Technology

Okay, just an FYI to everyone who uses SOSDG/AHBL services - we have some downtime coming up this Friday. 

We're heading to the data center to reorganize and install new equipment including several servers, a beefier router, gig ethernet switching, a serial console server, 8TB of SAN storage, and several other fun toys.

Downtime is expected to last throughout a good portion of Friday morning/afternoon and possibly evening (PST timezone).  Don't expect services to work, and BGP will most likely be either down or reliable.

... and not give IT advice.

This little gem came across on one of the mailing lists I participate in.

I hate to be arrogant and condescending, but this is one of the many reasons why people need to understand what they are talking about before opening their big mouths.  Just because you are an electrical engineer, does not mean you know anything about how IT, ethernet, wifi, or computers in general work.

Wifi is not just an antenna bolted on to the end of an ethernet cable - there is hardware and software involved in the conversion of one transmission medium to another.  It doesn't matter if the source signal is degraded - packets will get retransmitted, latency will increase, but the signal that comes from the WiFi will be however good of output the radio and antenna can manage.

Back in the day, as a network administrator, I used to get these e-mails from users who fell for the whole Windows software firewall bullshit on 95/98/ME.  They'd think that by getting programs like ZoneAlarm, somehow it would make them hacker proof and they were now network security experts with the information these lackluster firewalls would provide.

The most common one I'd get, is a customer telling me that I need to install Norton Antivirus on my DNS server (a Linux based server) because its infected with {insert random windows virus}, and it's attacking him on port 53 UDP.  Of course, once they protect themselves with their uber-leet firewall and block the attack, they start getting Domain Not Found errors, and can't ever fathom why.

Okay, let's get right to the content!

1) Windows 7.   I've been testing the beta of Windows 7 both in 32bit and 64bit, and am quite impressed.  MS finally got their shit together after the disaster known as queue dramatic music Vista.  It works amazingly well even on my old Toshiba S45 laptop (Pentium M 1.7ghz and 512MB of RAM with i915 video).  XP performed like absolute crap, Vista didn't work period.  Goes to show you, if you spend some time on optimization, things work rather nicely.

2) CircuitCity firesales.  Hah.  Sales my ass.  $100 (if you're lucky) off here and there on stuff.  Don't waste your time even bothering to go.

3) ClamAV!  I've managed to get my builds of ClamAV/SOSDG going again.  Reports I am getting from people say that my version is faster then the native Win32 one!  Yay for my porting skills.

 

I noticed some rather strange behavior with an unknown device on the Indy LAN - it was rapidly (10 or so times a minute) doing a DHCPDISCOVER on the LAN's DHCP server.  So I called Andrew to find out what device was causing the requests, and try to fix it.

I figured there was either a rogue device on the LAN, or one of the computers had gone apeshit.  But a quick discussion with Andrew and we found it to be an MN-740 ethernet adapter for the XBox - with one weird twist:  It wasn't actually connected to any XBox, just the power.  So, my guess, is that the adapter has enough logic in it to do DHCP requests, but since it has nothing to pass the received IP address to, it keeps trying and trying, and trying, and trying...

Bad design IMHO. 

Well, for those of you who have Windows XP with IPv6 support, you may have noticed after turning on the IPv6 stack, you were no longer able to use alot of applets in your browser with Java 1.5.0.

Well, I have the fix for you (provided you don't intend to use any applets which need IPv6 support):

1. Go to the Java control panel
2. Go to the 'Java' tab and click 'View' under 'Java Applet Runtime Settings'
3. In the 'Java Runtime Parameters' box, paste the following line in:

-Djava.net.preferIPv6Addresses=false -Djava.net.preferIPv4Stack=true

4. Hit 'OK' and hit 'Apply' then 'OK' again, and reboot.

Your java applets should now be working again! Yay!

I've been seeing alot of these Netzero 3G ads on TV lately, where they claim to make your dialup be as fast as DSL. Now, being the person I am, I love to disect claims made by companies about their 'new' 'technology' that does these amazing things that aren't normally possible.

So, lets rip open what this 3G service is:

Q: Is it faster or as fast as DSL?
A: No, not even close. It is still 56k dialup and does not come anywhere near the speeds of even the lowest end DSL.

Q: Does it work for any type of file?
A: Nope. It is only useful with text and images. Do not expect it to make any difference with programs, music, streaming video, etc.

Q: How does the text and image speedup work?
A: They use the same 'new' method that AOL has been using since the earily 90s - compress content before its sent to you. Unfortunately, this also creates a new privacy implications.

Basically, your browser makes a request for the page through Netzero's proxy servers. Those proxy servers do the actual request to the remote servers and compress the text before transferring it to your browser. This means if you download a 10kb text web page, it turns out to around 2kb once compressed (and thus downloads faster).

When transferring images, the proxy server recompresses the images further then they were before. So yes, a 50kb image may turn out around 15kb by the time the proxy server is done compressing, however most times this results in a severe loss of quality that is unacceptable.

To repeat, this method only works on non-SSL websites that have alot of text and/or images, and makes absolutely no difference with streaming audio/video, flash content, etc. There is no actual speedup to your dialup - it is still 56k.

This is also where the privacy implications come into play - since requests are sent through the proxy servers on Netzero's end, it is entirely possible they are logging all requests (including the content and payload of the requests). This information is extremely valuable to advertisers and businesses that use data mining, and could be used by Netzero to make an extra profit.

Side note: Like I said above, AOL has been doing this for over 10 years now. If you have AOL, don't bother wasting your time switching to Netzero if you think your dialup will be faster. If you really want better performance, get DSL or cable.