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Pastimes : Dream Machine ( Build your own PC ) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Greg from Edmonton who wrote (11527)	11/20/2000 8:40:18 PM
From: Moving Sphere	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 14778

>>"What about the reliability aspect, how many of you have measures in place for: - electrical power failure (UPS)" So far, I have not experienced any power failure or black out that blew me away... "knock on wood..." But a UPS power block is definitely on my "to buy list". " - data backup (i.e. tape or disk imaging)" Just bought the Drive Image 4.0 (by PowerQuest) recently. Already made an image of my Windows 2000 system. Thanks to this board who brought it to my attention. " - multiple / redundant high-speed internet service providers (ISP's) which use ethernet-based connections such as cable or DSL." Unfortunately, my house is too far away from the nearest service center, so I couldn't get DSL (to my dismay!). Next, I called the cable company and they told me that they do not have internet capability in my area yet! So, you can see how thin a line I'm walking on relying on my trusty analog phone line. "Good grief, I couldn't even get 56K modem speed! The most I could get is about 46K modem speed." But again, so far, my trusty AOL access give me no problem so far. In case AOL got shut down, I still have my free Netzero account to rely on... "Heck, I will welcome those advertising window if Netzero allows me the opportunity to go back to the internet if AOL failed for whatever reason." As to Linux based internet solution... I don't have a slightest clue... If my trading softwares are compatible with Linux OS, I will have no problem migrating over to it. But unfortunately, not all my trading softwares work on Linux. So, no Linux for me. :-( But you raised a lot of important issues! Thanks.

To: Greg from Edmonton who wrote (11527)	11/20/2000 11:55:35 PM
From: Nemer	Respond to of 14778

Greg .... to answer your questions ========= electrical power failure (UPS) ==== yes data backup (i.e. tape or disk imaging) === not on any of the 3 machines used for trading multiple / redundant high-speed internet service providers (ISP's) which use ethernet-based connections such as cable or DSL. ==== have 2 phone line ISPs on two different trunk lines* and have cable ==== am on a list for wireless to be hooked up before year end (hopefully) for a total of 3 and looking to have 4* Linux ==== don't really have any pressing desire for usage Nemer

To: Greg from Edmonton who wrote (11527)	11/21/2000 12:20:59 AM
From: mr.mark	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 14778

hi greg - electrical power failure (UPS) currently using apc surge arrest, but not a ups. and i keep wanting to get one... - data backup (i.e. tape or disk imaging) been using iomega jaz 1gb disks (with compression i can fit almost 2gb per disk) for both full system and incremental backups. i've used norton 'zip' rescue disks once to rebuild a corrupted start up routine. lately i've switched to disk imaging (drive image3.0) for data back up and rollback recovery. i installed a second physical hd and have used powerquest's partition magic5.0 to create multiple partitions on each hd. i store images from one physical drive on the second physical drive and vice versa. imaging has so far saved me once when used as a rollback after symantec software just plain screwed everything all up. imaging has caused me to almost totally ignore the jaz drive. takes me about 3 minutes to image a 2gb partition as compared to about 40 minutes via jaz. - multiple / redundant high-speed internet service providers (ISP's) which use ethernet-based connections such as cable or DSL i have three isp's. one is cable modem, the other two are dial up. i made sure all are on different backbones in case one goes down there's a better chance that the other will remain okay. cable modem is currently just 'one-way', i.e, downstream and analog upstream. in the spring it will migrate to a conventional two-way cable modem system. - high-availability, will automatically route to the other internet connection if one fails see above, but no auto re-route capability - internet sharing (NAT) for all computers on the internal network i will network my two pc's as soon as i get out from under this one-way cable modem that seems to be complicating any ics plans for right now. - automatic configuration of network settings (DHCP) for computers on the internal network not applicable as of yet - firewall protects internal network from snoopy hackers i am currently running three firewalls simultaneously, blackice defender, zonealarm and norton personal firewall. this is on my win98se partition. i dual boot win2000pro, and so far i only have blackice and zonealarm configured on w2k. the symantec people say their norton products are win2k compatible, but imo, that is not an accurate statement. i plan to disable the w2k windows installer in order to get the norton firewall to install. "What about the reliability aspect..." i've been running win2000pro for 10 days now. the os hasn't crashed once, no IPF's or GPF's, no browser crashes, freezes, hangs, low resource errors, nothing like i have experienced in win98se. hope this helps :) mark

To: Greg from Edmonton who wrote (11527)	11/22/2000 12:59:02 AM
From: Howard R. Hansen	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 14778

Linux-based internet solution which offers: - high-availability, will automatically route to the other internet connection if one fails Maybe you know something Joel doesn't know but the following article says that building a LINUX system that can automatically switch between a DSL and a cable modem connection when one or the other modem fails is not a trivial task. The following article was written by Joel Kiepplinger with earthweb. Publication date 11-1-00. Good luck with your endeavors. "I've been in the process of designing a Windows 2000 Server/Pro network with dual Internet connectivity -- DSL and Cable. The theory is that I can set up a Linux box as a router that will forward the Internet connection to the Win2k server, which will in turn pass it on to its DHCP clients. The Linux box would be connected with both DSL and cable Internet options, the first being primary and the latter being a backup. My solution would involve 3 NICs in the Linux box with every network connection being live and the routing tables being the only means of controlling through which interface the Net connections would flow. The challenges to this design would be making the transition from one ISP to the other simply done on the server and transparent to the end users. My current solution is to create a shell script that switches the default route from one interface to the other (and using the appropriate gateway). While being quite workable, it requires that the person doing the switchover be able to log into the machine as a superuser, something restricted to myself alone. I'd prefer a solution that would allow a couple other trusted individuals to have JUST this power and no others, but I haven't yet discovered it. The other major stumbling block is handling where SMTP points to when sending mail. Without a mail server on the Linux box (or perhaps the Win2k box), each client would have to manually reconfigure their SMTP server settings every time the ISP switch took place, destroying all pretense of end user transparency. I'd prefer not to run sendmail on the Linux machine simply due to the fact that the box is designed to be a firewall and sendmail has a long history of security exploits. MS Exchange is really not an option because of the high pricing. I'm not aware of any low-cost or free email server solutions for Win2k yet, although I've admittedly been lax on my searching. So what do you think? What are the solutions you would use or consider? Discuss your thinking on the SysOpt Forum or drop me an email. sysopt.earthweb.com "