Primitive Internet and Big Disks

The new home does have DSL. This makes it possible to work and do light surfing...VERY light. According to speedtest.net: Download: 2.58 Megabit, Upload: 0.39 Megabit. In my previous location, I was using Time-Warner's RoadRunner Turbo. I rather consistently got about 20 down and 2 up. This, coupled with the fact that my connection tends to drop 4 to 5 times a day for about 5 minutes, makes this really painful. Its no good to have a conference call drop part way through when you are getting critical information.

This means a slight bit of a change in my plans for Internet. Instead of having my friend run the wires for me, I'm biting the bullet and having AT&T add the drops I need so that I can have the fat data pipe. Here is hoping it goes well. I'm told that unlike Time-Warner which overloads their routers meaning that during peak times you aren't getting full advertised bandwidth, AT&T DOES give you the same pipe all the time. If that is so, then the "Max18" will be very nice watching Internet TV and not having problems downloading.

I've also made a bit of a change in my LAN setup. As previously mentioned, "Hermes" boot drive went kaput. I was able to recover my iTunes library off of it and it wasn't used for much beyond that and Instant Messaging, so I've decided to make a bit of an infrastructure change. On Monday, I went by Fry's and picked up a 1 Terabyte HDD for $92, an amazing price. I installed that on my MAIN desktop (Bender) and made that my primary drive. Because of the prevalence of Virtual Machines and the CPU I have (Opteron 185 - a little old, but still somewhat peppy) I could reduce my hardware needs to a single desktop and single laptop. It seemed to me that this would make my network easier to manage and cheaper as I wouldn't need to be keeping up with 2 systems worth of hardware needs and reduce the amount of heat produced by my "Data Center". With this, my next task will be to attempt to balance two network cards and set it so that iTunes doesn't accidentally try to download data over my work's VPN.

It seemed to me that as I did this I would be able to test the setup I'm eventually wanting in the event I can get the MacPro that I want as it wouldn't be terribly dissimilar.