You have a viable alternative - or rather about 130 of them, so get clued-up, ask BT retail for a MAC and migrate to another provider who can provide you with the service you want.

The BT Wholesale network is actually rather good. BT Retail is just one of 130 ISPs who use the BT wholesale network, and they're a particularly bad example.

It's vitally important to not confuse the two, and do not let BT tell you otherwise. I have BT copper to my home/office, I pay BT the minimum amount a month for this copper, but my Internet access is through the BT wholesale network, via another ISP, not BT.

Downloaded. Compiled. Installed and rebooted, and it's running on a little test "embedded" box I'm playing with. (Geode LX800) It's passed all my own tests, and that's that.

Like the new compression stuff. Compressed kernel under 1MB again - First time I've seen that for a while.

Now to try it on my Acer Aspire One...

I was living/working in the US and one of our UK colleagues had brought a tape of Linux over - A Sun DC150 tape with SLS I think...

So I bought a PC - a DX4/66 and an Ethernet card (ne2K) 280MB drive and I think 32MB of RAM. Loaded the tape onto one of the sun servers we had, NFS exported the partition, wrote a boot floppy and I think 5 more root floppys, booted the PC and did the install, initially off the floppys then via NFS.

Half an hour later I had a PC running Linux, X and fvwm and it was more usable and faster than the X windows terminals I was using on the Suns we had.

Back in the UK some months later and I switched to what was then an embryonic Debian and the rest is history...

So the first thing I did with it was marvel at just how good it was! I had my own "unix" box. How cool was that?

Yup. I've been using MRTG with a handful of home-grown plugins to do all the above.

Nagios not been mentioned yet? That gives me the overall picture, but MRTG for the individual server stuff.

I can't work out how many servers the OP has.. Is it 5 or 10? I know exactly how many servers I have in a remote data centre!

Make sure you use a business ADSL with "up to" 830Kb/sec upstream, however ... You ought to still be able to get good old fashioned 2Mb E1 lines for a lot less than 10Mb fibre. (and I'm not talking about SDSL either - "proper" 2Mb leased lines). You may even be able to get a distance independent deal, so bring a 2Mb line back to corprat HQ from each remote site - sure, it's not "fast", but I guess 2Mb upstream would be much better than 400Kb upstream as far as backups are concerned. (Still keep the ADSL at each site for general Internet access though)

It's generally not a good idea to keep liquid Nitrogen in a closed system - it expands by something like 700 times when it goes from liquid to gas, so either you need to keep it cool - hard to do if it's sitting on a hot-plate, or make the pot extremely pressure proof... And then you still need to keep it cool. Best to just let it boil away and top it up...

Speed, er "safety" cameras are everywhere - but most of the time they're fixed, so there exists databases of "point of interest" to download into most GPSs. (Along with the speed the camera is set to). Even the mobile/temporary ones are usually at known locations, so they're included too. So anyone with a GPS who gets caught speeding deserves what they get... We've also had average speed cameras for a while now too - number plate recognition (ANPR). I deal with these using cruise control, but it really irritates me when people decide "OMG, what speed have I been doing..." then slow down to a crawl 250 metres before the next camera... And I'm sure that as the variable ones are video, they'll just get added to the total surveillance society we're sleepwalking into...