We have plans to eventually remove that building, so paying Telstra $300 plus wasting a weekend digging a trench just to ensure she would be responsible for whatever usage for the very short time she plans to be there is nonsensical (the price is nonsensical at any time).

Instead, I think we can manage this using a wireless network that we had setup previously for the flat, and lock it right down so that only allowed traffic is sent over the link.

I haven’t done it yet, only thinking about it.

First, I’d specify a specific IP and set that in my Cisco router to allow access to port 80, 1863 only. No email, Skype, P2P or other hassles.

Then, I’d setup the wireless link using the Linksys WRT54G I have running DD-WRT. It would be a client of the main network, a static IP configured to ensure access-list compliance.

The password for the Linksys router being secured, should ensure that she can’t ever try and circumvent the measure by resetting the router – as it would remove the connection settings thus requiring my Cisco wireless password to get back online.

The Linksys router would then have wireless security applied (a second network at that, as DD-WRT can run as both a wireless client and a wireless AP). The Linksys router would be configured to drop traffic to all hosts with exception of specific hosts (i.e. hostnames ‘facebook.com’ would be allowed).

The other alternative would be for the Cisco router to forward that traffic through my proxy server first and have it filter out any requests for websites that aren’t allowed, but that adds needless delay – configure DNS in the Linksys router to point to itself, and specify a list of IPs and hostnames so that all that it can resolve are those hostnames.

Since only port 80 & port 1863 are allowed at the Cisco side of the network, there won’t be any traffic allowed for DNS (well, there is if they prefer to do web queries for every hostname they look up – but the specific host names only being allowed would stop that).

No Virus issues, no Spam, no P2P, just simple web browsing and some MSN capabilities. Sounds pretty secure. Theoretically, one could P2P using it, but since the only allowed hosts are specified – that removes that possibility.

My partner wants her to have limited internet access, since I didn’t want the traffic so just said no access at all – this sounds like a good compromise between nothing, and ‘very little’.

I was getting tired of setting up SSH port forwards and thought about using VPN, given I have both a Linux server and a Cisco router that both can easily fulfill the function, I decided to see what the Cisco would be like to setup for PPTP VPN.

I was expecting to have to use a Radius server for authentication, but found that the local usernames on the router are good.

IP ranges on a VPN don’t need to be different, it can work with the same IP range, however traffic for that specific IP must be explicitly routed to the router, else it won’t work – it’ll attempt to find the host via Broadcast address.

Rather than doing that, I have a second LAN subnet used primarily for the ADSL modem’s web interface, this works fine – so I used that.

Unless you really are using a radius server, I wouldn’t bother with ‘aaa new-model’ as suggested elsewhere.

Commands to setup a Cisco 871W for PPTP VPN:
vpdn enable
!
vpdn-group 1
! Default PPTP VPDN group
accept-dialin
protocol pptp
virtual-template 1
!
!
!
!
username (username) password 0 (password)

interface Virtual-Template1
ip unnumbered BVI1
ip nat inside
ip virtual-reassembly
peer default ip address pool vpn
no keepalive
ppp encrypt mppe auto
ppp authentication ms-chap ms-chap-v2
!

I use BVI1 as this is a bridge between my wireless LAN and wired LAN.

I created a pool of IP addresses specifically for VPN:
ip local pool vpn 192.168.1.5 192.168.1.10

Then I added that IP range to the access-list (well it was already there, but you need it for accessing the extenal connection)
access-list 1 permit 192.168.1.0 0.0.0.255

You can then connect to it (using Windows or Ubuntu PPTP VPN).

sh users gives:
Interface User Mode Idle Peer Address
Vi5 (username) PPPoVPDN 00:04:40 192.168.1.5

You can of course apply access lists to limit the access of users.

When setting up the VPN client, I first always, unselect the box that states to use the default gateway on the remote network.

After all, we don’t want to use the remote network for all traffic – just the traffic that matters to that network.
This creates a problem though, since we aren’t using the default gateway on the remote network, our traffic for the IPs in the LAN range i.e. 192.168.0.1 (and not the VPN IP Range – i.e. 192.168.1.1) would be sent to the default gateway of the PPTP Client.

To fix that, you need to add a static route on the machine you are connecting from (the PPTP client).
Windows:
route add 192.168.0.0 mask 255.255.255.0 192.168.1.5
.. will give routing to the 192.168.0.1 IP via the VPN 192.168.1.5

Ubuntu is far more friendly, allowing you to create routes in the connection definition to save having to do it at each time to the VPN connection is lost. This is in VPN connection properties under IPv4 Settings, then click Routes.

Specify Address, Netmask, and Gateway.

Obviously, you cannot have both networks in the same LAN IP range and be successful at routing across both networks.

The solution was to setup the bash script to echo the data it was collecting (for MRTG purposes), to go out as a UDP broadcast packet to the network.

It was annoying to setup, because current versions of netcat differ to those I was using originally, and eventually found the need for a timeout wait on the netcat command.

It works great tho, and spawned the next idea of an Applet to monitor the Aurora output, the CC128 consumption, and anything else I want to spit out on any part of our local network.

It’d work great as a file copy mechanism too – base64 encode each file, and send that way. Each machine on a network typically receives broadcast packets, and so it’s no issue to spread the same data to all machines at the same time (instead of sending it to one machine at a time).

I like the idea of it – and am amazed I didn’t come across that before. It gives me the data on as many machines as I care to have listening for it – and is relatively reliable (if I wanted guaranteed, I’d not be using wireless..).

The idea being that the inverter I have can output RS485 which gives us details about how much it’s putting out, the temperature, and we can then measure efficiency and make any further adjustments to it to improve efficiency.

I’m not installing anything yet, as I’m still waiting on the gross meter to be installed (been a bit of time actually, getting impatient). The company contracted to do it claimed 2 weeks last week, so hopefully in the next 7 days we are grid connected.

Back to the serial idea though, I can take RS485, use an RS232 converter and that gives us the ability to get the data to the PC. A wireless transmitter and receiver is what would be needed, and Bluetooth being the most common, used in industrial applications for monitoring / controlling various machinery.

I’ve found a few candidates in my search yesterday:

This PS110W Wi-Fi Serial Device Server – 1 Port offers much of what is needed, including RJ45 if we later abandon wireless. Not sure on price though.

I then looked into the LTC100 which seems a better device. Pricing internationally puts it at about $50 AUD, but I’ve asked RF modules if they can provide a price and then I might get it via them.

The advantages of the LTC100 are that it can be port powered, which means I can supply it 9V via the serial port. Getting the data from it should be relatively easy, I’d need a bluetooth adapter, paired to it, and then using the SPP (Serial Port Profile) to create a virtual serial port. Attach that to my Virtual Server 2005 or VirtualBox virtual machine, and then probe the serial port in the virtual machine for the data.

Then, place that data into RRD Graphs and use that for comparison of day and seasonal changes, and to detect performance issues. Think MRTG Threshold alerts – “Your Solar System is performing worse than a drained AA battery”.

The hardware isn’t going to be IP65 rated like the inverter is, so I’ll pick up a IP65 enclosure from Jaycar, use that to hide the Cat6 cabling from the inverter, the bluetooth adapter. Whilst I’m getting the enclosure, I’ll get a battery terminal so that the wires don’t get damaged from replacing the battery.

I’ll have to figure out how much power it uses, considering the continual probes – although.. it won’t be continual if we shut it down after 9pm and wake it up around 5am, so that’ll save some of the battery.

I’m half tempted to get a Linutop or similar low powered PC to replace the current server, but the offerings out there so far are from $400 to $700 for something very low powered (1Ghz). Due to the virtual machine, it’d need two to be effective – which makes a new server all of a sudden worth while (extra computing power for the same price).

I was testing an upgrade for MySQL, from 5.0 to 5.1, to gain Row Based Replication instead of Statement based replication (as statements are a cause of SBR breaking, and it doesn’t proceed til I tell it to).

So, in my usual lazy, just do it, manner, installed MySQL Server 5.1, pointed the datadir at the old so that I’d have my data pretty quickly up and running.

And the installation worked, until I started MySQL.

I use hMailserver for email on my box, this uses MySQL for it’s settings and database storage (which is good actually, a config file is inflexible for multi domain environments).

The database used by hMailserver is InnoDB, most of my needs are well serviced with MyISAM.

In my rush, I didn’t do a backup. I didn’t copy the data folders, just went right over it, started, and got an error:

100610 22:15:32  InnoDB: Database was not shut down normally!
InnoDB: Starting crash recovery.
InnoDB: Reading tablespace information from the .ibd files…
InnoDB: Restoring possible half-written data pages from the doublewrite
InnoDB: buffer…
100610 22:15:32  InnoDB: Starting log scan based on checkpoint at
InnoDB: log sequence number 0 1204538731.
InnoDB: Doing recovery: scanned up to log sequence number 0 1204538731
InnoDB: Page directory corruption: supremum not pointed to

It was shut down normally – using the Windows Service, the issue is that the MySQL database won’t work with the log files from the previous database for some weird reason.

I’m still yet to determine if any recovery can be done on the log files, making them usable again, however I have doubts.

I reinstalled my mailserver and did a quick setup on it today to get us operational again. And learnt a lesson – always backup.

Actually, I should have had a database backup of recent, I don’t. I have no database backup – I only have the datafiles as they are.

That instance of MySQL is rarely used, it’s most usage would be the mailserver, followed shortly by the replication I get it to do from the server in Newcastle. It is my home windows test server, I also have a linux one that I planned similar for – except that does much, much more and data loss there would very much annoy me.

So, I ask myself – why is there no backup of it then? Because, there isn’t.

I MUST use this weekend (which thankfully is a long one), to:
A) Figure out if that log is recoverable, and move back to it, then onward to MySQL 5.1 using a mysqldump.
B) Upgrade To MySQL 5.1 for the windows and Linux box here, and the box in Newcastle.
C) Setup replication using Row Based Replication for those databases I have that need it.
D) Design a regular backup script which backs up the databases locally, something like weekly (With email reporting).
E) Update regularly. 5.0 is really old now.

Reconsider using hMailserver is also on the cards, it’s not it’s fault, in fact, it has the ability to use it’s own seperate instance of MySQL (and does by default, and that’s what I currently have in Newcastle).  But, I want the ability to access that data – later for user purposes, greylisting statistics and so forth.

UPDATE: I found the issue! It turns out the ibdata1 file I needed, was in C:\MySQL Datafiles. In the Program Files folder was a 10MB ibdata1 file, which is why the error messages were occurring.

The Database came right back to life the very moment I shut it down. Copied the file from C:\MySQL Datafiles to the version 5.0 program files folder, and started the version 5.0.45 MySQL server with that file, and the log files intact.

Remember to remove the innodb_force_recovery option if it was added, and it can help to change default-storage-engine=INNODB to default-storage-engine=MyISAM – so that the server starts with MyISAM instead of INNODB.

This will not work if you don’t have consistent logfiles and data files – but otherwise, it’s a save!

Now, the plan is to dump all that data using mysqldump, and then go forth and better my lazy processes for database server management.

My colocation box is a HP DL360, G3, so it’s not exactly bleeding edge, but it’s a fantastic server, does it’s job and does it reliably.

Last night, we had a planned outage for just a short time to move the box to a different power situation, this was done and the box came back online.

It dropped off 6.30pm, came back 6.45pm. Then, 7.15pm there was notices coming through – I’ve began to ignore the warnings for a while now, so I failed there but it wasn’t too bad, because..

.. My colo provider, Inticon detected the port was flapping 20 minutes later, and went back to have a look, at 8pm he had advised that the issue was with the processor fan assembly, only one fan was spinning – strange, it was OK for a while before hand.

He went out and about to find a replacement part, and tried to find alternative measures, but came up empty. Considering the nature of the part – it’s pretty server specific, so it was understandable that we had no alternatives.

I then began hunting around for the part – found one, $185 online. I thought, wow, this must be a pretty premium part..

The contact at the colo provider went even further, and actually advised me there was a box on eBay for $250 – no kidding.

I looked at it, considered it’s marginally more expensive, but gives us a lot more hardware to play with as well. I contacted the eBay seller, asked if he could accommodate pickup for tomorrow – he was OK with it, fantastic I thought..

So, I head to bed – we can’t pick it up at night, it’s just not THAT important (and I had started work 8am, so by that point I was very tired). I think about this for a while in bed, then somehow drift off to sleep.

One of the kids is sick, so they crawl into bed beside me and annoy me, so I get up at 6am, head to sleep on the lounge, peaceful.

The next morning, I get up, sort out a pending PC related issue for somebody (it was arranged already), then the seller was interstate for the morning, not back to 1pm, so that was as good as we could get.

He then contacted us, advising he wouldn’t be back til 3.30pm – considering we were getting ready to leave around then, that’d work out perfectly. We got near the address in the southern Sydney area, but he calls and advises 4.30 – he was delayed. No problem, can’t do much if he isn’t there..

So, 4.30pm, he arrives, we have a look at the box, it works, he upgrades the CPU and RAM and throws in a 15K 36GB SCSI drive – fantastic I thought, more spare parts. The box worked, so in the boot with it, time to hit the highway for Newcastle.

We hit Newcastle at 7pm (after litterally, racing down the freeway to Newcastle), and the colo provider contact was already there – fantastic.

I take the server into the colo room, upgrade the box with what good parts I could – extra 1GB of RAM, 3.06 to 3.2Ghz Xeon, swapped over the fan assembly.. Power it on, it takes some time to boot, unusual, it eventually does boot.

Then, I enter into windows, get a ping going, get task manager up – make sure the virtual machine kicks over, it does. Box stays up stable.

Pack up the changed parts into the ‘new’ box, and get the colo provider to hold those incase something else fails down the track – pretty much a fully working machine with exception the front panel – which shouldn’t fail again.

Then, head back home approximately 30 minutes later, by this time the kid who is sick complains about pain, ends up needing a toilet break, all sorted.

Hit the highway to go back home, arrive at 9.30pm.

Wait for the colo provider contact to remove some trickery done to assist with the downtime, and I modify the SMTP route I put in place to redirect the affected domains to my router.

The outcome – all mail leaves, some spam shows, delete this, and I update the database, all in sync.. fantastic..

All up, nearly a full day, 460KM’s travelled, $14 spent on food at Aldi in Sydney, $22 spent at Maccas in Newcastle, $250 spent on a pretty darn good deal (compared to $185 for the processor fan assembly) – and we are all back and operational.

Hardware failures are REALLY annoying – especially when you can’t just call HP and say fix it in 4 hours.. – but we did pretty good for a 23 hour restore time (and still managed to keep some essential services up anyway).

And the dedication of Inticon is outstanding.

Had this been Servers Australia, I have no idea where we’d be. Part of me says ‘online sooner, cause they have HP DL360′s (or had them)’, the other says ‘getting Jared to get off his arse and take some damned action’. I’m leaning towards the latter, it’s just typical of previous experiences.

Note to self: work harder on high availability.

It has many different methods of operation, and can be used in different ways, such as a simple proxy, where you set it up, only allow your traffic, and set your browser to use it.

A reverse proxy, so that it caches traffic for busy websites and therefore removes load.

A transparent proxy, so that users don’t have a definite idea they are being proxied, and this is the method I used – purely so we didn’t have to set it up on the client machine, and that’d just be boring anyway.

So, I setup the access list in my wonderful Cisco 871. The access list is set such that any traffic that is not web traffic, goes out directly, the PCs that matter are also not routed to the access list, and every other machine is.

Then, I setup squid, I configured it as a transparent proxy, and then enabled the rewrite_program option, then I setup the rewrite script to rewrite the urls for youtube.com to xtube.com – so, any request for youtube, results in xtube – a more explicit knock off of youtube.

Unfortunately, the desired effect of having the traffic decrease was not the case, they indeed viewed the xtube traffic instead.

So, the next step (a later on thing), will be to setup a virtual host in apache on that server, mirror the youtube website content, and then replace the area where a video would normally appear with a singular cached video. I’ll have to find one worthy of such a task.

Then, any requests for youtube videos shall be met with a repeat video. Or, we could confuse things, and swap the code in the youtube video page, with one from another site, so when they next seek out the latest Black Eyed Pea (s)hit video on YouTube, they are met with a very, very different black, eyed, pea.

I thought nothing of it, until I began to ponder the possibility of a heap of port 25 outgoing sessions, and thought I’d check. At the time I checked, the machine must have been turned off for at least 5  minutes – they didn’t appear in my samba check, and pinging them resulted in no replies.

I checked ip nat translations, and sure enough the SMTP connection attempts were there.

Earlier on my partner removed the MSN virus from that machine, and it appeared again just 2 hours later.. Wonderful.

I’ve now reconfigured the wonderful Cisco router. No more port 25 connections from any machine, except mine and the server IPs, whilst I was at it, no more P2P can occur.

Cisco’s 871W does this by using class-maps to scan protocols (to identify bittorrent, limewire, kazaa), and set a DSCP on that particular class map.

Then, my access list allows my machine, the servers, and then drops all P2P, then drops all outgoing port 25, and then allows traffic – this disables P2P and drops all port 25 traffic that doesn’t go through the server – i.e. all spam traffic.

A slight adjustment of the machines to make sure they send mail via the server, and that should stop any further activity in its tracks – testing shows it is not possible to open port 25 to a server, but that server happily chats to my mail server – solved.

The configuration?

access-list 100 permit ip host 192.168.x.4 any <– Allow me, I don’t want to get denied access to anything, including the router.
access-list 100 permit ip host 192.168.x.3 any <– Allow my server.
access-list 100 permit ip host 192.168.x.2 any <– Allow the linux box.
access-list 100 deny   ip any any dscp 1 <– Drop all P2P
access-list 100 deny   tcp any any eq smtp <– Drop all SMTP
access-list 100 permit ip any any <– allow

Then in my LAN interface:

ip access-group 100 in

That makes it check access list 100 prior to routing any traffic ‘in’ (i.e. In from the LAN connection).

The class map for P2P:

class-map match-any P2P
match protocol bittorrent
match protocol directconnect
match protocol edonkey
match protocol gnutella
match protocol napster
match protocol kazaa2

Those are all the obvious protocols I found, I could add NNTP or FTP or HTTP if I wanted to..

The next step is the policy:

policy-map P2P
class P2P
set ip dscp 1

That tells the P2P traffic to have DSCP 1 set, so the access list picks it up and drops the packets.

There’s also some QoS config I have there too, to give full priority to VoIP, RTP, SMTP and SSH traffic – above all other traffic, works great.

I find myself very happy with the Cisco router – they aren’t the cheapest, but they sure can accomplish much the same, if not more than a Linux box setup (I was previously happy with my Tomato and DD-WRT setups, but the Cisco is just a tad more beefed up).

I think the better solution to this issue (and issues related to SMTP auth attacks, and 550 errors), are having an error counter in the mail server software, and if they hit a number of errors, the connection is then blocked and the IP is firewalled (denied a connection) any further.

This is rather easy to implement, because most servers can choose whether they accept or deny a connection, and in the case I am thinking, it should be a matter of looking in an array, seeing if the address is firewalled, if it is, then the connection attempt simply isn’t allowed and the server doesn’t open it at all.

That, will in turn make spam attempts like the 550 ‘guess’ ineffective, and ultimately destroy the spam attempts, getting closer to eliminating the needless waste of bandwidth the attacks on mail servers.

Spammers who try methods such as address guessing will find themselves unable to connect to many servers, and could perhaps consider a new career, perhaps as garbage collection, to repay for all the garbage they spit out.

As it stands, it is possible to analyse an army of logs I have now, and calculate the spammer IPs and place those in a database, which will be loaded by the server on startup and stored in an array.

The server then on connect attempt, will search that array for the address, and if it finds that it is in that list, then connections are denied.

Adminstrators of the server can then go and check a list of addresses and see if any are of interest or not, and if necessary remove them.

Most good configured mail servers which find they are disconnected will retry for days after, so reviewing a list of addresses (sorted by date added) should be a painless task to do.

This feature would be used in conjunction with greylisting for example, which already tells senders to try again later.

The IPs banned would be those which score 5 errors in a single connection, as these are typically the problem connections, from 221 and 89 IP ranges (but I’m not racist, or is it ‘IP-ist’ ?), so won’t block full countries of IPs.

This isn’t a complete solution to the identified issue, but, it’s a start at making it even less effective.

Enjoy!

I enrolled into the course then, and have found that I have a total of 800 hours (in TAFE terms) of study to complete to get my Diploma in IT.

The hours are a little packed up, but those 800 hours are spread over around 23 seperate modules, and many of them aren’t really complex. With names such as “Design A Server”, and “Configure an Internet Gateway”, you can easily see that it isn’t really a packed up task.

When I started IT courses, during a slow period here on the Central Coast, I decided that I would study for a while, and see what doors opened later on.

I completed as far as the campus I was studying at was prepared for, of my Certificate III in IT, and despite not completing it 100%, completed a great deal of the course and then enrolled into a Cert IV afterwards with a different arena.

Throughout my studies of Certificate III, it was constantly drummed into us, that IT isn’t actually working with computers.

IT, is in fact reporting on technology. And a lot of reports are generated for some simple things.

Build a network for example, and the requirement is several pages of text detailing what the network should be capable of, and what expectations and maintenance requirements it will have.

And, of course, what business will gain from the network.

You look at that and you think, what a big waste of time, reporting on what essentially are obvious recommendations obtained through observation and benchmarking the network in place.

None the less, the concept of IT is writing reports on what will happen if this plug is pulled, and what will happen if this much money is spent.

Does management actually read such reports with interest? Or do they simply call the IT Guru in and stare amazingly at his wisdom that the business has yet again been able to produce a pretty pie graph on a wall?

Reporting isn’t that bad though, it’s always a constant look at what technology is doing for a business, and keeps everyone on top of the technology. A new CPU is released, the average professional would buy the CPU, turn the machine off, pull the old CPU out, plug the new one in, turn it on and see what magic they can do.

In Business, this is changed dramatically, prior to purchasing the CPU, a report is written on what the current system is capable of, what the new CPU will acheive, what performance benefits will be delivered, what sort of service effects it will have, what it will cost, and what enhancements can come in the future.

Then, if that’s approved, you would buy the CPU either using a purchase order which might involve a few emails and calls to the ‘Financing’ department, then,  you would get the CPU.

With the CPU in hand, you must then, write up an implementation report, and get the implementation approved by management, to make sure they are fully aware of what is happening, what will happen if something goes bang, what if the CPU does not work and is faulty, essentially covering the details from start to finish.

Then, with that implemenation report approved, you can actually proceed with the implementation. Essentially, wait til after work hours, turn the server off, remove it’s cover, take off the fan, remove the CPU, install the new CPU, add a bit of cooling paste, install the fan, place the cover back on the server, power it on, and test to ensure there is no problems, and also test to see if the claimed performance gain is realised.

Then, yep, there’s more. You would write up a post implementation report, stating whether implementation was effective, what gains have been realised, and if any thing should be documentated about the installation.

And that’s how you install a CPU into a server in a real business environment, according to my Cert III studies. I have some doubts this is somewhat realistic, because I just don’t think business would pay someone to write 3 reports for 15 minutes work, but, it could happen.

The diploma is more a theory course then anything from what I gather, as it is a lot about how you would approach a situation, how you would design a server for example, or how you would ensure client privacy (yep, that’s one of them).

Not only do you “Design A Server”, but you also “Build and Configure a server”, and “Build a security shield for a network”.

From my previous studies, a lot of the IT Systems Admin arena is focussed on Active Directory networks, setting up Windows Domains, monitoring them, making sure they tick like clockwork, and upgrading them when required, securing them.

Writing reports isn’t really a big issue with IT, it’s great to some extent, as you gather a lot of data in a report, that can clear the water a little more, and you by research (required for many items), you naturally stay on top of the latest technology. You probably shouldn’t have a personal preference for any specific item, so that you can compare both side by side and always pick the best item, and know why you are picking it – something not always common with the ‘gamer’ style CPU purchase, where they might buy a CPU because it has 4 cores, of which 2 are actually used.

It nearly all focuses on networking, ranging from managing a project, to gathering data for business, and translating business needs into technical needs, and after that, it’s maintaining system security, securing a network, ensuring user privacy, and so forth

Interesting, but not entertaining.

I estimate that if I actually got stuck in every day for a solid day, the course could reasonably be completed within 6 months.

I don’t get stuck in every day of course, because I simply just don’t get motivated much to get stuck into it (or anything else really). It’s sort of annoying that I can’t get buzzed into completing items like I used to be able to, it’s just so hard to get started on something, but, once I start something, I can generally follow it through to finish.

The start is the hardest, once started, the finish is nearly always insight. This same situation applies to OzVoIPStatus for example, where I have started a new layout, new design, and new pages for the site, and they are there waiting completion. One of the new pages has been sitting there for a while, waiting for me to code the rest of the “Provider URL” line that I had started weeks ago. It’s just “HARD” to get started.

TAFE work is easier, because it’s new and unstarted, once I start something though, and walk away from it, coming back to it another date isn’t interesting, but I do get there.

Maybe this is related to my arrangement of the room, or maybe something else, I’m not much for Feng Shui for example, I’m not 100% sure what’s dropped me off the regular motivation that I used to have to dig into and complete things, like I used to! I’m sure it’s something that can be sorted though by finding out what makes me comfortable when I was able to get stuck into things.

Maybe it’s just that firefox window with Whirlpool open that’s distracting me from what I’d usually do.. hard to tell.

Networking, gotta love it.

Enjoy!

That looks to be improving, but we won’t have anything definite til tomorrow, after tonight, so that we can see if it drops out overnight still (it didn’t last night).

The other ADSL2+ connection has been dropping out a little as well, nothing significant, like mine as well, but, still dropped out.

It’s at the point where I’m near happy to accept it and keep going on, but if it is improved, then sweet, whatever was done, let’s do it to the other and get two stable lines.

In even better news, I don’t have much left to do in the way of other activity, been pretty quiet, probably half related to chasing down wreckers.

The good news for me is time might be becoming more available, so I can get stuck into my Diploma in IT and try and clear most of it out of the way at some point, but the other half the week is available to spend in other areas, like finishing the development of the Hosting service, and also working towards a better OzVoIPStatus.

I’ve spent today moving the server that we just setup in August to alternative hardware, so that it is only one hard drive operating continuously, and it is in a cooler case, and that system has a P4-D 820 CPU (so it’s dual).

That will allow performance enhancements! The move was relatively painless, which is suprising, most cases when you touch Windows (just ask our car’s rear window), they turn into trouble and require multiple hours of attention (or travel).

This week, we’ll have it fixed and cleared for rego!

I took the oppourtunity the other night to connect the rear speakers directly to the stereo, because it was thought to have an earthing issue or something on the old cables.

Unfortunately, doing this and balancing the speaker to the rear right still produced distorted soft sound at full volume, suggesting that there is perhaps another issue to get looked at.

I’ll bug the auto electrician tomorrow when he fixes the window as to what could be wrong, my main goal is to try and restore the car and remove all known faults with it, so it’s a ‘trouble-free’ car – and it is, it’s the wreckers who aren’t trouble free.

I’d love to get faster ADSL2+ speed, we sync at around 10.5Mbit, it’d be great to get 18Mbit, just to feel that 2MB/sec down, that said, I got a file from download.microsoft at 1.1MB/sec today, reallly fast, and it was a 80MB file, so I was waiting just over 1 minute for it. Very happy!

Overall, I find Exetel a great company. They provide good value services, they sometimes have periods of network slowness, but that’s pretty common with every ISP, and they rarely affect us anyway.

Top notch service, with a very cheap price, they really are a good supplier of services. Their main failed attraction to home users is the high setup charge, which no doubt scares many off, but the benefits of a short contract, and the freedom associated with it, and the fact Exetel have cheap plans mean its a no brainer.

If only the collective masses could see that.

Enjoy!

Computers have become very much so beefed up that the grunt they have spends a lot of time idle, and only peak loads when you are doing intensive tasks, even then, they generally keep within 50% of the processors full capacity.

Game play will use more of that processor usage, but that doesn’t really come into question in the server environment.

So, just about many of the servers out there are very capable of having additional virtual servers added to them, and with the price of disk space falling, virtualization technologies are very much viable.

I run Virtual Server here at my home, and it hosts my linux test environment, this is to save me booting between OS and also allows me to have computing resources available to me simultaneously.

So, I don’t need a second server running, I don’t need to pay for extra hardware, power, or anything like that, when I want to run the linux machine (and we use it often enough anyway).

One common issue with Virtual Server Linux Virtual Machines is the clock being out of sync and audio style resources skipping ahead or behind in the established virtual machine.

The fix to that is a combination of setting ‘clock=pit’ as a boot parameter, and also installing virtual machine additions.

If you run a CentOS distro though, installing Virtual Machine additions as recommended doesn’t work as expected.

The reason for this is, the ./install.sh script looks for a string in the /etc/redhat-release file.

The string it is looking for is the third one. So, on Red Hat (where CentOS is derived) it would be “release” - Red Hat Release.

On CentOS however, it is “final” – CentOS release final.

The fix to this? Couldn’t be simpler.

nano into /etc/redhat-release, and between CentOS, add a space, so it might read Cent OS release.

Make sure you have the kernel sources (yum install kernel-devel), and that will allow the virtual machine additions to install, and once installed, leave as is, or just change it back.

Use Virtual Machines, there really isn’t much going against them, they save power, they allow you to have the extra resource available (ie. Linux system) as well as your Windows machine.

And, Virtual Server is one of Microsoft’s good releases, it’s a great setup for virtualization, nothing silly like VMWare, just straight forward virtual machines.

Enjoy!

Technology evolves very quickly, so quickly that what is the latest and greatest quickly becomes the oldest.

I was working with an old machine today that presented itself with symptoms of rebooting, crashing and a general slowness.

I smelt hardware failure a mile away, so asked for them to bring the system over, this was months ago.

Months ago, I ran through a fair bit of testing with the machine while it was here and concluded that it was an issue with either RAM or CPU.

Unfortunately, at one point there, I took the CPU out to inspect for damage, and a few pins got bent.

Not a problem I thought, CPU pins get bent from time to time when you handle them, and you can’t not get a bent pin ever, so I proceeded to straighten the pins on the CPU.

Unfortunately, one of the pins on the CPU not only got bent, as it was being straightened ever so carefully, it actually just snapped off.

I sat there for about 3 seconds thinking “Oh fu” – 3 seconds over.

Then, I concluded, that the CPU obviously was suffering from some weakness to have simply snapped a pin by such a simple, careful move of a pin (normally they are able to move ever so carefully, without breaking).

Knowing the user of the computer was a smoker gave me some idea of the environment the computer lived in. It was a passive smoker, and suffering from what we’ll call electronicotinal infection.

What this means is the electronics on the motherboard, CPU, RAM, and other electronic components suffer a short of some sort (or many shorts) and this causes the machine to behave weirdly.

Electronicotinal infection is primarily caused by smoking in the same room, as the machine, and other machines subject to the same environment may also suffer from the illness.

Unfortunately, Electronicotinal infection is rarely able to be cured. I’ve seen a few cases of it, and the only conclusion is to eventually replace the equipment due to the damage done to several of the key arteries on the motherboard (or other electronic device).

Please note that you cannot cure such an infection with Nicabate products, these will only contribute to the problem and speed up the inevitable.

Anyway, this machine I was returning back today, to try a correct CPU on, after lending them a 800Mhz range CPU, instead of the 533Mhz they had, whilst I chased down eBay for an equivilent part, resulted in more panic.

The machine would freeze with the 533Mhz processor inside, with a 400Mhz stick of RAM. I tried to access the BIOS to adjust the properties that it was trying to run the hardware at (333Mhz for RAM, 133Mhz for CPU), but had no success, the machine would just freeze.

However, the 2.8Ghz CPU inside the same machine, which was running at 1.4Ghz, assumably due to incompatible hardware, was working fine, and I believe the RAM was operating at 333Mhz there (the CPU was operating on 100Mhz, instead of the normal 200Mhz with 400Mhz RAM).

I also tried the 533Mhz CPU (the new one, sourced from eBay) with 333Mhz RAM (I figure, if it wants to run that, OK). But, the 333Mhz RAM I have is single sided, so I assume this might be the reason why it won’t start with that RAM.

Actually, now that I think of it, I didn’t try it with 2 sticks. Perhaps I should have.

So, I’m now at that point where you start to question, do we keep trying to salvage this machine from its suffering pain?

A computer can last years, 386 (or even 286, or Amiga, or Commodore 64) tought us that much. We all know a computer is capable of lasting a long time, maintained correctly.

This machine however, just doesn’t seem to have a lot going for it.

I think I’m going to source some double sided RAM to place in it, 333Mhz, and see if that’ll play nice with the CPU we sourced for it.

Otherwise, I also have a Celeron 400Mhz CPU to try out as well, maybe it’ll like that and this problem will be solved for a while.

The system however, clearly needs to eventually be replaced, as it is very visible that it’s going to have further problems, and could be a waste of time. It might last a few years though, so trying to keep it going might be worth it.

But, I then realise, there must be cases of systems out there where you consider the owner of this has gone – TOO FAR- it’s time to stop, revive, and well, build a new box.

When you consider new computer hardware is rapidly becoming old computer hardware, replacing an ancient (in comparable terms) hardware is pretty much a good idea to save headaches further on (and costs as well).

I must however ask, has anyone actually had a case where a computer is simply beyond repair, due to any lengthy exposure to substances, and now just worthy of destruction?

I can imagine there might be a few lazy computer stores and so forth out there that would have called it quits when they saw this machine, but I think that they place little faith in the hardware.

I think that some machines are easily fixed, and that some technicians just get lucky, I then think that others perservere too far, and I also think there are others who simply throw in the towel too quickly.

I of course love a challenge, so will give anything a go.

Enjoy!

Essentially, the author claims that filters are ‘needed’ to battle child pornography.

I disagree, it is not filters that will stop the distribution of child pornography, and it is not filters that will protect children from finding inappropriate content.

Filters will simply not do the job. I wrote a post a while ago, about my quick search to find security information for an Apple Airport, and well, my search terms were not the best, using “airport +security”.

You can imagine what combinations of words, in a very innocent manner, could return inappropriate results.

What are we to do there? Filter it anyway, and just have a limited internet? That’s not within the idea of the internet to start with!

What about the encryption and P2P technologies? What will they do to stop the spread of porn there? How will they filter it without slowing the internet to a complete crawl, making a mockery of their plans for FTTN anyway. If every ISP has to filter every single packet, you can bet that processing time will add considerable speed reductions to a connection.

And since when did an ISP become a supplier of ‘content’, and not one of ‘connectivity’? I know when I go to an ISP, I’m asking for connection to bandwidth, hopefully with some also connected internationally, and at some cheap rates.

I’m not asking them to protect my eyes and give me content that should be appropriate for my viewing.

That’s the bigger issue with this porn filtering crap the Rudd government has tried to use to gain the popularity vote.

Anyone who is buying into it, really needs to do their research, because the filters, they’ll only ever really filter the standard port 80 HTTP access, which still means MSN, Skype, P2P, HTTPS, Email, etc. All wide open to pornsters to manipulate.

And, well, look what happens when you make drugs illegal? People find ways to work around it, or even do the crime underground, and commit further crimes to fuel that criminal habit.

This online filtering system needs to be binned right now, and be highlighted as the Rudd government’s first failed election promise, because purely, it’s a stupid promise, and one that they used simply to gain the uninformed vote. Stupid uninformed people, not that I blame you though.

The secret to protecting children from porn? Do your job as a parent and watch them. Simple isn’t it? You have kids, you have a inherent job to watch them, monitor them, educate them, and protect them.

If they are doing something inappropriate, they need further education on why its inappropriate. They most certainly do NOT need an electronic babysitter.

Now, if only we could get Kevin Rudd and Stephen Conroy to read my blog. Maybe then, we’ll have some common sense in our government.

Of course, common sense and government just don’t go well in the same sentence, but of course, we can sit by and hope that they’ll see daylight before its too late.

Enjoy!

And, it happened. I set out to complete something, and for the most part, it is completed.

I started today from yesterday, working on fattening a linux partition.

The process was pretty much where my thoughts were yesterday.

dd the drive (so dd /dev/hda to /dev/hdb), then remove /dev/hda, leaving only /dev/hdb (as /dev/hda).

I played around with fdisk and parted to resize the partition, but had no joy.

I googled at this point really quickly, and came across a blog post which suggested using resize2fs, to get the volume resized.

The problem for me was the virtual disk, which has a capacity limit beyond the bounds of actual disk space.

So, I resorted to trying to specify a limit, but gave up waiting after a while, and killed the command.

Rebooted it (hey, it’s a virtual box, worst case scenario, insert rescue disk, salvage any valued data, and insert rescue ISO).

Then, as the system came back, it complained about fsck (heh, that looks like an interesting command, considering the damage it is capable of), and so, I ran it. Answered yes to everything (like I care what inodes are worthy of bashing), so I then got back in the system.

And, ran a ‘df’, and what do you know, it’s gone and given us stacks of space. Exactly what I wanted.

Now, you know why I had to do this? Of course not.
I had to issue a yum upgrade to upgrade software on the box.
The yum upgrade seemed to suggest it had to have 30GB of disk space for 200Mb of downloaded packages.

You and I, and the world knows that it’s full of ‘it suggesting it can pull 30GB out of 200Mb.
But, none the less, I perservered and we came to a success!

Then, I got on with the rest of what I wanted to do yesterday. Install various software services, and get the system up.
Oh, and Elastix developers, I commend you for your creativity, but, alas, poor managed dependancies are enough  to drive me nuts. No longer shall I bother with any of the Trixbox, Elastix, FreePBX style distros. Plain and simple waste of time.

You want the job done, format, install raw CentOS. Get the packages from digium. Smack those on (that’s right, compile the suckers), and configure it manually.

It works as expected, it does all that you tell it to. And it doesn’t screw around with kernel dependancies, installing the xen kernel, or oslec modules, or zaptel where its not wanted.

It gives you exactly what you tell it to, without all the stuff around. You want a system that works, you definitely want to get rid of the slapped together distros (no offence to the Elastix crew, they are leaps ahead of Trixbox!), and do the configuration directly.

Anyway, moving on, the rest of the day was filled with migrating, DNS checking, and so forth.

Now, I just need to set about finding myself a few larger SCSI drives! Any offers? 73GB+, leave a comment.

Enjoy!

Today, I was discussing with someone, how to connect a router to their ADSL modem, and then setup wireless.

I figure that’s not really that hard, so set about helping him out. The PC was nice and easy to setup, though I did think his purchase of TP-Link (Toilet Paper Link) equipment for his PC was a bit out of place, the software provided was easy.

The problem then came when he mentioned he had an Apple PC he wanted to work with wirelessly, using his Airport card.

I figure, great, here comes a pain. Apples. I cringe at the thought of them. Mainly because I have never used them heavily outside of when I was younger. But, he seemed like a confident enough user, so I gave it a shot.

My first tip for advice is what I tell all else who ask questions likely to have popped up before. We wanted to secure his Apple Wireless network.

My thoughts were, I’ll google. I visit the google page. It loads as expected.

I click in the keyword box, and type in none other than “airport +security”.

Unfortunately, Google failed in my search for Airport Security for Apple, and instead, returned results for, you guessed it. Airport Security. I suppose you get what you ask for.

So I clarify my query further with a +apple, and get some results, but at last, it wasn’t needed, the person worked out where to find what we were roughly looking for in Safari, and then just following that through, we found what we wanted to connect to the secure network.

An amusing experience, when you consider that the security of a Wireless Network is no where near that of an actual Airport. And more so, apples chosen wording, Airport, for wireless networking.

In other unrelated news, it appears to me, though, not updated on many sources for information, Long Jetty has ADSL2+.

That was pretty quick deployment.
My purchase of such is not entirely impulse, but you see Gosford being full for as long as I have, and you don’t risk it. To get away from Telstra’s restricted ports is a very good Happy New Year present for me.

I anticipate nice speeds of 10Mbit inbound, and around 820kbps outbound, giving a much better improved VoIP service, and allowing me to move datafiles to and from the servers faster (around 3 times faster).

I guess if you are with Telstra, you are living it in the slow lane, but in many cases, its not by choice, it’s by lack of choice.

Enjoy!

Essentially its only capable of 2 disks, and it has 2 disks.

I’m unhappy with the sizing of those looking long term, so I want to fatten it up now.

I can’t fatten it up now, because I’m unsure how one can enlarge a RAID array, in the way we have, without destroying it.

Essentially, we have 2 disks. They are in a mirror configuration (one drive mirrors the other).
They have a single full size partition on the single logical drive.

So, how does one go about rebuilding a raid array in that situation without formatting?

Ideally, we can take advantage of the RAID hardwares own built in feature to rebuild. Remove one disk, and rebuild onto the new one.

I’m unsure if that’ll work 100%, because of the differences in sizing, yet can’t find any information at hand as to whether adding a larger drive results in a logical drive being created at 100% usage of the physical drive, or, whether it simply creates a logical drive of the same size as the other drive, and therefore, means we have two logical drives, and partitions.

Ideally I can get away with abusing the mirroring feature of RAID, but I can’t be sure it’ll work, and the experiment is a costly one to try out without at least having some expectatitons.

And I don’t have the spare hard drives, hardware raid controller, and time to test it all out and note some findings.

I’m going to continue my deep search tomorrow, and hopefully we’ll get some information from somewhere about how it works.

I don’t want to have to format, because it isn’t worth it. We’d have the extended downtime, the time of mine used, and so on.

It’d be easier to instead just get a second server when we grow this one to capacity (when we get moving with it).

But, if we can save a heap of dollars, and time and get a larger drive without too much fuss, then I think its worth doing.

Hopefully tomorrow I don’t come up empty handed (and I still yet need to find larger SCSI disks).

I’ve been spending a fair bit of time on a forum lately. Some questionable people post there!

Enjoy!

But today, out of curiosity, among others, I decided to determine what uses how much power, and found some rather interesting results.

We did the testing by finding the base load, that is, the load of all the devices that would occur with no systems or monitors turned on, and we used that as “Base Load”, and simply calculated the draw after the base load.

We have 3 machines running and they have various tasks.

My point at the wall (where we measured), showed 38W with the two systems and two LCD monitors turned off.
So, base load was 38W.

I then turned the LCD monitors on, one and then the other, and found they draw 22 – 24W of power. Pretty good.
I then turned my system on after turning the LCD monitors off. Unfortunately, I have a flaky Linksys router, and its constant reboot loop caused a result between 68 and 80W. I called the system at 75W, the extra 5W is negligble. That means, my system uses 37W.

So, for my complete system, it now uses 85W when it is turned on. Not bad!

Actually, I think I question these results. They don’t seem right when compared to my partners machine.

I then decided to determine the servers load. After turning all off, I had a base load of 41W (3W higher than what was happening with my tests, Linksys router again). The server pushed the meter to 154W, giving an idle load usage (that is, after it had booted and no hdd activity was occuring). This gives a usage of 113W continuously, 24 hours a day, even when I’m asleep. I think we’ll put a fix to that.

Next on the chopping block was the reason I bothered starting testing, CRT compared to LCD power results.

Since my partners new machine still has CRTs connected, we ran the tests.

Her power points base load was 23W.
Her system when powered on, and idle sparked up 110W, bringing her System in at 87W. She’s got a near identical machine to mine, with one extra HDD being the only difference, so that was surprising, perhaps her video card was the blame for the minor difference as well?

Anyway, we moved on to test the CRT monitors. I figured the difference wouldn’t be too great.

Turned one CRT monitor on and we got from 110W to 158W, meaning that it used 48W for one CRT.
Turned the other CRT on and we got to 205W (we peaked at 210W), meaning that it had used 47W more.

That’s incredible, so each time she’s using her computer, the draw is similar to that of a 100W light globe being on, plus the additional 80W her system will consume on.

Amazing to say the least. I think the ideal solution to our power consumption is to reduce the usage wherever possible.

I’m pushing for her to get LCDs, but my little one likes to play games and so forth, and she is concerned he might attack the monitors. My solution to that today, was to perhaps add perspex to them, however, consider this, LCDs cost around $200 each. The average expected life from a monitor for me at least, is 5 years.

The power savings off 48W over around 10 hours a day is not equal to the $200 each monitor will cost. So, the upgrade will end up costing more.

The servers results are surprising, considering it doesn’t have a monitor at all! I think its high reading is simply because its got a pesky Prescott in it, notorious for running Hot, and that heat is seemingly due to poor use of energy at the core. Causing it to piss away more power.

A dual core (that is 2 x CPUs in one) uses less than a Prescott (a single CPU).

Upgrading the server would probably have a future looking lifespan of 3 years or so from now. Costs more to upgrade then it does to simply run it for a few more years longer until its time to upgrade.

Anyway, the best power consumption in a PC you can get is what we have in the dual core machines.

Probably could even lower the results.
Use a single HDD instead of 2 or 3. Don’t plug in as much RAM as I have. Get boards with onboard video if you don’t game.

But the savings in power at that point are small, you are dealing with litterally up to 10-20W.

Combined load at peak reaches 300W on one point, and 210W on the other, meaning we can potentially suck 310W, or even more if the systems are worked hard. They aren’t all that often though, meaning they use less power.

Recently, I’ve added policies to machines to reduce further consumption where it seems good. So hopefully the results translate into a better power bill.

Enjoy!

Recently, the optus website has new conditions added which state that you will be charged excess usage on new signups to fusion plans, before shaping to 64kbps is applied for the 2 and 7GB plans.

Virgin, which is an Optus child, also saw severe changes, which put prices up, and reduced quota on its $60 plan, and took P2P speeds down to a new low of 32kbps (ouch!).

So, when you consider these changes, which seem targetted at fighting an inevitable link upgrade, we conclude that Optus are trying to devalue the service offered for new customers, in a manner that might see the new customers looking at broadband differently and the perception might change, accepting poor value broadband.

The good news with Optus’s changes are that they limit the damage to a customer. Rather than give them damaging multi million dollar bills like Telstra has the oppourtunity to do, they cap the excess usage charges at $300.

This activity will naturally bring about more funding for Optus to perhaps fund a link upgrade should they need one. I don’t see why else they would take such drastic measures otherwise, unless the network was being run down with high bandwidth consumption, and that was affecting other users experiences.

Wait. That did happen! There were complaints about problems with Optus related ADSL2+ services from Exetel suffering speed issues due to problems that they were having (that were fixed).

So, I’m only speculating here, but my guess is that they are running out of bandwidth on their circuits and don’t want to push an upgrade through just yet, so instead, they will simply try and work better with what they have.

I could be wrong and they could be simply dropping the value in their plans for another reason, but I don’t see how or why they would with such a tough marketforce.

Counting Uploads is something they started doing with the release of the plans, and so did iiNet with the Naked DSL plans, which suggests to me that ISPs are seeing surges of traffic going outbound, and where previously they were avoiding saturated downstream traffic, they are also doing the same upstream.

I guess my point here is why on earth do you devalue a product in a competitive marketplace? “Cost” comes to mind, and the costs of upgrading a network would certainly fit with the current decisions.

Enjoy!

I went to the RTA today, and got my provisional license.

There was no bribery involved. So it’s real. I do have my licence, and it only took 6 weeks to get it.

It’s fantastic. No longer must I have my transport situation dictated by bus timetables and taxi queues. No longer must we shell out hundreds a year for public transport.

No longer must we try and rush to meet a schedule.

The lesson before hand, not 100% good, but it helped me prepare for the real deal.

The folk at Central Coast Driving School are fantastic. Professional, yet affordable. Friendly, and experienced.

I’m happy to have passed first time! And its something that would almost certainly not have happened without the assistance of the instructor I had, who is a fantastic person, doing a fantastic job at driver tuition.

The lesson today was pretty good, the RTA test was actually really good, with the exception that at one orange light, I pulled it up tooo quickly, and that might have been a problem. I was actually concerned that I failed because of that, but it wasn’t a problem.

To make the test situation worse, it was certainly not easier having two of them (that is, the RTA examiner, and the examiners examiner) in the car with me while I took the test.

Full of suspense, we sat in the RTA waiting area, waiting for them to mark off the test, and patiently waiting for perhaps the words I failed.

But, I woke up today with every feeling I would get it, and I convinced myself I certainly am ready to get it.

And, I got it. That simple. Not.

It took 6 weeks. About $1000 odd in driving lessons every day over the period of 6 weeks. A lot of concentration. A replaced tyre. A patient instructor. A lot of learning. And, after all that, you eventually end up getting there, signed off and “Congratulations, You Passed!” made it worth it!

Fantastic news for me. I’m still excited.

After passing the test, we went out for a drive to find the one who doubted anyone could pass first time, simply due to his own misconception that you fail first time for whatever reason. Anyway, that was proven wrong today, when I started (with no to low driving experience before hand) 6 weeks earlier, and now, I’m the proud holder of a provisional license.

After we showed off to him, we took a trip to the video store and rented ourselves some DVDs, and then decided we’d go take the car for a much needed scrub (you see, when you park your car since August, it tends to get bird crap on it, and a lot of cob webs and just in general, get dirty), after the scrub, we decided we would cruise off to HJ’s at Wyong and go and have HJ’s for dinner.

While its misleading to say I got my licence in just 6 weeks (I had my L’s for something like 4 years, just sitting there), I did indeed pass first time!

—————————–

Moving onto another unrelated topic, I purchased a power meter from Jaycar on the weekend and it arrived today.

I’ve had it testing using the computers in the office.

I’ve made an interesting discovery:
1 x My new PC.
2 x 17″ LCD monitors.
1 x ATA.
1 x Cordless phone.
1 x beefed up P4 server.

Use around 300W of power. Incredible, considering we have 400W power supplies in both machines.

The LCD monitors combined use the same energy as just a 60W light globe when on.

My system uses approx 150W switched on.

The server uses around that, though I have completed my hard drive lowering process, and now we have just 3 HDDs in the server, removing 3 drives.

My partners 2 x 17 CRT monitors and system combined with a few small network routers, use 220W. That’s alot considering I fit a lot of my side of the room inside of ~280W (it reads now), and she is just one machine, and it is sucking around 220W+.

Time to invest in LCD monitors, considering her machine is identical to mine, I should have seen at least near identical results.

So the CRTs should go, but not now. I’m generally happy with the power bill as in (hovers around $280 for 2 adults and one baby), but it would always be good in the face of rising electricity prices to push downward pressure on usage to at least reduce the consumption (and stick it to the power company).

A few theories in mind for reducing our usage involve less reliance on network storage for some applications, so that the systems can go into stand by without affecting anything running. Implementing standby after lack of usage > 2 hours.

Adding wake up feature so that there’s no wait to wake the machine up (thereby cutting power consumption even further through the use of off peak sleeping – since the power company still bill us for off peak as if it was peak!!).

Anyway, back to the power meter, a great buy at just $40 and has some pretty funky features (yet to work them all out), and can indeed be used as a tool to discover loading placed on any point of power, and just what exactly is the biggest juice drinker in your household.

Since I plugged it in at around 1PM (I reset and started), I’ve worked on the server taking HDDs out (so, the copy process has resulted in higher power draw), the power usage for my point is just at 3.2kWH or – $0.374 cents for the time so far (its nearly 1AM now).

It also tells you the voltage and hertz range of the power being delivered so you can guage some idea of the consistent quality of the delivery (and it mostly sits at 240V – 50Hz, with exception to bumping down to 238V).

Very useful tool, and its just $40!

We always assumed the office sucked a lot of juice, but combined load off the only power point comes in at around 400 – 500W continuously, and that gets us 4 monitors, 3 new / recent systems, 4 network devices, 2 sets of sub powered speakers, 1 phone, 1 printer – that’s it I think..

So that’s pretty good considering the usage. And the only real way to trim our usage is getting 2 LCDs for the other workstation and setting up standby features on the machine for perhaps a few kWH a day gain (probably 2 – 3 a day). So around $35 a bill. Not that big a saving for the issues which setting that up will cause (reconfiguring applications that use network for storage to not do that any more (MySQL DBs, web sites, etc..).

—————

Still excited about getting my provisional licence. Incredible.

Enjoy!

You can’t generally do that when swapping between say an Intel 865PE chipset, and an Intel P35 chipset, simply because Windows will vomit so badly, you’ll be mopping the floors of the mess for weeks or even months after.

Once its tried to change over as a result of detecting a hardware change (ie change in Chipset) windows will literally end up in a blue screen crash fest.

Luckily for me I don’t get caught up in that trap either.

I generally take the working windows drive out, and any drives containing important data. Get the system running on a new HDD. Insert the old HDD afterwards, and then copy data freely about until you have the desired effect.

Next, if there is no room (or it seems wasteful), you generally take the drive out and that’s it really.

Unless of course, you come to the situation I now have.
We have in the server:
2 x 80GB drives – bought em years ago, off eBay.
1 x 160GB SATA drive.
1 x 250GB SATA drive.
1 x 320GB IDE drive.
1 x 120GB IDE drive.

The 320GB was out of my partners system, which we bought because she had a failed 120GB years back, and I still haven’t got around to doing the head swapover on that drive. We’d love to recover the data though.

Anyway, the 320GB is an IDE drive, and her system is SATA (which I planned for, I purchased a 250GB SATA to replace it).

So, now out of the above list, it’s pretty obvious I am in a position to perhaps do a merge of some of those drives onto the 320GB IDE, and therefore realise some power savings (costs more to have 3 drives running than just one bigger drive).

The problem of course, comes down to adjusting the server, and the network to suit the modified conditions. For example, the second 80GB drive serves as my internal updating server (BIG PLUS, seriously, if you upgrade machines, or change machines, and still use XP for some machines, that’s a BIG saving, it updates them without the need to go online and fetch updates, therefore saving your net connection).

So, to get rid of two or three drives (and make room so I can put the 250GB that was in it, back in it), I have to take all the data off the update services drive, dump it in a temporary folder, do the same for the 120GB drive, which has all the installers for all my applications and one of my longer running clients data on it, and that brings it to 200GB, leaving 120GB of room, so maybe consider taking out the 160GB SATA, though I am not in a hurry to do that drive just yet.

The server here has access to around 1010GB of data, of that, it’s used much less than half.

Might be time to rip some drives out and chuck em on eBay! The problem of course is trying to manage the data movement without upsetting things too much, and getting the drive letters back in the right place. Nothing too bad.

In other news, I went online to Jaycar just recently and decided I might just see how much juice some of the house sucks down the power lines, at least we can then decide where we want to apply even more downward pressure on our power consumption.

They only cost $39.95, and from what I have heard are pretty good devices, measuring power intake and reporting on usage statistics, in fact, I heard you can even calculate the bill for that particular power point.

Seriously though, I support timed based billing and not the use of Off Peak metering, since you aren’t allowed to have power points designated as Off Peak (obviously due to the problems associated with the supply nature).

Some of the meters available can even determine Time Of Use, which is a great feature, so that they can hopefully start time of use billing. Burn the power at 6pm and pay the standard rates, burn it at 1am and give a cheaper rate (since the network is cheapest in the earlier hours of the morning).

Anyway, the new system for my partner is also up and running nice and smoothly, still in that process known as “Software Installation” – where you repeatedly find programs you are missing and reinstall them, and to cap that off you have the settings to adjust, such as wallpaper, screen savers, and program specific settings (IE Home Page, etc).

All a royal pain, and its probably why many would instead setup an Active Directory server so that profiles are portable! Makes sense. But then, the data is on the server and not the workstation, so that raises more issues.

It was actually a smooth day with the transfer, and my little one was a perfect assistant to the task, helping wherever he could (you’d be amazed at just how smart a young child can be!!!).

I also got another practice driving test in today, and it was better considerably, with just 2 fail items (so a 50% improvement). The drive itself was smooth, and the only real issues focused on those pesky things they call reverse parallel parks, and my way of taking turns (too fast, so I’m crossing white lines). All seems likely however that we can improve again to top that and come out with a great score equal to a pass and no fails.

Interesting, I’ve avoided the Telstra supplied Broadband Services suck issue for a bit now. Maybe because they are priced to suck, and that’s already a well known fact? Maybe we are just tired of Telstra’s greed, yet also tired of searching for an alternative solution..

Enjoy!

The particular provider issue wasn’t determined until just recently, but has been fixed.

The reason for the delay? Well, I was investigating that issue and the time it took to isolate and correct it, was the time that should have gone into finishing off a last few lines of code, and then taking the site offline so I could integrate it all.

The changes are all backend, but they will affect the front end to some extent as a direct result.

I also took the time today to do a few other things, like watch a movie – nothing entertaining, was “Santa Clause 3″, pretty plain really, none the less, it was a break away.

Then, I got my night driving section ticked off in my log book in a nice long drive towards Budgewoi and back – it’s more of a highway stretch of road, so wasn’t town style night driving, and therefore made a little more complex, than that experienced in the suburban streets I’d rarely find myself on at a night.

So, therefore, it wasn’t completely error free, with a few instances exceeding the speed limit (it’s a 90K street, I kept dropping back to 80K- my limited limit, but continually found myself over the limit a few times), and a little distraction caused me to nearly touch the kerb, pulled away and corrected though.

But indeed, it is made more complex in darker highway conditions, when compared to that of regular streets, such as the well lit up Wyong Road.

Aside from that, I was pretty much error free, mainly due to the time, and the stretch of road being a straight ahead drive really, so no real blind spots to check, no turns to make, no giving way, no stop signs, no entering traffic, … none of the standard traffic conditions you’d be exposed to on a general mix of road conditions.

But, it got the night drive ticked off, so that works for me.

This week is an exciting week! I have a few things I am taking care of, such as the finalisation of a released website, the new system for my partner, getting my internal server back online, hopefully finding time to finish off what I was doing today, a few other projects and some more excitement.

All in the lead up to the most exciting weekend you’ll find in around 3 years, the federal election on Saturday, which really is looking for a Labor win, and my thoughts recently suggest voting Labor, because the way Howard is going against drugs, our crime rate is likely to increase.

He plans to withhold Centrelink funds from those who are convicted of drug offences and only allow vital purchasing.

The problem with that is a drug addict or not, they’ll get the drugs. They’ll resort to lives of crimes, crimes that will harm innocent members of the public.

Better having them shooting themselves up, then causing more work for our police indirectly, by withholding Centrelink funds.

It’s a disaster if they take the drugs away from them, because, they’ll steal to get the drugs. Drug dealing and drug usage affect the selected individuals only (generally), and with the supply being taken away, they’ll simply find a new way of getting their supply. Crime will become the answer. And instead of select individuals being affected, members of the public will also suffer.

I agree with his stance on intervening on Child Abuse in NT, fantastic move to clean the area up of Child Abuse. Children were affected.

This move however? Seems to be more about winning votes, by being seen as doing something about drugs.

Indirectly, creating more problems.

A vote for Rudd will see some good dollars spent over the nation, that’s probably what’s going to win me over at this rate, though I can see Labor State governments have bad debts, so perhaps we can instead later, put Costello back in if they do push the nation into a defecit, and the Liberals will again save the nation.

Better having a debt than having a nation of crime, pushed by poorly thought out drug policies.

A whirlpool poll reveals a 77% Labor win, when asked “What sort of Government will Australia have” – with notes that state not necessarily who you will vote for.

77% believe we will have a Labor government. Just 18% believe it will be Coalition.

Of course, that’s only 174 users, and the polls in main stream generic media suggest that its more close, and might even see a Coalition win.. It has happened, it can happen.

Here’s hoping that not necessarily the Coalition or Labor, but “The Best Party” wins.

Enjoy!

Essentially that was just my older 2 year old machine, which unfortunately, had an accident. It wasn’t the servers fault however.
Unfortunately, a Pop Top bottle filled with a bit of Sprite came into contact with the Zalman fan after being knocked on to the case, laying on its side, resting on the two servers that superseded it.

Unfortunately for that motherboard, it didn’t seem to want to come back on after suffering numerous injuries as a result of the soft drink being quickly propelled around the case by the Zalman fan (which I just put into that case not so long ago, upgrading my own fan due to copper fin ‘bendage’).

Anyway, so the time has come to solve two problems, one, my partners thirst for more computational power to process tasks faster, and the newly invented problem, my server suffering from liquid near the brain (CPU).

The good news for me is my habit of buying parts nearly identical for my machine and my partners, and the end result of my older machine becoming the new server means I don’t have to do any formatting or reinstall.

It’s simply take her high spec P4 3.0Ghz 531 Processor, 4GB of RAM, and the same model motherboard, and place that in the server case, plug the HDDs back in the same order, and fire them up, and we should be good to go again.

Unfortunately however, for me and my server (and the projects I maintain on it), they have to sit back a bit whilst we hack data from the Linux Virtual Hard Drive (we use Linux Virtual Machines over Virtual Server, on a Windows Server 2003 base), from the hard drive on that machine, so that I can continue finishing some updates to OzVoIPStatus, or, wait until next weekend, when the hardware for my partners machine, is to arrive (they were supposed to be here Friday, but the distributors can’t tell the difference between Sydney and Melbourne – strange, I can, one has a highly problematic public transport network, and its not Melbourne).

Anyway, due to the delay from Melbourne, I have to wait until at least Monday to get the gear, which means probably taking Monday (which I would usually use to put towards focusing on websites of clients) to build the server and get it back online, just so I can get somewhere, otherwise the whole week will be nearly spent doing little at all in the way of development (lack of test area).

The new gear will see a performance improvement for my partner, who long has been stifled by the Hyper Threading artifical dual CPU technoloy, and will almost definitely love the ultimate responsiveness of a dual core machine!

I was planning the upgrade, but not so soon, after Christmas.

The next item on her upgrade list is two LCD monitors to help trim down the fat on the power bill her two CRTs generate.
Although trimming fat shouldn’t be something we have to do, instead, power solutions should be worked on that are friendly to the environment and reduce costs to consumers. Such examples exist in GeoThermal power. Truly amazing idea (figures quoted as 5c a KWH, compared to the ~12c KWH we pay now (and the 15c KWH after XX kWH).

My plan to release a key update to OzVoIPStatus is likely to go ahead, with thanks to Virtual PC 2007, which works just like Virtual Server, except its desktop oriented, which will do now for the time being.

My updates aren’t much on the web side, and more in the back, though some of the changes I imagine will be visible to viewers, as this essentially will fix a bug with outages being logged every 60 seconds due to the more passive nature of the tests currently being done.

It sort of sucks to lose a machine that isn’t so hardly worked yet! Many of my machines get around 5 years or so before I take them out, simply due to aged hardware, leaky capacitors, warping due to CPU heat, etc. But then, it was originally my workstation, and I do work them pretty hard.

So, tomorrow, hopefully, assuming I complete it, we’ll have a OzVoIPStatus fix up that solves outages being logged incorrectly, and can (but won’t for a little while) provide data back out as to what was found at the cause of each outage.

Enjoy!

Problem for me is, writing three seperate topics would take considerable time that I could be doing other things with.

I’ll do short recaps of the two items I was going to do this post on, and focus primarily on the next Telstra scam afterwards.

Flat tyre, and ‘tards on the road

Today, I went for another driving lesson, nearly ready to go fetch my P license, and be allowed to drive on my own. Woohoo.
Friday, I spoke to the fools that work at the RTA, and on 3 seperate occasions, I was given 3 different reasons for the lack of availability of a testing at the local office.

1. They are booked out through to February. Yeh, right, why isn’t other testing centres nearby also booked?
2. They don’t have a driving examiner. Umm, but did they just sack her? She was there last week, when the school I am with just got a failed student?
3. They haven’t unlocked bookings for this month yet. OK, fair enough, perhaps they should in advance.

I was explaining this to the instructor today, and lost a little concentration, talking and focusing on the RTA and its rampant stupid inconsistence, and its complete failure to get a simple question like “Why is there no tests available?” answered correctly.

I’d be putting all the staff through a lesson in Business Administration, right now.

Anyway, as we were talking and thinking of the RTA, I lost a little focus on what I was doing and clipped the gutter, nothing too bad, except, well, later on, the car starts making a sound like it was in the wrong gear, or the road surface just got really rough.

We quickly consider what happened moments before hand, and realise we might have a problem with the rear tyre.

So, we pull over and check it out, and sure enough, the tyre was flat (with a small hole).
The next 10-15 minutes was spent replacing it, before continuing on to what was a near perfect drive.

About 5 minutes later travelling down The Entrance road, some stupid tard decides to do a star jump out into the middle of The Entrance Road (The Central Coast Highway for those unfamiliar).

I quickly pull the car to a stop nice and tidily, and sound the horn to get this fool to get off the road. He didn’t want to move, and a B-Double was in the other lane. I slipped into neutrel, and revved it a little, and the fool didn’t move. Stuck it into first and started towards them and the tard bolted off the road.

I guess he really was Chicken afterall. Still a very, very stupid move to make. If I wasn’t concentrating (as I wasn’t a little earlier) he wouldn’t have had the chance to play Chicken, I’d have not stopped and knocked him flat on his face, probably the better move considering his stupid idea of jumping out into the road in the first place!

Telstra: The Only Option for FTTN: My arse
A recent article in the news suggested Telstra would be the only option for FTTN.

Now, everyone I can think of will believe that it is absolute bullshit that Telstra could only build FTTN.
Optus could.
The G9 could.
Deutsche Telekom could.
Sprint could.
BT UK could.

Realistically, any company with the dollars can build an FTTN network in Australia.

The time it takes is also of consideration. But I beg to differ as to whether we need FTTN.

If we all had unrestricted ADSL1 services, and encouragement on deployment of ADSL2+, and WiMAX, the need for FTTN is immediately eliminated in many, many, many cases.

So, I suspect the Expert Taskforce might return with two possible results.
1. Legislate that any FTTN related deployment actions are allowed, and deny Telstra’s claims of legal action, simply because it is advancing Australia, and Telstra doesn’t have the balls to do it. (ie. Legislate in favour of the G9′s proposal).
2. Focus on the ADSL2+ outcomes and see that we don’t need FTTN right now, and recommend that ADSL2+ be focused on for deployment with WiMAX.

Election 2007 – The Next Telstra Scam?
The 2007 Election will see telecommunications be made a medium level issue, the higher issues will remain focused on the abolishment on the biggest waste of money, Unions.

Telstra wants to try and show its willingness to become politically involved (and perhaps should instead become a political party – Telstra meets all the requirements to become a political party, such as misleading the public, providing any story to support your point, and then becoming a hypocrite at the other side of it, expecting far too much from those that support you, etc).

Telstra started a new website recently, on the Election 2007, which claims to be showing the Telecommunications Policies of either party.

Amazingly, they decided that they would be unbiased (heh, how’s that possible when it is still under their direct control).

I figure this move is a result solely due to low traffic on the Now We Are Talking website. I decided that I had spent a fair bit of time there pushing points to people that can’t see past their fat arses (and they are fat as a result of being Telstra shareholders).

So, in recent times conversation on the forums have hit rock bottom low levels, and that to me suggests that Telstra’s marketing campaign – If you are a shareholder, read here: Telstra just wasted a lot of your money, as I said they would! – has failed miserably, failing to attract significant numbers to support its own cause.

Amazing, isn’t it. All those dollars in advertising, GONE!

Telstra’s management are soon to realise a very powerful message: Australian’s don’t get politically moved by company issues.
Australian’s couldn’t give a rats arse about shareholders.
Australian’s care ONLY about the price and service.

Australian’s are pissed off enough with Telstra’s high line rental and poor services.

This Election 2007 site however, does indeed contain very much near unbiased content todate, and I suspect this approach is to try and at least realise some goals out of the money pissed away to the overpaid developers of the sites (that apparently let polls get rigged, and have demonstrated some poor coding standards).

I do however, believe that the party’s messages and policies are best received direct, from your local MP.
Ask them why you should give them a vote, based on telecommunications policies.

They’ll send you their standard “Australia’s broadband is piss poor, but we will fix it” template letter, which will go into detail on either a WiMAX network, or the destruction of the regional telecommuncations fund.

Don’t trust Telstra for anything on any of its websites, we can only assume it is unbiased “NOW”. That’s almost likely to change, as Telstra decides that they are pissing too much money away.

Enjoy!

1. Many Linksys devices have Open Source firmware available, so you aren’t pestering the manufacturer for a fix, and you can customise the firmware as much as you want, don’t want wireless, turn it completely off, don’t want “x” feature, remove it.

2. I find Billion’s in general to be the lower quality device when compared to Linksys, Netgear, etc. The web interface for example, is a frames page. Whilst I won’t judge them solely on that, the product does seem “lower quality” than other products.

3. My experience with Tomato, which is open source firmware, the QoS has been somewhat acceptable, although we continually limit maximum upload to 80%, to save the extra 20% for VoIP calling (even though we are relatively low VoIP users)..

Anyway, a representative from Billion jumped in the thread, and bought in a feature Billion’s have, which was described as “VoIP InUse”.

This sounds like a great feature for Australian conditions, because we have pathetic upload speeds, artificially limited so Telstra can preserve the revenue it gets from its older, and more expensive business products, among other reasons.

I am keen on testing this feature out, essentially, its described as “halting” internet traffic while a VoIP call is in progress, so that VoIP will be crystal clear (and this paves the way for better codecs).

That’s ideal for us however, because when we don’t have a VoIP call happening, I certainly would love to be able to FTP a database for example, at the maximum speed of ~40KB/sec my connection is capable of, instead of limiting my connections capabilities to 30KB/sec permanently, “Just In Case” a call came in.

One of the bigger let downs with the Billion however, is I’ll have to drop my bandwidth monitoring logging feature, that identifies how much usage we have gone through and can alert us to when we are reaching that critical moment where our ISP might try and scam $3 from us.

But, it does support SNMP, and so I can recode my system to take advantage of that instead, though I will lose the data during Billion testing in my rstats file (which is bad, because rstats really does work well).

The compromise here is that for the sake of being able to use my full connection, I have to drop a few features that I sort of use for watching Exetel (they only update the usage meter every 12 hours, apparently due to the number of radius records, but I think they are just not integrating radius well, because it really isn’t that hard to process that much data, another topic).

In possible news coming in days, I’m expecting Exetel’s announcement of P2P caching, which should see a dramatic increase in the speed of connections Exetel wide, mainly because the demands placed on the links will, I believe, be dramatically reduced, so that could cause Exetel to hopefully revisit the off peak period and allow faster speeds to the users in the pool, or be prepared for more growth.

In fact, like others, I’m amazed others haven’t gone the caching path sooner. For a small $400,000, an ISP can potentially reduce a lot of load on their links!!

Enjoy!

I thought I might cover a few possible outcomes!

1. Nationwide WiMAX
The possibility of Nationwide WiMAX networking immediately sparks up with the consideration of the Unwired sale to Channel Seven, and its keen interest in investing Unwired into WiMAX networking by placing $200 million into it after the purchase of the company.

Talks with Austar by Seven also go to back that up with Austar owning the regional spectrum which could be accessed for WiMAX.

WiMAX has plenty of upsides, no copper wire needed, no wire needed at all! But it does need a good coverage plan, and consumer equipment of good quality to do well with it.

It’s other advantages are in the fact its a young, developing technology and is going to be innovated with, and allows a fantastic possibility of VoIP Mobile Phones over WiMAX, and internet access at good speeds in the middle of the highway, or out in the farm.

Disadvantages? Well, it’s wireless, and not fixed, so there’s no connection quality guarantees like you get with a fixed network which only ever has circuits with two states: Closed, or Open. It’s mobility advantages are a great credit to the fact that it doesn’t require any last mile maintenance.

2. Fibre to the node
Fibre to the node recycles the current copper paths we have in the ground right now, making them useful for a few more years to come yet by bringing DSL based services closer to the customer, and therefore increasing possible access speeds.

Speeds of this nature, generally speaking, aren’t required in my honest opinion, and simply adding ADSL2+ services to exchanges nationwide would do the solution for many, with select areas requiring a node however.

Advantages? It’s a great upgrade to the current network, but has a high cost and little to gain, it basically upgrades Telstra’s network to a newer standard, something they should have done themselves years ago. Fixed connections, so a service is either working or not, and not really in the middle of working and not. Faster speeds in some cases are possible depending on the DSL technology installed at the node. It’s key incentive is the upgrade to FTTH connections which is the next upgrade path.

Disadvantages? It’s still using higher maintenance copper in the last mile, and faults on the lines aren’t going to disappear as a result of a new network. It’s a high cost upgrade for little gain, because the gains are a simple increase of a few Mbps to some users, or only in minor areas, delivery for the first time of broadband. Possible issues with MPI (mid point injection) affecting any services at exchange levels, and will inevitably slow competition.

3. Fibre to the home
A national fibre to the home network would concrete Australia’s future. There’d be no more uncertainty for competitors as to what to invest in, or how they should invest. A fibre to the home system brings the internet directly to your door, the same technology used under the oceans to take the internet internationally are used to bring your home online. The speeds are limitless, and the expansion of the network still knows of no upper bounds.

Advantages? Never upgrade again (assuming lasers can’t transmit faster). Speeds in excess of any perceived future demand. Certainty to competitors on investment decisions. Would be designed to be open access due to its very nature, and will put Australia right on the map for services.

Disadvantages? Well, a high cost upgrade, but the permanent nature of fibre negates the cost to a high degree. Faster speeds might result in more homeless folk due to the 200MB limits still found on Bigpond plans, but we don’t have FTTH yet..

4. National ADSL2+ or VDSL deployment
This is the more reasonable expectation. A national ADSL2+ or VDSL/2 deployment.

It gives Australian’s world class speeds, doesn’t require any hostile blocking competitor access to customers, provides for the same competition levels we have now, or possibly more. Sees that everyone can hold their own ground to a extent. Competitors can invest more in services, and we all get faster speeds.

Advantages? Faster speeds for all without the high build cost of FTTN or FTTH. Innovates, without having to decide on the FTTN / FTTH debate now.

Disadvantages? Lower speeds for some people on crap quality Telstra phone lines, and lower speeds to no service for those on the fringes now. Upgrades from this decision will eventually be required as bandwidth demands increase, and this is simply a patchwork system to patch the issue until technology and politics show us the way.

5. The current situation
The current situation remains. We sit with the election finished, no new networks, a new election just starting. Telstra chucks its regular political spin out, employs another whinging, fool to destroy more of the company reputation.

Advantages? Well, we at least know services are provided to those that can get them, to some extent where Telstra isn’t politically involved.

Disadvantages? You already know these.

Of the above 5, number 4 seems like the safer, better option to me. Simply upgrade all exchanges to faster services and offer those on a wholesale basis.. Like OPEL are planning. The results can be seen that we will all be able to eventually get ADSL2+ based services, and due to competitive threat, Telstra will carbon copy them, and so we have price competition and nationwide faster speed services to a majority > 50% get 10Mbps.

So, that option is the one that makes sense right now. Sure the upgrade is inevitable, but playing judge around politics and election time is just silly and sees us only have a political slinging match, where at the end of it all, the only acheivement is a government that is just a little more smarter on broadband.

Australia need decisions and Australian’s need consistent movement in the market, Australian’s need certainty, competitors can’t invest in a market where there is no idea who is going to bite your head off for simply entering the market.

So, we need a framework for at this moment, a nationwide ADSL2+ or VDSL / VDSL2 deployment, which sees faster speeds to the masses, and a fair chunk of the problem patched over until both technology and politics grow to act their ages, and the path becomes more clear.

It should eventually become a “Why don’t we just do this” decision. And that’ll put an extreme amount of certainty in the industry at the end of it.

Enjoy!

Now, I’m not a corporate pro (far from it), so as is always welcomed, comments on any missed item will be both taken in and presented.

The obvious one to start with are the Advantages, since it is only being considered for any advantages it will have, it makes sense to cover these first (otherwise, there’s no point even talking about it).

Advantages:
1. Investment in infrastructure from competitors will increase, because they have no uncertainty surrounding the investment in infrastructure.

2. Regulation will be reduced, or even removed, because there would be no retail, wholesale, network conflict of interest.

3. Multiple wholesale bodies from the network provider would start up, and we’d be able to see another layer added to the mix competing based on numbers for the best prices.

4. Providers would have a base network rate to determine their investment from, and will not have to base their decisions in an uncertain market.

5. Telstra would shut up, because the seperation will remove regulation, and therefore all of the arguments they have against the government, would be invalidated.

6. Shareholders have the potential to see increased value in both the retail Telstra, because it could compete fairly (cough, like it would), but also, regulations on Telstra would be removed, and therefore Telstra would be a open market company, as would any other company.

7. Investment by the network owner would increase. Competition to the network owner would increase, so that there would be multiple layers of network investment happening. Essentially, I’m suggesting here that someone would start up a competing network infrastructure unit to compete with the new network owner.

8. Pricing structure from the network owner would be reviewed, and averaged prices might end up a thing of the past, with deaveraged (user pays) systems appearing, simply to create competition in the smaller areas, where there would be concentration on those single areas by a single company for example, and thus price competition on the network would occur.

9. We wouldn’t have to visit the issue of Telstra’s conflict of interest in any government in the future, as the market would essentially end up left to open forces. Build, invest, profit. Don’t build, go down the drain. Compete on the network layer.

10. Facilities based competition would end up much like markets such as VoIP and Web Hosting, where there are a lot of providers and prices would reach near input prices, with the focus on profit being the service income, or the added extras income.

Those are the first 10 advantages that I can think of. There’s probably more, and some of those really do look very tempting to simply take it up now.. I haven’t thought of the disadvantages as I write this.

Many of the advantages will see a booming market form, but I get the feeling there are negatives in the disadvantages..

Disadvantages:
1. Network investment might not occur at all, and instead we end up with a single network company, selling access to the network, and slowing raising prices to increase investment, or not investing in the network at all, just as Telstra currently do not invest in the network.

2. Prices will reach rock bottom web hosting style prices, where you find that providers cut costs so much so that they are light operations, running purely at cost, or below in some cases, and this might cause the market to drop, and no boom for investment, instead, a simple continuation, or even degradation of the network, or a price rise to maintain the network, with the new company still seeking profits.

3. Could see service prices rise due to additional layers of profit.

4. Shareholders of Telstra could be disadvantaged if either of the division sides fails to perform adequately, as a result of the split.

5. The government could be exposed to a class action should they split Telstra, and the chosen split method goes outside of the T3 prospectus guidelines.

6. The network owner might not upgrade, and competition might not invest, leaving the situation in a stalemate.

7. Averaged prices going, could see deaveraged prices cause regional and rural users wondering where to find the wheat to pay the bills in the drought.

That’s all I can consider about disadvantages right now.. The advantages seem good, and all do seem likely to occur, but we cannot ignore either.

The advantages might see a market boom, and really take off. The other hand, it could see the market take a real sharp downward turn, no investment, no maintenance, no competing networks, no innovation, and we could be worse off than we are now.

Such a big issue to pull apart! I’m interested in any other advantages or disadvantages if anyone has any. Let’s not focus on a biased interest here either, shareholder profits aren’t a major concern, but taxpayers being exposed to a lawsuit is certainly a big concern.

Enjoy!

I’m not sure whether Plesk is the cause of the outages, or if something else they do is the cause, the point is that they have been unreliable enough to warrant the move of a few people from them to a private operation to eliminate issues occurring.

So, I started setting up my windows operation after the purchase near the end of August.

Anyway, with the Windows server now setup and running fine, I had started adding sites to it. One site requires the use of SSL (shared). So I figure I might as well as get that out of the way now, and set it up so I can add sites to the server using Shared SSL (since many will want SSL eventually).

After setting the server up for SSL, the point came to get an SSL certificate signed from a provider of SSL (read: Excuse to charge you something for doing pretty much nothing).

I purchased from GoDaddy after using Google and seeing them come up for offering “Instant” and “Immediate” SSL.

Considering I was ready to set this up this weekend, I figure, let’s do it. So I order the certificate from GoDaddy, and then it starts processing.

I got an email stating they wanted to see a website before they go ahead. I thought that was a strange request, considering all my SSL dealings didn’t really involve any of this and it was a simple process, certificate issued in minutes.

I thought it must just be a GoDaddy thing and decided to follow due process and hope for a certificate in the next 24 hours (ie. Sunday).

I sent them an email stating it was Shared SSL for a web server. They wanted either a website active at the address. SO I stuck a page up stating it was the shared ssl for the service. I figure that’s good enough for the majority, it states the domain is for Shared SSL, the users of the service are going to simply use it for their own SSL requirements.

I didn’t hear anything back on Monday.. I did get a response today after following up from being sick of waiting, and got an immediate response (amazing).

The response was that they wanted to see a full live site there or a written signed letter of intent, FAXED – FAXED – to an internet company.

That was were I began to get really frustrated and figure I will just get a refund if they don’t understand what Shared SSL is on a web host (they are one FFS).

GoDaddy do seem to be a web of webs stuck together and unable to process a basic SSL request without forcing clients to become UNSTUCK from a web of rubbish.

My experience with them was nothing short of poor, ending with the rep involved stating that the committee wasn’t going to accept a SSL request without a signed letter of intent or a live website.

I figure if they won’t accept what is there, and I’m not going to go to all teh trouble of faxing them something when I can do better elsewhere. The same email stated they’d give me a refund because it was in 30 days. This contradicts previous advice given by a previous rep that they would charge $15 administration fees because of the cancellation.. The certificate costs $14.95 a year (I wanted 2 years).

Anyway, I’ve cancelled the certificate, I will get my refund, either from them or PayPal, and they will see the fact they haven’t delivered on what is requested.

GoDaddy are absolutely hopeless for SSL. I’m never dealing with them again based on this experience. The staff are rude, and the procedures hypocritical of what is advertised on the website (Instant, Immediate SSL)..

Optimum SSL did the trick, faster than 3 minutes and the server was showing SSL secured pages.

If only I went to them first. They cost the same as GoDaddy, yet do a better job!

Enjoy!

Google are believed to be investing in a undersea cable running over the Pacific Ocean. The cable project, which apparently has a project name of “Unity” is expected to be completed and launched in 2009.

There’s no direct confirmation from Google about the GoogleCable, however, it does make perfect strategic sense to do that and provide itself with a advantage, as it would be able to source all data off the network at.. well cost, where as MSN and Yahoo, and all those other sites on the internet have to pay to get the data users so seek to them.

The Cable Route isn’t direct to Australia however, and doesn’t have a plan set in concrete yet, however, it is possible it will go to Guam and Hawaii in two seperate links to allow for diversity from those two points.

The news doesn’t deliver exceptional news for Australia yet, because the cable would need to be landed in Sydney before Australian’s benefitted from any such cable.

The news adds to a list of cables likely to be heating up the oceans, with PIPE and Telstra also releasing cables.

PIPEs cable is so far looking like it will be going ahead and completed in 2009. The proposal is to take traffic from Sydney to Guam, and at Guam connect with VSNL for connectivity through asia and through to the USA as well.

Telstra is planning also to run its own cable through to Hawaii, and plans for its cable are apparently expected to be live in Mid 2008, which gives them around 9 months to complete the cable and have it lit.

Telstra’s cable is designed to be a cost saving incentive, shifting costs from the SXC cables to its own, and after placing its own cable, obviously there’s no costs on a monthly basis, but there is the cost of buying the cable, which should in realistic terms pay for itself within a year or two, and see better returns for shareholders after there.

The problem is for Telstra, the returns will likely only offset damage done in other areas of its business.

PIPE on the other hand with its cable going live, would see a great move with Google as a possible link in to the US as well, and therefore more cost effective connectivity and price reductions for consumers.

The key cost saving would be in getting the cable IN THE WATER from Australia to any international nation with connectivity, and that would see ISP costs drop and therefore services become more value added.

Enjoy!

The idea is sparked essentially from the common belief that the internet is an open network for freedoms, with the exception that laws in the states / countries where the content originates still apply.

Open Source software is not really much different, in the same model that it is placed up in a manner where others contribute to it, and the laws of the state / country apply where the software is peiced together. There’s laws about encryption of data in some countries for example, so those would apply in much the same way.

The internet is generally believed to be a wide open network, where you can access any content put out there by contributers to the internet, which makes it a great resource medium for information, as well as an entertainment medium and a self expression medium.

Open source, the same, I believe many open source software authors put the time into the software they do as a “art” or “self expression”, and others because – someone had to do it, and they figured they’d enjoy the challenge / the project, again, self expression.

Anyway, that’s not really too relevant to an Open Source FTTN network. I’ll be basing the same points required to submit a proposal to the Expert Taskforce here, except putting forward an open source model.

I think it might come out interesting, if not actually in real life – yeh, not likely.

Project Title:
OSN – Open Source Networks

Name of proponent:
OSN – Open Source Networks

Consortium members:
Every consumer of the public

Proposal summary:
Technical: The open source networks model works by providing a network which is open source, that is, the network is contributed to by the users of the software. The user seeking a connection would make their own fibre connection to the chosen point of interconnection. This would be in a place where a key project maintainer would be placing the parent project node, and users can contribute to that, by connecting their own premises to the node using fibre optic cable.

Geographical coverage: The project would start in many areas, with many project maintainers starting up nodes where they felt fit to start one, and then it would be a combined effort of the key project maintainers in two neighbouring areas to link the two areas together to gain connectivity to the core network, which would be contributed to by all project maintainers and provide all connectivity to all the project users. International connectivity would be provided also through those links. The coverage of the network is limitless, anyone can choose to connect to the network, or start their own sub network of the project, and project users may connect themselves to which ever project maintainer they choose to.

Scalability: The network is likely to be upgraded by project maintainers. Should a project maintainer not upgrade a network in a timely manner, others are free to instead become a new project maintainer and get project users connected to the network. Both the old and new network would exist, and any additional networks are able to be ran alongside existing networks.

Proposed wholesale, retail price, non-price terms, conditions and data speeds:As the network is open source, users are free to upgrade or downgrade to any speed of access as they like, the project maintainers job will be to ensure that the project section they maintain is capable of providing connectivity at any unsustainable rate, as a measure of future proofing. Project maintainers of shared areas for prime connectivity have a role to keep both sides of the network with speeds above what is sustainable by all users on the network. This is done by adjusting the speed of the link, or upgrading, adding links where necessary. There is no price terms necessary as all hardware and equipment is funded by the projects users, since they will be using and contributing to the network they will be bearing all network costs.

Proposed total expenditure: The project needs only a small section for maintaining project data, which can be web driven so only requires a server. The other costs, such as international transit will be expenses split among all project maintainers in exchange for them owning the network they hold and therefore being free from infrastructure expenses.

Scope of regulatory and legislative changes: There are no changes needed in this area, as the network is completely open, and regulations shouldn’t be applied, due to the users paying and maintaining and no such retail service existing.

Summary of proposal against Australian Government Objectives:
Timely roll-out and operation of new, privately funded, open access, high speed broadband network infrastructure in Australia’s capital cities and major regional centres that:
a) provides higher quality and faster wholesale and retail broadband services than those now available in those areas, and
b) enables future network infrastructure and service improvements over time.
Answer: This objective is met by the network being open and free for anyone to expand upon, add to, modify, recompile (well, not necessary recompile), etc. The network provides no wholesale or retail services, since the users won’t require any.

The above outcome is acheived in a way that promotes the long term interests of end-users and is consistentwith the following broader policy objectives of the Australian Government:
a) an industry environment characterised by sustainable, robust competition between market participants, supported by open, non-discriminatory network access arrangements.
b) economically effecient investment in, and use of telecommunications network infrastructure.
c) people having access at competitive prices
d) commercial returns commensurate with costs
e) consistent with international trade obligations
Answer: As the nework is open, users contribute to keeping it running entirely on their own. They plug themselves in, source their own hardware, make donations to the project maintainer and to the project management. no retail or wholesale services supplied, and it’s a FTTH network, therefore it will be a Faster Than Telstra’s Network, direct to the home. International trade obligations don’t apply.

a) Proposed legislative or other regulatory changes to the telco regime should be demonstrably linked to the facilitation of a particular porposal.
b) legal and other risks to the commonwealth should be minimised and
c) compensation to affected parties
Answer: There is no legislative or regulatory changes required. There is no legal risks to the commonwealth. There are no compensation amounts to any idiots due because the network is a new network, and simply puts the idiots own copper network alone to rot away, like they plan on doing anyway, by not upgrading to FTTN any sooner.

Project costs:
The project has minimal costs in the order of $10,000 through to $100,000 to get up and running, after that users carry their own costs of service, and recovery of any initial aggregate costs will be capable of being done by donations by users and cost contributions where required by users to project maintainers, and project maintainers and users to project management, where required for adminstration of the network.

Index of annexures:
There are no annexures.

Additional confidential information:
Unlike some, we have nothing to hide with a completely open network.

Proponent details:
Name: Open Networks
ACN: NA
ABN: Not For Profit
Registered Office Address: 1 Open Network Way
Postal Address: Locked bag open
Place and date of incorporation: NA
Name of parent company: Not Greedy Pigs Inc.

Principal contact:
Name: Project Management
Position: Project Management
Postal Address: Locked bag open
Mobile phone: 10100010001000100030001
Fax: Binary write socket 12414.
Email: open@open-networks.org

Consortium members:
A Australian
B Australian
C Australian
– Essentially the entire Australian consumers are the members.

Network infrastructure design and technical specifications:
Network infrastructure and architecture: Any fibre optic equipment users and maintainers wish to connect to the management fibre optic network.
Services: Services will be FTTH, and carry as much data as a user provisions at, with whatever the project maintainers equipment allows, and gets funded for upgrades to.
Capacity: More than you’ll ever see from Telstra.
Scalability: The network is capable of speeds faster than are currently used anywhere in the known world, except for the woman with a 40Gbps connection. I hear she has issues with shaping to 64k after just 40GB.
Future proof: As the network is open, it’s as future proof as you are going to get, with anyone able to upgrade any section of the network any way they like.
Redundancy: Is built into the open model. All Project users in an area can be project maintainers if they want and effectively be redundant off each other. Security: All data leaving a users premises can be encrypted if they want it to be.
Open access: Service providers don’t exist in this model, but it is open access, any one can connect.
Interoperability: Due to the nature of fibre, any user can upgrade to it and run at any speed they like, any compatible fibre equipment they like.
Suitability of technology: The technology is used worldwide for networking nations to nations. It’s suitable.

Network coverage:
Network coverage is really anywhere you need or want it. Run the cable there yourself. Done.

Timeframe:
The entire network could be complete within 14 days if every single user upgraded simultaneously and connected together simultaneously. The timeframes are user dependant. If they want it tomorrow, they connect it tomorrow.

Network construction and operation:
Construction: the network is constructed by users, do it themselves, pay someone to do it, whatever they see fit.

Equipment and systems: There is only a need to maintain one system at the core of it and that’s the maintenance system to determine capacity usage over international links, the rest of the network is maintained by the users.

Operation: The network is operated and maintained by users.

Migration: Users plug themselves in when they want to / pay someone to do it for them.

3.5 Retail services and price and non-price terms and conditions of retail services
No retail services supplied.

Consumer outcomes:
Speeds are at whatever the user sets them at, the availability is at what the users make it available at, the prices are non-existent, the quality and reliability are up to the users.
Choice doesn’t matter when it comes to a $0 service. Users can make the service whatever they want it to be.

Efficiency:
The network can be as efficient as the users make it. Use of the infrastructure is up to the users.

Competition:
Competition exists among project managers, though they aren’t really competing for any monetary or value item, but rather if they wish to, they can compete on upgraded networks where network upgrades are needed, in a FTTH deployment, these are generally not needed for anything often.

Open and non-discriminatory access:
Everybody has open access. There’s no discrimination possible when the users aren’t able to discriminate against themselves.

Wholesale information strategy:
What does wholesale mean? We don’t do any wholesale.

Wholesale pricing:
Free.

Contribution towards any network losses in rural and remote areas:
A: Provide views on whether prices should include a contribution towards losses:
Answer: There’s no loss in a user pays network.

B: If the proposed prices for wholesale services described above include contribution, identify amounts of losses:
Answer: There’s none.

Legislative and other regulatory changes:
There is no legislative or regulatory changes.

Compliance with legislative or other regulatory requiments:
There is no compliance needed as the sale of services doesn’t occur.

Binding commitments:
The only single commitment here is that the user plugs themselves in. If they have to run a cable round a pole, so be it. If they have to dig a ditch so be it, if they have to follow the path the existing cable into their own home takes, so be it. There’s no commitment required above the user connects commitment.

Assurances sought by the proponent:
No assurances are needed, the network is open, funded by users, made possible by users. Demand satisfies itself.

Corporate structure:
There’s no corporation.

Roles and responsibilities of consortium members:
The only role users (also members of the project) have are that they must plug themselves in and maintain the connection themselves, and project maintainers allow connection to project users where suited, or project users can become project maintainers by their own choice.

Consortium agreement:
The agreement of all users is essentially done when the user connects themselves.

Roles and responsibilities of key stakeholders:
Project Management is to ensure the connections to the international links and between the two project maintainers linked to it are capable of connectivity.
All project maintainers are required to make sure their own connecting networks are connected.
All project users must connect themselves, or pay for someone to do that for them.

Proponent risk:
All risks are taken on board by the project maintainers / project users. No financial risk is taken by anyone, as users connect themselves, and so take the full costs into account (and naturally don’t need to pay monthly fees as a result).

Commonwealth risk:
There is none.

Third party risk:
There is none. Users connect themselves, and therefore accept responsibility for their own connection.

Financial and performance guarantees:
Performance can be as fast as the users choose to go. Finances are up to the users alone.

Financial capability:
There is no finances.

Business case:
Free, fast, unlimited internet access. Sounds like a good business case to me.

Budget summary:
Year 1 – 15+: $0.

Summary of project funding:
The users fund it themselves. We cannot readily determine if that will be on the Visa card, or otherwise.

Management capability and experience:
Management is done in such a way that it is open to all. Experience isn’t really a required point here, as any expert or not can freely go over the details themselves and adjust accordingly.

Project management:
The project manages itself through the users. The only central management required is addressing and lists of project maintainers.

—
And there you have it.

An open network model that works by the users funding the network themselves. If they want connection (this includes big business, small business, government, residential), they run the connection themselves, and others can make arrangements to connect to that network by running their own.

Essentially what is likely to occur is governments, big business will want to join the network and so will run their own fibre cables to their own premises, and whilst those are being rolled out others are able to connect to that same link, avoiding the need to run fibre alongside it. The end result is the project manager can easily upgrade the network, or users can also become project managers and therefore become a point for users to connect through and gain access to upgraded network infrastructure.

All the users manage the connect themselves, maintain services themselves, and maintain connectivity in their own way.

The goverment or big business in the above example would be responsible for their side of the link, and the other end would be responsible for the other half of the link, thereby ensuring that both are responsible for keeping that link stable, or users can again, run a redundant additional link anyway they like to another point of interconnection.

It’s not too far fetched now I consider that, because all of that is generally speaking, possible in many of the metro areas considered, and it is easily extended by others who want to take the service further and further across the nation, or even start up a second point and link all points through their own choosing.

The network is completely open and left for everyone to maintain to ensure its upkeep, the theory is everyone will want access, everyone will contribute to keeping the network expanding or upgraded, and those that don’t can feel free to go without by not connecting – though no one will want to miss out on FTTH, and therefore avoid phone and internet bills altogether.

Should international capacity become a problem, a user pays method would see an additional cable put in, through the use of a donation system, or a contribution system where it is calculated the costs of an additional cable, and the cost per user would be calculated. Users could pay that much, or even donate more.

The project is free from commercial influence because it is ran by users, and users would almost certainly refuse commercial intervention and therefore be billed again for services they can get for free or donate to support.

Enjoy!