FBO's and WiFi

I wish Linksys made a router that would connect to the satellite
system's USB cable and run those Windows-only drivers and datacomm
software. But unfortunately they don't. Looks like the satellite
outfit had deliberately designed their system to exclude non-Windows
customers. They must own MS stock or something.

[I'm getting way off topic here, but feel the need to voice my opinion
anyway]
As to tolerating even a limited presence of Windows on the network,
these guys are the type that will say they'll be happy to do that the
day that everyone else is willing to tolerate privatization and user
fees in the US national ATC system. It's a matter of sticking to one's
principles, and with the onslaught of yet another Windows
virus/worm/trojan after another, after another, after another, after
another... ad nauseum, I don't blame them one bit. Seems that just
merely placing a Windows box on the public Internet anymore is fast
becoming an act of careless negligence, and even could be considerd
aiding cyberterrorism. I'm presently still a Windows user myself, but
this latest triple-shot of malware hammering the Internet, all
facilitated due to Windows, is the icing on the cake. I guarantee the
next computer I purchase will NOT be a Windows machine. Those new
Apple PowerBooks, albeit pricey, sure are looking more and more
appealing.


"John Harper" wrote in message news:1061403096.349486@sj-nntpcache-3...
Huh? MS attempted to build a NT-based router several years ago and gave
up. There is no such animal.

OTOH a Linksys router will cost $100-200 at your friendly local Fry's
(or whatever) and will do everything required.

I suppose I should admit a bias here since Linksys just got acquired by
my employer, but actually we acquired them precisely BECAUSE they
are such a good fit to this kind of requirement. They
have competitors like Netgear who do the same kind of thing at the
same price point, so you can take this as a generic recommendation.

John

"Peter Duniho" wrote in message
...
"One's Too Many" wrote in message
m...
[...] The money for acquiring a broadband Internet connection for our
humble little FBO is being mostly pooled together by the local EAA /
homebuilt guys who are all quite the Linux and Apple zealots and hate
Microsoft. A Windows-only broadband connection will be totally
unpalateable to them.

Well, it's true. Religious zealots often pay dearly for their irrational
beliefs.

By the way, if they'd tolerate even a single Windows box (the cost of
which
would be miniscule compared to the total cost of the Internet connection),
they could hook up whatever other operating systems they want, using the
Windows box as the network router.

Pete

"One's Too Many" wrote in message
om...
[...] with the onslaught of yet another Windows
virus/worm/trojan after another, after another, after another, after
another... ad nauseum, I don't blame them one bit. Seems that just
merely placing a Windows box on the public Internet anymore is fast
becoming an act of careless negligence, and even could be considerd
aiding cyberterrorism. I'm presently still a Windows user myself, but
this latest triple-shot of malware hammering the Internet, all
facilitated due to Windows, is the icing on the cake. I guarantee the
next computer I purchase will NOT be a Windows machine.

As long as you remain in the minority, you will be fine. But the only
reason Microsoft's operating systems are such a tempting target for hackers
is its predominance. If you and the other anti-MS bigots actually get your
way, the hackers will instead come after you.

Pete

"John Harper" wrote in message
news:1061403096.349486@sj-nntpcache-3...
Huh? MS attempted to build a NT-based router several years ago and gave
up. There is no such animal.

Of course there is. Windows comes with Internet Connection Sharing, which
is basically a software NAT router. Works fine.

OTOH a Linksys router will cost $100-200 at your friendly local Fry's
(or whatever) and will do everything required.

Not with the satellite hookups, since they require a specific USB connection
and driver. I think it's silly the satellite data services don't just use
Ethernet, but they don't. You can't use a regular hardware router with
them.

Pete

Oh how lovely.... an O/S flamewar in r.a.p.

While I tend to agree somewhat with your sentiments about MS operating
systems, they're not that bad if you run a decent software firewall
and antivirus package and make sure you check for updates at least a
couple times each day. You should think twice about the satellite
internet service, though. My boss lives out in the sticks, had it for
a few months and continously complained about it sucking badly before
he gave up completely on it.

I have to suggest the wireless connection myself. I have a wireless
internet feed to my house, from a tower that's 5 miles away and I can
get a solid 8 Mbps connection to the tower's WAP. I use a Linksys
model WET11 802.11b bridge (~$110 at Best Buy) and a 24db mag grid
antenna from www.fab-corp.com (~$70) mounted on a 30' pole outside my
house. The WET11 is mounted inside a weatherproof plastic box on the
pole directly underneath the antenna. I feed 6 volts DC up the unused
wires of the CAT5 cable to power the WET11 remotely so that my antenna
coax jumper is only 3' from the antenna to the WET11. Long antenna
coax is what kills distance performance when using cheap 802.11b stuff
for long-haul duty, so the shorter you can keep the coax, the better.
The WET11 comes with a 5V power supply, but the long CAT5 cable has
quite a bit of voltage drop so I pump 6V into it from a 2 amp power
supply at the computer end and still get 5V under load at the other
end up on top the antenna pole. See if one of your airport Linux
buddies has DSL or cablemodem service at his house and is willing to
share a NAT'ed feed. If he lives within a few miles of the airport and
you can manage to put up a pair of antenna poles with 24db antennas
pointing at each other, you've then got yourself broadband Internet on
a shoestring budget at your FBO. I'd approach your EAA buddies about
this plan. If they are into both building airplanes and Linux, they'll
probably eat this idea up.

"Joachim Feise" wrote in message
...
The beauty of capitalism is that other companies offering similar systems
may
see that there is a competitive advantage by offering drivers for other
platforms

And I hope they do. I think it's silly that any Internet connectivity
solution is reliant on a specific software platform, which just building it
as an Ethernet access point gives you universal connectivity.

True, stability of Windows has gone up, but it is still not at par with
*nix.

If and when Unix supports the same feature set and wide variety of hardware
that Windows does, you will see Unix platforms stability having the same
problems people see in Windows. Conservatively, half of all crashes on
Windows are due to third-party software and have nothing to do with anything
Microsoft wrote or published.

People love to say the same thing about Macs. However, first of all, those
people apparently forget the "good old days" when the Mac didn't have a real
memory manager, and rogue applications caused the entire machine to lock up
all the time. Also, those people blame Microsoft and laud Apple, while
forgetting that the main reason Macs are so stable is that Apple has
complete control over all of the hardware and operating system combinations.
They simply have a much smaller test matrix to ensure proper operation.

There's a reason that there's a correlation between the number of possible
software/hardware combinations and the problems with stablility.

[...] There should be no reason for a plain software install to
require a reboot.

You are right. However, that's just not the fact of life with Windows.
Windows itself doesn't require a reboot for basic application installs, but
third-party publishers continue to write application installs that require a
reboot. That's not Microsoft's fault.

Beyond that, some installs DO require a reboot. Anything driver-related
that affects hardware that is initialized on boot is going to want to reboot
the system.

Regardless, it's been years (since I moved our last Win9x machine to Windows
2000) since I've had to reboot a machine just to fix a problem. All reboots
have been for reasons unrelated to system stability.

It is known, btw, that Windows often has problems with laptop hibernation.

And in some versions of Windows, it was actually Windows fault. Win98SE was
a particular abomination in this respect (though it did get patched soon
after release). However, most of the time it's due to inconsistent
implementation of the power control in hardware.

Regardless, neither of the laptops in our household have any problem with
suspend/hibernate/resume.

How well does Linux handle suspend/hibernate/resume? I've never tried it,
myself.

Pete

"Ron Natalie" wrote:

There's no such thing as an ACK packet. A TCP packet can have
data as well as the ack for data received.

I wouldn't say there's "no such thing". The people I work with
generally call a packet with the ACK bit set an "ACK". :-). And
if you examine the packets flying in and out during a web surfing
session, they usually don't contain any data.

The latency in the network is going to affect the retransmission
timer on the sending end. Delay is delay. It's not constant, but
it is cumulative.

I'll concede, though, that as long as the acknowledgement timing is
not highly variable, the window will stabilize and you'll get your
nominal throughput *for that particular HTTP request*. Another click
or a redirect and, presto, another delay. It all adds up.

Sorry to flog the dead horse... I'll shut up.

-Scott

"Peter Duniho" writes:

TCP uses sliding windows to allow constant streaming of data to occur as
long as the latency in the connection is "reasonable". That is, it will
send many packets before needing to receive any acknowledgement even for the
first packet. As long as the acknowledgements start coming in time, the
latency of the connection will NOT affect throughput AT ALL. A latency of
500ms is MORE than reasonable in this context.

Everything you're saying makes sense to me, but you might want to hang
around on news:comp.protocols.tcp-ip for awhile. I regularly notice
people trying to debug satellite TCP issues there.

It's quite possible that it's just a matter of getting all of the
settings tweaked everywhere, but it seems to cause a lot of grief.

--kyler

On Wed, 20 Aug 2003 16:24:14 -0700, Peter Duniho wrote:
"One's Too Many" wrote in message
om...

[...] with the onslaught of yet another Windows virus/worm/trojan after
another, after another, after another, after another... ad nauseum, I
don't blame them one bit. Seems that just merely placing a Windows box
on the public Internet anymore is fast becoming an act of careless
negligence, and even could be considerd aiding cyberterrorism. I'm
presently still a Windows user myself, but this latest triple-shot of
malware hammering the Internet, all facilitated due to Windows, is the
icing on the cake. I guarantee the next computer I purchase will NOT be
a Windows machine.

As long as you remain in the minority, you will be fine. But the only
reason Microsoft's operating systems are such a tempting target for
hackers is its predominance. If you and the other anti-MS bigots actually
get your way, the hackers will instead come after you.

Somehow, I don't think so. There is a constant pressure against Linux
from the Black Hat community, you are simply ignorant of it.
Linux is widespread enough to attract it. However, the prevalence of
worms for one platform or another is a matter of unsafe programming
practices in the name of "friendliness". In this regard I am concerned
about Ximian and their penchant of copying everything from Microsoft,
both good and bad. It may be only a matter of time before a virus
exploiting a bug in Evolution or Mono componentry comes about,
conveniently vindicating views of "Linux is safe only while it's
in minority" crowd.

-- Pete

Newps writes:

Morgans wrote:


During solstices, or even within a few days, the elevation to the sun and
the satelite is nearly the same. As the sun transits across the sky, for a
period of time, your reciever, the satelite, and the sun are all nearly in
line. The sun; since it appears directly on the other side of the
transmitter, overcomes the transmitter signal with white noise (radiation)

Directv is unaffected. I have had my system for 7 years now. Not so
much as a hiccup excpet when there is a heavy wet snow. The snow
sticks to the feedhorn. Brush it off and the picture is back. I have
turned the TV on in a heavy downpour and checked signal strength, no
change. Always in the high 80's here.

DirecTV and Dishnetwork are indeed affected. The affection lasts just
a few minutes twice a year. Check it at the next equinox, you will
see. The exact time varies with your location, I'm sure there's a web
page somewhere that will calculate the service-out time for your
lat/lon.

-jav

"Peter Duniho" wrote...
"Pete Zaitcev" wrote...
This depends on how big the data piece is relative to the
starting handshake. Consider that TCP start-up involves
so-called 3-way handshake, and that many protocols have
a setup phase when client and server exchange messages
strictly in simplex, before bulk data transmission can commence.

Regardless, that still only affects the initial delay in response. Even
if
the delay were 10 seconds (which it's almost never going to be), that's in
the same ballpark as the delay some servers have just getting around to
servicing a client. It's just not a big deal.

Ever tried VOIP over satellite? Painful, is a good one word discription,
same for remote access applications, network gaming as mentioned is
impossible...

[...] So, your downlink
is virtually rain proof. The bad news is that the same cannot
be said about your uplink.

Hmmm...okay, I see. I wasn't aware that they didn't provide a high enough
power transmitter to deal with weather.

Someone who lives in the desert might not experience as much rainfall that
occurs in other parts of the USofA or other countries in the beam... Hmmm
Las Vegas just got flooded, so better wording might be, "on a regular
basis"...

Solstices only knock communication off for several minutes a day,
when the Sun is directly behind the satellite. It is a well known
effect. I used to depend on an old Soviet satellite Raduga-7
for connectivity, and it was true back then.

Several minutes? I guess I'd call that insignificant. That's what, 10
minutes of downtime per year? Big deal. I have to deal with that kind of
downtime with my wired DSL access.

Nearly 10 minutes per day spread over several days, twice a year...
Guaranteed to screw up something important that needed to be done,
everytime...

Satellite data delivery has faults, just making you aware of it... I've been
there done that (our lawyers got the money from the class action lawsuit
against Hughes) and won't geaux back (2 cards still sits in the deactivated
computers since '98, dishes are still pointed at the satellites) to anything
with a ping time over 90 ms to the world... I actually endured the loss of
the satellite itself once, and the repointing a few times due to bird
migration (moving from one satellite to another, as the provider sees
fit)...