🚀 go-pugleaf

Joe Schwartz wrote:

> So now I'm shopping around for a new service provider, and AlbanyNet
> appears to be a reasonable choice.  If you use AlbanyNet, how happy are you
> with their service?  Do you ever get busy signals or dropped connections
> when you dial in?  How good is their Usenet newsserver?  Do you ever seem
> to miss articles from a thread?  Are there any other problems you've had?
> 
> Thanks in advance for any comments and suggestions.

Joe,

I've been working developing Web pages for a client on albany net.
My experience is not so much with news (since I'm supposed to be
programming) or dialing up (I come in over the net directly) but I'll
touch on a few of my observations.

Overall, I'd say they're good.  Their tech support always friendly and relatively
prompt.  They have a good base of installed software - gcc, perl, emacs,
pine, bison, etc.  A few things to note:

	- very slow link over the net from my internet site (below).
	  When I asked an albany.net techie what their take on this was,
	  I was a bit taken aback by the "it can't be us" response.  They 
	  indicated that the whole SUNY/nysernet network was slow and was
	  no doubt the source of the bottleneck.   
	  This may be.  However, I haven't experienced anywhere else the 
	  sluggishness I see when logging into albany.net over the internet.
	  Web access is effected in a similar way.  If all you want to do
	  is dial-up, you're not affected by this but if you've got some
	  local account(s) that you want to hop back and forth from, I'd
	  try to get a sense of what your connection is going to be like.

	  I will say that dial-up connections are good (in my limited experience)
	  and recently I've gotten through at 28.8 consistantly, which is 
	  apparently the result of some recent hardware upgrades.
	
	- recently, they upgraded their OS and Web servers which is great.  
	  However, suddenly, a number of pages that were running fine, broke.  
	  The fixes were pretty easy and ordinarily I wouldn't care except
	  that our client was right on the phone to us.

	- a number of technical things that are mildly inconvenient:

		- crontab is disabled
		- web server is configured so that IP names
	 	  aren't available to cgi scripts (I have to resolve
		  them myself)
		- web server stats files don't seem to be accessible.  they
		  do send you daily mail with a nice, formatted
		  summary, but I'd like to get at the access.log and,
		  more importantly, the error.log files myself sometimes.

As a disclaimer, I'd point out that I'm used to having my own unix
machine with control over everything so I have little sense of
boundries.  I also have no experience as an internet service
provider person and so am probably missing some of the 
efficiency/convenience tradeoffs and some of the necessary safegaurds
against user abuse.

-jim

-- 
Jim Schlemmer			http://grunt.asrc.albany.edu/~jim
Research Associate		jim@grunt.asrc.albany.edu
ASRC, Albany, NY.		(518) 442-3792