OT: A broadband question.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

My broadband connection from Pipex failed earlier this week. ADSL link still working, according to the router.

I set it up myself, rather than just from a plug and play CD, using instructions provided by the late Paul Vigay - specifically for my RISC OS computer. Which is one reason I used Pipex - some others don't give you all the settings you need to do this. And it's been fine for some 5 years. The problem turned out I was using a fixed IP address for the ISP. Changing it to dynamic restored things. But why after all this time?

[Mike Halmarack]

You and Bernard Veasey are the only people I know still doing this RISC OS thing, though there are sure to be more. I wish I had that kind of loyalty. Life would be quite different, not that different is necessarily desirable in every case.

[Andrew Gabriel]

A lot of dynamic IP addresses actually change very rarely. A good DHCP server remembers who's had which addresses in the past, and if the address is still available, it will try to give you the same one you had last time. This might result in the address changing very rarely.

[John Rumm]

Most ISPs favour dynamically allocating and reusing a pool of IP addresses for the broadband clients - since it makes their job easier as they network grows and expands. They can also get away with a smaller IP address block. Some also have the option (or in some (now) rare cases) to offer static fixed addresses.

It sounds like in the past pipex gave you a static address, and now have moved your connection to a dynamic one. Many of the ISPs who do offer static addresses configure their systems to that they still work with DHCP. Hence you can leave your router etc configured to acquire an address automatically, and it will automatically acquire the same address every time. If most of their users with static addresses were doing this, then they may not have even noticed the change. Obviously if you have hard coded your original static address into your configuration, then things break.

Having a dynamic IP is ok for most users, although it becomes a pain if you want to run servers accessible from the internet on your machines.

[Adrian C]

TalkTalk up to tricks trying to consolidate what they now have acquired into something hopefully managable for the future.

Lots of disparate networks and IP address allocations. I guess your new IP address might be in another block?

Ah, a new server ...

[Dave Plowman (News)]

If you have a perfectly balanced favourite hammer (to you) what's the point in changing if all you're doing is knocking in nails? So I stick with RISC OS for the things it does well. I have a PC for things it can't do.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

Ah - might explain a few things. The week before the news access died too.

[Mike Halmarack]

Your approach is impressive. With computer systems I usually find consolidation to be a big help when it comes to ease of use and reliability.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

The RPC gets used for news, email, writing letters or documents, and of course Draw, which is still the easiest of any I've tried. And I have my own library of symbols for that which suits me nicely for the simple stuff I do.

I have got Thunderbird set up to use for email etc but simply don't like it. These days it tends to be looks over functionality.

[Mike Halmarack]

I must 've spent thousands of hours using Draw and DrawPlus. It was a great experience but somehow an obstacle when it came to learning some of the PC equivalents.

Same went for the Multistore database. I thought the time invested in that was going to be a permanent asset. It just made me very reluctant to start at the beginning again with the likes of MS Access.

Like the new football perhaps. I can hardly believe how so may good designs have been superceded by bad ones. Or perhaps it's that I got hit on the head by an Acorn early in life:-)

[Dave Plowman (News)]

Indeed. Which is why I haven't bothered. It does what I need for my own stuff. Be different I suppose if I had to send files for others to work on.

Yup. And DTP. If you have a prog you can use OK why learn another just for the sake of it?

There's not a day goes by where Windows doesn't annoy me in some way. So I'll just stick to the Acorn for things it does well. It doesn't hide things from you and keep telling you you're a naughty boy for trying to do something. ;-)

[Andrew Gabriel]

Never used or seen RISC OS myself. A quick browse would indicate there's an emulator to run it on Windows. Some years ago, I wrote an emulator for a minicomputer I had used for over a decade. When I first wrote it, it ran at about half the speed of a real system. Tried it on an Intel Nehalem a few days ago, and it runs at 35 times the speed of the original system:-) The rate at which PC hardware has speeded up over the years easily does this to emulators, given a little time.

Does anyone still develop/update RISC OS or its apps?

[JTM]

Yep. But with such a small user base I don't think any of the developers make a living from it.

John

[<me9]

I'm using it now. I haven't found an email/news client I'm happy with on any other platform. I'm using it currently with a freeware emulator (RPCemu Spoon edition) under Ubuntu10.04. I also use VirtualAcorn (VRPC-SA-Adjust) on this box when booted into windows.

There's a few developers left, both with the OS and applications. The OS is currently being ported to the beagle board, which is new hardware about 70mm square.

[Mike Lane]

Dave Plowman (News) wrote on Jun 20, 2010:

I used to be an Acorn user - in fact I still have a RiscPC sitting under my desk (does anyone want it?). Windows makes me ill if I ever have to use it.

Macs are not at all bad - in fact my Mac Pro is a pleasure to use (mostly).

[Dave Plowman (News)]

Surprisingly they still have some value if reasonably well specified, like a Strongarm.

[Mark]

I'd have thought dynamic IP addresses would be less useful for an ISP nowadays since most people have a router permanently connected and hence will be using an IP address all the time.

... Or have clients who insist on a fixed IP address for their firewall rules.

[dennis]

Static addresses allocated to users are the reason the internet keeps nearly running out of addresses and why router tables in the core are so huge. You can't have a static address on IPv6, the upper portion doesn't belong to the user and changes if you move about, it is a hierarchical addressing scheme unlike the IPv4 cockup.. The lower portion is like the MAC address and moves with you.

There is almost no circumstance where a static address is needed, only the root DNS needs to be static and that could be done away with with a bit of thought.

Dumb administrators.

[Tim Streater]

Not if the static address is within an allocation already made to the ISP. If an ISP has decided to use a particular /24 (say) for ADSL customers, it makes no odds whether some of that /24 have been allocated statically. Its gonna be one entry in the global routing table, possibly even no entries if the /24 is part of a larger allocation.

And if they decide, OK use the whole /24 for dynamic, and an adjacent /24 for static IP addresses, then there's still one entry in the table - a /23.

[The Natural Philosopher]

I think the point was to make it harder to do domestic serving.

indeed. Its not so much insist as making it almost impossible without a more complex firewall.