| Last Updated 17 August 2005 |
ADSL in Droylsden |
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Well here we are surfing the internet day and night without a modem in sight. What is it ? ADSL is a new technology which is being rolled out across the country, currently on a trial basis. It just so happened that I managed to get a place on the FreeServe trial. Its a little bit pricey at £49.99 per month, but it is connected 24 hours a day and you do not need to dial in. There are a few downsides to the equation though, you cannot host a web or FTP site, and you cannot host game servers etc. What does it look like ? The service that I have, is meant to be the business version, which will be rolling out this month. It will cost £99 per month and will allow several computers to be connected via a hub. You get 2 boxes, and a change to your master line box. Here is a picture of my installation :-
The top unit is the ADSL router and the bottom bit is the ADSL modem. The router plugs into the modem via an RJ45 lead. I then have a hub (not shown here) which plugs into my router. My 2 PC's are then plugged into the hub. The bottle of Stella is to give you an idea of the scale of things. How Fast is it ? Well just look at this, 50k is fairly average, although it does depend on the general speed of the internet and how good the site is that you are downloading from.
The speed could be limited by your distance from the exchange, as you probably know the exchange is situated down past the Fairfield Moravian settlement.
USB Version The USB Version has now been installed, and I am having problems with the Windows 2000 Driver. After a short period of time, the USB ports lose power and the modem lights go out. This happens using Windows 2000 Advanced Server, but strangely enough it doesn't seem to happen with the Windows 98 or Millennium edition. I decided to get an old machine up and running, bought a USB card for it from Europa Computers in Salford. The machine already has a built in Ethernet card. So I configured windows 98 SE internet connection sharing on the old machine, networked my windows 2000 machine to it using a RJ45 crossover cable. I configured the Windows 2000 machine to automatically assign its ip address (The internet connection stuff installs a DHCP server which allocates addresses to the other machines on your network). I then setup the ADSL modem and configured the connection to connect automatically. When the windows 2000 machine booted, it obtained an ip address from the windows 98 machine and that connected to the internet automatically. GREAT !! I know that connection sharing is against the rules of the ADSL agreement, but if they fixed the bug with the USB driver, I wouldn't have to sit amongst these machines and be deafened by the whirring of cooling fans. Plus it would save on my electricity bill.
Lets host some services !! Well things have progressed quite a way now, I downloaded the evaluation versions of Micro$oft Internet and Acceleration Server (ISA Server) and Exchange 2000. I have 3 machines now!, one as the gateway with the ADSL modem on, and ISA server installed. A twin celeron BP6 with exchange on it, and my desktop with Windows XP professional installed.
 The picture is trying to show that web requests hit the front end server, then are redirected to the corresponding back end server, depending on what is requested. In this case its simple because there is only one back end. The green fluffy clod and the arrows are showing the presence of droylsden.net DNS entries out on the internet. So when a message is sent to anyone at droylsden.net, the message is sent on port 25 via SMTP to my front end machine. ISA server then routes the traffic through to the back end mail server. Exchange services can be reached via the internet by pointing the web browser to www1.droylsden.net/exchange. You will be asked to identify yourself, then the outlook web access page should be shown. In order to set the DNS records up, I had to buy a service from easyspace, whereby they allow me to create and maintain DNS entries for droylsden.net. This facility allows you to host your own services and direct people to your own server, or any other I suppose. So if I want to change the email provider for droylsden.net then I just have to update the ip address that the mail MX record points to. Incidentally the reason for an MX record, is that when someone sends an email to paul@droylsden.net, then their mail system does not know which server in the droylsden.net domain is handling mail. (It could be any one of my 3 computers). So by registering an MX record in DNS we can direct the mail to a specific server. The server specified does not have to be in the droylsden.net domain.! |
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