I have been a direcway subscriber for about 4 years because I too live in the country. My primary job requires that I be able to be connected and move data and source around. I get to see my 2 year old daughter and wife every day when I am at home. We have llamas and horses and a bunch or other animals. I have tractors, trucks, and other big equipment to play with. The trade-offs are worth it. However my direcway experience has not been too good. It crashes (driver instabilities) and slows down dramatically during peak times. It will seem slower than a 56k dial-up when you are browsing. I choose my tooling carefully. I write automation scripts. I work longer hours. If I really need to I can go to a local store and use their wireless bradband for about $5 an hour. The only problem I have is large database files and sometimes big doc files. There is a throttling mechanism that limits you to about 50k if you pull too much data too fast. The tech support is not very good. Here is a good article for direcpc, and it still applies to direcway: http://www.hamradio-online.com/1999/nov/direcpc2.h tml
I have one of the DW6000 units on order, but haven't heard anything about the install yet. I can't tell if it provides the DHCP address to the client uses it itself to proxy the requests. The current setup I use proxys the traffic for one machine and provides an address on their private network. Not all of the addresses have reverse resolution so I have had probelms with mail servers. The address is only "live" during the proxied transaction and can be pinged from the internet during the transaction, but only them. When the client is idle the traffic is not passed in from the net. I had to install a firewall because my system was getting infected by viruses even though I was behind their proxy. I use VPN and SSL from behind their proxy. I use sygate office network on my local server so I can support multiple VPN tunnels through the direcway system. The satellite driver requires a seperate systray applet to work correctly and does not work with M.S. routing and remote access, so no built-in VPN. There is a Linux driver out there, but it requires initial setup on a windows box and was still pre-release last time I looked. There are other bidirectional satellite providers out there now. My research has shown that the equipment cost is more, but the service is better.
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Does anyone know if the filesystem is encrypted? Are the files formatted in some unique format?
I have been a direcway subscriber for about 4 years because I too live in the country. My primary job requires that I be able to be connected and move data and source around. I get to see my 2 year old daughter and wife every day when I am at home. We have llamas and horses and a bunch or other animals. I have tractors, trucks, and other big equipment to play with. The trade-offs are worth it. However my direcway experience has not been too good. It crashes (driver instabilities) and slows down dramatically during peak times. It will seem slower than a 56k dial-up when you are browsing. I choose my tooling carefully. I write automation scripts. I work longer hours. If I really need to I can go to a local store and use their wireless bradband for about $5 an hour. The only problem I have is large database files and sometimes big doc files. There is a throttling mechanism that limits you to about 50k if you pull too much data too fast. The tech support is not very good. Here is a good article for direcpc, and it still applies to direcway: http://www.hamradio-online.com/1999/nov/direcpc2.h tml
I have one of the DW6000 units on order, but haven't heard anything about the install yet. I can't tell if it provides the DHCP address to the client uses it itself to proxy the requests. The current setup I use proxys the traffic for one machine and provides an address on their private network. Not all of the addresses have reverse resolution so I have had probelms with mail servers. The address is only "live" during the proxied transaction and can be pinged from the internet during the transaction, but only them. When the client is idle the traffic is not passed in from the net. I had to install a firewall because my system was getting infected by viruses even though I was behind their proxy. I use VPN and SSL from behind their proxy. I use sygate office network on my local server so I can support multiple VPN tunnels through the direcway system. The satellite driver requires a seperate systray applet to work correctly and does not work with M.S. routing and remote access, so no built-in VPN. There is a Linux driver out there, but it requires initial setup on a windows box and was still pre-release last time I looked. There are other bidirectional satellite providers out there now. My research has shown that the equipment cost is more, but the service is better.