reflective.
Coat Hangers in the ceiling does nothing, nor does the tinfoil/aluminum foil hat.
Anyone else know any good ones that are just utter bunk?
well, Linux or not the simple fact of the matter is, the linux version ones worked very well without mods, and the version 5 routers SUCK ASS, and I tell everyone to return them immediatly and demand a btter version.
They lock up like mad, buckle when you try to save config changes, refuse to do pppoe properly after a few hours of runtime, god, my list of complainst goes on.
I did not know this, but it sure as fuck explains a lot. I don't care if it runs linux or not, I just want it to run right, and the linux versions do so very well. So, the best reason to get all nutty over this, is because the alternative was a piece of crap.
Dell sent me a big book of hard drive stickers, they say things like "100 GB 7200 Ultra 320" I guess they are supposed to go on those removeable hard drive enclosures in all thepoweredge 2850's we have. But, they didn't send us any stickers in the sizes of drives we actually have.
So, now all the office phones have "36GB 10K Ultra 320 SCSI" drives in them, and most of the monitors sport sexy 300 gig drives.:-)
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If ADSL is avilable, then SDSL is available too, it will shoot a further distance over copper than ADSL. Unless there isn't SDSL service out of the central office, but there is usually both.
Oh, and barring either of those, you might still be able to get IDSL, slow but fairly reliable (once you get it working), and barring that, order a freaking T1.
Of course, if you cannot get a T1 delivered, expensive as it may be, move your business, because you are working in an area where rodents should have sex, and that's about it.
DSL always runs over the ILEC lines. So if you buy 2 different ADSL circuits from two CLECs, you are getting two different ISPs, sure. But it is arriving at your location over the same copper. If one breaks, you can guess the other one has a good chance of dying too.
While SDSL is pretty reliable, just remember, when it comes to anything that runs over the phone lines, the phone company is involved, and they will slow down a repair time. Usually if its down for an hour, expect it to stay down for 23 more.
Then you are expecting the impossible. If you need to be that reliably connected, then you need to be multihomed. You need at the very least, two T1's to two different ISPs, carried by two different telcos, over different fiber/copper. If this isn't possible due to your location, you might be SOL. But expecting a single circuit to never fail is just foolish. Ideally, you shouldn't order T1's from single homed ISP's either, you don't need to get your bandwidth from a tier-1 carrier, in fact, for a T1, its probably cheaper to find a smaller ISP that gets their bandwidth from 2 or more tier-1 carriers. Just remember, backhoes happen.
If being multihomed isn't an option, perhaps you don't have a large enough chunk of IP space enough to qualify for an ASN, you don't have the knowlage/willingness to run BGP, or whatever, there are many steps you can take to avoid the T1 going down being a pure nightmare.
For starters, get some DNS outside your network. Colocate a server on a some multihomed ISPs network, perhaps you can get a deal with your current ISP. Run DNS inside your network, and outside. So you're MX records are available even if you get kicked offline.
Have a MX backup outside of your network. One way is to use your colo'd box as your primary MX, and have it relay mail to your Exchange server. Or have another MX record pointing directly to the exchange server, so law of averages says half of it gets delivered to your external server, then to the exchange server, and the other half comes directly in. And if one of those server's goes offline.... any sending mail server will just try the other one.
If you need to stay online no matter what, the key is to eliminate single points of failure, and make outtages as painless as possible.
I believe I just said that, "Doesn't mean it happens, any smart ISP noc shuts anything down as soon as they get a complaint." Albeit, with a great deal less detail. That's my less fancy way of saying, "Just do what the law tells you to do, and you will have no problems."
.Which is why I wish somedays, it was my decision to send some customer's right into the complaintant's waiting hands, but I am not the POC for DMCA and Copyright violations, someone else here recieves them directly, and usually, they are forwarded to me for immediate action. But I have no say in the decision of whether or not a customer should have their address sent to the authority making the complaint.... but some days, I really wish I could.
Basically, you are liable if you don't do anything, or don't do it fast enough, or it happens a lot
We have never had to hand anyone over, we have always shut stuff down promptly. But we do have repeat offenders, and I have one in mind that I simply _loathe_. But I guess letting your personal opinions into your work is a bad way to run a business, so I simply complain about this person all the bloody time.
I work for an ISP, and no, you are incorrect. ISP's are not Telco's and are therefore, not covered by common carrier status. You share illegal files, your ISP is just as liable as you are. If the copyright holder files a complaint with the ISP, and the ISP doesn't deal with the issue to the holder's satisfaction, the ISP can be sued as if they were directly responsable.
Doesn't mean it happens, any smart ISP noc shuts anything down as soon as they get a complaint. Frequent offenders might just find themselves being contacted by the copyright holder directly.
As for server's at my core network caching bit torrent, and sending it out all over the place, no thank you. Bandwidth costs money people. I'd rather the customer saturate the hell out of his own connection, encourage to throttle it back a little, than have 10 mbit of zero revenue generating bandwidth flying out over my upstreams.
Oh, and that's CISCO Discovery Protocol, get your own acronym.
That's a good point I probably could have made more clear. One of the key skills in a lot of job feilds is when to leave something well enough alone. If it is a bad memory stick, tweaking the code will only make things worse. You have to know when to do something, and when not to.
I took 3 years of CS classes, dropped out, with disgust and contempt for the department I might add. Later I returned to finish college, this time as a history major. I swore I'd never take another CS class as long as I lived, and settled for the minor. I've currently got about 20 hours left for the BA. Which will take forever, since I work full time as a Network Admin, and I love my job far more than I ever loved college. I still maintain that all college did for me was network me with some great friends, the degree has become a matter of pride for me, and little else.
So, I have no credentials to speak of, other than a self built business, mostly consulting work, and a load of time spent learning anything that sparked my interest, and certifcations are a waste of money IMHO. But I can code, a good admin has to be able to write, read, and alter code. A good admin has to be able to make programs accross the network work together, and shoe horn stuff together when need be, all while keeping the whole thing secure and stable. You might find yourself reading C one day, figureing out why the billing system suspends accounts for 24 hours after successfully proccessing credit cards, if the credit card was ran on the last day before the account would have gone deliquent(true story), and the nexy day, you are manually patching a hacked phpBB because the owner customized so much of it that you can't just upgrade their forum....
I tend to ramble, but my point is, you won't make it very high up the ladder in the CS/CE world without the ability to code, it is a fundemental skill.
Wow, consider yourself very fortunate. So far I have celebrated this day by explaining that email is not instant communication, nor is it a good way to send massive files, to a guy whose every response has been, "how is that _my_ problem?"
Oh yeah, and some bitch yelled at me for suspending her account for _extremely_ late payment. Six months of service, has never even paid the install fee. I said if we didn't see money by the end of the month, I would dispatch someone to grab the equipment, and send their bill to a collections agency.
Oh, and my _most_ bested buddy of a customer, who is oh so intelligent and amazingly resouceful just called. So I better cut this short.
The problem, this demonstrates that today's modern, young hipster _still_ has no clue how the internet works. We had a happy deluge of calls, people asking, "when is MySpace going to be fixed?" As if I fucking work for MySpace, I can't fix it, and if I could, I sure as hell wouldn't. I'm just your ISP, no it is not my fault that you can't get to MySpace, I'm sorry, but they blew something up, I can't do anything about it.
What in the fuck do people do on myspace all day long anyways? Its like crack, but I can't figure out for the life of me why it is fun. All those awful homepages, playing shitty music, forcefeeding you loads of animations, leaves me with a desire to shove pencils in my eyeballs and cover my ears with duct tape. I don't get it. I have customers who don't call to complain that they have lost internet connectivity, its to complain that their daughter can't get on MySpace and she won't shut up about it.
Years ago, when I worked phone support for a decent sized dialup isp in Ohio, we had this woman, she was utter hell to deal with. She was a neat freak, vaccuumed almost everyday, and would knock the power cable for her pc out of the wall. Now, for some reason, when people can't turn their computer on, they call their internet service provider and complain..... don't get me started on that. But she would call almost everyday, and some unfortunate SOB (usually 3-4 of us in the office) would have to convince this woman to plug her PC back in, and she was stubborn as hell. The conversations almost invariably went like this:
HER: My computer is broken again, I need it fixed now!
TECH: Ma'am, could you please check and make sure that the power chord is plugged in?
HER: Why do you always have me check that, that's not the problem.
TECH: Ma'am, we are just going down the checklist, and this is very easy to check for, so it makes a lot fo sense to check it first.
HER (usually pisssed off at that last remark): I'm tired of your stupid checklist, I want someone out here to fix my PC right now.
TECH: Ma'am, we are an ISP, not a computer repair shop, if you PC is in need of repaits, you should take it to one of the many local computer stores to have it serviced, but I am sure that is not nessesary, if will just please check all the power cables, I am sure we can resolve this quickly and easily.
(now, this would go on for at least 3-4 minutes, at which time it would turn better.)
HER: Oh, I found a chord that was unplugged, guess I knocked it loose while I was cleaning. (hangs up)
TECH: *sobs*
Now, like I said, this happened almost everyday for nearly two weeks. She signed up, and the calls started. About the 4th time I was unlucky enough to get her on the phone, I'd had enough. I cannot handle it when people refuse to learn. So when she got angry about us asking her to plug it in yet again, and it never being that (yeah right), I blew up. I'd do remember what I said, but I screamed it loud, and long, it was a five minute verbal onslaught that made me realize three things: I hate people, I'm about to be fired, and I'm glad.
My supervisor hugged me, the entire staff clapped, and I was fired on the spot. I'm told she called back an hour later, in tears, and closed her account. I hope she boxed up her PC, and sent it back to wherever she got it from.
This rives me fucking crazy. I work for an ISP, we have plenty of bandwidth, our service is nice and peppy(I have it at home, and our main office uses it for bandwidth as well). Yet, we get customers constantly calling, "why am I only getting so much speed from this ?" I got news for you, they don't fucking work.
1) When you access a speed test, it is not very likely that the webserver running said speed test is directly on the other side of your link to your ISP. It far more likely that you accessed a test running on a web server on a different network than your ISP's. SO, you are not testing the speed of your line, you are testing the speed of the slowest/most congested link between you, and the speed test site. Or, to put it a better way, you are testing your connection speed to a speedtest. If a speedtest's feed to the internet is only a T1 line, got news for ya, it will never show anyone's speed as anything faster than 1.5 mbit, even if they have 3 mbit dsl.
2) Speedtest enthusiasts (and yes, some people click them like mad, it must be fun, I dunno), seem to believe that just because they have a 7 mbit download, that every web server on the planet is willing to send 7 mbit at you, just because you can potenially see it. Got news for you, that web server is busy servicing god knows what else, and if you get 1.5 mbit, consider yourself lucky. a 7mbit connection is not about having 7mbit to any _one_ site, because it is just not going to happen. It is about having 7mbit capacity TOTAL.
You want a decently (and not good mind you) acceptable speed test, go to freebsd.org, select four different ftp mirrors, and download four different isos at once. A better method is simple, "let the merits of the service speak for themselves." If you can do many things at once, without any noticable speed hit, you have a nice fast connection, with a lot of capacity, be happy. If you can slug it out with little to no effort, you're hitting your upper limit, whip out a calculator, and do some actual math, because a speedtest will not tell you your connection speed.
The question is ignorant, moronic, and doesn't belong here.
A few days ago, I was parking my car out front of a small philly cheese steak place (Mr Spots, BG Ohio for anyone who cares, they also have one in Ann Arbor, MI, I suggest you try it sometime). It was a tight spot, I was between a Scion, and some Sedan, both at the edges of their spaces. What did I do? I backed in, I pulled forward, and was perfectly parked. Some college student watched me do my flawless execution of the mythical ordeal, and was shocked. He actually congratulated me on a job well done when I exited my vehicle. I have had a license for ten years now, and I have never been trained in any way whatsoever to parellel park a car. My dad explained it to me once when I was 17 over dinner (I am 27 now), and I followed his instructions to great results. It is not hard.
I don't need a gadget to park my car for me, I need the government to stop dumbing down the country for the growing class of people who fail to meet even the lowest grade. Hell, they stopped teaching parellel parking a year before I took driver's ed, didn't stop me from learning.
sir, you are a godsend! I can usually get people to the start menu....
I work for a medium sized ISP, and as a consequence, I have had to do tech support. One of the biggest problems in tech support is establishing what the person on the other end is seeing. The question, "are you running windows XP, or 98? or Me?" Never works, end users have no fucking clue, I get answers like, "yeah, I'm using Microsoft Navigator..." or, "American Online 7.0." So, I have to ask the person ot describe what he/she is seeing, and I can usually figure what I need to do from there. This just makes that worse....
Fuck you microsoft, fuck your useless software, fuck your lame brained security, fuck your belief of, "well, we have so much money, must be because we can do no wrong!" Just fuck you.
While it is great that these do exist, and they are starting to dot the landscape with a higher and higher frequency, they are a drop in the pond compared to the total traffic of the internet. They also are truely difficult to justify in a budget for smaller AS's. Each AS (autonomous system) needs to establish pressence in the IX, which means, either already have a POP there, or run a line in, be it T1/T3, ethernet, whatever. The gain is of course, traffic directly into a target network, without the need to go over your transit links. And the social issues involved, you'd think it'd be a no brainer, but bear with me.
The problem starts when the IX hits a certain popularity, and peering with any sizable number of its members requires you to turn up the capacity on the line you have to the IX. The money saved on transit bandwidth has to exceed the cost of the cableing into the IX, or it becomes a fincancial burden, despite beign a technical asset.
Then there is the issue of peering arrangements going sour. Because you have to expend money to get to the IX, you expect to gain a certain amount from it. When a neighbor gains more from the agreement for lower investment, peering agreements can go south quickly.
The Tier 1's have peering issues all the time, remember cogent and level3, was an argument over cogent gaining far more, than it was contributing to the agreement(to cover the real reason, which was, level3 and most other tier ones, _hate_ cogent).
And let us not forget the jerks, you get the AS's that abuse their position in the IX, do BGP tricks to favor only outbound traffic to certains peers, and trudge all the back traffic in over a backbone provider. This makes the peer far more valuable to one side than it does the other, depending on the content of the networks involved, and almost always, leads to angry, angry admins and bean counters. And no, you don't see jerks go away just because your all trying to do a cooperative effort together, there is alwaysa rotten apple in the bunch.
This is not to say I do not applaud their efforts, hell, I'd help start one with my resources in NW ohio if anyone wanted to chip in (I run a multihomed ISP), but the cost involved, and the politics that will emerge from any sizable collection of AS's makes me believe it'll be a long time before we see the end of the tier 1 backbone.
I work for an ISP, and my answer to each of them is as follows:
45% of Americans say it's simply too expensive
Boo hoo, cry me a river, you want better service, it costs more. These are the same people who own gigundo screen tv's, and have dish network's "super-deluxe premium, all the porno channels, and hbo too" service for 109.95 a month, and they balk at another 40 bucks.... then they call in and bitch because dialup is too slow.
30% say that they just don't want it.
Well, I can't sell you something you don't want, but I'll bet you are the same person that calls the 3rd monday of every month, right on my lunchbreak, and gripes that our service is too slow. Ya know what else is slow? DIALUP! Seriously, some people simply believe that dialup should be "allowed" to go faster. No I am not kidding, some people actually believe that their phone line DS0 should go faster than 64k (that's 56k data, + 8k signalling channel for you non telco types). When people say this, I interpret it as, "I don't feel I should pay for broadband for faster service when its the government's fault that dialup is so slow." Got news for ya, for once in life, it is not the government's fault that something is slow and annoying!
14% say they feel dial-up is adequate for their needs.
Good for you, you are obviously very patient, I admire patient people, I am also very fond of selling them dialup. Patient people a) never call in with a problem because b) they seem to be more than happy to learn things on their own! Heaven forbid people realize that 99% of all PC issues are end user error. These people know it, I know it, why can't the rest of the world know it?
Less than 10% are not able to get broadband access in their area.
That number should be around 2%. My ISP branched into wireless a few years back (I do not consider us a wisp, we existed for years before wisps came out), but wisps are fucking everywhere. They are also, not hard to find, they really go out of their way to make themselves known, gotta get your voice heard over the cable and dsl providers, and they usually do so very well. Do the unamerican thing, ask your neighbor what that dish facing east on his roof is for.... I know americans don't talk to neighbors anymore, but come on people, at the worst, they look at you funny, at the best, you make a new friend, and find a broadband provider. Now you people who bought those huge mansions in the copse of trees? Yeah, your fucked, wireless doesn't like trees.... what's it gonna be? House in the woods? Or broadband, pick ONE.
Five percent insist broadband is "too complicated".
WTF are you, retarded, or just a standard issue human, for which, everything that you don't understand right away, is obviously too hard, beyond your abilities, and therefore worthless. Broadband makes connecting to the net easier, but you are too set in your ways, cannot be moved, no amount of talk can change that. You are obviously right, as opposed to just a stubborn bastard who feels no need to learn anything new.
Another 5% aren't even sure why they don't have it...
I'd wager this means you don't really care, and shouldn't waste any more time thinking about it. If your reading this, you have already wasted too much time thinking about it.
Uhh, yeah, my only argument is that people are a) stubborn, b) lazy, c) ignorant, and d) all of the above. Or, they really don't give a shit.
Yeah, I agree, is this a common problem on wikipedia? I'm not a frequent visitor to the site.
Uhhh, why is there a picture of a vag on the wikipedia page about copyright extensions?
Ask Yourself the Same Question I Did.
How badly do you want to do things, "Your Way?"
I work for an ISP that gives me a lot of freedom to do things as I see fit, and I am very proud of the work I have done, and the machines I maintain. However, I am bound by compatability issues with previous design decisions I don't always agree with. That sort of entrenched policy is impossible to quickly erradicate. Hence, I opted to maintain my own trio of machines that do my bidding.
I do make extensive use of my work servers as well, but for my personal use, I wanted it to be 100% all mine. I have prior design decisions of my own that I regret that have become entrenched, but at least they are "My" mistakes, and mine alone to fix. But I am an insatiable individualist, to the point of obsessiveness.
Just how badly do you want to run a sys your own way? If the answer isn't, "I wanna run a server for myself and possibly a few friends as if I were a demon from hell, sent to restore order to the entire interweb, one puny server at a time." Its probably not worth the effort. If that _is_ your answer, medication?
This is why I hate Gnome and KDE. Both of them are just windows cloners, and they are dragging Linux down with them. More and more, you can't install linux without either a pile of kde or gnome libs along with it, or you end up neutering the system. I don't get it, I've read things Miguel de Icaza has said, and the man is unbelieveably in love with Microsoft, to the point that he thinks gnome and Linux need to be more like microsoft products. So, why doesn't he just run Microsoft's stuff, and stop tainting an otherwise fine OS with crap like Mono?
My god, gnome and kde have managed, over the years, to eliminate anything goo about the average linux distro, simplicity, elegance, ability to run on super old hardware, and replaced them with bloat, complexity, and insecurity, all in the name of "user friendliness." And the distro's have gone along with it, tying themselves more closely to whichever camp they deicided to align themselves to in the old gnome/kde flame wars. I got news for ya, the only people who came out clean on the other side of that shit storm were debian, slack, and the bsd's.
Sorry, if I wanted user friendly, I would run Windows. But I never expected the Linux crowd to turn their backs on their strengths in this mad quest to be more like what all you zealots claim to hate. Desktop Linux may very well end up being a Windows killer some day, and it will be just as bad in the end, if not worse.
Glad I ran off to BSD land, where I have karma to burn slamming why I went from loving, to hating linux almost overnight. Go ahead, mod me down, I said something critical.
Sure, you do have the right to run an insecure PC, run an adware ridden piece of crap to your heart's content, most people seem to think those fifty billion popups and 14 minute boot times are normal. Doesn't mean you should do it....
Its when I start getting spamcop complaints, and reports of intrusion attempts on other people's pc's that we start to have a problem. Then I have to cut you off from the internet (I work for an ISP), acceptable use policy says nothing in it about infesting the internet just because you aren't smart enough to keep your pc a little more secure.
If you owned a house next to mine, and you let it fall into disrepair, and become a huge fire hazard, sure, I guess that is your right to do so. If it actually catches fire, and spreads to my house, then we have a problem, because now, your neglect has caused damage to somone else's property. Same on the internet, if you become a threat to your neighbors, I will simply isolate you until you are no longer a problem.
I can assure, anything you saw in enemy of the state is pure bullshit. sweeping the room with an AM radio,while switching channels.... hello? other frequency ranges? Sticking strange decies in your spent potatoe chips bags won't do squat either, Mylar is just sooo reflective.
Coat Hangers in the ceiling does nothing, nor does the tinfoil/aluminum foil hat.
Anyone else know any good ones that are just utter bunk?
well, Linux or not the simple fact of the matter is, the linux version ones worked very well without mods, and the version 5 routers SUCK ASS, and I tell everyone to return them immediatly and demand a btter version.
They lock up like mad, buckle when you try to save config changes, refuse to do pppoe properly after a few hours of runtime, god, my list of complainst goes on.
I did not know this, but it sure as fuck explains a lot. I don't care if it runs linux or not, I just want it to run right, and the linux versions do so very well. So, the best reason to get all nutty over this, is because the alternative was a piece of crap.
Uhhh, show me that you can run an xbox 360 game on an xbox 360 and I'll be more impressed at this point....
Dell sent me a big book of hard drive stickers, they say things like "100 GB 7200 Ultra 320" I guess they are supposed to go on those removeable hard drive enclosures in all thepoweredge 2850's we have. But, they didn't send us any stickers in the sizes of drives we actually have.
:-)
So, now all the office phones have "36GB 10K Ultra 320 SCSI" drives in them, and most of the monitors sport sexy 300 gig drives.