Networking

Paul Donahue donahu16@msu.edu
Sun, 7 May 2000 09:26:41 -0400


I too must agree.. in the east Lansing, Okemos, and Haslett area I highly
recommend Tcimet, it was the original cable modem service offered and I
signed up shortly after it was initially offered. It is now a very speedy
service and I used to average speeds of 400 kilobytes per second from MSU
servers with it, however with @home you will not get anything close. Here is
why.... Tcimet is hooked directly to MSU's network through a switched
100MBit connection, that is divided between the various nodes on their
network. @home however goes to Detroit and is connected through New Jersey's
internet pipeline (again this all to the best of my knowledge) and there it
routes through @home's routers that I believe are out on the west coast.

In sum, if you are going to be doing any heavy serving of websites or lots
of work with MSU things I HIGHLY recommend MET, but if it's just the basic
internet stuff @ home is sufficient. I have some clients on @ home setup
with a Linux server and IP Masq up and running, and I of course run it here
at my house which is through MET.

Things to know:

- Met is a real IP with no special junk. either static or dynamic. they do
however get quite mad if you run a server off of a "dynamic" IP so I
recommend going with a static (and it's cooler anyways :)

- @home they have some weird configurations that require your computer to be
a specific host name in order to remain talking on the network. This is ok
as long as you don't care about being creative with the name of you Linux
server. I have one that is like:
c183601-a.elnsg.mi.home.com or something along that line. I setup everything
like normal and have no problems with that service. I do recommend that you
have a winblows box there for the "technician" (loosely defined) to setup
the service, then after they pack up and leave you can port all the
information over to your Linux box.

best of luck, you can email me if you are having any problems because I've
fought through most of them :)

Paul Donahue