Your computer and mine talking to each other
I’ve moaned before about the lack of good upload bandwidth despite having rather decent download speeds. Comcast’s new PowerBoost for upload took effect this week, giving a burst of about 1Mbps for uploads for the first part. While this doesn’t quite fix the problem with making remote backups, it does help in some cases.
Hopefully DOCSIS 3.0 or FIOS will come around.
It’s well known cable modems are “shared bandwidth”, meaning if everyone on your neighborhood is downloading Paris Hiltons latest video off the net (ahem… her music video), your connection slows down. Well Comcast’s feature for the past several month allows you to briefly use the excess bandwidth when it’s quiet. So what does it look like at 1:30 AM?
During peak hours it’s really not that much worse. Typically between 7000kbps – 14000kbps. Not to bad. Of course Verizon will eventually roll out 15Mbps sustained with 2Mbps upstream. Comcast just announced “speedburst” for upstream, and it doesn’t really compare to Verizon’s Fiber offering. DOCSIS 3.0 can’t come quick enough.
Take that 56k dialup!
Several weeks ago the root servers were attacked. CNet is running a story that says Anycast played a role in preventing larger problems.
It would be interesting to see if all the root servers switch to Anycast. Where would the new distributed servers go? Does Verisign etc. own that many data centers? Or would they be in data centers and colo’s all over the world?
There is an interesting slideshow (PDF link) that discusses the effects of switching k-root to Anycast. It doesn’t really go into foiling DoS attacks though.
I noticed this a few months ago, but never gave it much thought until recently. My Laptop has a Intel 2915 A/B/G Wireless Card, more commonly known as the wireless portion of the Centrino package. It’s pretty decent in regards to power consumption, and performance is typically not to bad. But I’m growing rather tired of it’s antics (took me a little bit to ID this one).
I can wirelessly download a file from my local file server on my LAN at approximately 19Mbps. Yet I can’t seem to break 10Mbps WAN even though Comcast supports “PowerBoost” (traffic shaping) in my area to burst downloads. My Mac Mini G4 with it’s built Airport Extreme, which is really some Broadcom chipset (not sure which exactly since no specs seem to be available) does get as much as 20Mbps bursting on WAN traffic. This leads me to believe the issue is somehow related to the Intel 2915 card.
The access point itself uses the TNETW1130GVF chipset, which is actually used to certify 802.11g devices.
I could always witch to Lenovo/IBM’s 11a/b/g Wireless LAN Mini-PCI Adapter II, which is based on the Atheros AR5BMB-44 (apparently in the AR5004 family). The only downside is the lack of EAP support. Not that I employ EAP, but you never know what you run across or end up needing in the future.
Downside is having to open up the laptop and remove the keyboard/palmrest to reach the wireless card, not to mention the $70 for the card itself. This isn’t really something that seems really worthwhile at the moment.
The question of the day is why does Intel still can’t get it right. The web is littered with reports of connection problems. Thankfully I don’t get disconnects. I just don’t seem to get the performance I should. For having “Excellent” signal quality rating in the Connection Status Window, I’d expect more performance.
Norton AntiVirus has this strange omission I just can’t figure out. For some reason “Internet Worm Protection” won’t allow for creating a connection to a PPTP VPN. Not very helpful if you have to connect to one of the many VPN’s out there that use this protocol.
First a little primer on making a PPTP connection . You essentially need two ports open, 1723/TCP, and IP Protocol 47 (GRE). Ok, this is pretty basic stuff. We can do that ;). Well in the little wizard Norton provides, to create a rule you have the following choices for protocol: TCP, UDP, TCP/UDP, ICMP, ICMPv6, All (pointless). No way to select GRE.
So the only way I’ve found to connect to a PPTP VPN thus far is simply to disable either just Internet Worm Protection, or disable Norton AV.
It’s rather odd that something like this is not supported. A search on Google didn’t turn up an answer. Symantec’s tech support database didn’t turn up anything helpful either.
I would have expected something like this to function without a hitch. I’m very surprised to see this requires any intervention, and even more surprised to see that even with intervention there’s still no way to get it working.
Why does windows have a crummy loopback interface?
Once again, thank you Mac OS X for being there for me.
Edit: oh yea, 802.11 support isn’t to good either. Not sure whose fault that is. Took me a few minutes to figure that out.
I’ve been wondering why my ping times have been so high on my laptop, and so low on any other computer I have here. I finally found the culprit.
The Intel 2915 wireless card (part of the whole Centrino package) has a power saving mode with 3 options, High, Medium, and Low (creative eh?). Mine was set to high. Which created pings that varied from 20ms to 400ms. Going to medium brings the average down to 2ms, which I can deal with.
Why this is a separate setting in Access Connections (the utility used on Thinkpads to manage different connection settings) rather than in the Power Manager as part of a profile? I don’t know. Ideally it would switch to high when I unplug, and go medium when I’m plugged in.
Anyway, always good to know why stuff happens. Very good for gaming, VoIP or anything where latency is an issue.
Decided to run a speedtest in the lab today, to compare with my test from the other day. I know they limit the dorms a bit. But boy was I suprised to see this:
That’s insane.
Most people think I’m joking when I say my school has absolutely pathetic bandwidth. Yes, that’s the result of the best of several speed tests. You don’t get much more sorry than that. And sadly, it gets much worse around finals week as everyone goes online at the same time.
Asterisk@Home looks like it would be a lot of fun to set up. This could totally rock to have at home. I see a few great advantages:
There are so many possibilities to make phones rock.