Back online

[MaineShark]

As some of you know, Fairpoint royally screwed up the DSL/phone transfer when we moved, so we spent a week and a half without Internet or phone.

And then, in the process of moving my computer, it succumbed to old age (eight is pretty old, in computer years).  Of course, since it's been eight years since I last built a computer, everything's changed, so I had to do some research and re-learn the current technology before ordering parts and building the new one.

But, I should be set for another decade, give or take, now.

I was sick of being stuck with Windoze, so the new system is a dual boot.  I have one partition with Kubuntu on it.  And another partition with Kubuntu on it.  The one is for guests/kids, and I have a copy of it in a folder within my partition, so I can wipe it and return it to stock, any time I want (without having to do an install).

Lots of encryption, of course, just on principle.  And a RAID array, for reliability.  Now I just need to figure out what, aside from downloading Wikipedia, I'm going to do with over 5TB of space...

Anyway, the summary: back online, in a bigger place with a saner landlord who actually fixes things when they break (and sometimes before: "that was getting old, so I replaced it for you"), plus much further from the road, so the kids can play outside in greater safety.  Pretty busy with work, so may or may not be online, any given day, but there are worse problems to have...

[Alex Libman]

(1)  Consider satellite for fallback.  This could be a neighborhood-wide sorta deal.

(2)  Kubuntu is for kommies.  Consider FreeBSD.

(3)  Use a caching proxy and pre-fetch your favorite sites (including the forums).  Use youtube-dl to pre-fetch your favorite channels.  If I wasn't drowning in depression, I would be running a FSP-oriented BitTorrent tracker by now, which would let people share full site cache snapshots, multimedia, etc...

[MaineShark]

(1)  Consider satellite for fallback.  This could be a neighborhood-wide sorta deal.

Several folks in town have satellite.  Their reports are uniformly negative regarding speed, reliability, and regulatory hassle (each transceiver is a Federally-licensed station, and falls under all manner of Federal restrictions).

(2)  Kubuntu is for kommies.  Consider FreeBSD.

Remind me again... how much of the development of FreeBSD was funded by the Feds?

[littlehawk]

here weee goooo.

[Alex Libman]

I thought you'd find item #3 the most helpful...

Several folks in town have satellite.  Their reports are uniformly negative regarding speed, reliability, and regulatory hassle (each transceiver is a Federally-licensed station, and falls under all manner of Federal restrictions).

I've had the same negative experience as well, but if you're in the boonies it may be your only option, or only second option if you don't want to put all your eggs in one cable/DSL basket.

Remind me again... how much of the development of FreeBSD was funded by the Feds?

At this point about the same percentage as Linux (or less for OpenBSD and Haiku), but BSD is unpoisoned by a statist license.  I'm not going to ignore scientific discoveries that were made by the Nazi and Soviet scientists either, as long as no one claims that using those discoveries makes me subject to their contract.

We can discuss the details on a more appropriate thread.

[Alex Libman]

I really need to quit my Copyfree puritanism - it makes me totally isolated, even by UNIX geek standards...

I am genuinely curious about the health and state of MaineShark's 5TB RAID array.   

Any response to the "FSP-oriented BitTorrent tracker" idea?

[MaineShark]

I am genuinely curious about the health and state of MaineShark's 5TB RAID array.   

Pretty much seamless.  The primary OS doesn't know that it isn't just operating on a single, 5+TB drive.  The boot OS handles all that, and the encryption.

It's also nice knowing the whole mess is ridiculously-encrypted.

[Alex Libman]

Which means they'll have to tickle you to get the boot password.  Or install a hardware keyboard logger.  Or maybe they already did. 


I meant what you said about what, "aside from downloading Wikipedia", you'll do with the space, and I suggested archiving FSP-related online content.  Any interest in that?

[MaineShark]

Which means they'll have to tickle you to get the boot password.

Anyway, the password is long and complex enough that it's likely I honestly couldn't remember it under duress.

Or install a hardware keyboard logger.  Or maybe they already did. 

It would be hard for me not to notice.  But there's no such thing as absolute security, anyway.  Best bet is just to make yourself a poor cost/benefit prospect.

I meant what you said about what, "aside from downloading Wikipedia", you'll do with the space, and I suggested archiving FSP-related online content.  Any interest in that?

Depends upon what content.  Sounds potentially interesting.  Wouldn't want to eat up the whole thing with that, though...

[Alex Libman]

As I recall, the Ridley Report archive (WebM, best resolution downloadable from YouTube) is only around 40GB.  Don't know how many other Free Stater video channels there are, but I doubt it would be more than 200GB total.  All LRN and other FSP-related audio podcast archives are probably under 80GB (rough estimate).  All non-multimedia HTTP stuff -- hundreds of FSP-related sites and forums, large and small -- is probably under a gig .tar.xz'ed...