the little garden / TLGnet, Inc 2

Here's another major milestone for little garden... getting kicked off Alternet! Rick Adam's biggest mistake -- if he hadn't done this, we wold have remained a "share", but instead we ended up with T1 to Sprint Gov't Systems Division (remember, thi sis all before the CO/RE split) and a real colo at 444 Market (MFS) for $250/month! We were the first customer for them. Man was this all so flaky! ANther one of those monthly mailings. No redacting this time. --------------------------------------------- The Little Garden news, April, 1993. This is about 100 lines long. If you are in a hurry, please refer to the last section at least, search for ":::" three times, about line 75, regarding our relationship with Alternet. ::: TLG was pretty stable this month, size-wise. One person, M. Strata Rose, is soon to be connected in Palo Alto. Phonelines, etc are the order of the day. There are a lot of Zyxel 1496E modems in the little garden; they are fast and easy to use, but the pre-6.00 EPROM version has a rather annoying bug, that dumps the connection most commonly during FTPs of largish files, though it happens other times too. There are other, less-important bugs. There is a 6.00 version that fixes that, plus introduces a new bug something to do with result codes, which probably matters a lot less. 6.01 will probably fix that too. The Portmaster in Palo ALto remains reliable, with one crash during someone testing their system, a possible Portmsater bug. It's being persued. It's been quite stable otherwise. Members connected via Toad Hall had a flurry of crashes in the NOS routers, all within about a 24 hr. period. NOS seems to do this. There is some vague pattern to it; sometimes I visit the site and find some remote site hammering TONS of UDP packets to various TLG members, these seem to be involved in the crashes, though the relationship is obscure. After about 10 reboots in a 12 hr. period, both nos1 and nos2 stay up for weeks or more. Wierd. 'nos3' in toad hall is really a 386BSD box, with one port in use; me. It's been very, very reliable. The problem is, the TTY driver doesn't understand "Carrier Detect", so when I lose carrier for any reason, I have to dial into the net, telnet to nos3, KILL -9 <sliplogin PID>, then I can reconnect. Sigh. Once we get the patched driver installed... but I can't FTP the sources because my Zyxel drops carrier on long files... But it's stable, and performance is excellent. ::: WHICH BRINGS ME TO this: Pozar and I and others have been talking about how nice it would be to have a box on the ethernet at Toad Hall (for starters) that would run news, and nothing but news, and take a lot of the load off of toad.com. TLG doesn't have a budget, and so there's no hardware to use. It could have a numberof uses; it could be the news server for everyone tied in at Toad Hall. You could also have an account on it to read news on, rather than dragging mail to your box, for those of us who only read bits of it around the edges, avoiding having to peek into friends boxes that only carry a few groups, etc. The idea is that it would be something like 386BSD, with 600MB of hard disk, partitioned such that DISK FULL wouldn't halt things, etc. (This box has an additional function as file server for the routers; see below.) The problem is that we don't have any extra hardware, mainly disks. Volunteers, anyone? We need probably 600MB or more, no sense in driving ourselves crazy with less. 386BSD seems a good choice, and the drivers allow mixing types; we could install two 150MB ESDI drives with two IDE drives to make the 600MB. We need: power supply, case, 386 motherboard, 4MB memory minimum disk drives, ethernet card. Mix'n'match is fine, ugly cases fine, etc. Keep this in mind... I will assemble, install and maintain the connectivity part. Obviously this would work just fine in Palo Alto too. (A future brainstorm: when/(if) we swap 386BSD into the existing NOS boxes, the one-floppy, 2meg machines will have zero space for Unix utilities, beyond the routing tables and VI. This news box could also act as the server for additional, optional binaries etc for the routers; the routers would remain reliable, stand-alone boxes.) ::: AND FINALLY -- to be brief (just for contrast) the little garden is looking for a new Internet carrier. Relations with Alternet are umm strained, and a mutual decision was made to look elsewhere. We have info requests pending with some and are in discussion with some other internet carriers. I was hoping to have at this time mor info on the range of offers and opportunities, but like everything else in the world it goes slowly. I had expected to hear back from people this week, but here it is Thursday already. So John GIlmore thinks it's a good time to have a meeting to discuss all this, and I couldn't agree more. How about The Little Garden meeting at it's namesake, the Little Garden Restaurant in Palo Alto? In two weeks? Say 13 April, a Tuesday, 7pm or so? Because of the importance of this, I'll post the meeting and reason separately from this monthly boilerplate. The date and location are not 'hard', so suggestions are certainly welcome; though the Palo Alto location is probably a reasonable compromise physically for all TLG members.