[IOML] Re: IOM Digest, Vol 26, Issue 2

[Simon Slaytor]

>The other nice thing you can do with it is "poor man's multihoming" - you
>can pool two or more relatively inexpensive ADSL lines to give you more
>resilience against ISP problems. PF controls the pool. With a little
>scripting you can make it automatically failover too...
>  
>
Who can afford that at MT's prices!

What really gets my goat is that when you upgrade your line from the 
standard 512k, I'm currently running on a 1Mb circuit MT have the cheek 
to double your rental charge for the connection, WHY? Did you come and 
replace my telephone line with 99% Oxygen free copper to cope with the 
extra speed NO!, do you guarantee it will always work NO!, do I get a 
better contention ratio at the exchange NO! did one of your engineers 
spend 2 minutes sat on his arse changing the speed setting at my local 
exchange whilst drinking coffee YES! So why am I paying YOU GUYS more money!

The ISP who's bandwidth I'm using YES the guy that owns the paper cups 
and the bit of string NO!

>Now there's a good thought :-)
>I've never checked the boot order on that device - given the lack of
>removable storage, will it PXE boot?
>
>  
>
Not to my knowledge, I've performed a quick wire tap and cannot detect 
any BOOTP packets originating from any of the interfaces. I'd expect the 
Nic's BIOS, if there is one to be disabled as there is no means of 
interacting with the POST on this box.

So apart from OpenBSD and did I hear mention of Debian, what other OS's 
power the clients connecting to this hot bed of Manx technological wizardry.

For my sins I've become quite addicted to Windows Media Center 2005, but 
apart from that small deviation from the path I'm running Ubuntu 4.1 PPC 
(Debian based distro) on my G4 GE here at work, OS X Panther at home on 
my MDD and Ubuntu 4.1 on my Laptop, only a PC as the wife has vetoed the 
G4 PowerBook I was looking at. VMWare powers a hosted XP Pro Install on 
the laptop for apps that must run under Windows.