TangWei
OrcSlayer
Registered: Apr 2001
Location: Olympia, WA
Posts: 279 |
I am an AT&T@home installer and trainer, so you could somewhat consider me an expert. The recent decline in the @home service can be attributed to two major things. #1 All the lovely viruses floating around. For those of you who are on @home (or really any static IP ISP's, and potentially a t1) and have a firewall you will have noticed huge amounts of port scans. Mainly on port 8080 (http port), port 1212, and your udp ports. This is Code red and sircam knocking. Basicly what is happening is that these viri are looking for new hosts. And they scan for flaws in your security. What this means is a low level DoS attack (denial-of-service). I've talked with installers/network admins about this and it's not just isolated to @home. All static ISPs are having the same problem. Now some good news. First get a firewall. Even Zone Alarm is fine. This will stop your pc from responding to the scans which will save your upstream bandwidth. A typical AT&T connection is limited to 2880 kbs down and 125 kbs up. As you can see you can take a huge amount of requests, but start replying to those and you are screwed. And second update your virus software. Most homes that I go to that complain about slow service have those two viri on them. And they will dominate your upstream bandwidth which would make your pc crawl. These viri are not smart in the way of hidding on your pc. Any virus scanner can whip them.
#2 Excite@home has filled bankrupcy. These are the people that we and most other broadband cable providers lease are equipment from. Once the you internet stuff leaves your local cable provider's equip (for the most part when it leaves your city) Then it's up to Excite to get you the rest of the way. Unfourtunitly the network upkeep on thier end is lacking. The employees just don't give a damn. Good news, AT&T is in talks to buy the Excite infrostructer. That means that AT&T is in a 300 million dollar buying spree to buy all the routers, switches, servers (mail news dns gatways ect) Once that happens not only will you see your service improve, but the talk is that they are going to raise the max bandwidth. Plus chances are your bill will go down now that excite is out of the picture.
To anwser your question Goldy.. (Or was it Matt, can't remember) a nice server is a 700mhz+ 256 Ram and a nice fast hd. You don't have to worry about a vid card if you are running dedicated. There are no graphics to show. A t1 would be great, but make sure your Upstream is bigger. Silver and I did some tests and we came to the conlusion that you need 10 kbs per person you want. So if you have 100 kbs upstream then thats about 10 people. Downstream is the same, but most broadband connections are limited by thier upstream connection. Some varibles are where you live. If you are on the west or east coasts you'll be faster than in the midwest. Unfourtunitly the coasts are where the main backbones are. Also depends on how many hops it takes to get out of your ISP's network. you can you use the dos program to see. Go to your dos emulator. and type "tracert www.dslreports.com" for a east coast test or "tracert www.real.com" for a west coast. Also DSL Reports has some very good and acurate tools to test your connection speed.
Ok, gotta go tto work hope that helped.
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A Question Of Server Specs -Server Owners Read Please-
10-06-2001 05:47 PM
