Alex A. Hutnik

If you’re on a college or university network, chances are you have access to internet2 (i2), the private internet that connects many higher education institutions.

Recently, I attended a meeting at the Ohio Supercomputing Center where the leadership of OARnet (a private fiber network in Ohio, which Case accesses) announced they were removing bandwidth limitations. Soon (perhaps now, even), our OARnet (and therefore i2) bandwidth will be at least 500mbits/sec, a 300% increase over our current service level.

You can exploit this new increase in bandwidth by selecting package mirrors that are on i2. Then, when you access them on your campus network, the traffic will be routed over the faster connection. For example, at Case our routers are smart enough to know if you are accessing a machine that is reachable over i2 and route your traffic accordingly.

So, fire up a terminal and type:

sudo gedit /etc/apt/sources.list

And then find-and-replace “us.archive.ubuntu.com” with a .edu package mirror (I use http://mirror.anl.gov/pub/ubuntu/).

When I download packages, I would get a measly few hundred KB/sec. Now I get several MB (megabytes!) per second.

Leave any questions or comments below.

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There are two answers to that:

1. Hell yes.

2. Who knows. Apparently the phones might not be on sale until next week.

Either way, I’m really excited to get one. As it turns out, I can realize a lower TCO over two years by canceling my current Verizon contract, paying the cancellation fee, selling my current phone on eBay, and then signing a new AT&T contract and buying an iPhone (with or without the rumored subsidies) than by upgrading my current service (to the minimum $80/month) and getting a Blackberry (which I would have to purchase at full price - $400).

Update: No.  July 11th.  I’m camping out in front of the store the night before.  MacBookPro and DSLR in hand.

Popularity: 19% [?]

My boss at ITS has a new blog and I have been mentioned in the notorious First Post.

Hopefully the trackbacks all line up and these posts will be linked together.

Popularity: 15% [?]