Inert Ramblings

I’ve been a Speakeasy 768/768 SDSL customer for over three years now and, up until recently, I couldn’t have been happier with the service! That is until I found out that Speakeasy had a new 6000/768 ADSL offering in my area. The 768/768 SDSL line was originally chosen because we were locally hosting around a dozen Web sites and needed the corporate class QOS. Now that all of my Web services have been colocated with ValueWeb, I opted to migrate to the much faster consumer class 6000/768 ADSL circuit.

The basic migration process only took a few minutes! A self-install kit showed up with a Broadxent 8012-V bridge, some filters, and an installation sheet. A filter was dropped into place to isolate all phones in the house from the bridge, and the bridge was installed on a dedicated line that ran straight to the demarc. I took a sledgehammer to my Linksys BEFSX41 and redeployed a fresh installation of SmoothWall Firewall running on an old AMD K6 box. With 8 IP addresses to spare in the DMZ, Netgear FS108 10/100 switches were deployed both on the LAN and WAN interfaces.

Once all the physical hardware was setup, I made sure secondary MX records were configured on our colocated Web server, and migrated the local mail server from the old SDSL circuit to the new ADSL circuit. The DNS update was instantaneous and mail immediately started rolling in. The colocated Web server acted as a backup mail server while DNS propagated to any stragglers. With a secondary MX, the local mail server can be shut down for an indefinite period of time and the colocated Web server will continue to spool mail.

So far, performance has been phenomenal! I’m averaging 550 KBps (4400 Kbps) on most transfers, and have even peaked out around 700 KBps (5600 Kbps)! With TCP overhead, I’m thinking that’s about as fast as it’s going to get. Either way, it’s pretty damn fast!