5 Sep
2020
5 Sep
'20
10:13 p.m.
Hi Mike,
I live in a rural area here in New Zealand.
The best internet on offer is 5Mbps/500kbps ADSL, slow satellite with horrendous latency,
or rural broadband on 700 MHz LTE.
To solve the Internet problem I found a friend about 6 miles away in the local village
area that could get fibre. We set him up with shiny new Gbps service and run a dual
polarised 5.8 GHz link with 2' dishes that gives me 400 Mbps downloads and a 1ms
typical ping times.
Reasonable civil works needing 4" galvanised support pipes being placed to hold the
antennas. At my end the link is then hooked to a Cisco metro Ethernet switch with a
further 5.8 GHz link to another neighbour. Finally we installed a small UPS at each site
to carry over the occasional brownouts.
All three of us are radio amateurs.
HECnet round trip ping time to Legato:: is about 200ms from here, that includes a 24ms
ping to the relay at my work (via Cisco VPN and another OpenVMS 7.3 emulation which
actually has the MultiNet link to Bob's area router 2.1023).
73, John
On 6/09/2020, at 07:23, Mark J. Blair <nf6x at
nf6x.net> wrote:
?I just got connected for the first time yesterday, thanks to Johnny and Robert (YAY!!!).
I'm now squatting on the 2.600-2.699 range (which is WAY larger than I expect to fill
up!), with HUSKY being my "most likely to be turned on and connected" node since
it's a simh emulation on the same Linux box where my PyDECnet router runs. If area 2
ever starves for node addresses, I could easily give up at least half of that chunk.
But unfortunately, I'll be connected only intermittently for now, and probably down
for extended periods when my front-burner focus drifts away from DEC-related things. I
have awful internet connectivity at home, so even when I'm connected, the link will
bounce like a superball. If and when I can solve my internet last-mile problem I will
hopefully be persistently connected to HECnet even when my attention is elsewhere.
My pipe dream would be to create some sort of fun service(s) for other HECnet users to
connect to. It's really neat to be able to network like it's the 1980s again, but
I gather that there's not a lot of regular user activity on HECnet yet? If my
attention span was long enough, I'd consider writing a VMS-native MUD in order to
learn VMS innards (I'm totally a UNIX guy; VMS is still a very strange place to me).
Then I'd put it on HECnet so y'all could get an hour or so of passing enjoyment
out of my year of effort! :)
Anyway, I just thought I should chime in about why my nodes will usually not be
reachable. It'll be mostly because of my choice to live in a rural area, with a side
effect of having very substandard internet connectivity.
--
Mark J. Blair <nf6x at nf6x.net>
http://www.nf6x.net/