Prompted by a friend who finds a dialup internet connection about as appetising as being food for mosquitoes, I thought I'd share some tips for using the current internet on dialup.

It's easy to say that dialup is dead, but I've transitioned from dialup to broadband and back something like 4 times so far, and since I don't want to rule out spending time in the middle of nowhere in Costa Rica, or at McMurdo, or in an RV, or in a Bigelo orbital hotel, amoung other dream destinations, I don't let availability of bandwidth deter me.

Here's some habits you can learn to lessen the pain:

work local

This is the most important thing. ssh is great, but latency sucks. If you need to edit a file on a remote system, edit it locally, and copy it across. Since I keep most of my files in subversion, I edit it locally, commit it, and update on the remote machine. If ssh isn't appropriate, use rsync or something.

Editing files is just one example; I try to avoid doing anything on a remote machine if I can do it locally. For example, even though an irc client in screen on a remote machine is a nice setup, it's to be avoided on dialup. Another example is using offlineimap to download your mail, so you can read it locally.

Yet another example: I have all my projects scripted so I can make a complete release with just single locally ran command, that goes off and automatically triggers everything that needs to happen on the server. Same for blogging, and for making changes to my wikis.

cache everything

This is an obvious one, but worth mentioning.

The most important cache is probably actually a caching dns server. Dns lookups are an easily missed slowdown (true even for many cable/dsl connections). Other useful caches include a squid web cache, and a shared apt cache.

Also get in the habit of squirelling files away, instead of deleting them, to avoid re-downloads.

know your traffic

Look at everything that causes internet traffic, and turn off the fluff. Even the small fluff will make a difference on dialup. This includes turning off VPNs, not keeping chat programs running in the background. If you're not currently using irc, close it. Use a remote irc proxy server to cache messages while you're away, to avoid missing anything. Avoid sitting on web pages that refresh or stream content. Keep iftop running all the time, and know what all the sources of traffic on it are. You can easily waste 25% of a dialup pipe with fluff if you don't keep it under control.

downloads are batch jobs

Learn to treat downloads (and uploads) as batch jobs that go on in the background or overnight. Don't let your work be blocked waiting on a download if at all possible; don't sit staring at the screen every time a five minute download pops up; go do something else instead. When possible, try to anticipate what you'll need and download it the night before.

Set up a remote download queue, of things you want to download at some point, sorted by priority, and rsync from it as a batch job overnight or when you don't need bandwidth for anything else. If you upload a lot of stuff, set up an upload queue too.

don't try to do everything on dialup

Some things are just not appropriate for dialup. There's no point in trying to download CD images, or much music, or apt-get dist-upgrade, or watch the latest videos on YouTube, or whatever. Even things like Google Maps are just not designed for dialup; the one square you want to see is always the one that will fail to download while the other 8 squares slooowly download in parallell. And AJAX sucks. So avoid this stuff on dialup, don't frustrate yourself. Schedule pit stops where there's high bandwidth to do this kind of thing.

Find alternatives you can use while on dialup -- use old fashioned mapping services, and instead of pursuing the latest and greatest videos, download an e-book -- a whole book downloaded in just 5 minutes -- who said this dialup was slow?

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