Sleeping
Napping
As access to the Internet becomes integral to daily life, it becomes important to have reliable service. However, for most home users, reliability may be problematic, whether you use dial-up, xDSL, or cable modem.
Keeping a Internet connection live is an expensive proposition for providers and their customers. And perhaps more importantly, an expense not directly tied to growing quarterly profits. While there is a clear return on investment when opening a new area to the public (that translates into new customers and therefore new fees), keeping the existing network humming is seen as an expense to be minimized. For end users, this can turn into into slow response times to service requests (local Road Runner in-home service response times are typically two to three weeks).
While cost is part of the problem, having monopolies running these services does not help reliability. If there are barriers to choosing another provider, your choices are either live with the bad service or have no service. To many people, this is no choice and the providers know it and create their business models around it.
Fortunately, the cost structure for xDSL has recently come down. Verizon, essentially our only xDSL provider in the state, dropped their price for 768kpbs up and 128kpbs down to $39.95USD per month (see it here). Compare this with Road Runner, which does not list speed restrictions but typically gets speeds 50 to 100 percent faster that xDSL costs $44.95/month (see it here).
Up to now, the debate has been between choosing one of the two broad band connections (i.e., cable versus xDSL). But one way to overcome the problem of reliability is to have redundant access. That is, two connections using two different companies to the 'net.
Major providers do this all the time. For example, Pair, the host I use for this web site, has six redundant connections to the Internet backbone (see it here). Each of the connections are from different providers. Such redundancy increases reliability, although it comes at a high price.
So if Jane Average, sitting at home, wants/needs high reliability through redundant connections, how does she do this? Let's look at a couple of options below.
One way is to buy a NexLand Pro800 Turbo Internet Security Box (see it here). This box provides for two broadband Internet connections and a serial connector adds a third fail back through analog or ISDN modem. The reviews have been good but the list price is $399 (one street price, from TigerDirect, is $319. Disclaimer, I have never ordered from them so I make no claims nor recommendations. The price is simply for comparison to list price).
Another is to user InterGate software from www.vicomsoft.com (see it here). InterGate is not pitched for this purpose alone, but it does provide for connection fail over. The problem is that it runs only on the Windows platform (or MacOS). Namely, Windows requires substantial hardware resources to run efficiently, as compared to the Linux command line mode (which I know, is not a fair comparison but there you go), and is not known for its security.
Finally, I took a look at the various offerings at the Router Design Project (see it here). Unfortunately, I did not find anything that would work. If anyone knows otherwise, please let me know as I would love to use an OpenSource solution.
I don't plan to run out tomorrow and buy the NexLand product, but right now, it looks like the most secure and reliable alternative. Let me know what you think.
Sorry for no updates over the last few days but I've been down with the cold that will never end. I'm at work today, but I don't know how long I will stay.
Aloha!
Heroes come from all walks of life. Some are leaders in high positions and some appear to be your average person. Some do incredible one-time feats and others, day-by-day, do their duty - and in so doing, become heroes.
Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Bill Mauldin spent much of his time illustrating the quiet heroism of the common foot soldier in World War II. His drawings celebrated the everyday tribulations that the GI had to endure. Whether is was the weather, officers, or the enemy (see one and two) Mauldin seemed to find the truth that cut through the BS.
William Henry Mauldin died yesterday in a California nursing home. He was 81. Read more about his life from Stars and Stripes here with a link to some of his drawings. May he rest in peace.
Aloha!
It's Friday!
Since there is such a todo about content management systems I decided to take the plunge and experiment with one of them - Movable Type. I don't have it running yet but here are a few things to be aware of should you decide to follow.
There is no installation program. You download the gzipped tar file, unzip and untar it, edit the configuration files as needed, create new directories, and then copy the files to those directories on your web host server. Said server must have Perl and one of two databases installed. You also need access to custom CGI as there are scripts that need to run.
If your server has cgiwrap installed, and you choose to use it, you must edit the mt.cfg file to use the directory your host uses. For my server, it would be:
CGIPath http://www.seto.org/cgy-sys/cgiwrap/foo/bar/mt/
where /foo/bar/mt would be the path, from the web root (I think, it's not entirely clear to me), to the Movable Type program. If you don't do this, everything will still appear to install correctly, but things won't run, especially later in the install when you try running any of the scripts.
More as I travel down this road to perdition.
I have a long meeting on reorganizing the Judiciary to go to this morning. I've talked about this effort at reform before and how it will take close to a decade to complete so I won't restate it here. But I need to get ready for that so I gotta go.
Have a Great Weekend Everyone - Aloha!
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