Verizon DSL

[Silvan]

Now there's an interesting topic.

I'm trying to find a Boy Scout camp waaaaaaaay in the middle of nowhere, with nothing more than an extremely crappy map to guide my way. I drive around for over an hour on all kinds of twisty little unpainted back roads, and I still haven't found it.

I know exactly where I am in relation to my point of origin, and I can find my way back home easily. I just don't know where I am in relation to the destination.

So is that lost, or not? I say not. I'm not lost if I know how to get back to a known location. Everybody else tells me I was lost.

[Silvan]

Setting the thing up for the first time, basically. You don't just take it out of the box, plug it in, and get online. You have to jump through some hoops to prove who you are. I imagine this is especially true for cable modems, since the cable company has no way of knowing who you are except by the MAC address of the modem you're using.

I don't understand the inner workings of the process or I never would have spent four hours screwing with reinstalling Windows (because I had to feed it all those stupid driver CDs to get it running well enough to run the setup program) just to do this.

[Mark & Juanita]

Sounds to me like you weren't "lost"; the Boy Scout camp was. ;-)

[J. Clarke]

"Tarzan not lost, Tarzan _here_. Trail lost."

Seriously, if at all times you know where you are and how to retrace your steps you're not lost. Your destination might be lost but that's another story.

Just for hohos, try plugging the address if there is one into Mapquest and see if it can give the directions.

>

[Mark & Juanita]

... snip

... snip

Mapquest will almost always give directions; however, those directions may not necessarily be of any use. This past summer, I was staying in Huntsville at the airport hotel and requested Mapquest provide directions to a certain destination. Mapquest obliged with a detailed list of "go this far, turn north on ..., go ... etc." I followed the directions, unfortunately Mapquest took me to a point, where, sometime in the future, people may be able to cross over or under the interstate that dead-ended the road I was to follow. I was able to gaze through the fence, across the interstate to the other end of my route but had no way of getting there from the directions I was provided. So, with the exception of approximately 100 yards of road and an overpass, Mapquest provided a detailed route to my destination.

I did find my way to where I was headed, but Mapquest kind of disappointed me.

[Silvan]

Right. The address. 1 BFE Plaza East. :) Seriously, that place is waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay out in the middle of nowhere.

[Silvan]

Same thing with Street Atlas USA. They told me they use the maps provided by various localities, and sometimes these maps include roads that were planned, but never built.

Locally, they show a road connecting two points, but actually you have to drive about 20 miles out of the way, all but three of them on gravel roads, to reach the other side of that imaginary mile-long line.

[patriarch]

Silvan wrote in news: [e-mail]:

Which is exactly where Boy Scout Camps belong. ;-)

Patriarch Woodbadge '87

[Mark & Juanita]

Yep, I think in my case the cross-over is planned, but it will be sometime when I'm a little-old old person.

Ouch!

[patriarch]

Silvan wrote in news: [e-mail]:

The best thing to do is ignore their process. Their process is designed to automate the installation in a standard manner.

When you are using anything that isn't a plain-vanilla setup, you are far better off to put something in the middle to talk to their network. In my case, it has always been a not terribly expensive router. Our first one was a FreeBSD box that one of the kids put together from leftover parts, a

1-floppy type super low end box that did simple routing and address translation. The current box is a less than $150 firewall/router, from SMC, with features that were $50k when I got my first dialup account.

Today's routers handle all of the network config dynamically. There's very little reason for you to have to run their software on your desktop. And their software is almost never current.

My cynical experience says that you do NOT want the provider to label you as 'one of those LINUX guys'.

Patriarch, who knows more about the business side of this stuff than is good for the soul...

[Tim]

I suffered with Verizon DSL for three months, and then cut my losses and switched to cable.

The DSL was cheaper then cable, I wanted a digital satellite dish, so I decided I would go with DSL (and so have two bills a month instead of three). Like an idiot, I bought into the package that had a $250 cancellation fee if I had it less then 12 months.

I had no problems getting the service up and running instantly, but the connection was really poor. Download rates were great (60-100k/sec), but my connections would usually time out after about

200-400k. This meant that many web pages would time out when loading giving me an error screen, and require hitting the "reload" icon several times. Forget about downloading a big program unless you use a download manager like GetRight, which can reconnect after each time out. Numerous phones calls and emails and chat sessions with the Verizon techs did not solve anything (The usual answer being to clear my browser cache and power cycle the modem. Yeah, like I was not smart enough to have already tried that myself).

Finally, one tech told me that this was not a problem with my setup, but was representative of the service other people in my area received due to my distance from the switching box. Of course, they were happy to charge me the $250 early termination fee to get rid of my faulty connection.

What a joke. I got reliable 49k hookups with a normal modem, which gave a more pleasant browsing experience then the DSL due to never timing out when loading web pages.

I felt that even pying the $250, I was saving money due to the loss of aggrivation. I switched back to cable, and had no more problems.

[George]

So the database derived from maps failed you. Do you think the maps themselves would have done better?

In praise of the postal people, the information they furnished mapquest on the location of the post office bearing our zip code is 35 years old and three and a half miles away.

[Silvan]

Yeah, but I spent two days picking some of the best brains on Earth trying to figure out how to get the cable modem to do something, to no avail. After I finally went through the ordeal of setting up Windows far enough to run their stupid little program, it woke up. I hadn't been doing anything wrong. Upstream just wasn't talking to me yet because I hadn't spoken the right magic words to it. After that, I haven't needed Windows since.

I have a not terribly expensive router. That's exactly why I bought it. :) I figure if I tell them I'm running Linux, they backpedal, but if I tell them I have my OS set up to talk to my Cheapass Ultrasuck 2000 XL router using DHCP, then they gloss over the user config side of it and focus in on the real issues.

I don't even have any other computers hooked to it, and I'm not using its crappy firewall, so it's pretty pointless except as insurance against being told I'm running an unsupported operating system.

No, you don't, although my experience with my current provider has been that once I manage to get through the layers of drones whose job it is to weed out the imbeciles, most of the real techs upstream are running Linux at home. :)

[Silvan]

Yeah, I love how my cable provider's answer to everything is to turn off the computer and wait five minutes.

I've never had to worry about making a choice, since I absolutely can't ever get DSL unless I move. I've used it at enough remote locations to have a feel for it though, and I think cable is worth the difference. Verizon DSL is better than dial up when it works well, but cable IME is more than twice as fast, and only half again as expensive.

[Silvan]

:)

The funny thing is they are upgrading the whole camp to have running water and septic systems. The EPA or CDC or some environmental health study people are making them get rid of the latrines.

The even funnier thing is that we, as Cub Scouts (Webelos II, currently) aren't even allowed to camp their by BSA regulation because we are more than 100' from hot showers.

Hot showers.

(Nevermind that we camp there a couple three times a year at BSA-sponsored events.)

(And yes, I had been there before, and I still spent an hour trying to figure out where it was this last time, because there are two camps, and the last several times we have been going to the other one.)

(Ottari vs. Powhattan)

[Roy Smith]

Give me a break. When I was in the Boy Scouts, we cleaned the latrines at summer camp every day with scrub brushes and pine soap. They were a hell of a lot cleaner, odor-free, and hygenic than a lot of gas station bathrooms I've been in. As long as they're not upstream of the water supply, it's a non issue. Where do people think the wild animals in the woods take a crap?

[Swingman]

Gimme a break ... Bambi, and all those other precious woodland creatures, don't do _that_! That those steaks had hair on them at one time would mortify the hell out of many folks these days.

[Jack]

Here in Hawaii, the state has recommended (posted signs) that hikers not swim in the pools at the bottom of the waterfalls on Oahu because of bacteria from animal crap...

[Mark & Juanita]

Hey, at least they aren't telling you to disconnect the cable and run your fingers over the pins to discharge any static that has built up. (No, I'm not kidding, that was DirecWay's Indian tech support answer to just about every call last year).

[patriarch]

Silvan wrote in news: [e-mail]:

The forest service has rules to follow, when the areas get this level of intensive use. As a veteran of more than one water system/septic system upgrade in the middle of forest service land, I tend to agree with them.

And the serious outbreak of 'flu-like symptoms' at one of our council's camps a decade or so ago leads me to believe that not all of the hygiene efforts were successful. That camp closed in early July, and didn't open again that year. Pretty much over-use.

BSA camping is not, and hasn't been for a long time, a wilderness experience. A wilderness experience is best done in very small groups, rather than with 100 kids.

Patriarch