🚀 go-pugleaf

In <CzJBvs.sM@kd3bj.ampr.org>, chris@kd3bj.ampr.org (C. T. Nadovich) writes:
>norman@pagesat.net (Norman Gillaspie) writes:
>> 
>>Complete installation is simple and easy, and can be completed in as little 
>>as 1 hour with ordinary screwdriver and pliers. 

>I really like Norman's system (I have been using it for a month or two)
>and I agree with most everything he says in his post, but "1 hour"
>installation is a gross exaggeration. 

I don't agree. It only takes a screwdriver and an adjustable wrench,
for pete's sake. I moved recently, and until today I had the dish
mounted on a 5-foot piece of Radio Shack TV mast hammered a foot into
the ground. Worked great -- I only moved it because it was in the way
of my outdoor barbecue :-). Moving it to a more permanent location was
about a 15-minute operation -- just swing the azimuth and peak on the
tone. If you need more RG-6 cable, Radio Shack carries it. I'm now
running between 200 and 250 feet with no noticable signal degradation.

>If you have never been a Usenet administrator, you can have no concept
>of the difficulties involved in managing 100-200 MB per day of news.
>This alone requires full days, if not weeks of work, even if Norman
>himself flew to your site to install the dish. 

Well, this is probably true the first time you do it, anyway.:-). In
that case, setting up the dish is probably the simplest part.

>If you are not running a Unix based system, you will have trouble.  If
>you are not running at least 16550 UARTs, you will have trouble.  (I
>have an i486, SVr4 Unix, and a Digiboard intellegent serial card.  My
>load average over 24 hours is 35% CPU/IO utilization to support the
>feed.) If you expect a plug-n-play system on a typical Windoze consumer
>PC, you will have trouble. 

I've run a variety of systems for personal Usenet use, the first one
about 7 years ago running on Microport Unix on a '286. My present
system is a Sun Sparc II, and with the DTE running at 19200 the load
is such that the system is virtually useless for anything else. The
"right" way to fix this would be to feed the modem into a terminal
server and put that on the ethernet. The load then, based on
experience with our office systems, would be minimal. If I can find a
used Livingston Portmaster for a reasonable price, I will probably do
this.

Without starting a flame war, IMHO anyone who tries running a full
feed on anything but a Unix system is a masochist. With Linux and
FreeBSD available for next to nothing and a fully supported Unix
(Unixware) costing only a couple hundred bucks, it just doesn't cost
nearly as much as it used to to run a good, solid Unix system.

>I hate paying the phone company for anything.  I love getting a full,
>unedited feed.  NNTP over 9600 baud slip is a dog.  I like having
>the news database on disk -- nn runs super fast.  If the price stays
>where it is, Norman is very competitive with other means of getting
>news. He has a great system. 

The only problems I ever had were software problems. The hardware
works great, and it's now the most reliable feed I've ever had (more
reliable than our office feed that we get via 56Kbps leased line from
PSI). I'd also like to put in a plug for David Coelho's satfeed 4.x,
which has been solid from day one. Combined with Pagesat, it makes for
an industrial-strength system.

As always, YMMV.

--
Rolfe Tessem                    Lucky Duck Productions
rolfe@ldp.com                   96 Morton Street
(212) 463-0029                  New York, NY 10014