Woah buddy; important point -- don't forget to de-rate your generator!

If you actually use even close to 80% of your 100A service, that 17kw Kohler running on natural gas is going to fry.

Most gas generators can be fueled with either LP or NG, but when you burn NG, your efficiency is diminished. In addition, utility companies like to keep the BTU content of their gas close to the minimum they are legally allowed, so it's good even to overestimate. Rule of thumb on this is around 15% total below the advertised rating or 5-10% lower than the official NG rating of the generator. For that 17kW Kholer that puts you at around 14kW that you can realistically produce out of that genset at peak.

Also keep in mind that for a number of other reasons, you're not going to be able to get peak power out of that generator for a while after it starts up, and most "standby" generators are not rated for peak power during continuous duty. There is also power factor to consider, as well as some other minor unfavorable types of things that the marketing numbers don't really include, so you really need to de-rate about 10% more to figure the nominal size load you can protect.

SO just being conservative on that Kholer (which you need to be when you are considering an EMERGENCY generator), you could reasonably ask it for 55A or so. That might be sufficient for a whole home without major electric appliances, but it's not going to deal with electric heaters, ovens, clothes dryers, etc. all that well. You'd need either a larger genset or to do some selective circuit protection using a sub-panel.

The title of this post is rather misleading. It implies VirtualBox can run a virtualized 64 bit machine on a 32 bit processor and VMWare cannot. Neither of these are true. It can now host a 64 bit guest VM when the host OS is 32 bits.

Support for 64 bit VM's under 32 bit host OS's has been standard in VMWare's entire line ever since they included 64 bit guest support. Even the service console through ESX 3.5 is a 32 bit VM (Though it's not really fair to call it the "Host" OS)

AFAIK, virtualizing 64 bit guests does still require Intel VT or AMD Pacifica support on the CPU regardless on all products that support 64 bit guests.

The other thing to consider is that these "Tier 1" companies who are also "Last Mile" access providers are huge businesses. It is irresponsible for the "Last Mile" division to rely solely on the "Tier 1" division for access for its customers. Sprint (the ISP that connects customer cellphones to the net) should have an alternative to routing through Sprint (the backbone provider).

I'm not sure whether or not to blame Sprint & Cogent (collectively) or their customers (collectively) for any trouble caused on Oct. 30. They were all getting exactly what they paid (or did not pay) for.

Well OK so others have cleared this up for you -- transit free etc.

So we have these big networks all feeling high and mighty because they are so freaking insistent on remaining transit free; it's ridiculous.

Here's the question that customers should be asking their providers instead of just complaining when things go wrong: If I am paying you for Internet access, how will you handle this type of contingency? If Sprint & Cogent were receiving money from customers for Internet connectivity, Sprint & Cogent should have had paid transit available for their customers. They can blame each other all day long for all anyone cares, but in the end the customer loses. To be basically transit free you have to peer with something like 11 networks or some such these days. When you tell your customers there isn't an alternative and start blaming some other company, you are flat out lying.

Problem is nobody knows to ask so there's no incentive to do it.

Anyone who has taken even a passing glance at Iridium data knows it's 2400bps with stream compression -- it really bothers me that you have apparently looked into using it and don't know this basic spec.

But, on to the problem: You need to manage some gear remotely and the lowest common denominator is 2400 bps. I really don't understand why you can't use a serial device server and forward/reverse telnet to do anything you really need. Windows 2008 "foundation" or "core" or whatever they call it really has made it possible (though horribly un-fun) to manage windows from a command line.

If you absolutely require remote GUI, your best bet will be ICA as it supports direct serial and can run at a functional level at 9600 baud and probably pass in a pinch at 2400. I am not sure if Citrix's PortICA (The version that runs on XP etc.) can be made to support serial connections, but it's worth asking them about. RDP will be quite a bit thicker and requires IP connectivity to work.