The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly About My Fibernet Upgrade (And How You Can Help)

[JG]

Good news is that the fibernet upgrade has been completed and my network's new IP is already propogating over the Internet.  Online speed checks seem to indicate my upload bandwidth has increased to about 15 - 17 megabits/second (that's around 2 megabytes/second for you lay folk) from about 0.25 Mbps (even though I was paying for 1.5.)  As the fiber signal attenuates a bit more, it'll inch upward to 20.

The bad news is EPB totally lied to me about it being a static IP.  I specifically asked during my order placement and was given an affirmative answer, but found out after installation that static IPs are only assigned to business customers, not residential folks. It's apparently coming, but not available yet. So the bottom line is that this feature has had a downgrade in service.

The ugly is that SDM is now prone to going dark after the DHCP lease expires, if I"m not renewed with the same IP.

Yikes.  All this means that if the IP changes, I've got to go into GoDaddy's Domain Manager and update the IP for all the domains I run (5 of 'em.)  This is a completely manual process and takes a good 10 minutes or so.  To my knowledge there exists no automatic update tool for GoDaddy's DNS service.

However, ZoneEdit is a DNS service compatible with GoDaddy domains and allows for auto-update clients published from third parties.  So if I switch over, I have the ability to update automatically, which will greatly reduce SDM downtime.

This is where you guys come in.  If any of you by chance use ZoneEdit and/or DynDns.com for your own dynamic DNS services, do you have an auto-update client you can recommend?  Ability to handle more than one domain is a must; free is preferred.  I'm considering shelling out the $20 for Eponym, as it appears to be the top of the line product, but if you any of you have something better, or just as good but cheaper, please say so.

I'm going to work on this over the weekend, so until then, SDM and my other sites may go dark for a while until I manually straighten them out.

[黒い灯影]

I wonder what kinda setup your ISP has...
right now we serve over 500 clients, and they all have permanent static IP address, which is linked to their secret IP address/which is then linked to their MAC addresses.

[JG]

I wonder what kinda setup your ISP has...
right now we serve over 500 clients, and they all have permanent static IP address, which is linked to their secret IP address/which is then linked to their MAC addresses.

It's fiber to the power box on the outside of the house, then cat5 from there to my router. Since its entirely ethernet, no modem is required.  And since no modem is required, it makes business sense to make installation and support as inexpensive as possible - ie, DHCP.  I just don't like that they don't have a static ip option at all for that ask for it.  They're advertising that they have all the features AT&T DSL and Comcast cable can offer, but they apparently don't.

[黒い灯影]

Ahh that sucks
You must be connected to a switch located at their headend.
Fiber is truly amazing,
you can put any kinda data through fiber,
as long as you have the media converter for it.

[JG]

Well its run by the local power company and they're assigning a 255.255.255.0 subnet, so it stands to reason they're putting in a switch for every neighborhood or two.

The whole fiber network was really set up for a smart power grid, but they found out that with so much bandwidth available they could recoup alot of money by offering tv, phone, and internet access on the line.

[Hyperguy]

How large is SDM now?  Would it be possible to mirror portions of it?

[JG]

How large is SDM now?  Would it be possible to mirror portions of it?

2.1 GB. About 1.2 if you don't count the Snakebit Scans site.  If you don't count Snakebit Scans, the downloads section or the music section, its a mere 165MB.

And even though its mostly HTML (only the advertisement at the top and the search function are ASP.Net) I'm not all that interested in having a mirror of it.  It's hard enough keeping the beta and production sites in sync.