Tomorrow I start making the necessary changes in our network infrastructure to move us from a 1.1Mb DSL line to our newly installed FIOS service. It’s going to be nice to go from 1.1Mb to 25/25Mb. I’m particularly looking forward to the ability to do legitimate remote/off-site backups. Right now all backups are held in the same physical location (address). There are multiple copies on multiple machines but now to be able to add an off-site location will ensure a more complete solution.

I have been using FIOS at home for a couple of years now and it has been very reliable and ultra fast. We will be using a Soekris net5501 for the router/firewall at the office. Saturating that 25Mb line requires a pretty robust router. I had to move from a 4501 at home to a 5501 at home for for that reason, the 4501 just couldn’t keep up on large sustained downloads.

Besides the backups the speed increase is really going to make a difference in our mail services. We use Google Apps for our mail back-end (superior spam filtering) and everyones clients are set for IMAP access to the Google servers. Multiple users all doing IMAP to a remote server can be tedious. Now it should be insignificant.

I’ll be back with a follow-up in the future and report the results.

I spent the evening with some friends yesterday and somehow the topic of diving horses came up. Well it was news to me. I had never heard of such a thing.

I’ve never felt comfortable about the so-called cloud and the concept of it being the new home to all of my data. For anyone who questions authority or has any interest in privacy the cloud is extremely questionable but when it comes to data security and stability it is even more so. I can’t see any scenario at this time that is better than having physical possession and total control over your own data.

I think Cringely states a great case HERE.

More on the Antikythera Device from Wikipedia