Could it be that only SUSE is 'officialy' supported and that other Operating Sytems will work anyway? It seems that the major requirement for Linux (including SUSE) is a 'Xen-Enabled' kernel.
Use PCI Express instead, it has dedicated serial bandwidth to each slot instead of shared bandwidth for all PCI or PCI-X slots connected to a PCI controler.
The big routers and switches use PCI/PCI-X on their backplanes and when some of them started doing 10Gig ethernet ports the ran into the PCI-X bandwidth limit of abouth 8.5 Gbit. So do like Cisco & the others did and start using PCI-E. I saw another post here mentioning multiport gigabit ethernet cards for PCI-E slots made by Silicom: http://www.silicom-usa.com/
Theo has always stated that it was more difficult to setup a non profit in Canada. There was also recent statements that for international donations it is even more difucult to do. If they were in the U.S. they could more easily accept non profit or 'Not for profit' donations from US residents but then they may run into future crypto export restrictions when they try to export advanced crypto from the US. So they stay in Canada and can do what every then need to do to keep OpenBSD, OpenSSH, OpenNTPD, OpenBGP & OpenCVS as secure as they can without worrying about politician whims on crypto export matters.
At the ISP I work for, we have been using the Roxen web server since 1997-98 and it has always had the "Run scripts as" option in the CGI module located in the modules for each site. It defaults to 'nobody' but if the web server is running as root, you can specify any username in this box. It is dificult to get PHP running on Roxen, but for everything else it works great. Documentation located at: http://docs.roxen.com
Even the in new Routers from Cisco you can't put 1 to 2 Gigabytes of RAM in them, most top out at 256 or 512MB. RAM for PC's might be cheap but most of the RAM for routers and such have not come down in price like the RAM for PC's.
Here in the US there is similar requirments, BackBone providers often filter routes at a/19 level. ARIN's minimum block size is/20 or for Multi-homed ISP's that qualify for a/21 also get a/20. But if you want you routes (and IP's) to be globaly distributed with no problems, then you need a/19 or bigger.
Stored in the basement at work there are three or four ISA legacy NCR wavelan cards. Each of these have an empty EPROM socket. They run in the 900 Mhz band (915 Mhz I think), max data speed of 2Mbit. At one time we used one in a server to provide home access for an employee. I do not know if there are any access-points for these. The chips on the board either have NCR or AT&T(NCR) on them, this was probably before Lucent was around. Linux support is provided by the wavelan driver, you need the iwconfig program to set the particulars. Also the cards do not have built in antennaes, you need to connect one to the BNC connector on the card.
also look at this prior slashdot story about ORBS (Open Relay Behavior-Modification System) forking:http://slashdot.org/articles/01/07/02/1540210.sht ml
here is a list of the DNS zones:
or.orbl.org
relays.ordb.org
orbz.gst-group.co.uk
manual.orbz.gst-group.co.uk
inputs.orbz.org
outputs.orbz.org
I use IMHO Webmail.
one of the newer features is an interface to your.procmailrc file.
IMHO (IMAP Mail HOst) runs on the Roxen web server. Some of the other features of IMHO are: ispell/aspell spell checking, multilingual interface and interface to edit.procmailrc &.forward files.
Under-clock the processor, and use filters on the fans pulling air in. This will work for a mildly hostile environment. Perhaps using multiple 120mm fans and washable filters, then you might be able to get away with a room tempurature 90F (32C) degrees. If the tempurature is going to be higher than that and the air dirtier than filters can handle, then you would need to take more extreme measures.
My OEM style PC with an Athlon 1100 is doing fine in my apartment without air conditioning. It has not had any problems with the room tempurature being in the high 80s. At work we had the air-conditioning for the NOC fail for part of a week end, the tempurature was in the low 90s when we got in there. Nothing crashed and we have not seen any problems with any of the dozen Sun servers nor the few Cisco Routers since then. It was not something I would desire to repeat though.
My recommendation would be to put the modem and WAN connectivity on one box (RAS capable Router, or WAN capable RAS box) with either the an inbound T1 or ISDN PRI line, and have a Frame Relay Fractional T1 outbound connection in the same box. Then use a stable, cheap box with Linux or FreeBSD doing Radius, DNS and Mail.
{Lucent Portmaster 3, Cisco 3800, Ascend MAX ?}
If that is to big, then use a router that has 8+ async. serial ports and a WAN port Some ISPs started on a Cisco 2500 series with async serial ports connected to modems and sync ports connected to T1's. They now use the router to terminate Frame Relay Customers.
Great engineered used hardware is better than cheap new hardware, so just get a used Sun workstation and put Linux on it, get a good router that can handle your needs.
If you can do without mail, and your upstream provider can do DNS for you, then just store all the login info on the RAS box to get a 1 box solution.
You can get used routers to handle 8+ modems and 1 or 2 WAN T1s for around $2500-$3000. Don't forget the cost of management, if you have gobs of time then try the one Linux box solutions, otherwise spend a little bit more for the more stable, easier to manage setup.
Belkin might have a solution. Their USB BusStation line of products allow you to have a stack of USB modules: USB hubs, Serial addapters, Ethernet, SCSI, etc. Theses stackable modules connect to your computer through one USB cable. You could place this anywhere you want; This is a much better solution then the proprietary external boxes by NEC or COMPAQ. I've only seen these at computer shows, I haven't used one myself, and I don't know if their are Linux Drivers or not.
Another solution is to make your own box and put a USB hub inside, and if you want a Serial Cable extension. Or you could just mount a USB to serial adapter, a USB Hub, headphone jack or anything else, if it can fit, in an empty drive bay in your computer
When my boss started the ISP I now work for, he lived in one of the apartments above the office for the first year or so, he now lives a couple of blocks away. I am tempted to move into one of the apartments after the events last week: A UPS failure, billing server's hard drive overheating, my speeding ticket in trying to get there quicky per a co-workers panic request; all three hours before I normally wake-up. I have thought about tele-commuting a couple of days a week, but one of my duties at work is user support via telephone. And the telcos has the opinion that my home should be in a different area code than my work, that is only half an hour away. But I am lucky, the speed limit on the interstate in this area is 75MPH and the traffic is light by the time I am to be at work (10am). As most techs that are on call after hours I can't depend on public transportation. My city just recently got a couple of bus routes and they go at the wrong time. Here in the west it is hard to use public transportation for all your transportation needs. I only live an hour from the nearest international airport, yet I pass more farms on my way to work than bus stops. Public transportation just isn't for everyone, just like isn't for everyone. Being with-in walking distance of work may be the only solution; a mile is within walking distance. We americans are just to atached to the freedom of using our own car.
isn't Mac OS X going to use XML to their config files in/etc/ and/etc/rc*. I seem to have seen something about that over at arstechnica: Mac OS X DP3 . It would be the next logical step to configure BSD kernels the same way. This might be some thing we will see in Linux 3.0 or 2.6 if there is enough interest. Or maybe we will see it in one of the cutsy distributions, ie: Corel, SuSE, Caldera, etc..
When I was a sophmore at a Utah school an hour north of SaltLake, my mom started working for the at that high school as a teacher. A short while later they started offering home internet access for the school district employees (though 16 courier v.everything modems and a cisco 2500 series router). Somewhere along the line port 80 was blocked and every single machine need to go though one of the half dozen proxy servers running in the state. The proxy servers were run at the bigger universities (U of U & USU) and the bigger school districts in the Salt Lake Area. Of course you could get around the system by using a different proxy. At first they were smart and had proxy servers block any IP addresses(you had to use www.suckysite.com or www.uen.com not 194.242.146.22) but after a while they turned that off so that hotmail could work. My Sister-in-law started to teach at the same school district and then her husband(my brother) did a little work. Between my senior year Internet class and all of my siblings we found many, many sites that were blocked that shouldn't be. Like a review of a new Palm Piolot. The bad thing is all the teachers and students trying to do reasearch and not being able to get to 5 - 10 % of the sites you come accross. The next problem is caching coruption, having a download of netscape stops half-way through and then when you restart it would stop the same place everytime.
Now that I am a few years out of High School and working for a small ISP I have been amazed that I even thought that the Internet was fun when I was using that system. Here at work they have choosen Planet Good (www.browsesafe.com) as the prefered OPTIONAL filtering software for our custimers. It takes a whole different approch and uses a white list, if you ever come to a site or page they haven't approved it pops up a window to let you submit it to them to have them (browsesafe aka planetgood) review it and let everyone one in. The latest software has a parental override if you don't want to wait 12 - 24 hours because someone need to get to a site for home work. The only problem is that the software is basically a customized, locked-down versions of Netscape or IE. So, unless you are creative, you can't get it to work with any of the Unixes (unless of course you run VMWare).
With the values and beliefs of people here in Utah, it would be suicide for the Governor or any other politician to vote against this bill. But libraries should try to find a really good piece of software that works, a lot of libraries are considering pulling the computers out because of these filtering problems and the abuse to the hardware it-self.
Of couse once I could afford it, I paid for My own Ineternet Service. Even when I started to work at this ISP I went through a compting ISP; even though I only work a half-hour from home USWorst (USWest soon to be bought by QWest) thinks that it should be a long distance call, and a differnet Area code.
To close this up, every School and library (maybe even parents/households) has to make the dicision of whether to have no access, filtered access, or wide open unchecked access. At homes parents may decide that trust is more important than filtering, but in public places you might not even know the name of the individual that is abusing the service. So a solution that: prevents abuse, provides logs and blocks what you want to block and nothing more; would be a killer app. Filter has its place, but there are no good filters currently available!
When the 386DX processor came out, it included 32 bit memory addressing. The 386SX, 386SL and 286 di 24 bit, the 8086 and 8088 did 20 bit. Intel, Amd and everyone else stayed with 32 bit until the Pentium Pro came out with 36 bit addressing, with 32 bit you could only address 4GB but with 36bit you could address 64GB. The limiting factor has been the OS, with it only handling up to 32 bit (4GB). Linux has been able to address more than 4GB before 2.3.23, but on other platforms (like ultraSparc) than x86, this just added support for the limited x86 platform.
Don't expect to be able to cram anything over 1-2GB of ram into a machine anytime soon. The other limit is the Chipset, they normally only support upto 1GB mabey upto 2GB on nice motherboards. Linux and other OS's have used the the area from 2GB to 4GB to address the virtual memory (swap partition/file). SGI has been working recently to get Linux to support more than 2GB of physical ram(2GB real+2GB of swap=4GB of addressable memory)on x86. I think SGI released a patch to support upto 3.8GB of physical memory for the x86 platform.
All this talk about ram is making me sick of only having 64MB and everyone else at work has 128MB or 256MB for their home computers.
Doesn't Mozilla have an option to selectivly reject or accept cookies based on the web site?
Clancy's "Net Force: The Deadliest Game"
on
Infinite Space
·
· Score: 1
Over the weekend I read Tom Clancy's "Net Force: The Deadliest Game". It was based around a Virtual Reality Medieval War Game. In a mix of Hellmouth and Infinite Space the game took a terible turn. An uknown person started bumping successful players off of the game so he could become a little richer in the game. He bumped them off by either trashing the players computer or trashing the players themselves; so they would have to restore all the passcodes and by the time they got back in the game, there virtual possesions would be gone.
The game was so big that they added 'constucts' (equivalent of bots in Q3Arena) to fill in the gaps and do the dirty work. So it was almost unlimited space, they had to use spells to get from one end of the world to the other or take months of walking.
I just hope that the people playing Ultima and the successors (everlast, asheron's call, etc.) are the responsible intelligent type who wouldn't fall to that level. In the book it didn't seem all that possible to sell, trade characters because of the rules of the game. But if it was possible I don't think that the new owners could keep up the reputation of the prior player. In a lot of the current online games going around money does help you be succesful (ISDN or T1 for less lag, better machines for better performance, land and money in Ultima).
Adapting to new environments is the only way to stay anywhere close to the current digital generation. But being a little fammiliar with some of the older technology helps you succesfully use the new nechnology 'like assembly programing can help you port kernels to new architectures'. The best use you can get out of studing history is to not make the same mistakes that others did. How many people hate those BIOS limitations on PC's? And you can learn from what was done right because some of the new stuff still can't come close to the grace and elegance of the past.
Netscape has an archive site that has a lot of the older browsers 2.2-4.05 including 3.01. also they have them for different platforms and languages http://www.netscape.com/download/archive/index.htm l
Slashdot Mirror
Could it be that only SUSE is 'officialy' supported and that other Operating Sytems will work anyway? It seems that the major requirement for Linux (including SUSE) is a 'Xen-Enabled' kernel.
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008/en/us/hyperv-faq.aspx
Isn't OSI, the network layer model everyone had too learn in their networking class?
Use PCI Express instead, it has dedicated serial bandwidth to each slot instead of shared bandwidth for all PCI or PCI-X slots connected to a PCI controler.
i dths
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_device_bandw
PCI 32-bit/33 MHz 1066.66 Mbit/s 133.33 MB/s
PCI Express (x1 link) 2500 Mbit/s 250 MB/s
PCI 64-bit/33 MHz 2133.33 Mbit/s 266.66 MB/s
PCI 32-bit/66 MHz 2133.33 Mbit/s 266.66 MB/s
PCI 64-bit/66 MHz 4266.66 Mbit/s 533.33 MB/s
PCI-X 133 8533.33 Mbit/s 1066.66 MB/s
PCI Express (x4 link) 10000 Mbit/s 1000 MB/s
PCI Express (x8 link) 20.00 Gbit/s 2 GB/s
PCI Express (x16 link) 40.0 Gbit/s 4 GB/s
The big routers and switches use PCI/PCI-X on their backplanes and when some of them started doing 10Gig ethernet ports the ran into the PCI-X bandwidth limit of abouth 8.5 Gbit. So do like Cisco & the others did and start using PCI-E. I saw another post here mentioning multiport gigabit ethernet cards for PCI-E slots made by Silicom: http://www.silicom-usa.com/
Theo has always stated that it was more difficult to setup a non profit in Canada. There was also recent statements that for international donations it is even more difucult to do. If they were in the U.S. they could more easily accept non profit or 'Not for profit' donations from US residents but then they may run into future crypto export restrictions when they try to export advanced crypto from the US. So they stay in Canada and can do what every then need to do to keep OpenBSD, OpenSSH, OpenNTPD, OpenBGP & OpenCVS as secure as they can without worrying about politician whims on crypto export matters.
At the ISP I work for, we have been using the Roxen web server since 1997-98 and it has always had the "Run scripts as" option in the CGI module located in the modules for each site. It defaults to 'nobody' but if the web server is running as root, you can specify any username in this box. It is dificult to get PHP running on Roxen, but for everything else it works great. Documentation located at: http://docs.roxen.com
Even the in new Routers from Cisco you can't put 1 to 2 Gigabytes of RAM in them, most top out at 256 or 512MB. RAM for PC's might be cheap but most of the RAM for routers and such have not come down in price like the RAM for PC's.
/19 level. ARIN's minimum block size is /20 or for Multi-homed ISP's that qualify for a /21 also get a /20. But if you want you routes (and IP's) to be globaly distributed with no problems, then you need a /19 or bigger.
Here in the US there is similar requirments, BackBone providers often filter routes at a
What does a w2k terminal server do?
what else, crash and/or get hacked.
Stored in the basement at work there are three or four ISA legacy NCR wavelan cards. Each of these have an empty EPROM socket. They run in the 900 Mhz band (915 Mhz I think), max data speed of 2Mbit. At one time we used one in a server to provide home access for an employee. I do not know if there are any access-points for these. The chips on the board either have NCR or AT&T(NCR) on them, this was probably before Lucent was around. Linux support is provided by the wavelan driver, you need the iwconfig program to set the particulars. Also the cards do not have built in antennaes, you need to connect one to the BNC connector on the card.
here are some websites for replacements of ORBS and or MAPS
:http://slashdot.org/articles/01/07/02/1540210.sht ml
http://www.orbl.org/ Open Relay Black List of Phoenix, AZ
http://www.orbz.gst-group.co.uk/orbs/ Open Relay Block Zone (ORBZ), of Basingstoke, England
http://www.ordb.org/ the Open Relay Database (ORDB), of Aarhus, Denmark
http://www.orbz.org/ Open Relay Blackhole Zones (ORBZ) Nassau, NY
also look at this prior slashdot story about ORBS (Open Relay Behavior-Modification System) forking
here is a list of the DNS zones:
or.orbl.org
relays.ordb.org
orbz.gst-group.co.uk
manual.orbz.gst-group.co.uk
inputs.orbz.org
outputs.orbz.org
I use IMHO Webmail. one of the newer features is an interface to your .procmailrc file.
.procmailrc & .forward files.
IMHO (IMAP Mail HOst) runs on the Roxen web server. Some of the other features of IMHO are: ispell/aspell spell checking, multilingual interface and interface to edit
Under-clock the processor, and use filters on the fans pulling air in. This will work for a mildly hostile environment. Perhaps using multiple 120mm fans and washable filters, then you might be able to get away with a room tempurature 90F (32C) degrees. If the tempurature is going to be higher than that and the air dirtier than filters can handle, then you would need to take more extreme measures.
My OEM style PC with an Athlon 1100 is doing fine in my apartment without air conditioning. It has not had any problems with the room tempurature being in the high 80s. At work we had the air-conditioning for the NOC fail for part of a week end, the tempurature was in the low 90s when we got in there. Nothing crashed and we have not seen any problems with any of the dozen Sun servers nor the few Cisco Routers since then. It was not something I would desire to repeat though.
My recommendation would be to put the modem and WAN connectivity on one box (RAS capable Router, or WAN capable RAS box) with either the an inbound T1 or ISDN PRI line, and have a Frame Relay Fractional T1 outbound connection in the same box. Then use a stable, cheap box with Linux or FreeBSD doing Radius, DNS and Mail.
{Lucent Portmaster 3, Cisco 3800, Ascend MAX ?}
If that is to big, then use a router that has 8+ async. serial ports and a WAN port
Some ISPs started on a Cisco 2500 series with async serial ports connected to modems and sync ports connected to T1's. They now use the router to terminate Frame Relay Customers.
Great engineered used hardware is better than cheap new hardware, so just get a used Sun workstation and put Linux on it, get a good router that can handle your needs.
If you can do without mail, and your upstream provider can do DNS for you, then just store all the login info on the RAS box to get a 1 box solution.
You can get used routers to handle 8+ modems and 1 or 2 WAN T1s for around $2500-$3000. Don't forget the cost of management, if you have gobs of time then try the one Linux box solutions, otherwise spend a little bit more for the more stable, easier to manage setup.
Belkin might have a solution. Their USB BusStation line of products allow you to have a stack of USB modules: USB hubs, Serial addapters, Ethernet, SCSI, etc. Theses stackable modules connect to your computer through one USB cable. You could place this anywhere you want; This is a much better solution then the proprietary external boxes by NEC or COMPAQ. I've only seen these at computer shows, I haven't used one myself, and I don't know if their are Linux Drivers or not.
Another solution is to make your own box and put a USB hub inside, and if you want a Serial Cable extension. Or you could just mount a USB to serial adapter, a USB Hub, headphone jack or anything else, if it can fit, in an empty drive bay in your computer
When my boss started the ISP I now work for, he lived in one of the apartments above the office for the first year or so, he now lives a couple of blocks away. I am tempted to move into one of the apartments after the events last week: A UPS failure, billing server's hard drive overheating, my speeding ticket in trying to get there quicky per a co-workers panic request; all three hours before I normally wake-up. I have thought about tele-commuting a couple of days a week, but one of my duties at work is user support via telephone. And the telcos has the opinion that my home should be in a different area code than my work, that is only half an hour away. But I am lucky, the speed limit on the interstate in this area is 75MPH and the traffic is light by the time I am to be at work (10am). As most techs that are on call after hours I can't depend on public transportation. My city just recently got a couple of bus routes and they go at the wrong time. Here in the west it is hard to use public transportation for all your transportation needs. I only live an hour from the nearest international airport, yet I pass more farms on my way to work than bus stops. Public transportation just isn't for everyone, just like isn't for everyone. Being with-in walking distance of work may be the only solution; a mile is within walking distance. We americans are just to atached to the freedom of using our own car.
isn't Mac OS X going to use XML to their config files in /etc/ and /etc/rc*. I seem to have seen something about that over at arstechnica: Mac OS X DP3 . It would be the next logical step to configure BSD kernels the same way. This might be some thing we will see in Linux 3.0 or 2.6 if there is enough interest. Or maybe we will see it in one of the cutsy distributions, ie: Corel, SuSE, Caldera, etc..
When I was a sophmore at a Utah school an hour north of SaltLake, my mom started working for the at that high school as a teacher. A short while later they started offering home internet access for the school district employees (though 16 courier v.everything modems and a cisco 2500 series router). Somewhere along the line port 80 was blocked and every single machine need to go though one of the half dozen proxy servers running in the state. The proxy servers were run at the bigger universities (U of U & USU) and the bigger school districts in the Salt Lake Area. Of course you could get around the system by using a different proxy. At first they were smart and had proxy servers block any IP addresses(you had to use www.suckysite.com or www.uen.com not 194.242.146.22) but after a while they turned that off so that hotmail could work. My Sister-in-law started to teach at the same school district and then her husband(my brother) did a little work. Between my senior year Internet class and all of my siblings we found many, many sites that were blocked that shouldn't be. Like a review of a new Palm Piolot. The bad thing is all the teachers and students trying to do reasearch and not being able to get to 5 - 10 % of the sites you come accross. The next problem is caching coruption, having a download of netscape stops half-way through and then when you restart it would stop the same place everytime.
Now that I am a few years out of High School and working for a small ISP I have been amazed that I even thought that the Internet was fun when I was using that system. Here at work they have choosen Planet Good (www.browsesafe.com) as the prefered OPTIONAL filtering software for our custimers. It takes a whole different approch and uses a white list, if you ever come to a site or page they haven't approved it pops up a window to let you submit it to them to have them (browsesafe aka planetgood) review it and let everyone one in. The latest software has a parental override if you don't want to wait 12 - 24 hours because someone need to get to a site for home work. The only problem is that the software is basically a customized, locked-down versions of Netscape or IE. So, unless you are creative, you can't get it to work with any of the Unixes (unless of course you run VMWare).
With the values and beliefs of people here in Utah, it would be suicide for the Governor or any other politician to vote against this bill. But libraries should try to find a really good piece of software that works, a lot of libraries are considering pulling the computers out because of these filtering problems and the abuse to the hardware it-self.
Of couse once I could afford it, I paid for My own Ineternet Service. Even when I started to work at this ISP I went through a compting ISP; even though I only work a half-hour from home USWorst (USWest soon to be bought by QWest) thinks that it should be a long distance call, and a differnet Area code.
To close this up, every School and library (maybe even parents/households) has to make the dicision of whether to have no access, filtered access, or wide open unchecked access. At homes parents may decide that trust is more important than filtering, but in public places you might not even know the name of the individual that is abusing the service. So a solution that: prevents abuse, provides logs and blocks what you want to block and nothing more; would be a killer app. Filter has its place, but there are no good filters currently available!
When the 386DX processor came out, it included 32 bit memory addressing. The 386SX, 386SL and 286 di 24 bit, the 8086 and 8088 did 20 bit. Intel, Amd and everyone else stayed with 32 bit until the Pentium Pro came out with 36 bit addressing, with 32 bit you could only address 4GB but with 36bit you could address 64GB. The limiting factor has been the OS, with it only handling up to 32 bit (4GB). Linux has been able to address more than 4GB before 2.3.23, but on other platforms (like ultraSparc) than x86, this just added support for the limited x86 platform.
Don't expect to be able to cram anything over 1-2GB of ram into a machine anytime soon. The other limit is the Chipset, they normally only support upto 1GB mabey upto 2GB on nice motherboards. Linux and other OS's have used the the area from 2GB to 4GB to address the virtual memory (swap partition/file). SGI has been working recently to get Linux to support more than 2GB of physical ram(2GB real+2GB of swap=4GB of addressable memory)on x86. I think SGI released a patch to support upto 3.8GB of physical memory for the x86 platform.
All this talk about ram is making me sick of only having 64MB and everyone else at work has 128MB or 256MB for their home computers.
Doesn't Mozilla have an option to selectivly reject or accept cookies based on the web site?
Over the weekend I read Tom Clancy's "Net Force: The Deadliest Game". It was based around a Virtual Reality Medieval War Game. In a mix of Hellmouth and Infinite Space the game took a terible turn. An uknown person started bumping successful players off of the game so he could become a little richer in the game. He bumped them off by either trashing the players computer or trashing the players themselves; so they would have to restore all the passcodes and by the time they got back in the game, there virtual possesions would be gone.
The game was so big that they added 'constucts' (equivalent of bots in Q3Arena) to fill in the gaps and do the dirty work. So it was almost unlimited space, they had to use spells to get from one end of the world to the other or take months of walking.
I just hope that the people playing Ultima and the successors (everlast, asheron's call, etc.) are the responsible intelligent type who wouldn't fall to that level. In the book it didn't seem all that possible to sell, trade characters because of the rules of the game. But if it was possible I don't think that the new owners could keep up the reputation of the prior player. In a lot of the current online games going around money does help you be succesful (ISDN or T1 for less lag, better machines for better performance, land and money in Ultima).
Adapting to new environments is the only way to stay anywhere close to the current digital generation. But being a little fammiliar with some of the older technology helps you succesfully use the new nechnology 'like assembly programing can help you port kernels to new architectures'.
The best use you can get out of studing history is to not make the same mistakes that others did. How many people hate those BIOS limitations on PC's? And you can learn from what was done right because some of the new stuff still can't come close to the grace and elegance of the past.
Netscape has an archive site that has a lot of the older browsers 2.2-4.05 including 3.01. also they have them for different platforms and languages http://www.netscape.com/download/archive/index.htm l