Cable/DSL dilemma

[Kendric Beachey]

I too have an old clunker 486 set up like Gerald, which I use as a gateway to 
Road Runner.  I've got no clue about how long I keep the lease; I guess for 
now I'm not paying attention to it.  :-)

I should mention that the gateway machine runs the ThinLinux flavor called 
Edge Router, which you can find at http://edge.fireplug.net

Edge is set up to fit on one floppy disk (specially formatted to hold 1760 
kilobytes).  My clunker doesn't actually have a hard disk.  That enabled me 
to save some money on parts when I put the thing together.  Booting from 
floppy does take a few minutes, but after that everything's done in RAM, and 
I've never been able to choke the thing with too high a speed.  200 kilobytes 
per second, up and down, is not at all uncommon.

Lastly, here's a page where you can check your download speed, although if 
you're not a Road Runner customer, some of the latency of the net will be 
figured in:  http://www.kc.rr.com/rrspeed.htm

On Friday, 22 December 2000 09:10, Gerald Combs wrote:
> According to my DHCP client logs I've been getting lease times of 86,400
> seconds (one day).  However, I keep getting the same address when I renew.
> My experience has been that this happens indefinitely as long as my box
> stays up.
>
> I have an old clunker PC with two NICs that I'm using as a firewall, DNS,
> NTP, and CallerID server.  One NIC is plugged into the cable modem, and
> one is plugged into a hub along with the other computers in my house.
> I've been using the ipfilter package under OpenBSD and FreeBSD to do
> firewalling and network address translation between the two networks.
> Many others on this list have been using Linux to do the same thing.
> You can also pick up a small router designed specifically for this
> purpose for $100 - $150.
>
> BTW, I've always been skeptical of claims that DSL is somehow inherently
> better than cable.  Both have multiple congestion points between you
> and the Internet at large, and the responsiveness of both is similar
> to many LAN-based technologies.  As you add more and more connections,
> performance drops in a non-linear fashion.
>
> On Fri, 22 Dec 2000, Chris Mitchell wrote:
> > Has anyone here been successful with subnetting their own network with a
> > cable modem connection?  I have not tried yet but am skeptical since it
> > is a dynamic IP. Heck I haven't even bothered to figure out how long the
> > lease life is on an IP that RR leases on it's network.  Does anyone know
> > that?  I guess it wouldn't be so bad if the lease life was, say, 75 days.
> >  Anyway I have been tempted by the fruit of DSL with Futurenet but am
> > skeptical of performance because their competitive package's bandwidth f
>
> r transmitting is 128K (download is around 600K).  I like doing the online
> gaming thing and heard complaints from DSL users.  I smoke with my cable
> connection, granted I am fighting for bandwidth and don't have a dedicated
> connection to a switch.  Anyone know of a program that gives
> upload/download speeds on a network connection so I can check my cable
> connection?
>
> > Chris Mitchell
> > bonovox at kc.rr.com
> > squish362 at yahoo.com
> > mitchec2 at leavenworth.army.mil
>

-- 
Kendric Beachey
ak at kc.rr.com