[CLUE-Tech] qwest, msn & dsl am I doomed?

[David Anselmi]

Matt Gushee wrote:
> 
> On Sat, Jun 01, 2002 at 07:17:37PM -0400, jeremy wrote:
> >
> >       I don't have the $$ to switch isp's right now.   If any one has any ideas
> > drop a line. It's ok to say "you are doomed"
> 
> How much money do you think it takes to switch? Last year I got DSL, was
> very dissatisfied with my first provider, and switched after 2 months. The
> setup fee with my new ISP was minimal ($10 or $20, I guess), and my
> monthly rate went down.

When I switched to Americanisp they didn't charge me.  Just told Qwest
to switch and it happened (didn't take too long, either).  Then Qwest
charged me $30 to do their piece--sigh.

BTW, MSN doesn't control this, Qwest does.  So if MSN causes Qwest to
take a long time to release your account they must be in cahoots (well,
we knew that didn't we?)

My d/l programs routinely report around 20kbps downloads, or less, and I
have 640k d/l speed.  But I don't worry about it--I don't know the
framing of what goes down the phone line, so I don't know how much
overhead I have.  Then there are inefficiencies in the IP algorythms,
and maybe the server isn't sending any faster than that.  So I'm not
sure you'll see much better in any case.  (I would like to learn more
about this and how to profile a connection to find the bottlenecks, but
I haven't had time yet.)

So my conclusion is that everything is a-ok.  Of course I'm naive about
this stuff so please educate me.

Dave

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Date: Fri, 31 May 2002 10:37:29 -0700 (PDT)
From: "Sean 'Shaleh' Perry" <shalehperry at attbi.com>
To: Dave Price <davep at kinaole.org>
Cc: debian-user at lists.debian.org, clue-tech at clue.denver.co.us
Subject: [CLUE-Tech] Re: Clear HDD of old OS, etc?
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On 31-May-2002 Dave Price wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I am looking for a quick way to clear an HDD of old data, partitions,
> etc.
> 
> I found this on /. thru a google search:
> 
> dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/hdX 
> 
> When i do this from a console shell after booting from a woody install
> disk, It does not seem to work ... i.e. I can still see the old
> partition table in fdisk ...
> 
> Is there maybe a better dd invocation ?
> 

first, use cfdisk, fdisk, etc to wipe the partition table.  Then send random to
it.

I would be a little leery of random and would use /dev/zero myself.