response 68 of 125:

Oct 19 04:10 UTC 1998

Not if we already have the ISDN connection.

response 72 of 125:

Oct 19 18:32 UTC 1998

Only a phone line was turned off, right?  No one has cancelled the 
connection on IC-Net's side as of yet.  The Board is going to discuss 
turning off some phone lines, and it seems likely they'll decide to turn 
off at least one.  That connection could easily be used to re-connect to 
IC-Net, if that path were desired.

In short, though this was a decision, it wasn't irrevocable, or even 
expensive to revoke (given the assumptions I made).  I would hope, and 
have every reason to expect, that no disrespect for STeve, nor for the 
staff, was intended.

It's pretty likely this change saved some money, even if it's just the 
advance turning off of a phone line that will be turned off anyway.  The 
only way it can cause any harm is if a rift develops between (some 
of) the staff and (some of) the Board.  That can only happen if you guys 
let it happen.

response 74 of 125:

Oct 19 22:02 UTC 1998

STeve hasn't raised any arguments here that the board wasn't already aware
of when deciding to cut the link, as far as I know.  So perhaps we've got more
stuff on the record here, but I woudln't expect this discussion to change
anybody's vote.  Also, like Mark, I'm not at all comfortable with a non-board
member being given veto power over the actions of the board, which seems, if
nothing else, procedurally bad.

response 76 of 125:

Oct 19 23:06 UTC 1998

Folks.

1) Ditch the ICNet link
2) Get ready for Solaris before y2k.  SunOS does not work
w/ y2k well at all.  Sun doesn't support SunOS 4.x anymore

I'm never on anymore, and am just wandering about old places
fora few minutes.

The vote is done.  Ditch it.  Picking up a mail server
and dropping it someplace with internet connectivity while
grex has a major outage isn't that hard.  it's called
"low dns ttl".  

As far as routing the mail over another link, yeah, it would
be cool.  oh yay for us.  It would be nice.  But
last I checked nobody has time to jump into and
after this.

If the net link is down, and you have this new mail server
up, it will handle the mail load just fine.

There is fancy router queueing that can be done
to give precedence to telnet rather than http/smtp, etc.

sigh.

Comments, send them in e-mail, as i'm never online
anymore.

response 78 of 125:

Oct 20 15:55 UTC 1998

Could someone take the IC-Net message out of the MOTD?  It would shorten
the MOTD by two line and help fight "bloat."

response 80 of 125:

Oct 20 20:02 UTC 1998

I'd suggest waiting until a final decision is made and the deed is done/not
done before removing the ICNet message from the MOTD.  It is only two lines
after all, and a few more days of thanking ICNet for all they've done for us
isn't too much to ask.

response 82 of 125:

Oct 23 00:34 UTC 1998

Actually, we don't know that's so.  Sun has released quite a few y2k
patches for sunos, most of which we've installed (some, such as the
patch for passwd, don't apply to us).  The basic data structures used by
Unix and most unix utilities shouldn't be affected by y2k, so there's no
reason to expect that sunos will turn belly-up on jan 1.  The most
likely effects of y2k on sunos would be a few utilities might produce
weird output; this is not necessarily all that big a disaster.  One
thing we haven't done (but should have) was to do some y2k testing
before switching onto the 670.  That's a shame.

Solaris has its own interesting problems, some of which are a
significant problem for us.  The kernel blocks we have would be
non-trivial to install in solaris, which has a completely different
tcp/ip architecture.  While Sun does distribute a C compiler with
solaris, it is not free; you have to purchase a license from sun and run
the license manager to use it.  The vandals have found quite a few
security holes in various versions of solaris.  We'd probably need to
get the latest stable solaris release, and do quite a bit of research to
make sure we have the right set of patches for it, that fix all the
holes found by the vandals.  Doing this right means finding a 2nd
machine to run in parallel with grex, which we don't have.  On the
bright side of things, solaris would fix the uid overflow problem, which
may be a more serious problem for us than y2k.

response 84 of 125:

Nov 2 03:18 UTC 1998

So, I take it staff is not chomping at the bit to get their hands on solaris,
eh?  :-)

response 86 of 125:

Nov 3 07:40 UTC 1998

WHile surfing today, I came upon a note that Ameritech is now offering
ADSL service, in ANn Arbor only, for about $60 per month.  This is a
dedicated full-time 8M/640k service.  Even though the rates are skewed
the wrong way for our traffic, 640k is still 5 times our current speed,
for about the same price.

Hayes is selling an ADSL PCI card for a windows box for $299.  3COM has
an ADSL router with 4-port 10baseT hub builtin, but I couldn't find a
price.  Think we could get an ADSL router for close to what we could
sell our two pipelines for?

response 88 of 125:

Nov 3 21:15 UTC 1998

Ameritech's ADSL service wouldn't fit Grex's needs very well.  It only comes
with one IP address, which may be dynamically assigned (I'm not sure about
that, though).  It's a very fast connection to Ameritech and possibly to their
web cache, but not likely to be a very good connection to the rest of the
world.

The ADSL technology itself does look quite nice, and once ISPs other than
Ameritech start offering it in this area it will certainly be something worth
looking at.  I'm guessing, though, that the standard home user cheap ADSL
connection will never be very well suited for Grex's needs, since Grex's needs
are different from those of a typical home Internet user.

response 90 of 125:

Nov 4 06:20 UTC 1998

Yes, but an asymetric connection with 384K out and 1.5M in would still be
better for us than a connection that is 128K in both directions, since 384K
is bigger than 128K.  The asymmetry of ADSL doesn't bother me that much.  The
other problems are problems with ameritech.net's current ADSL offering, and
not with the technology itself.  Whenever it becomes easy for other ISPs to
offer ADSL service, I expect the other limitations will go away, for a price.

Grex actually probably could get by with only one IP address visible to the
outside world, using NAT (network address translation), if we had to.  It
wouldn't work as well as our current setup, and isn't anything we have a
reason to seriously consider, but it could be made to work if needed.