3 ms·

Why not just buy a sim box instead?

rstuart4133 7y ago
I've used Hypermedia’s SIM boxes. They are pretty good - neat install, didn't break for a long while, well documented. Also very expensive what what they did, but hey you are paying for a boxed solution, right? Maybe when I was young. But I have grey hair now. I'm sure some of it is grey because over the years I've made too many on off purchases of specialised boxes promising to do everything I needed at the time. The expensive, nerve racking disasters I've had in IT were caused by boxes like that - raid arrays that used some "high speed" proprietary format, IBM SCSI boxes that needed specialised IBM disks whose firmware bug happened to spray shit across the data flowing across the SCSI bus on occasion, hell even specialised Telco APN's they work for a few years then didn't, and after 6 months they admitted they had fired the people who set it up. When that Hypermedia box died (and they all do eventually), I phone up the suppler - and a replacement was an order, payment, international freight, and customs away. That was weeks. So we are down for weeks. The alternative is to make do with off the shelf retail components that is sold to ordinary punters every day. Yes, the components aren't as reliable. You also have to provide glue - but you write the glue or use open source, so visibility into problems is excellent and the response time is amazing. And they are dirt cheap, so you can keep a couple of hot spares on the shelf (as you would if you had 75 modems). Failing that getting new ones is just a case of going down to you local retail outlet and picking one off the shelf. And they actually have _less_ bugs, partially because there of millions of them out there, and partially because a retail brand will be overwhelmed if their channel fills up with failures. I saw a misbehaving IBM SAN take out video production house once, and the 100 people who worked there. (Turns out movie length video editing pushes a SAN very hard.) I didn't make that purchasing decision, but I may well have back then. There but for the grace of god go I. I've came close enough as it is. So no 128 x SIM boxes for me thanks. For what it's worth, a one off expensive box is worth it if the purchase price includes a man carrying the requisite spares on your door step with 8 business hours when it breaks. Big companies like Dell, HP and IBM do that for their big iron. (In an amazing coincidence, the boxes they are willing to cover with that sort of service for 5 years at a moderate increment in the purchase price almost never break.) The other time I'm now willing to purchase specialised boxes is if they are mostly open source (so I have visibility, and very little bespoke poorly road tested complex code), and I'm purchasing 100's of them so I can realistically price in keeping a bunch of them on the shelf in the initial purchase.

I've used Hypermedia’s SIM boxes. They are pretty good - neat install, didn't break for a long while, well documented. Also very expensive what what they did, but hey you are paying for a boxed solution, right? Maybe when I was young. But I have grey hair now. I'm sure some of it is grey because over the years I've made too many on off purchases of specialised boxes promising to do everything I needed at the time. The expensive, nerve racking disasters I've had in IT were caused by boxes like that - raid arrays that used some "high speed" proprietary format, IBM SCSI boxes that needed specialised IBM disks whose firmware bug happened to spray shit across the data flowing across the SCSI bus on occasion, hell even specialised Telco APN's they work for a few years then didn't, and after 6 months they admitted they had fired the people who set it up. When that Hypermedia box died (and they all do eventually), I phone up the suppler - and a replacement was an order, payment, international freight, and customs away. That was weeks. So we are down for weeks. The alternative is to make do with off the shelf retail components that is sold to ordinary punters every day. Yes, the components aren't as reliable. You also have to provide glue - but you write the glue or use open source, so visibility into problems is excellent and the response time is amazing. And they are dirt cheap, so you can keep a couple of hot spares on the shelf (as you would if you had 75 modems). Failing that getting new ones is just a case of going down to you local retail outlet and picking one off the shelf. And they actually have _less_ bugs, partially because there of millions of them out there, and partially because a retail brand will be overwhelmed if their channel fills up with failures. I saw a misbehaving IBM SAN take out video production house once, and the 100 people who worked there. (Turns out movie length video editing pushes a SAN very hard.) I didn't make that purchasing decision, but I may well have back then. There but for the grace of god go I. I've came close enough as it is. So no 128 x SIM boxes for me thanks. For what it's worth, a one off expensive box is worth it if the purchase price includes a man carrying the requisite spares on your door step with 8 business hours when it breaks. Big companies like Dell, HP and IBM do that for their big iron. (In an amazing coincidence, the boxes they are willing to cover with that sort of service for 5 years at a moderate increment in the purchase price almost never break.) The other time I'm now willing to purchase specialised boxes is if they are mostly open source (so I have visibility, and very little bespoke poorly road tested complex code), and I'm purchasing 100's of them so I can realistically price in keeping a bunch of them on the shelf in the initial purchase.