<OT> How many Boxen?

[Andrew Mathews]

Michael Hippo wrote:
> Overall I'm reasonably happy with it. It works much better than I thought it 
> would. It is the *only* affordable broadband out here in the stix.  Costs 
> $60US/month and speeds often exceed 1Mbps. Cost was $650US to get it 
> installed. (I had 128k ISDN for 4 years before that at $190US/month.)
> 
> It does have several drawbacks:
> 
> - It must gateway through a Win box via a USB connection. Dumb. But my W2k Pro 
> box does an ok job so it isn't really a big problem. Hughes has announced a 
> DW4020 gateway/router box that would do the job currently filled by the Win 
> host box. I'll buy one if they ever ship and price is reasonable. That would 
> put my Linux box on equal footing with Win.

I could live with a sacrificial Windows box on the outside of the 
firewall. Barely.

> - Linux (several distros) really seems to hate the latency aspect. Kmail and 
> Mozilla mail both frequently hang when trying to check mail. Even browsing 
> (Konq, Opera, Moz) is frustrating. I need to learn how to turn the Linux IP 
> stack to better cope with it.
> 
> - Hughes has something called FAP. Fair Access Protocol. Except it should be 
> called Punitive Punishment Protocol. What it does is throttle you if you use 
> too much bandwidth in a given time. Like when doing a 650M download of an iso 
> of the latest version of CalderaSuseTiva, I have to set GetRight to a "speed 
> limit" of 10kB/s or Hughes will FAP me. And the link essentially dies when 
> FAP kicks in. Even browsing stops working, for all intents.

That's the part I'd have real difficulty with. Throttle the bandwidth is 
one thing, to limit it to a 10k connection to download as ISO image 
without incurring the wrath of God is too much. Or are there other ways 
that you know of such as scripting an ftp session to quit after an hour, 
wait 4, go for another hour with regatta, and on and on?

> - Hughes forces you through their proxy server. "To accelerate performance". 
> Yeah, right. But the accelerator frequently dies and browsing stops 
> altogether.
> 
> - A high latency link causes web pages to sometimes seem slow to load (scads 
> of little tiny files means lots of round-robin requests). But that's mostly 
> not a problem compared to the alternative.

I can handle latency (a bit) since I do very little with a browser, 25% 
browsing, 50% console work. the rest reading mail

> Some good points:
> - The sucker is really, really fast on moderate download sizes (say, <50M). It 
> will often do 150kB/sec.
> - Hughes tech support is pretty good as ISPs go. And the best part is that 
> they are not Earthlink.
> - The thing works in all but the most inclement weather. It takes a heavy 
> downpour to stop it.
> - It beats 24,000 bps dial-up "8 ways to Sunday" - which is what I would have 
> otherwise.
> - They're supposed to soon have a $10/month option for a static IP. That would 
> be nice for some things I need to do.

Now that might interesting. I definitely need a fixed ip address

thing to a Windows box?
> 
> 
> 
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-- 
Andrew Mathews
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