News Satelite Feed Fried...

[Robert Dinse <nanook@eskimo.com>]

     I don't know if it was a victim of the lightning storm or just
coincidence, but news has been really weak since.  I called Cidera (formerly
Skycache) this morning and found out the receiver was seeing a very weak signal
(about 3 when 10 is normal). 

     I moved the dish around but couldn't succeed in making it any better.  So
then they suggested I power cycle the receiver.  I did, and it went down and
didn't come back up.  Tried power cycling several times, it will not initialize
and talk. 

     So they are shipping a new receiver as this one appears to be baked.  In
the meantime, the only incoming news we have is the terrestrial feed, and two
T1's can only supply a dribble these days (two T1's total 3.154 Mbit/s
bandwidth verses the satelite feed 45Mbit/s). 

     I've done what I can to optimize for a terrestrial feed in the meantime
(increase the number of NNTP streams to make most effecient use of a high
latency link, where the satelite works best with a low number because there is
not significant latency and more streams just means more context and
multiplexing overhead in the kernel). 

     But at best it's going to be a dribble for a day or two.