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Harebrained Recruiting Ideas.

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RoadWarrior

Senior Member
Joined
Nov 25, 2001
Location
Niagara Falls, Ontario, Canada
So, we're facing the prospect of OCAU getting a few thousand more CPUs.

How do we fight this?

Well here's some ideas for all of you with cable/DSL/2way satellite broadband with bandwidth to spare.

Start your own ISP :D

Okay here's what I mean. You provide internet connectivity for a friend/neighbour/relative for free providing they run F@H for team 32.

You could do this in several ways. For a neighbour, you could run Cat 5 across to him. For a relative/friend across town, you could set up dial in access, it will only be 33K but if the phone lines are bad in the area it might be as fast as he can get from an ISP anyway. For several people on the same block or the guy across the street, you might be able to set up a wireless hub for them to connect to, you might be able to cover quite a few houses if you mount an antenna high.

Now, you'll have to target people who just have diallup at the moment. A) because if your two neigbours drop their broadband service and traffic on yours goes up 3x, then the provider is going to be suspicious. B) because it will be a little more sluggish than a good dedicated broadband connection and they'll get b!tchy. People on sluggish dialup links will be far more willing to switch.

You should try recruiting in the normal way for anyone on broadband.

Legal notes, well you'll notice that in your TOS it probably says you cannot resell access. It probably doesn't specifically say you can't share it with friends in return for a charitable donation of computing time :D


Other ideas for recruiting diallup users.

So say you've only got one phone line, you don't want to be tying it up giving free internet access do you? Well it could still help you recruit for team 32. Diallup users particularly those with limited accounts might agree in principal with F@H but be against it "wasting" their connect time. So, what you can do for them is schedule them a free diallup slot to upload/download work in the middle of the night. You'd set it up with task scheduler or similar to dial in at a set hour, then F@H can exchange work. If you don't use your phone between 11 am and 6 am for instance you could get 7 different friends dialling in on the hour.

anyhow, just some ideas, fold on.

Road Warrior
 
I read over my ISP's contrat quite carefully, and the way it's written, I'm not aloud to connect the connection to any proxy or gateway. That didn't stop me from settin up a router anyway, but I'm definatly not switching a cable around to my different systems when they are all on a network to start with. I wouldn't cheat them by distributing the connection outside my house, but I'm not going to look for alternative methods of connecting my other computers (and I'm not paying for a modem for my laptop!)

I've been toying with the idea of bringing a T1 line to my house to run my servers, and setting up a wireless ISP to cover my town, but I don't have the money to finance this operation unless I make it my full time job, and I don't have the technical knowledge to secure a wireless network to prevent anyone from linking in and stealing my bandwidth. Too bay I'm unable to turn this into something more than a pipedream at the moment because I'm in a good broadcast location, and the cable company only covers one street, and the phone lines suck bigtime on the sidestreets.
 
*Starts running cat5 cable to the neighbors house

They might even agree to. Their Dad is a HUGE computer geek and has been drooling over them since punch card machines. I might be able to get him to run folding without running cat5 around the yard.
 
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