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Week of 6/7/99 Friday, April 18, 2003 07:56 A (mostly) daily journal of the trials, tribulations, and random observations of Robert Bruce Thompson, a writer of computer books. |
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Monday |
[Monday] [Tuesday] [Wednesday] [Thursday] [Friday] [Saturday] [Sunday] Monday, June 7, 1999 This week marks one full year of this journal. With the exception of a few days during the very early weeks, I believe I've made an entry for every day during this period. I was going to get rid of the "(mostly)" in the title, but I may in fact miss some days, so I'll leave it as is, at least for now. * * * * * The power failed about noon yesterday, and was off for an hour and a half. Thank goodness for APC UPSs. The big APC Smart-UPS 1100 did yeoman duty. It has three PCs, a 17" monitor, and a bunch of small stuff connected to it. All my important boxes are on APC UPSs, and all of them shut down normally except kerby, my main workstation. When I tried to shutdown kerby, it took forever. After watching kerby try to shutdown for five minutes or so, I turned off the monitor. The hard disk indicator light kept flickering constantly, and I could hear the disk banging away. After 15 minutes or so, the hard disk indicator was flickering only sporadically, but I gave it a while longer. After five minutes or so of no disk activity, I powered up the monitor to see if it was ready to shutdown. Nope. As I was waiting for the monitor to come back up, another flurry of disk activity took place. I powered down the monitor and waited a while longer. Finally, after 45 minutes (!), I got another major flurry of disk activity followed by silence. I turned the monitor back on and it was displaying the "safe to shutdown" message. Fortunately, kerby is attached to the Smart-UPS 1100. If it had been connected to a lesser UPS, it would have died from loss of power long before it finally completed its shutdown. * * * * * This from Paul Robichaux [paul@robichaux.net]. The URL contains a detailed description of how a guy built his own refrigeration system for his PC.
Santayana defined a fanatic as someone who redoubles his efforts after losing sight of his goal, and it seems to me that this guy fits that definition. He's invested many hours of his time and spent $700 to run a dual Pentium III/500 system at 620 MHz. Big deal. A good rule of thumb is that it requires at least a 25% boost in processor speed for the difference to be subjectively noticeable. He's spent all this time and money to get a 24% boost. I don't understand the point. Surely a dual Pentium III/500 was already fast enough to do anything he wanted to do. * * * * * I see that Pournelle has announced on his site that I'm helping him move it, so he need no longer be nameless. FrontPage and the extensions are still driving us nuts. He started by publishing his entire site to the pair server. There were a bunch of upper-case directories and other elements that were driving us nuts because UNIX is case-sensitive and NT is not. I decided to import his web site to a local copy on my hard disk, fix the case problems and then publish it back up to the pair server. The first problem was that import doesn't work. Although the import appeared to succeed, there were numerous files on the pair server that didn't make it down to my local copy. In fact, there were entire directories missing. I fixed that by doing a file-by-file, directory-by-directory compare of what was on my local copy versus what was up on the server. After I fixed the case problems, I used FP to delete all the directories up on the server and then published my local copy up to the server. It almost works now. Almost. I hate FrontPage. But, as Pournelle told me on the phone last night, the guy who got him started using FrontPage was named Bob Thompson. So, I have an obligation to make this all work. And I will.
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Tuesday |
Tuesday, June 8, 1999 Well, I have Office 2000. I've looked at it briefly on a system other than my main workstation, and it looks pretty good. One very nice feature is that Custom Install allows you to install O2K versions of the applications while keeping your old versions as well. The only exception is that you can't keep Outlook 97/98. It gets upgraded regardless. Which poses a slight problem. If I install O2K on my main workstation, I'm committing irrevocably to running Outlook 2000. Fortunately, file formats aren't going to be a problem with this update. I understand that, with the exception of Access, all Office 97 file formats are used unchanged in Office 2000. That means I'll be able to run Office 2000 and still have people using Office 97 be able to read my Word files and so on without going through any export or convert hoops. I spent ten or fifteen minutes looking at FrontPage 2000, and was very impressed. It appears to be a significant upgrade of FP98. I think I'd like to use it. The problem, obviously, is whether I should just dip my toe into this new pond or just strip down and dive in. I do have my Kamikaze headband with the Rising Sun on it (the one I always wear while doing stuff like this), so perhaps I should just strap it on and go for it. * * * * * This followup from Paul Robichaux [paul@robichaux.net]:
Yes, but he doesn't get a 24% increase in performance. He gets a 24% increase in CPU speed. Those are very different things. Note the various benchmarks comparing a Pentium III/500 with the Pentium III/550. That's a 10% CPU speed increase, but the real-word performance increase usually shows up in the low- to mid-single digits, sometimes as little as 2% or 3%. There are so many other potential bottlenecks that going to extremes for a small percentage increase in CPU speed is a sucker bet. * * * * * I've been encountering server timeouts when publishing to my pair server. All of the changed files are published successfully, but during the final phase, "processing web updates for ...", the server times out after a minute or so. I'm not sure exactly what happens during this final phase, but I think it's when the text indices and other internal housekeeping information gets updated. I mailed pair Networks tech support about this late last week, and got the following response yesterday afternoon:
I did do a tracert several times recently when this happened to me, and the results seemed completely normal. I also checked the server loads, which looked very low--something like 0.01, 0.03, 0.01--most of the times that the server timed out. Once, the loads were something like 0.13, 0.24, 0.35, but all other times they were quite low. I thought perhaps you had a new customer on the server that was doing a lot of heavy CGI processing. I'll be publishing again tomorrow morning, so I'll keep a close eye on things and mail you the tracert results if the problem recurs. Thanks for upping the CGI Timeout setting. We'll see what happens when I try to publish today's notes... * * * * * The following from Chuck Waggoner [waggoner@gis.net]. As he says, it's long, but I'm publishing it in full because there are quite a few interesting points:
That is amazing. I've been treating disk space as essentially free for quite a while now. At less than $12 per GB, that's more true every day...
There are a bunch of "limits" that arise with IDE and Windows. Some are caused by hardware and others by Windows itself. The best solution for all of the hardware limits (other than the absolute 137 GB IDE limit) is to install an updated BIOS that supports Extended Int13. I don't know for a fact that Gateway has such an update for your motherboard, but it wouldn't surprise me if they did. Your Pentium/90 is also old enough that it may require a BIOS patch for Y2K issues.
Yes, the Maxtor drive is likely a great deal faster than what you were using, which would give you a noticeable performance boost all by itself. The clean install may also have a great deal to do with it. As far as the NT dual-CPU system, I note that some manufacturers are beginning to produce dual-Socket 370 motherboards, with built-in jumpering for dual operation. That would be an easier solution, as well as allowing you to avoid paying for slockets. As far as the Celerons, if you want 300/A ones it may already be too late. Intel ceased producing them some time ago, I believe, and they're probably already all gone. If nothing else, overclockers have probably seen to that. Not that it really matters much. You can buy 400 or 466 Celerons now, and they're likely to be as inexpensive when you're ready to build your system as Celeron 300s were recently.
As I recall, I downloaded the iesetup.exe file, which was about half a meg. I then ran it locally. On the first screen that appeared after I accepted the license, there was a button labeled "Advanced" or something similar. Clicking that brought up a dialog with three or four checkboxes, one of which was set by default to do a direct install over the Internet rather than downloading the distribution files. If I hadn't cleared that box, I'd have been in the same position you are. The ie5setup.exe file is customizable, so it's possible that you downloaded it from a source that disabled the option to download the distribution. It might be worth your while to download ie5setup.exe again, this time directly from Microsoft, and re-run it with the option to download-only enabled.
That's all news to me. I never used the subscription feature under IE4, except for a couple of halting experiments with it. I don't know of a Manage Subscriptions equivalent in IE5, but then I use IE5 synchronize only for a couple of sites, so keeping track of them is no problem. Perhaps someone else who uses this feature as heavily as you do can offer a suggestion. * * * * * This followup from Chuck Waggoner [waggoner@gis.net]:
I'm rather surprised that Gateway does not have an upgraded BIOS for that system. Granted, 1994 is pretty old in computer terms, but Gateway is usually pretty good about posting BIOS updates. I'd have expected there to be a BIOS update much later than your original 1994 version, although perhaps a very new update would be a bit much to expect. I agree that buying a BIOS update is a sucker bet. * * * * * This from Dennis Loretz [loretzd@gte.net]
Thanks for the kind words. As far as recommendations, here's what I would do: 1. Boot a Win95 startup floppy that has fdisk and format on it (as well as your CD-ROM drivers, which you'll need later to get to the Win95 distribution CD). Use it to blow away all existing partitioning information on the hard disk. 2. Create a 2 GB primary partition and mark it active. That'll be C: and Win95 will live there. 3. Create an extended partition that occupies the remainder of the available hard disk space. 4. Create three 2 GB logical volumes, D:, E:, and F: within the extended partition. You have two choices for the volume where Windows NT will live. If you format it as FAT, both WinNT and Win95 will be able to see all four volumes. If you format it as NTFS, only WinNT will be able to see that volume, but NTFS is considerably more robust and secure. If you elect FAT for your NT volume, it doesn't matter which of the three volumes in the extended partition you install NT to. If you elect NTFS for the NT volume, you want to put it on the last (F:) volume, because if you put it on D: or E: the volume names will change depending on whether you have Win95 or WinNT running. That is, if you install NT to a FAT volume, you'll have identical C:, D:, E: and F: volumes whether you've booted NT or Win95. But if you install NT on NTFS in the D: volume, for example, you'll have C:, D:, E:, and F: under NT, but only C:, D: and E: under Win95. Worse, what shows up as E: under WinNT will show up as D: under Win95, and what shows up as F: under NT will show up as E: under Win95. That way lies insanity. So, if you want to install NT to an NTFS volume, make that volume the last one available. You'll still have C:, D:, E: and F: under WinNT and only C:, D: and E: under Win95, but at least the same volume names will point to the same volume that way. 5. Restart the system and FORMAT C: /S to make it bootable. Format the D: and E: volumes as FAT as well. If you want to install NT to FAT, also format the F: volume. Otherwise, leave it unformatted. 6. Run Win95 setup and install it to the C: volume. Make absolutely sure that you install Win95 before you install WinNT. If you do it that way, WinNT will detect that Win95 is installed and automatically configure the system for dual-boot. If you install NT first and then Win95, you'll have to configure dual-boot yourself manually. 7. After you have Win95 installed and configured, shutdown the system and restart it with the WinNT boot floppies. Install NT to whatever volume you decided on, and restart the system. You'll get a boot menu that allows you to pick Win95 or WinNT at boot time.
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Wednesday |
Wednesday, June 9, 1999 Well, I got the same timeout problem yesterday morning when I published this, so the fact that pair Networks doubled the CGI Timeout period on my server seems not to have helped. It was obvious that they'd done so; it took twice as long to timeout this time, but timeout it did. Pournelle is having similar problems, but more extreme. When he mailed pair Networks tech support to ask what was going on and how it could be fixed, they responded:
I have little doubt that the situation is exactly as they represent it. When I checked my site size versus Jerry's, I found that his was about 1,500 files and 20+ MB, while mine was about 1,700 files and 10 MB. We have roughly comparable numbers of files, but Jerry has many more large images than I do. Perhaps it's a matter of perspective, but I consider both of these sites to be small or small/medium in size. If FrontPage can't handle sites this size, it's a toy rather than a serious tool. I'm inclined to see what happens with FrontPage 2000, but the fact is that these problems are all server-side, and I haven't heard anything about FP2000 extensions. Although FP98 has some aggravations on the client-side, I can live with those. I need a solution on the server-side, and I don't see that happening. I think Jerry and I are agreed that we're not wedded to FrontPage, except to the extent that neither of us has time to re-do our entire site. We'd both drop FrontPage Extensions entirely, but we want the search function, which requires it. So what do we consider doing? Continue to use FP for page layout, but publish using WebPost? Change to one of the competing products from Symantec or others? What? If people give me some feedback on this question, I'm going to open a new heading under current topics for this (it won't be there until there's something to post). * * * * * This from Tom Syroid [tsyroid@home.com]:
That's disappointing, given that the real motivation for me to move to Office 2000 would be improvements in FrontPage. I'll probably still give it a shot, but I'm more-or-less satisfied with Word 97 and Outlook 98, so I'll probably test it on another workstation before I commit to running it on my main system. * * * * * This followup from Tom Syroid [tsyroid@home.com]:
I'll probably go ahead and install it, but I'm always nervous doing anything like this on my main system. I spend about 99% of my time in Word, Outlook, and FrontPage, so I guess it'd be dumb not to take advantages of the improvements, incremental though they may be. * * * * * This from Dave Farquhar [farquhar@lcms.org]:
Good thought. I've used and can recommend the EPoX Socket 7 boards. They make several models in the AT form factor that use different chipsets, support different types of RAM, and so on. Another thing you might consider is buying a $40 WinChip2. That might easily double the integer performance of the Pentium/90, although the WinChip's floating point performance won't be as good as the Intel. Be aware that different motherboards have different voltage settings available, and that the WinChip is available in two different voltages, so it's important to get the right motherboard and the right WinChip. * * * * * This followup from Dave Farquhar [farquhar@lcms.org]:
Good point. I don't know what I was thinking. WinChips are a good choice to upgrade an existing Socket 5 or Socket 7 system, but if you're buying a new system board it'd make sense to go with the AMD. I checked around briefly and found that the AMD K6-2/300 was selling for about $50, and it would be a significantly better processor than the WinChip for this application. Of course, it also makes sense to consider a Celeron solution at that point. The Celeron is more processor than any of those we've mentioned, and buying a Socket 370 motherboard with a Celeron won't cost much more, if any, than buying a Socket 7 motherboard with something like an AMD K6-2. The only remaining issue is memory, because as far as I know all Socket 370 motherboards take only SDRAM DIMMs. What's currently installed on the Pentium/90 system may be too small or too slow to be worth worrying about salvaging. Or it may not. Isn't upgrading systems fun? I've not worked much with ASUS motherboards, but I've heard good reports of them from various people.
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Thursday |
Thursday, June 10, 1999 Lots of mail today, including some suggestions about FrontPage alternatives over in Current Topics. * * * * * We had a visitor last night from the Carolina Border Collie Rescue organization. Barbara contacted them and offered to do some volunteer work for them. We have two Border Collies. They make excellent pets if you understand their needs, but they are the worst imaginable pet for most people. They are working dogs with very high activity levels, and are extremely dominant. Their behavior and other characteristics are, in fact, closer to those of the wolf than are those of any other domestic breed. Probably fewer than 1% of potential dog owners are capable of handling them. Unfortunately, they are the smartest breed of dog by far, and are extremely trainable if you know what you're doing. I say unfortunately because these characteristics make them ideal for use in television commercials. People read about how smart they are, see them on a TV commercial, and decide on that basis that that's the dog for them. What they find is that they've purchased a Tasmanian Devil puppy. They quickly decide that they can't handle the dog, and it ends up abandoned or in a shelter. Responsible Border Collie breeders interview people who want to own a Border Collie, and refuse to sell a puppy to someone who is unlikely to be able to handle it. Unfortunately, as Border Collies have become more popular, breeders with fewer qualms have begun to offer them to anyone who wants one. Carolina Border Collie Rescue tracks down abandoned animals and attempts to place them. Volunteers serve as foster homes until a dog can be adopted, handle email and telephone inquiries, transport dogs great distances, and so on. Barbara and Laura got on very well, and plan to start making home visits to people who have asked to adopt one of the rescue dogs. CBCR is completely volunteer-staffed, and they also need help transporting the rescue dogs. They use a bucket brigade method. A dog in Winston-Salem may be adopted by someone in Texas or Oregon or British Columbia. A volunteer here may transport the dog to the Tennessee border, where they'll hand off the dog to another volunteer who will transport it another state or two towards its final destination. As you might expect, coming up with volunteers who have both the time and a suitable vehicle is not easy. Laura drives a Nissan Altima, and was delighted to find that Barbara drives an Isusu Trooper. Barbara has offered to help handle email and phone calls, as well as doing pre-placement visits, but I suspect she'll also end up doing some transport. * * * * * More from Dave Farquhar [farquhar@lcms.org] about upgrading PCs:
Good points, all. And another thing to consider is the possible effect of mixing memory on system performance. Some motherboards allow you to mix SIMMs and DIMMs, but, depending on the SIMM type, you may not want to. For instance, I've seen one motherboard that allows you to mix FPM SIMMs and SDRAM DIMMs, but if you do so all memory performs at the FPM level. Given that SDRAM is available for around a buck a megabyte, it usually makes no sense to restrict your options with a misguided attempt to salvage old memory, which is often too small and too slow to be worth saving anyway. I also agree that Slot 1 has much more future potential than Socket 7, but it's not as simple as it used to be. Intel will soon discontinue all Slot 1 Celerons, leaving the market bifurcated into Slot 1 for Pentium III and Socket 370 for Celeron. Of course, slockets will continue to be available, and will allow you to install a Socket 370 PPGA Celeron in a Slot 1 board, so perhaps Slot 1 does make the most sense in terms of keeping options open. * * * * * More from pair Networks tech support about the timeout problem:
Thanks for increasing the timeout. I'll let you know what happens the next time I publish. It almost seems that I crossed some sort of threshold a couple of weeks ago. If not the total size of the web, perhaps it was the number of files, the number of links, the phase of the moon, or some combination. Up until a couple of weeks ago, I was getting a timeout once or twice a month, and simply republishing immediately always solved the problem. Since late May, I think I've gotten the final "Published to..." prompt only once or twice. It's timed out every other time. I've also tried to update the indices by calling up the real web site (rather than my local copy) directly into FrontPage Explorer and doing a recalc links there. It times out just like the publish process does, presumably for the same reasons. I hesitate to have the FP extensions re-installed, simply because I don't trust Microsoft or FrontPage not to bollix things up entirely. I'm also working closely with Jerry Pournelle, who recently relocated his site to your service and is having all sorts of similar problems. Dr. Pournelle is personally acquainted with the FrontPage product managers at Microsoft, so he may be able to get an answer and/or a workaround directly from the horse's mouth. Incidentally, I'm considering upgrading to FrontPage 2000, and I wasn't able to find any material on your support pages about FP2000 or about the FP2000 extensions. I assume that simply upgrading my client to FP2000 won't do anything to solve the server-side problems I'm having, but I wonder if the FP2000 extensions might fix the problem. Do you plan to install FP2000 extensions any time soon? If so, you should check the Microsoft web site. There are all kinds of articles about problems with them running under UNIX/Apache, including broken installation scripts and worse. But if the FP2000 extensions solve this problem, it'd certainly be worthwhile doing whatever it took to get them installed. Surely we can't be the only users you have who are having these problems. * * * * * And, finally, a workaround for the bizarre behavior of IE4/IE5 when you use folders within the Links bar. For those who haven't been following this, IE behaves as follows: (1) open an IE session and load web page "A"; (b) open a second IE session (it doesn't matter how you open it) to display the default start page; (c) open a folder on the Links bar and click the link for web page "B" to display it. What happens is that IE displays web page "B" in the original instance of IE rather than in the second instance (which keeps displaying the default start page). Chuck Waggoner [waggoner@gis.net] came up with this work-around:
Wow! It works. Finally, an answer. I was a bit confused at first, because my Links bar was a separate line below the Address bar. But I dragged it up to the same line and shortened Links down as you suggested. Now it works as it should. Thanks. * * * * * This from Bruce Denman [bdenman@FTC-I.NET]:
Thanks. I'll note for the readers that your comment about the IDT WinChip requiring a BIOS upgrade refers to the fact that the BIOS in the machine is not Y2K compliant. Ordinarily, you can drop a WinChip into any machine with any BIOS, and it'll just work. You may see weird things at bootup (e.g. a speed that bears no relation to the speed of the installed chip), but it will work. * * * * * This followup from Bruce Denman [bdenman@FTC-I.NET]:
* * * * * This from Chris Carson [cc@bcsupernet.com]:
I'm sure you're right that pair would have put a case-conversion script in. I probably would have asked them if they could help by doing something like that, but I got started on converting Jerry's site at 6:30 last Saturday evening. At that point, we were hoping to have everything done and the new site working by Monday morning. Although pair does have 24X7 "urgent" support, I didn't think this qualified as urgent. And, yes, I am certainly beginning to understand why people who manage web servers are annoyed with Microsoft. As far as Jerry and ftp, the real problem isn't getting the files transferred. FrontPage does that just fine. The problem is that transferring the files is only a part of what the FrontPage publishing process does. After it completes the transfer, it does various housekeeping, including updating the text indices that it uses to support the Search function. That's the part that keeps blowing up. The only reason that Jerry wanted to migrate to a server running the FP Extensions was so that he could use Search, so this is a particularly aggravating problem. * * * * * This from D123FOX@aol.com:
No, it's not possible. If it's a legal tap, the phone company installs it at the main distribution frame in the central office, and you have no prayer of detecting it. If it's an illegal tap, any eavesdropper with the sense that God gave a chicken is going to use a high-impedance, inductive, or optical tap that will be undetectable. Those little boxes with the lights that supposedly tell you whether your line is tapped are completely bogus. The only thing they could possibly detect is a tap installed by someone foolish enough to put a low-impedance load (e.g. a normal speaker) across tip and ring of your line. * * * * * Afternoon: Well, I've just donned my Kamikaze headband and installed Office 2000 on my main workstation. So far, it appears to be working pretty well. This is my first edit in FrontPage 2000, so I'll post it shortly and see what happens. I also have a Tecmar Travan NS20 20 GB tape drive sitting here on the floor, and a couple of Adaptec SCSI adapters sitting on top of kerby. I need to get a CD-R drive ordered, along with some CD-R disks so that I'll have everything I need to do the upgrade on kerby. Everything takes time, and that's what I'm short of.
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Friday |
Friday, June 11, 1999 Important This warning from Werth, Timothy [timothy.werth@eds.com]:
This is delightful. When I attempted to publish yesterday afternoon's update, FrontPage 2000 prompted me for the account name and password, which I entered correctly. It rejected that and looped back to prompt me for my account name and password over and over. I tried exiting and starting it again. No joy. Fortunately, I have FP98 installed on Barbara's system. I called up my web there, clicked Publish, and entered the account name and password. It published fine. Yep. Just verified it during this session. It won't accept the correct username and password. Watch out for FP2000. * * * * * I also ordered a CD-R/W drive yesterday afternoon. I dithered about what to buy. For reliability, I was inclined to buy a SCSI version, but part of my job is to suffer so that others won't have to. If SCSI CD-R(/W) drives are more reliable than IDE versions, I need to run the IDE version. So I bought a Smart & Friendly SAF798 4X2X24 SpeedWriter Plus Internal IDE drive. I got it from PC Connection. They're never the cheapest source, and are often significantly higher than NECx, but they ship overnight and I've never had a bad experience with them. They advertised the drive for $239. I always try to beat them down a bit, and got it for $234, which was competitive with what other good retailers sell it for. The absolute lowest price I found on shopper.com and pricewatch.com was something like $207, but I gave up dealing with bottom-feeders long ago. They invariably end up shipping late or not shipping at all, shipping you a repackaged unit, overcharging grossly for shipping, etc. Just not worth it. I also got a 100-pack of Smart & Friendly CD-R disks (SAF711) for $97, knocked down $2 from the advertised $99. I almost ended up buying a Fuji 100-pack for $139 that also included jewel cases. I have no use for those things. CDs I use end up in a disk wallet. Those I need to store end up in old Tyvek 5.25" diskette sleeves, safe in an old 5.25" diskette flip file. Jewel cases are an abomination. So now I have everything I need for the upgrade I plan to do to kerby, my main workstation. I'm going to upgrade the CPU from a Pentium II/300 to a Pentium II/450 and the RAM from 128 MB to 256 MB. I'm going to install the CD-R drive, a second hard disk drive (a Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 10 GB 7200 RPM ATA drive), an Adaptec 2940U2W Ultra SCSI host adapter, and a Tecmar Travan NS20 tape drive. I've already upgraded to Office 2000. For a guy who really, really doesn't like to mess with his main workstation, I'm messing with my main workstation... * * * * * This from Michael L Earl [mlearl@statestreet.com]:
Well, yes and no. This is kind of a grey area, but if you check RFC1738, you'll find that it says that things "should" be case-insensitive. But "should" is very different from "must" in RFCs, so technically Apache fails to comply with RFC recommendations, but does comply with RFC requirements. In fact, of course, it would be very nice if Apache did ignore case, or if Microsoft in fact preserved case, both in their OSs and their applications. * * * * * This from Chris Carson [cc@bcsupernet.com]:
That looks pretty slick. Unfortunately, the account type I have at pair doesn't allow me to run custom scripts, but Jerry's account type does. Incidentally, if I link to your $20,000,000 and $40,000,000 items, can I get a 10% associates fee like Amazon? * * * * * This from [MLewis965@aol.com]:
Unfortunately, that's an impossible question to answer because so much depends on your particular environment, the types and pricing of communications services are available in both areas, the amount of traffic that will be exchanged by the two LANs, etc. Broadly speaking, there are two likely alternatives:
Deciding which will serve your needs better and what the costs will be is non-trivial. I'd suggest you locate a consultant who is experienced in this type of work, tell him what you need to do and how much you are willing to spend, and see what he can come up with. Designing and implementing a WAN, particularly one that bridges different telco service areas is a job for experts. And it won't come cheap. Expect to pay probably several thousand dollars in startup costs to design and implement the WAN. Competent WAN consultants don't come cheap. For example, if you hired me to design and implement your WAN, you'd pay me $1,500 per day, and designing and implementing the project might easily require a week or two of my time. The first question you should really ask is whether you really need a full WAN. Simply providing both ends with decent full-time Internet access may solve most or all of your problems, particularly if you can use Microsoft's built-in PPTP VPN technology to access resources on the remote site securely. * * * * * This from cc [cc@bcsupernet.com]:
Thanks. * * * * * This from [support@pair.com]:
* * * * * This from David Silvis [HUPPNUT@aol.com]. We've been best friends since we were six years old. His email address refers to the fact that he collects Hupmobiles:
You forgot the source of that quote--Adolph Hitler.
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Saturday |
Saturday, June 12, 1999 Well, the Smart & Friendly CD-R drive showed up yesterday morning. I donned my Kamikaze headband, stripped a bunch of excess equipment out of the test-bed system, and installed the drive. After trading my headband for my pirate's black eye patch and stuffed shoulder parrot, I put a CD in the CD-ROM drive, a blank CD-R disk in the S&F drive, fired up Easy CD Creator, accepted all the defaults and allowed it to "test and burn". After 13 minutes of test pass and another 13 of burn pass, EZ-CD told me the copy had been successful and ejected the disk. ARRRR! Well, it *looked* like it worked. EZ-CD said the disk had been copied successfully. The trouble was, the disk wouldn't read in any CD drive, including the CD-R drive itself. Fortunately, I'd also ordered a 100 pack of bulk S&F CD-R blanks, so I tried some more. It didn't work at 4X, so I tried it at 2X. No joy. I tried it with the intermediate copy-image-to-hard-disk step. No joy. I called up S&F tech support. After 5 minutes or so on hold, I spoke to a technician who seemed to be in no hurry at all. He walked me through a test to make sure that the drive itself was working properly, which it was. So, at this point, all I can say is that I can't seem to burn a copy of a source disk that is itself a CD-R. ARRRR, indeed. I talked to Paul Robichaux in the middle of all this. He asked if I had my Kamikaze headband on, and I told him that I had had it on while doing the install. He thought I should take a picture of myself wearing it and post it here. I told him that I'd thought about doing that, but decided not to for two reasons. First, the headband has a Rising Sun centered with (I presume) Japanese characters on either side of it. I don't read Japanese, and have no idea what they say. Probably something like, "the guy wearing this headband is an idiot." But the real reason I don't is a bit more serious. As I told Paul, I always feel funny even mentioning the headband. The men who wore the real ones were incredibly brave. Trivializing their sacrifices, or those of the men who died on the ships they attacked, makes me feel uncomfortable. * * * * * I've decided to start playing around with sub-webs. If you highlight a folder in FP2000 and right-click, one of the options is Convert to Web. That option is not present in FP98. Someone told me that the only thing one has to do to create a sub-web is to put a file named index.html into a sub-folder. I just created a subfolder named \rbt\subweb and created index.html in that subfolder. When I publish this (with Barbara's FP98; FP2000 still won't let me publish) I'll mark the option that tells FP not to publish subwebs and see if the folder and page show up on my server at pair. This link should be dead if things work properly. * * * * * This from Paul Robichaux [paul@robichaux.net]:
You may be be right that Hitler did not say this.
I have not myself read it in any of his writings, but the only
thing I have ever read by him was Mein Kampf and small extracts
of speeches contained in history books and so on. * * * * * This from Steve R. Hastings [steveha@mdlcorp.com]:
Thanks. I knew it was the fault of FrontPage rather than UNIX. I think I got Pournelle's site pretty well converted using the brute force method--renaming folders within FrontPage from mixed-case to all lower-case. That process should also fix the links accordingly. There are a few files remaining that use mixed case names, but not many. The major problem seemed to be with directory names rather than with filenames, anyway. I've normally use all lower-case (a hold-over from my programming days), so I don't have that problem here. I do have some upper-case filenames (e.g. each of my weekly journal files is "<date>RTDN.html) but that didn't cause any problems with my UNIX servers. As far as the power and flexibility of UNIX, I don't think that Jerry or I disagrees with that at all. We *know* that UNIX is much more powerful and more flexible. We just don't have time to learn it. More's the pity. * * * * * This followup from Steve R. Hastings [steveha@mdlcorp.com]:
I did understand it, but it certainly bears repeating. Actually, I *never* use anything except lower-case. My original 9999RTDN.html files were actually named 9999rtdn.html. One day, FrontPage all by itself decided to rename every file in that directory to upper-case, so I ended up with all files named "RTDN". For some reason, FrontPage left the extension lower-case. In the process of gratuitously renaming my files, it also updated all the links to point to the upper-case names, so I decided to just leave them as they were. I've probably mentioned this before, but I hate FrontPage. Every month or two, it arbitrarily decides to go out and edit/save every htm* file in my web site. I could live with that (although it means I have to publish hundreds of files each time it happens) except that it also updates the date/time bot in those pages. I've noted something about that in bold red at the bottom of my Daynotes home page. No need to apologize for saying nice things about UNIX. I like UNIX. I just can't afford the time to become competent with it. If I could use Linux to do everyday things as easily as I use Windows NT, I'd switch to Linux in a heartbeat. I think I may get a copy of Caldera OpenLinux and build a computer to run it on. * * * * * This from Steve Worley:
Everything is a trade-off, and picking a web hosting company is like picking a spouse. Jerry indeed is moving to pair Networks because I'm there, but I'll tell you the same thing I told Jerry: pair is not perfect. They have absolutely superb connectivity--better than some countries--and they know how to run web servers. But don't expect a lot of hand-holding. Not only does pair Networks not have toll-free tech support (as many web hosting companies do), they don't have telephone support of any type. If you have a problem, you send email to them and get an answer in a day or two (or three). If you have an urgent problem, you send email to urgent@pair.com and probably get a response within an hour or two. pair is UNIX-based and doesn't provide training wheels. Many other hosting companies, for example, provide web-based tools that allow you to configure mail autoforwards and so on. With pair, you use telnet and UNIX-based command line tools to configure your autoforwards. Overall, I'm pretty happy with pair, although I still hate their billing department. But what I want in a hosting company may not be what you want. If you want hand-holding, they're a terrible choice. If you want a professionally-run web hosting company that expects you to do a lot of things for yourself that other web-hosting companies do for you, with the additional flexibility that that implies, pair is a great choice. For example, my last hosting company (BigBiz.com) provided usage reports generated by Analog. I didn't have any choice about how the reports were formatted or what information appeared on them. pair Networks dumps the raw data files into a subdirectory of your home directory and lets you do what you want with them. My friend Steve Tucker has set up a cron job that processes the stat files with Analog and mails reports to him. I prefer to massage my data locally, so I simply download the raw stats files and run Analog locally. That's a choice that pair gives you that isn't even available with many hosting services. But the flip side is that many users will never see any of their stats because pair doesn't have a canned setup to generate them.
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Sunday |
Sunday, June 13, 1999 Here's an amazing true fact. Did you know that when you copy a CD to a CD-R, the result is *never* an exact copy of the source? I had been under the impression that the process of burning a CD-R was a straight digital copy operation like using diskcopy to copy a diskette. Not so. In fact, it more resembles an analog copy like photocopying a photocopy or duping a VCR tape, with all the generational degradation that implies. Each generation introduces additional errors. These errors occur in the low level data structures that actually store the data on the CD. The visible data--a file or music track--are actually derived from the underlying low-level data. Errors in the visible data are not immediately evident, because the drive electronics actually construct that visible data on the fly from the underlying low-level data. Error correction allows succeeding generations to continue to deliver perfect digital data, up to a point. But when the error correction stuff is swamped by generational copy errors, the disk itself or some files on it may be unreadable. My conclusion is that a CD-R source disk may be marginal but within limits for direct reading. But using that CD-R as a source disk with the inevitable errors that arise during the copy operation may render the target CD-R unusable. The only real solution is to use a bit-by-bit compare or CRC compare utility to compare the source against the destination. Rule of thumb: copy only from original CDs. Obviously, all this has serious implications for people who depend on CD-R for backing up or archiving data. * * * * * Laura Kangas and Barbara just left to pick up three rescue puppies in Greensboro and deliver them to Raleigh. I was planning to go with them, but I just have too much work to do. I assumed that the three puppies were Border Collies, and was surprised to find instead that two are Beagles and one is an Australian Shepherd.
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