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Grex > Coop11 > #249: Internet Connectivity Revisited |  |
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| Author |
Message |
| 25 new of 176 responses total. |
mdw
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response 127 of 176:
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Aug 18 03:19 UTC 2001 |
Grex needs a provider who won't freak out when some stupid NT
administrator sends nasty mail threatening legal action if the X who
tried to exploit their ISS bug happened to use grex to run his script.
Some providers are going to take that as par for the course. Some are
going to freak out and go ballistic. I don't think we want to find out
the hard way.
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drew
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response 128 of 176:
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Aug 18 18:33 UTC 2001 |
Re #125: I pay less than that for my house.
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gelinas
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response 129 of 176:
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Aug 18 18:40 UTC 2001 |
I assume you mean your home connection. What kind is it? Who provides it?
How much *does* it cost? I'd love to move up from ISDN at home. (Last I
checked, neither DSL nor cable-modem were available in my neighborhood.
But then, I'm not willing to settle for an asymmetric not link.)
Eventually, we will need to do some comparison shopping. 'Twould probably
be easiest to appoint a shopper to gather the facts.
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rksjr
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response 130 of 176:
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Aug 18 19:13 UTC 2001 |
Among numerous usenet postings regarding Covad which I found
at:
http://groups.google.com/googlegroups/deja_announcement.html
one posting was singularly prominent, excerpts of which are
the following:
> From: Bill Somerville (bsomerville@toad.net)
> Subject: ToadNet re: Covad
> Newsgroups: comp.dcom.xdsl
>
>....
>
> Date: 2001-08-10 21:25:20 PST
>
>Today I received the following letter today from David
>Troy, CEO of ToadNet regarding the Covad situation. I
>understand that other ISPs are sending similar letters to
>their customers.
>
>>"August 7, 2001
>>
>>Dear Valued Customer:
>>
>>....
>>
>>Covad Communications, the carrier that you use to receive
>>DSL Internet access through ToadNet, today announced an
>>agreement with its bondholders that will eliminate about
>>$1.4 billion in debt, lifting a significant burden from
>>the company's shoulders and allowing it to focus on
>>achieving profitability sooner.
>>
>>....
>>
>>Covad is and has been the leading independent DSL provider
>>in the U.S., with about 335,000 active residential and
>>business DSL subscribers. Today its stock has moved
>>upward on the news.
>>"The main issue was getting out of debt," Charles Hoffman,
>>Covad's chief executive, said in an interview. "In one
>>fell swoop, this restructuring will take us out of debt."
>>
>>....
>>
>>We [ToadNet] have also been working quietly for the last
>>several months with other carriers including Verizon and
>>NAS. If for any reason Covad becomes unable to deliver
>>service to you, we will immediately notify you with
>>information about migrating to one of these carriers.
>>...."
>
> (c)2001 Google
Given that (as stated in the above letter):
Covad is and has been the leading independent DSL
provider in the U.S., with about 335,000 active
residential and business DSL subscribers.
it is not surprising that there are 391 usenet postings
in Google posted during the last seven days regarding
Covad:
Searched Groups for covad from 11 Aug 2001 to today
Results 1 - 100 of about 391. Search took 1.79 seconds.
Has Grex received any notices or e-mail from CoreComm
regarding Covad?
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drew
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response 131 of 176:
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Aug 19 02:28 UTC 2001 |
Re #129:
No, I mean I *live* here for less than the cost of that connection.
For contact I just have dial-up service.
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gelinas
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response 132 of 176:
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Aug 19 02:36 UTC 2001 |
Yup; network connections are expensive.
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gelinas
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response 133 of 176:
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Aug 19 03:36 UTC 2001 |
The discussion culminating in response #127 above reminded me that Merit
used to discourage anonymous access to the Internet. So I went looking
at their Acceptable Use Policy and Conditions of Use. Eventually, I found:
There are a few technical steps that you can take to limit and
help recover from Internet abuse incidents:
Limit anonymous access to and from your systems.
If you must allow anonymous access, limit what can be
done from the anonymous session to local activities that
are not likely to cause problems for others elsewhere on
the Internet.
Develop and publicize your own Acceptable Use Policy.
(Taken from http://www.merit.edu/michnet/policies/abuse.html)
I think we have implemented those suggestions.
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remmers
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response 134 of 176:
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Aug 19 18:19 UTC 2001 |
Indeed, that's almost exactly our outbound access policy (except
to the extent that unrestricted outbound access to port 80 might
"cause problems for others elsewhere on the Internet.").
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i
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response 135 of 176:
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Aug 20 11:21 UTC 2001 |
(But see item #39 - our port 80 policy appears to be changing.)
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remmers
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response 136 of 176:
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Aug 20 13:48 UTC 2001 |
(Noted.)
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gull
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response 137 of 176:
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Aug 20 18:18 UTC 2001 |
Re #129: My asymmetric DSL connection is as fast in the "slow" direction as
an ISDN link is in either direction.
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scg
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response 138 of 176:
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Aug 21 05:49 UTC 2001 |
It should be noted that Merit's prices for years have been well above what
any of their competitors were charging, for what has generally been far slower
connectivity. Price quotes (and bizarre policies) from Merit are probably
more confusing than helpful to this discussion.
Having a bunch of experience working for and dealing with ISPs, I don't find
Marcus's fantasies about things that would cause the ISP to go balistic and
cut Grex off at all realistic.
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mdw
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response 139 of 176:
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Aug 21 07:46 UTC 2001 |
So how much experience have *you* had with ComCast's customer service?
I've dealt with them, and heard plenty of other stories. Their ISP
might be your kind of cool folks, but thems definitely not in charge of
the rest of the organization.
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gull
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response 140 of 176:
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Aug 21 13:20 UTC 2001 |
I hear ComCast is now telling residential customers that web servers are
against their AUP, and that port 80 will stay blocked. I kind of doubt this
is the kind of ISP that would want business from someone like Grex.
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scg
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response 141 of 176:
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Aug 21 18:28 UTC 2001 |
Who said anything about ComCast? I thought we'd alrady established that we
needed an ISP that would allow customers to "run their own servers,", which
it sounds like isn't remotely ComCast's business model? That's very different
from "must be familiar with public access Unix systems," which would exclude
just about everybody for no good reason.
ISPs that deal with business customers are used to customers putting up
servers that need to be connected to on arbitrary ports. This is something
a few of the cable companies have explicitly disallowed from their residential
offerings because they want to deal only with residential customers, but that
has far more to do with their specific narrowly focused business model than
wiht any sort of paranoia on the part of ISPs in general. This means that
residential grade cable service (complete with dynamic IP address) isn't
appropriate for connecting devices that need to be connected to from outside
(such as Grex, or a corporate web or mail server), but that was already
obvious. Any ISP dealing with business customers (in other words, pretty much
anybody except the cable companies) will not have that issue.
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krj
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response 142 of 176:
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Aug 21 18:31 UTC 2001 |
Grex is not a residential customer, and it should not be attempting
to squeak through as one. Prices for "residential customers"
are set assuming a certain pattern and intensity of use, and it's
reasonable for the ISP to set rules and policies so that people who
want to use lots more bandwidth are forced into a different category.
From a network-service point of view, Grex is a business, even if we
are a non-profit organization.
Disclaimer: I have no direct knowledge of ComCast's access policies,
and no idea if they offer anything which would be suitable for business
use.
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krj
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response 143 of 176:
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Aug 21 18:32 UTC 2001 |
((scg's resp:141 slipped in and said what I was saying, more or less))
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mdw
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response 144 of 176:
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Aug 21 21:26 UTC 2001 |
I believe ComCast offers business service as well, but I know very
little about it. I expect they see it as an extension of their
residential service rather than something special.
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dpc
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response 145 of 176:
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Aug 22 20:42 UTC 2001 |
OK, I'll ask. What is Port 80? Can someone explain its
significance for the technologically challenged?
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cross
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response 146 of 176:
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Aug 22 22:15 UTC 2001 |
``Port 80'' in this context refers to TCP port number 80, which is
the well-known port for the HTTP protocol, which is the protocol that
web servers typically use to move data around.
So, in other words, port 80 is what you talk to a web server on. It's
significance, other than that, is that that's the port that Microsoft's
IIS web server `listens' on. IIS has all sorts of funky security holes
in it, most recently the one used to propogate the `code red' worm
which has been plaguing the Internet recently.
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keesan
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response 147 of 176:
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Aug 22 22:21 UTC 2001 |
The Ann Arbor public library uses some other port which is why you have to
go an indirect route to renew books if not a paying grexer.
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scott
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response 148 of 176:
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Aug 22 22:34 UTC 2001 |
The proxy route we're implementing should allow all users to get to the most
common non-standard HTTP ports (8080 is one of them).
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jared
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response 149 of 176:
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Aug 23 04:28 UTC 2001 |
Sorry for being out of things, but what's the current deal here?
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janc
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response 150 of 176:
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Aug 23 20:59 UTC 2001 |
Not much. We still have Covad DSL through whatever Voyager is called now.
Nothing has changed. But people are worried that Covad will vanish, and our
net connectivity will vanish with it. Nobody has come up with any viable
suggestion of what we should or could do about it.
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russ
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response 151 of 176:
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Aug 24 23:17 UTC 2001 |
Has anyone investigated the possibilities of 802.11 links
around Ann Arbor?
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