[COLUG] Linux-friendly rural broadband in Central Ohio?

[Jonadab the Unsightly One]

peter kukla <fruviad at yahoo.com> writes:

> Does anyone out there have experience with the "alternate" sources
> of Internet connectivity for the wired guy? Satellite, plain old
> dialup with an extremely good provider, or something else?  What has
> worked well, and what hasn't?

I'm going to talk about dialup, because it's what I know.  You'll want
to compare with what other people can tell you about other options.  I
don't know that dialup is necessarily your best option, but it is an
option, and while it's not broadband, it's actually pretty decent in
other respects if you get a good provider.

If you do go with dialup, resist the urge to go shopping for discount
prices; pay the $22/month or whatever that most dialup ISPs charge.
The discount ISPs are discounted for a reason.  Also, avoid large
national ISPs; go with a local or regional outfit.  Large national
ISPs have larger tech support departments with a script-reading first
tier you have to go through; smaller ISPs mostly don't.  My experience
with bright.net has been good[1], both in terms of service and support.

The disadvantages of dialup you already know:  bandwidth is limited,
latency is noticeable, and if you want a static IP it costs extra
($10/month extra from bright.net for example).  One way around the
dynamic IP issue that will allow you to still find your home system
from elsewhere is dynamic DNS, e.g. from dyndns.org.  Due to the
bandwidth and latency, your remote login activities will be limited to
commandline stuff.  X11 forwarding is right out.

One advantage of dialup is that upstream and downstream connectivity
are identical.  Once you get used to the amount of bandwidth you have,
you don't suffer slower speeds when you try to upload, for example.
If you're used to DSL you may find that dialup feels slow at first,
but actually I'm on a T1 at work, and I manage to deal with the dialup
at home just fine.  Sure, I notice the difference, but it's not that
big a deal[2].

Another advantage of dialup is that it works well with virtually every
operating system.  PPP is as close to universal as any data-link layer
protocol; in my estimation it is as widely supported as ethernet,
possibly more widely than ethernet if you count old systems like DOS.
(Yes, I've used by dialup connection with DOS.  Also with BeOS,
various versions of Linux, and Windows.  These days I have a Linux box
that sits on the connection all the time and shares it out to whatever
else I'm using.)

Also, dialup is available pretty much every place that has phone
lines.  The only other option that's available in anywhere close to as
many locations is satellite (which is significantly more expensive
(even counting the phone line) and only provides better bandwidth in
the downstream direction and does not provide lower latency at all).

With a good provider, you will not have problems with your ISP
deciding that they don't like the way you use your connection.  You
can download at the maximum rate your connection supports for two
weeks solid with no breaks and nobody will raise an eyebrow.  (This is
partly because that's just not that much bandwidth, of course.)  And
as noted you can upload at that same rate, also with no problems.

Do make sure that the provider you choose has a dialup number that
your local phone company will consider a local non-toll call.

> I'm currently using 2 IPs from Road Runner, one for my Coyote Linux
> box, and one for my personal webserver.
>                         
> Keeping this configuration would make my life a LOT easier, so
> multiple IPs are a bonus.

The only way I know to use multiple IPs with dialup is to use multiple
separate dialup connections.

If your personal webserver serves out a significant amount of content
to places outside your LAN, you might to want more upstream bandwidth
than either dialup or satellite can provide.  In that case you might
consider getting the personal webserver colocated or the content
hosted.  If the webserver with any frequency gets more than two
simultaneous users hitting it, you'll definitely want to think about
this.

OTOH, if it's just something you use personally or for family stuff,
you could look into having your Coyote box forward a port.  I forward
port 80 for approximately this purpose (though I'm not using Coyote).
As far as sshing inward, just use two hops:  ssh into the Coyote box
from outside and then from there ssh across the LAN.  (This doesn't
add hardly any latency, compared to just sshing across dialup in the
first place, other than the extra time it takes you to log in on a
second system and type another ssh command.  Ethernet is a lot faster
than dialup, so it doesn't add anything noticeable.)

> I'm not a major bandwidth-hog.  I download a few ISOs and tarballs
> now and then, but I don't play network games or bother with
> file-sharing.  Mostly I web-surf and login to a remote machine or
> two using ssh.

You can do this stuff with dialup, if you are the patient sort.

Downloading ISOs does take 2-3 days per full-sized ISO, but with wget
or the equivalent you can set it going and then do other stuff while
it happens.  You'll experience some lag if you do anything on the
internet, but PPP is surprisingly good about dividing its available
bandwidth more-or-less fairly between competing processes, so you can
e.g. get your mail and read slashdot while it's downloading, it just
takes about twice as long as usual to arrive.

What you will NOT be able to do is stay current with an active CVS
tree (e.g., Mozilla).  A dialup connection can't keep up with that.

And as mentioned, when you login to remote machines, it will not be
practical to run GUI apps.  You can use command-line stuff, and screen
editors such as Emacs work okay in terminal (non-GUI) mode.

For web surfing, you will want to develop a habbit of middle-clicking
links to open them in a new tab (see Edit->Preferences->Navigator->
Tabbed Browsing in Mozilla).  The browser's tab bar functions as a
queue; the one on the left is the one you're reading, and the ones to
the right of it are waiting for you, and the ones to the right of them
are still downloading.  When you're finished with the one you're
reading, you close it and read the next one.  When you see a link to
something else you want to read, you middle-click it and it gets put
at the end of the queue.  This way you don't waste your time waiting
for pages to load.  (Instead, you waste your time reading web pages :-)

For mail, you will want to use POP3, not IMAP (or put your IMAP server
on your LAN and have it retrieve your mail from the ISP using POP3).
Similarly, if you're into usenet, you'll want an offline reader -- not
because you need to disconnect while reading but because you want to
batch-fetch articles while doing something else and then not wait for
each message to download while you're reading.

> A constant-on state would be preferred.

A dialup connection *does* drop and have to be redialed sometimes when
there's noise on the line.  With a voice call you only get a second or
two of annoying static, and usually you can still tell what the party
on the other end of the line is saying, but a data connection will
sometimes have to be redialed when this happens.  How often this
happens depends on the phone lines in your area.

The connection can generally be redialed right away, which takes maybe
thirty seconds, after you start the redial process.  Detecting the
dropped connection and redialing it *can* be automated (though you
might have to write the script to do it), or pppd theoretically
supports dial-on-demand, though I've never used it.

> Linux friendliness (or, at least, tolerance) is very much desired.

Should be no problem there for dialup.  Your ISP will probably
officially support Windows only, but you won't have any trouble
connecting using Linux if your provider is at all decent (avoid
NetZero and their ilk, as advised above), and I've had good
experiences getting tech support from bright.net, although I didn't
ask them for help setting up pppd, and I suspect they wouldn't have
been able to help me there.  If you install XFree and stuff on the
system that has the modem (e.g., your firewall), you can use something
like kppp, which makes getting connected initially fairly easy.
However, for automating the thing you would probably want to reference
the ppp howto and set things up by hand; this allows a more hands-off
approach once you go through the trouble of getting it configured
initially.  Make sure you have a modem that supports (or is supported
by) Linux, preferably one with hardware flow control.

> Any Linux folk out there in the 740 area code with an opinion?

I'm in 419 here, but my ISP (bright.net) is regional and has dialup
numbers across much of Ohio.  The area code isn't really so much of an
issue with dialup as what numbers are local non-toll calls from your
location.  In my case I can only dial Galion numbers (419-468-* and
419-462-*), but if you're in a rural area you will probably be able to
dial at least the nearest city.  (This isn't always symetrical; there
are people who can call me and it's a local call, but if I call them
it's long distance.)  Check with your local phone company and find out
exactly what local means in your location, then look for providers
that have dialup numbers meeting that definition of local.  Try to
find one whose mail, www, and dns servers run on some kind of *nix.
(Don't look for them to tell you this; investigate.  For the www
server, you can use the "What's that site running" service from
NetCraft.)  This will mean two things:  fewer outages, and their
technicians will know what *nix is.  (The smaller the ISP you choose,
the more likely their technicians who maintain the servers also do
tech support, or at least work closely with the people who do; this
means that when you ask a question like, "I'm having trouble
connecting to the news server" and they ask you something about
Outlook and you say that you can't even telnet to port 119, you won't
hit a brick wall.)

Anyway, those are my thoughts on dialup.  HTH.HAND.

[1] Caveat:  lately they seem to be filtering traceroute traffic.  I
    don't know if this is deliberate or a side-effect of some standard
    router hardening, but I can't traceroute in or out.  I usually
    work around this by sshing to a system at work that's on frame
    relay and doing traceroute from there, but this obviously doesn't
    tell me things like how the connectivity is between *me* and a
    certain subnet.  Bear in mind, this is the biggest complaint I
    have, having used this ISP since 1998.  The second-biggest is that
    they charge a dollar a month extra for paper billing, which you
    can get around either by setting up credit card payments or by
    doing a six-month discounted prepay.  And, of course, it's dialup,
    with the limitations on bandwidth that that implies.  I could get
    RoadRunner now for about $5/month more than I'm paying for the
    dialup account and the phone line it uses, but that wouldn't
    improve my upstream bandwidth much, and I'm not sure how well RR
    supports Linux, and I've been satisfied with bright.net's service,
    and I'm loath to switch ISPs only to switch again when something
    better becomes available, so I'm holding out for more options,
    sticking with what I have ad interim.  YMMV.

[2] Except when I want to run GUI apps remotely.  It does annoy me
    that I (for practical purposes) can't do X11 forwarding over my
    connection.

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