Category: Networking

Your computer and mine talking to each other

Categories
Networking

The $500 Ethernet Cable

I’ve seen this in several sites over the past few days. Apparently Denon decided to put out a $500 Ethernet Cable (AK-DL1). Free shipping via Amazon. I’ll give you few minutes to laugh.

Hopefully your now under control. As pointed out in various places like Slashdot and all the links in the paragraph above, the only thing possibly unique to this cable is a thin piece of foil. Considering it’s use, that likely has no material difference. Someone will still purchase it despite a variety of cables that are almost unquestionably of equal or greater quality and cost less than 1% of that one.

I’m convinced cabling is the biggest scam in the electronics industry today. It amazes me that the “pros” use $5-$25 generic cables while the novices spend hundreds on gold plated, shielded, USB, speaker, ethernet cables. For some reason USB seem to be the most abused (though never to the $500 level). HDMI is expensive to begin with, so while it’s still abused, percentage wise it doesn’t seem to be to the same degree. Not exactly sure why, but even SCSI was never subjected to this level of price variation.

This reminds me of the coat hanger cable experiment a little while back (among others). A modern classic.

It’s a sad state of affairs that you can’t just walk into a store and by a reasonably priced good quality cable these days.

A few months ago I ordered a USB cable where shipping cost more than the product. Still cheaper than going to the store. I should add that cable works perfectly. It’s actually better than anything I could get at a store since it didn’t come in one of those plastic packages that cut you when you open it (which should be outlawed by the way). Just a sealed plastic bag with a sticker on it.

USB, HDMI, speaker cables might be overpriced, but it’s nothing compared to the $500 Ethernet cable.

Edit [6/20/2008]: Network World has a nice rundown of it.

Categories
Networking

Cable Modem Power Level Graphing

As I hinted last week, I graph a fair amount of data, since I find it pretty handy at times, not to mention just interesting to see in a pretty graph form. I’ve been doing this for years and it’s served me well.

One thing I really wanted to get going was monitoring the cable modem’s power levels. This is now implemented:

Cable Modem Power Levels

How pretty is that? I also moved my ping/latency graphs away from MRTG to RRDTool based graphs. Next up is interface traffic (when I get around to figuring out why it didn’t work when I just tried it).

Categories
Networking

Poor Broadband Performance

For the past several weeks, the cable modem has been getting more and more unstable. Having dealt with this before I knew the signal quality was pretty poor from looking at the stats. By using a different line that goes more direct, it made a real difference as the data below shows (sidenote: I need to start tracking this using RRDtool).

Before

Forward Path:
Signal Acquired at 723.000 MHz
SNR: 27.1 dB
Received Signal Strength: -19.4 dBmV
Bit Error Rate: 0.459 %
Modulation: 256 QAM

Return Path:
Connection: Acquired
Frequency: 31.6 MHz
Power Level: 61.0 dBmV
Channel ID: 4
Modulation: 16 QAM

After

Forward Path:
Signal Acquired at 723.000 MHz 
SNR: 37.1 dB 
Received Signal Strength: -6.9 dBmV 
Bit Error Rate: 0.000 % 
Modulation: 256 QAM 

Return Path:
Connection: Acquired 
Frequency: 31.6 MHz 
Power Level: 49.8 dBmV 
Channel ID: 4 
Modulation: 16 QAM

The performance before was getting pretty bad (never more than 10Mbps, often below 4Mbps). Just ran another test and got this:

Comcast Speed

You can see the packet loss was at 100% for several hours yesterday, and was even when up the connection was pretty poor. Around 3:00 it was disconnected while they fixed the coax hookup. You can see the clean connection afterward, with only one small hiccup while I made a little adjustment to the networking cabling that resulted in a few minutes down.
Packet Loss

Pings to this server are still a little high after the tornado incident due to some weird routing on Comcast’s part. Not sure when will get resolved.

Categories
In The News Networking

Strange Population Statistics

Yesterday the estimated world population passed 6,666,666,666. Interesting (though just coincidence) the estimated number of available IPv4 addresses was supposed to pass 666,666,666. Perhaps we are the beast?

An interesting thing to note is that the population is increasing at a very rapid rate. How long it’s sustainable before a Malthusian catastrophe is subject to debate. Some say the industrial age freed us of that pending disaster, others say that just bought a little more time. By about 2024 there is expected to be 8 billion people. IPv6 can’t come soon enough

[Hat Tip: Slashdot]

Categories
Blog Internet Networking

Slow Site

Last Friday (May 2), the data center where this site lives suffered a power fluctuation due to some tornado activity in the area. The actual outage (if there was even one) seemed to have been in the 5 minute ballpark based on various monitors. Apparently this somehow resulted in a routing problem resulting in some lag and packet loss for some (including myself). Possibly a router that didn’t persist as well as one would hope. This is being investigated.

As a result, if this site (and it’s feed) seems slower than normal, that’s the reason.

Categories
Networking

Accepting Less Than 99.999% Uptime

The Standard has a good writeup on how we accept less than stellar uptime for things that are becoming more and more valuable such as broadband.

Phone service is reliable because it’s mandated to be. There’s pretty strict rules regarding uptime. As a result it’s pretty good. The reason for this is that phones are used for emergencies (911). But what about VoIP?

It makes you wonder why broadband access isn’t being held to these standards. Of course the answer is “money”. But should it be changed? Should ISP’s need to ensure connectivity is as reliable as old POTS lines? I suspect for people to ditch POTS, it will need to be.

I wonder if FiOS is held to the same 99.999% uptime requirements when it’s run by the phone company, and used for VoIP. I doubt it, but I’m not sure.

I suspect reliability of broadband will become more of an issue as VoIP interest increases in the next 18-24 months and larger players like Verizon and Comcast start pushing it to even more homes.

Categories
Internet Networking

Phone 2.0: DNS Dialing Anyone?

I’m going to make a giant proposal to the web. Identifiers suck. Email, IM, Phone, etc. Most people have more than one of each. Lets fix that. Step by step.

Continue reading “Phone 2.0: DNS Dialing Anyone?”
Categories
Networking Security Tech (General)

Hacking A Boeing 787?

According to Wired the Boeing 787 Dreamliner connected the networks for passenger services to critical flight systems:

The computer network in the Dreamliner’s passenger compartment, designed to give passengers in-flight internet access, is connected to the plane’s control, navigation and communication systems, an FAA report reveals.

Here’s what a Boeing spokesperson had to say:

…it is employing a combination of solutions that involves some physical separation of the networks, known as “air gaps,” and software firewalls. Gunter also mentioned other technical solutions, which she said are proprietary and didn’t want to discuss in public.

Would it really be that much more costly to create 2 networks. One for the important stuff like navigation and control systems, and another completely independent network for passengers to download porn? Networking gear isn’t that expensive. Internet access at 35,000 feet is high latency anyway.

I’m really not so sure I’d feel comfortable knowing that the same network that’s carrying a Rob Schneider movie to the guy in 11F is also carrying packets intended for the horizontal stabilizer.

Maybe I’m just paranoid. After all, I’m not to comfortable with the Airbus A380 apparently running windows in the cockpit.

Hopefully they get it all figured out quickly.

Categories
Networking Politics

China Blocks RSS

China’s Great Firewall has now started blocking RSS, a long known loophole to get information blocked all other ways. An entire syndication standard is now blocked. According to the Ars Technica:

PSB appears to have extended this block to all incoming URLs that begin with “feeds,” “RSS,” and “blog,” thus rendering the RSS feeds from many sites—including ones that aren’t blocked in China, such as Ars Technica—useless.

I wonder if a good workaround would be to just use yourdomain.com/d0e862d00be15796f/ or some other randomness. It would be a better way around filtering of just the URL. Then the government would need to start sniffing content-type. The problem they would encounter there is that it’s far from standardized when it comes to feeds on the web. As a result they would have to either live with a high error rate. Unless of course the would resort to content sniffing, which has a ton of overhead when your talking about an entire countries internet bandwidth. That would be extremely expensive and either: slow down the internet in China, make it much more expensive, or just shut things down. My guess is a slowdown.

You can also just switch to atom until they catch on and block that too. The article mentions several other tricks including RSS aggregators, SSH tunnels, etc.

[Hat Tip: Slashdot]

Categories
Hardware Networking

Drobo for network storage?

Drobo initially didn’t impress me to much, but after watching a demo I’m somewhat impressed. The positives:

  • The hotswapping, RAID-like (but not RAID) redundancy is awesome. That’s perfect for backup/bulk storage purposes.
  • Transfer isn’t bad (Up to read 22MB/s write 20MB/s)
  • Power consumption idles at about 12 watts which isn’t bad.
  • Adding storage capacity is really easy.

There are some downsides:

  • No Linux support. Which stinks if you were to hook it up to an old PC running Linux and use Samba. You could of course use a Mac.
  • Pretty expensive $499 isn’t cheap for a glorified drive enclosure. You still need a host, and drives.

Of course for true backup you need to offsite your data, but you can do that through standard means, and using Amazon’s S3. So your covered there.

The downfall of this product is the lack of a 10/100 Ethernet port. It would likely have been pretty cheap (lets face it network devices are pretty cheap these days) and would have removed the need for a PC. You could of course hook it up to a Access Point such as the Airport Extreme… but you don’t get the greatest level of control with these.

Ideally a real cheapo Linux machine (Intel Celeron, 1GB RAM, 80GB HD) with a Drobo would be an awesome backup solution. You could then use MRTG to graph network/data storage usage, manage usage, quota’s or whatever else you wanted to do. Even a media server. Backup some data with S3? No problem. Could even setup something like BackupPC to backup entire PC’s.