@home used to be ok, I started using them 3-4 years ago in one of the first roll-outs of the service. But quality and service have fallen as time has passed.
I have had the connection out for 2-4 days at a time on at least 8 occasions in the past year. I have had to call the @home tech support people and harass them for an hour or more telling them exactly what is wrong with their routing or the head end, and they still can't fix it.
Download speeds are ok depending on how messed up the routing is (packets traversing the country 3-4 times because of inept routing is common). Upload speeds are the worst part of the deal however, the connection gets clamped down to 14kbps!!
One thing is for sure, when I move in a month, I am not getting a cable modem at the new place.
I have been looking for reliable network backup hardware and software for a while as well. The problem is my main box is Linux with ~40G in Disk, so I would want to put a drive there, but I also have 2 Windoze boxen, 1 old PowerMac and 8 other linux boxes that I need to be able to back up to the same drive. Because it's near 100G total, I have accepted that I'll have to fork over $5k for a SCSI tape drive, but I need some intelligent software to backup and restore with. Something that likes to work in Linux, and can also restore an NT system from just a floppy or 3 is what I need. It's pointless if I have to re-install the whole OS to reload the backup. Is there any cross platform software that is more intelligent than just tar/dump and can be used to recover from a total drive crash (no/minimal OS)? Duplicating files between boxes and archiving off critical files to DVD-RAM is sooooooo slow.
Check out http://WVTC.net/ - the radio station of Vermont Technical College. They have been using some custom Linux software to run a radio station completly from MP3's. I forget all the details, but you can e-mail the guys who set the whole system up to get the dirt. Encoding for low bandwidth users is easy to do in software, and if you are just spitting out pre-encoded stuff, you are basically limited to the bandwidth of your upstream pipe.
I saw one of these things in the middle of the Be booth @ pcExpo. The boot is all manned by real Be staff, so you should be able to get a decent answer out of them. I didn't play with it much, but it seemed like it was a custom program/interface running on straight Be.
R4 and R4.5 come with the most all of the GNU Utils, and use GCC as the compiler. That is more likley the part that is "Linux"
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@home used to be ok, I started using them 3-4 years ago in one of the first roll-outs of the service. But quality and service have fallen as time has passed.
I have had the connection out for 2-4 days at a time on at least 8 occasions in the past year. I have had to call the @home tech support people and harass them for an hour or more telling them exactly what is wrong with their routing or the head end, and they still can't fix it.
Download speeds are ok depending on how messed up the routing is (packets traversing the country 3-4 times because of inept routing is common). Upload speeds are the worst part of the deal however, the connection gets clamped down to 14kbps!!
One thing is for sure, when I move in a month, I am not getting a cable modem at the new place.
I have been looking for reliable network backup hardware and software for a while as well. The problem is my main box is Linux with ~40G in Disk, so I would want to put a drive there, but I also have 2 Windoze boxen, 1 old PowerMac and 8 other linux boxes that I need to be able to back up to the same drive. Because it's near 100G total, I have accepted that I'll have to fork over $5k for a SCSI tape drive, but I need some intelligent software to backup and restore with. Something that likes to work in Linux, and can also restore an NT system from just a floppy or 3 is what I need. It's pointless if I have to re-install the whole OS to reload the backup.
Is there any cross platform software that is more intelligent than just tar/dump and can be used to recover from a total drive crash (no/minimal OS)?
Duplicating files between boxes and archiving off critical files to DVD-RAM is sooooooo slow.
Check out http://WVTC.net/ - the radio station of Vermont Technical College. They have been using some custom Linux software to run a radio station completly from MP3's. I forget all the details, but you can e-mail the guys who set the whole system up to get the dirt. Encoding for low bandwidth users is easy to do in software, and if you are just spitting out pre-encoded stuff, you are basically limited to the bandwidth of your upstream pipe.
I saw one of these things in the middle of the Be booth @ pcExpo. The boot is all manned by real Be staff, so you should be able to get a decent answer out of them. I didn't play with it much, but it seemed like it was a custom program/interface running on straight Be.
R4 and R4.5 come with the most all of the GNU Utils, and use GCC as the compiler. That is more likley the part that is "Linux"