Talk:HughesNet
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[edit] Archive
[edit] USB? DirecWay?
I had DirecPC service in '96 and '97, and the satellite dish was labed DirectPC by Hughes, with no mention of DirectWay. Also, given that USB wasn't available on most computers at the time, connection to the service required a (pretty large) PCI card, not an external USB modem.
[edit] Sorry, didn't work!
I have HughesNet, and I described my problems here. Doing "ping -t myhughesnet.com" didn't work at all for me.
BTW, this is in response to the last message in the Archive linked above. * Even though this isn't the kind of discussion forum to resolve problems, the problems you described with "rotating" IP addresses got me thinking. Since I have a static IP for VPN reasons and don't recall using bittorrent when I had an dynamic IP before, I never saw this problem. I don't believe they use "rotating" addresses but my guess is that they are using a pool of IP addresses. They probably throw your "idle" IP address back into a least-recently-used NAT address pool to be used by the next person to do an implicit "soft" NAT logon when they send a packet. They did something like that for the original DirecPC: "The source address of the original IP datagram is then changed to that of the DirecPC satellite gateway so that information from the remote Internet host is returned to the gateway instead of to the user via his Internet service provider." [[29]]. So it looks like they could be using NAT with an address lifetime shorter than you would like (see section 4 in [[30]] where IPSEC tries to address a similar problem). You may be able to fix the "problem" with a continuous slow background ping (i.e. DOS command: ping -t myhughesnet.com). This will keep your IP address constantly "in use" even while you are doing local wiki page edits thus keeping your address alive. I don't believe they will let an active "in use" address expire since they probably want to avoid dropping packets "in-flight" that used the previous NAT address.
