Re: [GTALUG] GTALUG - BUILDING DEBIAN 8 PC TO REPLACE WIN XP PC
Hello Stan, Thanks for your response. My comments are inline below. Steve ----- Original Message ----- From: "Stan Witkowski" <stan@stanwitkowski.com> To: "Steve Petrie, P.Eng." <apetrie@aspetrie.net> Sent: Wednesday, July 27, 2016 12:02 AM Subject: GTALUG - BUILDING DEBIAN 8 PC TO REPLACE WIN XP PC
I suggest:
<snip>
2. Unless you have a specific need (MUST HAVE backup for stock market trading, for example), don't install a dial-up modem. Why? (Everything is Internet based...)
Mainly because I use dial-upon the Win XP system, and I don't want the hassle of changing it to use DSL, before I get the new Linux PC. Also, I'm curious to see if the experience with dial-up is better on Linux than on Win XP. I do plan, after the Linux PC is operational, to switch to DSL.
3. Install as much RAM as you can afford. (This also allows the use of a ramdisk, which can give you VASTLY faster access.) Personally I would not build a system with under 16 GB RAM, and better, 32 GB.
Others have mentioned this too. Makes good sense. I will change the spec to 16 GB and assure expandability to 32 GB.
re: Hard Drive Western Digital Caviar Blue Internal Hard Drive 750GB 3.5" 7200RPM 6Gb/s SATA 64MB cache;
IMPORTANT: I used Western Digital Green drives (and now their replacement, the Blue) ONLY AS BACKUP DRIVES!!! These are "environmentally friendly", meaning they will spin down down after a short interval (2 - 3 minutes) if there is no access to them, to save on electricity. THIS IS BAD IN A WORKING SYSTEM!!!
They are perfect as external **ARCHIVE** drives (you write a bunch of stuff to them for archival use once an hour, say), but as daily use drives they can be a disaster.
Example: The drive is written to, and spins down. A few minutes later it is accessed again, and so spins up. Down/up/down/up.............
Better: Western Digital Black drives = more expensize, but also tougher, etc.
Advice worth it's wait in gold !! I'll look at the Western Digital Black drives.
Stan.
(I'm moving in a week and hence am surrounded by packing and chaos <grin>, so any replies may be spotty...)
I saw no "spots" ... Please accept my extra thanks for taking time out from your move, to advise me.
(I'll follow your progress - may go the same or similar route at some point later.)
Stay tuned ...
On Thu, Jul 28, 2016 at 01:50:00PM -0400, Steve Petrie, P.Eng. via talk wrote:
Mainly because I use dial-upon the Win XP system, and I don't want the hassle of changing it to use DSL, before I get the new Linux PC. Also, I'm curious to see if the experience with dial-up is better on Linux than on Win XP.
I can't imagine anything that would make it better on Linux. Web pages are simply not designed with low bandwidth in mind these days.
I do plan, after the Linux PC is operational, to switch to DSL.
Well in that case, it would seem a waste to buy a modem that works with linux at all. If you already have one, that's different. Dialup modems are not that cheap these days due to lack of demand.
Others have mentioned this too. Makes good sense.
I will change the spec to 16 GB and assure expandability to 32 GB.
16GB is good these days. -- Len Sorensen
Hello Lennart, Thanks for your message. My comments are inline below. Steve ----- Original Message ----- From: "Lennart Sorensen" <lsorense@csclub.uwaterloo.ca> To: "Steve Petrie, P.Eng." <apetrie@aspetrie.net>; "GTALUG Talk" <talk@gtalug.org> Sent: Thursday, July 28, 2016 3:40 PM Subject: Re: [GTALUG] GTALUG - BUILDING DEBIAN 8 PC TO REPLACE WIN XP PC
On Thu, Jul 28, 2016 at 01:50:00PM -0400, Steve Petrie, P.Eng. via talk wrote:
Mainly because I use dial-upon the Win XP system, and I don't want the hassle of changing it to use DSL, before I get the new Linux PC. Also, I'm curious to see if the experience with dial-up is better on Linux than on Win XP.
I can't imagine anything that would make it better on Linux. Web pages are simply not designed with low bandwidth in mind these days.
I agree that dial-up is painfully slow loading many web pages. My experience used to be that web pages loaded slowly over dial-up. But they always used to load successfully. Over the years there's been a gradual degradation in page load reliability until today, when far too many pages just fail to load completely on the first attempt and I have to retry the load. My ISP (understandably) is not interested in finding out the cause of these problems.
I do plan, after the Linux PC is operational, to switch to DSL.
Well in that case, it would seem a waste to buy a modem that works with linux at all. If you already have one, that's different. Dialup modems are not that cheap these days due to lack of demand.
Here's the complication that motivates me to first, get a dial-up modem working on the new Linux PC, and then, switch the Internet link from dial-up to e.g. DSL. Right now, I run my Internet life (email, web browsing) on the Win XP PC using dial-up. If I switch to DSL before I set up the new Linux PC, then I'm going to have to update the Win XP PC to work with the DSL modem (e.g. seeing it as an Ethernet router). I really am not keen to mess around with changing the Windows XP PC to DSL from dial-up, when I'm planning to quit using the Win XP PC anyway. Maybe I'm just a Nervous Nellie, but I would rather try first to get the Linux PC to work with a dial-up modem, so I can continue to use dial-up on the Windows XP PC for my live production email operations. Once I have switched to using the new Linux PC for email and web browsing via dial-up modem, then I can comfortably upgrade my telco twisted copper pair from dial-up to DSL, and I only have to cope with getting the new Linux PC to work with DSL. And never bother to switch the Win XP PC over to use DSL.
-- Len Sorensen
On Sat 30 Jul 2016 01:26 -0400, Steve Petrie, P.Eng. via talk wrote:
Maybe I'm just a Nervous Nellie, but I would rather try first to get the Linux PC to work with a dial-up modem, so I can continue to use dial-up on the Windows XP PC for my live production email operations.
There is no need. You can use dial up and DSL simulaneously. Thus you can keep using the Windows PC and dialup at the same time as a Linux PC on DSL.
Hello Loui, Thanks for your message. My comments are inline below. Steve ----- Original Message ----- From: "Loui Chang" <louipc.ist@gmail.com> To: "Steve Petrie, P.Eng." <apetrie@aspetrie.net>; "GTALUG Talk" <talk@gtalug.org> Sent: Saturday, July 30, 2016 1:54 PM Subject: Re: [GTALUG] GTALUG - BUILDING DEBIAN 8 PC TO REPLACE WIN XP PC
On Sat 30 Jul 2016 01:26 -0400, Steve Petrie, P.Eng. via talk wrote:
Maybe I'm just a Nervous Nellie, but I would rather try first to get the Linux PC to work with a dial-up modem, so I can continue to use dial-up on the Windows XP PC for my live production email operations.
There is no need. You can use dial up and DSL simulaneously. Thus you can keep using the Windows PC and dialup at the same time as a Linux PC on DSL.
I do realize that the DSL modem provides a dial up "line" in parallel with the high-bandwidth DSL link. However, there is still a difference between: 1. a telephone link over a twisted pair of physical copper wires, and 2. an emulation of a telephone link, over a DSL modem. So, I prefer not to make the switch from dial up to DSL, until after the new Linux PC is working using a dial up modem with the current plain copper twisted-pair connection. While the Win XP system continues to work for live production Internet use, as always, via dial up modem over the twisted pair. * * * * * * Based on Russell Reiter's advice that a (e.g. USRobotics) USB dial up modem looks promising for use with Linux, and based on my subsequent my research into this USB modem idea, I am pretty confident that a USB dial up modem will work on Linux debian 8. So the plan will be: 0. Continue to use the existing Win XP PC dial up modem as usual, connecting to the dial up ISP over the existing twisted copper pair telephone landline. 1. Get the new Linux PC working with a USB dial up modem, connecting to the dial up ISP over the same existing dial up twisted copper pair telephone landline. 2, Migrate email folders and email operations (sending, receiving via POP3) from the Win XP PC to the Linux PC, while the new Linux PC uses the USB dial up modem for its Internet connection. Migrate the mail folders using a direct high-speed Ethernet crossover cable connection between the Win XP PC and the Linux PC. 3. Upgrade the telco twisted copper pair line to DSL service from plain landline telephone service. 4. Get the new Linux PC to connect to the (DSL) ISP, using the DSL line service, instead of using the USB dial up modem and dial up ISP. 5. Try (as Loui suggests) using the dial up modem on the Windows XP PC, through the DSL modem's voice phone link, to connect to the dial up ISP.
On Mon, Aug 1, 2016, 10:58 Steve Petrie, snip
I do realize that the DSL modem provides a dial up "line" in parallel with the high-bandwidth DSL link.
However, there is still a difference between: 1. a telephone link over a twisted pair of physical copper wires, and 2. an emulation of a telephone link, over a DSL modem.
The DSL modem does not provide a dial up "line" in parallel with the DSL link. DSL operates over the same wires as the traditional phone service. One does need a small filter to prevent the DSL signals from interfering with the use of the telephone link.
On 08/01/2016 12:48 PM, Ivan Avery Frey via talk wrote:
One does need a small filter to prevent the DSL signals from interfering with the use of the telephone link.
Actually, it's the other way around. The filter keeps the phone from interfering with the ADSL signal. ADSL uses frequencies that are well beyond the range a phone is capable of reproducing and well above hearing.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asymmetric_digital_subscriber_line "26.075 kHz <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KHz> to 137.825 kHz is used for upstream communication, while 138 kHz – 1104 kHz is used for downstream communication"
The ADSL filter is a low pass device, which keeps the telephone set from affecting the ADSL signal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DSL_filter
On Mon 01 Aug 2016 16:48 +0000, Ivan Avery Frey via talk wrote:
On Mon, Aug 1, 2016, 10:58 Steve Petrie,
I do realize that the DSL modem provides a dial up "line" in parallel with the high-bandwidth DSL link.
However, there is still a difference between: 1. a telephone link over a twisted pair of physical copper wires, and 2. an emulation of a telephone link, over a DSL modem.
The DSL modem does not provide a dial up "line" in parallel with the DSL link. DSL operates over the same wires as the traditional phone service. One does need a small filter to prevent the DSL signals from interfering with the use of the telephone link.
Yes. Like Ivan states you will still have traditional phone service on the same exact lines as DSL and nothing needs to be changed. Except with modern VDSL2 you don't even need a filter to separate phone and DSL, though getting a POTS splitter can improve the DSL quality.
On Mon, Aug 01, 2016 at 08:37:46PM -0400, Loui Chang via talk wrote:
Yes. Like Ivan states you will still have traditional phone service on the same exact lines as DSL and nothing needs to be changed. Except with modern VDSL2 you don't even need a filter to separate phone and DSL, though getting a POTS splitter can improve the DSL quality.
I have never seen a VDSL2 connection that didn't use a splitter/filter. I suppose it could be done but I never even looked into it. It seems to work well when split at least. Quality signal on the line is nice to have after all. -- Len Sorensen
On Aug 1, 2016 12:48 PM, "Ivan Avery Frey via talk" <talk@gtalug.org> wrote:
On Mon, Aug 1, 2016, 10:58 Steve Petrie,
snip
I do realize that the DSL modem provides a dial up "line" in parallel with the high-bandwidth DSL link.
However, there is still a difference between: 1. a telephone link over a twisted pair of physical copper wires, and 2. an emulation of a telephone link, over a DSL modem.
The DSL modem does not provide a dial up "line" in parallel with the DSL
link. DSL operates over the same wires as the traditional phone service. One does need a small filter to prevent the DSL signals from interfering with the use of the telephone link. The modem also bands traffic with unused tones as well as using the low pass filter on the line. Tone 1 = POTS, Tone 2-5 guard against cross talk. The initialization handshake chooses the optimum frequency's for data based on the signal to noise ratio as determined by a variety of physical factors. The better the SNR the more bits in the mux-bucket. List of tones and more may be found here. http://www.kitz.co.uk/adsl/adsl_technology.htm
--- Talk Mailing List talk@gtalug.org https://gtalug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk
Russell Sent from mobile.
On Mon, Aug 01, 2016 at 10:58:23AM -0400, Steve Petrie, P.Eng. via talk wrote:
I do realize that the DSL modem provides a dial up "line" in parallel with the high-bandwidth DSL link.
The DSL modem has nothing to do with your phone line working as a regular phone line.
However, there is still a difference between: 1. a telephone link over a twisted pair of physical copper wires, and 2. an emulation of a telephone link, over a DSL modem.
No no no. DSL runs on a phone line at the same time as the normal phone does. DSL filters make sure they don't mess with each other, because they run in different frequency ranges. Adding DSL to a phone line does not change anything about how you use it for normal phones or dialup. My parents have had their DSL on their fax line for many years, and the fax is perfectly happy, and a fax is just another modem essentially. DSL doesn't go near the low frequencies that the phone line uses for voice calls (and hence modem calls too). There is no emulation going on.
So, I prefer not to make the switch from dial up to DSL, until after the new Linux PC is working using a dial up modem with the current plain copper twisted-pair connection. While the Win XP system continues to work for live production Internet use, as always, via dial up modem over the twisted pair.
You can keep dialup as long as you want after adding DSL to your line, they have nothing to do with each other. -- Len Sorensen
participants (6)
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Ivan Avery Frey -
James Knott -
Lennart Sorensen -
Loui Chang -
Russell Reiter -
Steve Petrie, P.Eng.