[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by devilsadvocate

Right, the hold-for-x-seconds thing is where there is variance between router makes...see, I told you I was tired!

Not a problem.

Started on an Apple IIe back when no one outside an office knew who Microsoft was.

I played with Apple IIes a bit back at the bank where I worked on the mainframe. They were being used to run VisiCalc. At about thet time, the IBM PC began to come in, and Lotus 1,2,3 singlehandedly forced everyone to upgrade their PCs to a whole 640K of memory to run their enormous Lotus spreadsheets.

Also had a little Timex Sinclair 1000 (in the UK it was a ZX81 or somesuch) which used the TV as a monitor and saved programs on cassette tape; problem was getting a tape recorder to record with no noise, else you would corrupt the data.

I never played with one of those. I did log time on a Commodore 64, discovering the joys of "wedges" and detailed memory maps.

The C64 had 64K of RAM, and 16K of ROM, with an 8K ROM holing the kernel, and another holding Microsoft BASIC v2. Turn it on, and you were in the BASIC interpreter.

The 6510 CPU saw 64K of memory total, and the ROM chips were normally mapped into the 64K. But you could diddle a register to flip the ROM out and access the underlying RAM. One enterprising program did that, stashing code and data in the normally unused RAM. You accessed it by pressing the Restore key, and it gave you a menu of functions. You had to be careful your code wasn't trying to call kernel or BASIC routines while they were mapped out of the address space, but it you were careful, neat things were possible.

I've thought off and on about getting a C64 or C128, adding enough RAM to provide a usable RAM disk, and run GEOS on it. GEOS was astonishing on the C64, save that it was disk based, and I/0 to the 1571 floppy was terminally slow. You'd grow old and grey just waiting for things to load. Run from a RAM disk, performance might be a lot nicer.

I'd love a *nix admin job; server at work is running Oracle 8i on a copy of NT that's so old the version number is negative, and AS400 on a recently-relocated remote server which has been responsible for 22 hours of downtime this week alone. I come home to my ArchLinux64 workstation, and...you know those fabric-softener commercials where the person throws a window open and suddenly the air is fresh and everything is beautiful? It's kinda like that only not as melodramatic; also I'm not that good-looking.

When I worked on the mainframe, I had a common experience. I'd have a problem. I'd pull down the manual for the part of the system I was working on. I'd turn to the chapter documenting the program I was using. Where I hoped to find an answer to my question, I'd find a pointer to another manual I didn't have, so matter how many manuals I accumulated. I never saw a complete set of System 370 manuals, but I suspected it wouldn't fit in my cube.

The I started playing with Unix, where a complete set of manuals took three 9x6 binders occupying about a foot of space on a shelf, and said "Where has this been all my life?"

(A letter in Computerworld back then described an IBM mainframe guy's shock on encountering Unix. He took what he had been reading in to his boss, dropped it on his deak, and said "How could we have been so wrong, for so long, and nobody told us?" )

I thought that happened later but it would neatly explain a few things.

Might have. My memory is hazy on the time sequence, and I didn't Look Stuff Up.

I wanted to OpenWRT a 54G series just for the SNMP functionality since I had Comcast at the time when they started capping and (openly) throttling, and I wasn't about to take them at their word on usage numbers. Now that I don't have that issue to deal with, I can't personally justify hacking a router to get it to do what it should do in the first place. I got a D-Link DIR-655 for the Gig-E speed (hosting virtual machines on a RAID-10 array) and it "just works".

Which is all you reall care about. I hacked a bit because I could, but it wasn't a necessity for anything I did.

And seriously, I know the Belkin is a throwaway piece (got it from Wallyworld) but for the price...well, I bought a second one after all, and I'm not rationalizing when I say the electrics are iffy in this place.

I bought the Belkin as a cheap temporary measure when I thought the Linksys had failed. (It hadn't.) It's bare bones in many respects, but it does the job. It was worth what I paid for it.
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Dennis