Be Excellent To Each Other

Get less routers is the answer

Is this their problem though? As long as the router's getting an internet connection, isn't that the end of their responsibility?

Fewer.

Is yours a combo modem router?

Dunno.
I mean, he came into my house and fucked up my network.
But I see your point.

Fothermudgers! I'm dreading moving away and having to find an ISP that isn't complete arse. Although ironically, I'd very much like to have Virgin Media available - just not the 100Mb flavour.

I'm not sure either to be honest. Maybe if it was a business broadband package, they'd be more willing to ensure everything was working as it should before they left.

The annoying thing with the router they gave me is that you can restart the damn thing remotely. Not a big hardship to wander downstairs to sort it, but every other router I've ever used has had a restart facility in the web interface.

Also on the subject of Virgin, it was interesting to see they've signed a deal with Spotify.

Can or can't? I've been able to restart both of the ones I've had.

... Oh wait, there's not a 'restart' on this "super hub". Huh.

Still...

Sorry.. "can't". It's a minor thing but I don't understand why it's not an option.

Last time someone from Virgin (or NTL as it was then) touched one of my computers, it was running Windows 2000 and he couldn't get his head around the fact that the command winipcfg wouldn't work. So yes, as long as their kit is working, I wouldn't expect much beyond that, although obviously it depends how knowledgable/helpful they're feeling at the time.

You'd be happier if he went around your network, getting root passwords, diddling with config, and touching your stuff? And why do you have so many static IPs, man?

It is interesting, as its four years ago that they announced they would have an iTunes rivalling free music download service. I know this because it was originally announced when I signed up.

Now it turns out to be spotify on TiVo. Just as I get one :-)

Three wireless points, a NAS and a server all have static addresses*.
I'd have been happier if he'd have rung me (or talked to the wife who rung me) about how shit worked.
I'm not exactly unhappy, though. It's just that home networks are only going to get more complicated as time goes on.

*yes, I know.

Thread Idea!

Entertainingly, I've just realised that you get unlimited online storage with a Virgin 50Mb or 100Mb connection, and a backup tool of some kind to use with it.



They may regret that.

Bloody hell, that's quite the perk. I'd immediately stuff it with a full off-site backup of my RAW photos (~175 GB) and go from there.

The backup is quite good.. I believe it has all my photos, I will check at weekend

Relatedly: Who knows of a good backup tool that does versioning? I want to get it to throw all the stuff I want backed up into a folder, then have that folder backed up by Virgin. If it does encryption so that Virgin can't see that I'm backing up fucking great big BluRay rips, so much the better.

Objection!

Over-ruled - valid use.

Agreed! But you can't immediately do anything with 175 GB of data

You can't immediately do anything with anything. Unless you're talking about space rather than time. The word you should have objected to was 'full'.

Doesn't that mean you have to store two copies of your stuff -- wherever the stuff is right now, and a second copy in a folder just to be mirrored by Virgin?

What does the Virgin share look like from your end? WebDAV? FTP? Something proprietary?

Yes. I'm not too worried about that, though. Thinking on, I only really want to version stuff I care about timeline-wise (dev stuff and documents, then), but I'll still need two copies if I want to encrypt everything.


Proprietary.

There's a shocker. Will it monitor a directory?

Yes. Apparently you set it to monitor directories or files, and it does "real-time updates". Like Dropbox in the Dropbox folder, I'd imagine.

Obviously, you have to give it an extra nudge to make it delete things.

Info: http://shop.virginmedia.com/broadband/b ... orage.html

I've a friend who's been backing up his family's photos to Virgin's thingymabob for about a week. It's either horrifically slow, or they're part of the same "if it exists, take a photo of it" school as the Doc. He did moan on Facebook that it'd stopped for a while, then mysteriously carried on.

Using Virgin's backup thing, I assume?

Edited to add confirmation of just that.

Maybe it paused while a tech added a new disk.

I used the Virgin backup thing when I first found out about it. It did seem really slow to me too but that's to do with my upload speed I guess.

I will report back!

Bik is correct it does pause randomly..

Gosh, I have about 6TB I would want to backup. I don't think this has been made with people like me in mind

Well, quite. I fully plan to backup my two servers with it, too, and Beex alone is over five gig.

I think it only uploads when you have no network traffic at all, not only on the connection concerned. Which does mean that if you have an iPhone, it takes a long long time to get the first pass done.

Aw, it doesn't seem to do network locations - not even with a mapped drive. Boo!

what does it do? just local hard drives?

can you map a drive and then use subst to trick into thinking it's a local drive?

something like:



Then try and backup from the z drive?

Malc

I get a horrible feeling it only actually does the C: drive

Hmm, Win7 does Symlinks - maybe that will fool it...

Win

Posted this to help my fellow Virgin users.

I'm going to put ithere too, in case they delete it (in which case I'll blog it somewhere).

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Hi, all. A little late to the party, but if you have Windows Vista or Windows 7 you can create a "symbolic link" to backup an external drive, which is basically a 'straight-through' shortcut to your external drive, for want of a better phrase.

Tap start and type CMD (don't press return). Right-click on the command prompt (cmd) icon and choose 'run as administrator'. Confirm the box that pops up.

Now type:
where x:\ is your external drive (you might go for d:\ or e:\). So, my username is matt and I wanted to connect to my f:\ drive, so I used
Now if you look in the desktop tree on the backup software you'll see the folder you made, and in it will be the contents of your external drive.

This also works with network locations:

Mac users should be able to do the same thing, using the command
although I don't have a Mac handy so I can't test that the backup software will work with that (but I'm fairly sure it will). A quick Google search for "mac symlink" will get you more information on what to do.

Enjoy!

ah yeah, I forgot about those, almost the exact opposite of subst...

Malc

Couple this with ExpanDrive (which mounts an SFTP location as a network drive) and I can easily backup my servers, too. Oo-rah!

Is is quick?

EDIT: to back up to the Virgin site I mean

The friend I mentioned is using Acronis apparently, not Virgin. I thought he was on Virgin, but in that case why'd he be paying Acronis?

No. I'll work out speeds tonight.

What's the upload on your big old virgin pipe?

Was that supposed to be a PM? There are kids around here, you know.

10Mb.
viewtopic.php?f=3&t=6152&p=571683&hilit=zoom#p571683

It did less than a gig in six hours

Oh. That's fucking terrible.