Slashback: Bandwidth, Animation, Gruvin' 259
More news you can use on the @home front. Anubis333 writes: "After a while talking with customer support, I have learned that Comcast@Home (Soon to be ATT Broadband) has instituted a network-wide cap on user upload to 15KB! (Thats not much more than dialup) Also, they have now capped Usenet news access. What am I paying 50 dollars a month for again? More info on usenet here.
Upon even longer hold times, I found out that when Comcast switches over to ATT the cap will be set to 128KB and the usenet caps will be lifted, also they will support more groups. The full change over will be complete by the end of Feb. Any users in the Savannah Ga. Area, they will start here Jan. 15 and end in early feb. Call support for exact local dates if interested."
Yessir, about oh, yea big by a few more inches ... Dave contributed a link showing a side-by-side comparison of the current Apple laptop line, including the new bigger iBook. Shame about the resolution, though ...
By their fruits ye shall know them. zsazsa writes: "According to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Missouri Attorney General Jay Nixon has sued James Hibbits and Michael Webbs, the two founders of Linuxgruven for deceptive business practices. He alleges that interviewers were actually salespeople paid to enroll job applicants in training programs costing up to $3,150."
Would the FSF call Sun "GNU-minded"? maitas writes: "It seems that Sun has removed Solaris for Intel from its free download list. It's really sad to see a company that promotes its 'GNU minded' culture to go back on the few good things it had made. They even removed the Solaris source code from their site! Sad, sad, sad."
That them thar' book larnin' Stardance points to an interview at Salon with Steve Grand, in which the "designer of the artificial life program 'Creatures', talks about the stupidity of computers, the role of desire in intelligence and the coming revolution in what it means to be 'alive.'" You may remember Grand's book Creation: Life & How to Make It, reviewed on these pages. Speaking of reviews, several readers have contributed links to the New York Times' review of Lawrence Lessig's new book.
linuxgruven (Score:3, Interesting)
The person who answered worked for an "answering service" that could only take your name and a time for you to drive in to their super-inconveniently located "interview center". They knew absolutely nothing.
Anybody who would give these people money sort of deserves what they get, because they're fairly obvious about being a scam where you aren't getting a job.
Usenet is still accessible I think... (Score:3, Interesting)
Try using Google Groups [google.com]. Free USENET reading and posting...
I have @Home (Score:2, Interesting)
Solaris for Intel (Score:2, Interesting)
The future... (Score:3, Interesting)
Why are they bothering when it's clear their networks can't handle even current traffic levels? And who would elect to pay for a 10Mbps+ connection if they're gonna get capped to a tenth of that within 3 months of signing up?
What exactly is going to change when 10Mbps ISP connections are available?
@home bytecap idiotic (Score:4, Interesting)
To set a bytecap on their servers isn't exactly a good idea, throttling would be so much better, so if certain people were taxing the servers too much, they can be limited. I used to pull about 600KB/s(yes that's BYTES) on my local SF Bay Area server and loved it. I never exceeded 500 megabytes a day (mostly for anime) though. In fact, from what I've read and from what I've experience pre-AT&T-split, the news servers were never taxed, but it's possible that the network was at times (I seriously doubt it, but that's what they say).
Although I don't do massive downloads, I do know many people who are warez kiddies and rely on usenet for their fix. We're talking 10+ Gigabytes per day here by the way. They're going to get their 10+ Gigabyte fix whether @home caps the downloads on the usenet servers or not, the only difference is that they're going to get it from somewhere else. The result of this is a bigger strain on their INTERNET network. Before (double-checking with traceroute), when one accessed the news server, it would just use the local @home network, never leaving the internet. Now, I know a few people that have signed up with Newsfeeds (note: don't even consider these guys unless you're a warez kiddie, stay with giganews/supernews/easynews/newshosting, they go there because it's unlimited downloads at fast speeds but the completion is horrible, spread over 18 servers so you have to use special programs).
The warez kiddies are going to get their fix either way, before less bandwidth was used using the @home usenet server (no bandwidth going to the internet). Now they're getting it from college dorms and pay usenet services. Smart move, pushing the network traffic to the internet, where it costs money!
15KB (Score:2, Interesting)
You are lucky to be with @home
Re:FraudGruven - and /. was talking about it 1 yr (Score:5, Interesting)
start at comment 46309 [slashdot.org] and end at 469313.
15KB-128KB-128Kb (Score:2, Interesting)
As for usenet, I like to view others animation and files on usenet. Its not as much the cap, its that they are capping it. I dont like any change in TOS that gives me less room to stretch. 3gb in 3 days today, 3gb a month tommorow.
CE
Re:linuxgruven (Score:3, Interesting)
The burned-out 40 year old dude interviewing me didn't know much about computers or Linux beyond his cheat sheet (sitting out in front of him during the interview). Shit, he didn't even have his computer turned on.
The skills assessment 'required' to be hired asked questions like 'What does WWW stand for?'.
But, I'm not gonna lie, they had me hooked initially, with their spoutings about the pay and the job description. Come on, at 19, who wouldn't want to get paid to work with Linux?
_
Bandwidth (Score:5, Interesting)
Keep in mind that I've only tried this with DOCSIS modems. It may or may not work for you.
1. The first thing you want to do is find the IP address of the ISP's TFTP server. For me, this was the same IP as the HFC DHCP server. You can find that out by looking at your cable modem's mini webserver if availble. If not, play around with an SNMP client.
2. After you find the name of the TFTP server, get the name of the TFTP boot config file. This is availble through the same manner that you got the IP tothe real TFTP server.
3. Get the TFTP file. Use tftp to do this.
4. Decode the TFTP boot file using the docsis utility availble from http://docsis.sourceforge.net. The output will look something like this:
Main {
NetworkAccess 1;
ClassOfService {
ClassID 1;
MaxRateDown 1544000;
MaxRateUp 128000;
PriorityUp 0;
GuaranteedUp 0;
MaxBurstUp 0;
PrivacyEnable 0;
}
MaxCPE 3;
/* EndOfDataMarker */
}
5. Edit the config file to your own liking. You probably want to set "MaxBurstUp" to 0 to make this value unlimited.
6. Encode your own version of the file and place in the root level of your tftpd server, which is set to
7. You then need to create a
8. Create an alias address to the eth interface your cable modem's CPE interface is connected to. This IP address alias needs to be the same address as the real TFTP server's IP. You can do this like so:
ifconfig eth0:1 TftpServerAddress netmask 255.255.255.255
Notice the netmask setting. This is important. Otherwise you wind up having unwanted network routes which will break things. Plus, you only want the CM to have access to this IP, nobody else.
9. Create a static route to your cable modem from this "spoofed" address. This is needed so that you're "coming from" that spoofed IP when you communicate directly with your modem.
This can be accomplished by:
route add -host 192.168.100.1 gw TftpServerAddress
10. Make sure you have a time server enabled in your inet service, as well as the tftpd service.
11. Start watching your log files which will indicate a connection to the TFTP server. You can do this by:
tail -f
12. Start pinging your cable modem's CPE interface. This "poisons" the ARP cache and makes the modem think that TftpServerAddress is located on the CPE interface with a MAC address of your NIC. Then when it comes to connect to that IP, it will know where to find it.
13. Reset the modem while you are still pinging it. Make sure that the modem connects to your TFTP server and grabs the file. You can verify the upstream speed by querying the modem with an SNMP client after it comes back online:
snmpget 192.168.100.1 public transmission.127.1.1.3.1.3.1
The output should be equal to the value you used for MaxRateUp in your configuration file. If it is, make sure to destroy the IP alias on your network interface by doing:
ifconfig eth0:1 0
LinuxGruven - Scam tales from the inside (Score:3, Interesting)
What a bunch of liars, cheats, and con-artists.
I was one of the ones suckered into their scam. After weeks of job hunting I saw their add in the paper... Went in for the interview and a slick "HR" rep in a suite was there to "interview" me for the position. We were given a apptitude test, that an illiterate child could pass ( I later found out they were never looked at) and told we would find out if we qualified later in the day.
We were told it was 45K a year salary, AND overtime if you worked more than 40 a week. Only have to take our $2500 class and pass either the SAIR Certs or their Highly Accredited In house test "the NEW standard for linux certification."
Well, I was a sucker and told my head hunters I was going to go with LinuxScrew'em... whoops gruven. I took the class.
The class was 12 people in a 15 by 10 foot room with one less computer than student. Taught by instructors that had passed neither their SAIR cert or the Linuxgruven Cert...
It was a VERY basic Intro into Linux... honestly not that bad for a VERY BASIC Intro to linux, but NOT in any way a preperation for the SAIR or Linuxgruven Cert.
Ah the LinuxGruven Cert... I asked the HR rep what the pass rate was... he said about %70.. mind you the test DIDN'T EXIST yet. It didn't exist till well after january of 2001. And when it was finished... it was IMPOSSIBLE. The test questions were developed by polling the employees and I never was able to find out if any of the answers/questions were checked for veracity. I think out of all the people who took it there were only 2 people who ever passed both parts.
The "HR" people WERE salesmen, and were called such inside the company. And they worked almost entirely on commssion. They had a warm body policy... if you were enough sucker to pay cash up front, then you were in the class. The instructors, begged them again and again to at least make sure the students were computer literate but they were telling people that if they could check email, they could do well in the class and pass the tests...
Well I did get my SAIR certs after a month of study and testing AFTER the class - I was one of only like 3 from my class to actually pass them. I knew another fellow from my class that spent over $2000 retaking the exams only to be put off about starting for a month. His first day was the day they closed the doors and told us not to come to work.. mind you without any provision for informing the students. I and a few others defied the edit to not come in. Felt we had to face our students and let them know what we could of the situation. Way to much only came out afterwards but I was warning students already to not quit their current positions.
We kept hoping that LG would actually start looking for contracts for us, work to do... but they never did. We begged for real work, but they kept just basing the whole thing on a pyramid scheme till it burst.
While Hibits and his croney were the worst, general opinion is that Porter was not blameless either... but to be fair he may have just been promoted way above his competancy level and used as a scape goat/fall guy by the owners.
Oi, I could go on but that is enough.
Any other LG victims out there?