This & That
For no particular reason I updated WordPress to the most current version yesterday evening and managed not to break anything, so I updated my Raspberry Pi to Raspbian-Jessie and got a surprise – it is now a very usable computer with LibreOffice and a competent browser. I use the same wireless keyboard and mouse on the Pi and my Dell XP box by simply moving the transceiver – no installation, no questions, it just works.
As long as I was puttering inside I decided to add some programming to my “SmartTV” [A cold front came through and I don’t want to do the last big fix I need to make outside. There’s always a cold front Easter week.]
The Cable company has been ratcheting up the price on the basic service my Mother had, so I finally cut it off and replaced it with the Internet service I had at my old place. Well, when people come by they expect television, and the wonderful woman who cleans the house likes the TV running in the background, so I signed up with something called Hulu, another called Acorn, and the BBC News. Hulu has a variety of shows that are apparently familiar to people who watch television, Acorn features British TV shows. All of this is costing a third of what the Cable company was charging.
It would have been nice if the people who programmed the SmartTV had included an on screen keyboard to enter account names and passwords.
31 comments
Well done m8 . 😀 Yes, you have to keep the staff happy. The work better, & are less inclined to take liberties. 😉
Nice news about the Pi. Should have mine this week. 🙂
If the SmartTV uses Android (most use a variant at least), you should have a virtual KB. Maybe it was disabled, check settings. Does it have Bluetooth? Get yourself a Bluetooth KB. I use one from a US company, Spire Corp. It’s small, but has largish keys suitable for my fat fingers, & was cheap. Runs on 2 AAA batteries. 🙂 Model #: SP-K1100SW-EN
Otherwise a WiFi KB & Mouse (if it has a spate USB port).
OT: I just got an SMS that my ADSL2 service is ready! 😮 😮 I’m almost afraid to unpack the router & plug it in! But I wiped the Notebook SSD earlier today. Going to reinstall W10. The install that came with it has all the M$ crap I don’t want! Need an Ethernet port to config the router. Why I bought the Notebook really. Tablet only has WiFi & PC is dead until I can D/l drivers & Win 7 & 10 updates.
Well, dinner & extra strong coffee first! Then… We see! Bit worried about performance. Oh well. Anything is better than nothing! 😀
Well, the euphoria wore off quickly. Not working. Followed instructions, & it connects to their server. Router says DSL &PPP are working. But can’t browse. Even used the Google & OpenDNS DNS IP’s.
(Sad to discover OpenDNS was acquired by Cisco! I’m sure the ‘Open’ part will evaporate eventually, as will the ‘free’ part).
Can’t ping, Netstat, NBlookup… Nothing.
Also the router reports a DN speed of only 8,330 Kbps! That’s ADSL1 speed! THD is crap (less than 5, sometimes up to 9.8) & Line Attenuation over 40.
So now we start the tech support waltz!
What’s the bet they start the ‘blame game’.
First off, I have the keyboard and mouse connected. The damn thing knew they were there, but required you to explicitly select them from a menu on which they were the only choice. That was a great User Interface decision.
Come on, if you had just plugged everything in and it worked you would have been a nervous wreck. Nothing new ever works right out of the box. I messed up and used an early Belkin Cat 5 cable when I moved everything over here and it confused the hell out of the router because Belkin used to reverse the wires in the router to modem cable. I just said screw it and bought some Cat 7 cables and threw out everything that looks a bit dodgy.
Yes, it is annoying, but you are a hell of a lot closer to being on line than anytime in the past weeks. I have been reading that Telstra has been having trouble keeping things going, so it may be part of that. Two major outages in a couple of days sounds like a software update gone wrong. I wasn’t down a couple of days when my DSL provider did it. Most people were down a couple of hours, but someone forgot to update a block of addresses that included my line.
You have at least found the tunnel, so light has to be there….
I’m still waiting for the promise of 10G-BaseT. Alas, every time it seems that we’re about to get affordable switches and NIC’s for 10G-BaseT, something seems to happen and either they don’t materialize, or materialize for way more than buying surplus 10G SFP+ gear off of eBay. Don’t get me wrong, the SFP+ gear is great for the machine room. But we’re going to need Cat6 to get 10 gigabit Ethernet to the wall jacks in the offices. Fiber is just too persnickety for normal in-wall facilities wiring.
I’m alive!! And… crawling. 🙁 *sigh*
Still, at least I have broadband, even if it is only 8,200Kbps DN / 980Kbps UP. But I think I’ll change my plan from unlimited to 500GB/mth. At those speeds, unlimited is a joke! Will save me about $20/mth. Definitely going to move to Qld. Need NBN FttP @ 100Mbps/40Mbps! Costs about the same too. Can’t move for 6 mths now though.
The problem was with their RADIUS server config.
I was thinking of going 10G here. Was cheaper to buy a good 24-port switch and 4-port Gb Network cards for the WS & Server. NAS has 4 ports. So I essentially have a 4Gb network. 🙂 My DLNA server only has 1 Gb port + Wireless AC. But that’s good enough. I have it connected directly to the Router. 🙂
I must say, ASUS have done a good job with this DSL-AC68U router. Easy to use, and has built in Trend Micro AV/FW & Intrusion detection. Seems to work very well. 🙂 Good to have that @ the router rather than each node. 🙂 Also has built in FTP, NZB, aMule & Bittorrent. so I can offload d/l & u/l from the nodes. Nice. Will be very useful to distribute website updates etc. 🙂
The thing has a dual-core CPU & 250MB RAM! lol Probably because of the built in Trend Micro s/w I guess.
Curiously, I’ve had a lot of trouble accessing a couple portable hard drives I had on Win 7 on the W10 notebook & tablet. They keep throwing errors and reconnecting, yet all diagnostics say they are fine. I decided to connect one to the router USB3 port and set up as a network share. No problem since!
One of the features I like are the excellent real-time stat’s on just about everything. Even what app’s from the nodes are doing what. Useful. 🙂
Well, I am definitely going to be busy for awhile! 🙂
Kryten, do some research on LACP and that switch and get back to us. My guess is that your switch only implements by-MAC LACP, i.e., it chooses which port to use based on the source and destination MAC addresses in the packet. Any one client will only get 1 gigabit of bandwidth. This is suitable for NAS that is serving four or more clients, for one thing it keeps any one client from hogging all the bandwidth, for another thing a small NAS with four drives isn’t going to be able to serve data at a full 4 gigabits anyhow. But it doesn’t give you anywhere near the total throughput of 10 gigabit Ethernet between two systems. For one thing, if you’re doing fiber Ethernet, the fact that you have effectively zero latency (well, speed of light, but in a machine room that’s effectively zero) makes protocols like iSCSI really, really fast — far more than the 10x faster that you’d expect compared with 1 gigabit copper.
That’s why I implemented 10 gigabit Ethernet in our machine room at the office, it’s used to connect the virtualization hosts to the data storage servers to give them much faster access to data than if I’d stuck with bonding. The virtual machines are accessing iSCSI as if it were local disks, and do it *fast*, I’ve dd’ed data at the full speed of the underlying data store through an iSCSI connection there. On bonded gigabit Ethernet, on the other hand, the max I can get through an iSCSI connection is, well, 1 gigabit.
This is also why I have *not* implemented 10 gigabit Ethernet here at the house. I have an iSCSI connection set up between my Windows box and my Linux NAS just to have one for testing purposes (we have a server health agent that runs and determines how healthy things are, and it looks at any iSCSI connections to see if the storage server at the other end is healthy), but I’m not using it for any kind of production purposes, it’s just sitting there. Everything that needs speed is already local on SSD’s on the local machines, and 1 gigabit is plenty fast to stream video and music all day long. I had initially implemented bonding with a 4 port NIC just like you, but a) the 24 port switch that I was using *howls* (but hey, the price was right — free — they were throwing out *hundreds* of these things at work because they were “obsolete” and “end of life” and “useful only as scrap”), and b) it didn’t give me any real performance advantage anyhow due to the fact that I really only had one client (my Windows box). So next time I reformatted my Linux box to install a different Linux variant, I didn’t bother setting up the LACP again, I just unplugged three of the ports and used the remaining port as a stand-alone port.
BTW, that’s the same router that I’m using, except mine has no DSL modem, it’s sitting between my cable modem and my internal network. One thing to be aware of is that these routers have a bad tendency to overheat if you turn on all the bells and whistles. That comes because of the decision to not include a fan. I have mine mounted vertically on its stand rather than sitting down on its rubber feet in order to give it more surface area to radiate heat. Mine doesn’t have the Trend AV, that may be a regional thing. I’d be wary of running it on this processor anyhow, given the heat issues. What I like about it is that it has dynamic DNS support that will auto-register its DNS with an asuscomm.com address when its IP address changes. Then I can simply CNAME that asuscomm.com address on my own DNS server so I know where to go to tunnel back in from the outside world. Given that I’m away from home more than I’m at home (sigh!), that’s very handy…
Switch: ZyXEL GS2210-24 L2 managed GbE w/ 4 dual-personality (RJ-45/SFP) Gb ports, 56 Gbps non-blocking connection & 42 Gbps forwarding rate, 802.3ad LACP w/ max 8 links/trunk.
NAS: Buffalo TeraStation 7120R with 12 x 4TB Enterprise NAS HDD’s in RAID 61, Xeon E3-1225 3.1 GHz quad-core, 16 GB DDR3 cache, 4 x GbE w/ trunking support for 2/4 links/trunk. Simultaneous NAS and iSCSI target functionality. Support for 10GbE NIC (Emulex OCe11102-N, OCe11102-I, OCe11102-F or Intel X540T2, E10G42BtDA, E10G41BFSR, E10G42BFSR, E10G41AT2).
WS/Server NIC’s: AEI AEI-e1400C PCI-E Quad GbE Adapter w/ trunking/failover support (802.3ad), MIPS RISC Processor + DMA engine. Supports GEC (Gigabit EtherChannel).
Networked over Belden DataTwist 600e cables (I luckily had about 130 meters left over from a project about a decade ago).
The ZyXEL switch actually has much better security features & firewall than the ASUS router! 😀 There is also an excellent PoE version that I considered. But it’s not really worth it for me until I have a stable living arrangement.
I got that router because it’s the only one at that performance level that has a built in xDSL/VDSL modem so I can use it with both ADSL & the NBN, eventually. 🙂
I got the optional TrendMicro NAS Security Software because Buffalo offered me a “3 year for the price of 1” deal.
I think the router needs a RAM upgrade! I was watching the stat’s shoot up to 245 MB and wobble up & down a few MB’s when I was browsing & copying files from the attached USB3 portable drive to the DLNA server over ethernet!
I can understand some of your frustration, Kryten. Many years ago a few of us were looking at the feasibility of starting our own ISP locally. Not 100 feet from where I’m sitting, not 50 feet from my computer in the little house are at least 4 fiber bundles, an inch and a half of fiber pairs per bundle buried three feet underground. The Phone Company won’t sell access to that fiber to anyone other than the military and their contractors. That fiber goes up to the Interstate 10 right of way where the state of Florida has fiber running, from Pensacola to Jacksonville, that connects with the fiber that runs in the I-95 right of way. I’m surrounded by fiber, most of it funded by the state and Federal governments, and I can’t rent a pair.
The cost of copper doomed the ISP idea. The phone company installed all of their new switching equipment outside of the immediate area, anticipating that the growth would be to the East. Of course the phone company is going down faster than the cable company as people are switching to cell phones, and streaming their choice of shows,
The equipment that filled the rack we were pricing to handle a hundred accounts to start was tens of thousands of 1990’s dollars, and it didn’t have the speed or capacity of most of today’s $500 laptops, much less the stuff you two have at home.
I do know Brian I am not alone in being annoyed & frustrated by stupid shit done by stupid bastards just to piss off us all. 😉 😀
However, I think my frustration is going to increase exponentially!
I’ve been trying to d/l all the software and data I bought or got free over the past 2 years or so. It’s well over 200GB, so I knew it would take quite awhile, even at normal ADSL2+ speeds.
It’s sooooooo slowwwwwww… I just download the SoftMaker Office 2016 Pro (they made me an offer I couldn’t refuse) which is 329 MB. It took over 3 hours!! And other downloads have been just as slow, some even worse. 🙁 It’s gonna take years! *sigh*
The universe must really hate me. Or, there is a god and he knows I would despise the egomaniacle immoral bastard if he existed! And I’m not gonna change my opinion just to get faster internet! 😛
I know… There is a special place in hell for me! Known this most of my life!
It’s called… A Throne! LMAO
I have to joke… Either that or go find a deserving a’hole to beat the crap out of! *SIGH*
I just ordered pizza and a wonderful desert they make from my fave Pizza place. Maybe that will help. *shrug*
Hmm, that Zyzel switch looks like an Accton design. Not surprising, Accton licenses their designs to all sorts of people — most Dell switches, for example, are Accton designs with Dell-specific firmware. If I’m not mistaken, it’s the same switch we sold (under SMC label) at our prior employer for hooking up iSCSI storage appliances to Windows video surveillance recorders. It’s an okay switch, for 2008, which is where its design dates to. Not near as good as the Dell 6224 switch to my left, another 2008 vintage design, but one that has a switch fabric capacity of 136Gb/s and a forwarding rate of 95Mpps. But given that it was literally 1/3rd the cost of that 6224 switch back in 2008, well. If I’d been paying for it rather than picking it out of the recycling bin I certainly wouldn’t have bought a switch with the Dell’s kind of capacity, talk about overkill! I picked it out of the eWaste bin mostly because of the four 10 gigabit ports on the back… I keep having these delusions of updating my network to 10 gigabit, but this thing has four fans that howl like a banshee, and my network’s still plenty fast at 1 gigabit, so I’ve never gotten around to putting it into service… I do have fiber, and I have some 10 gigabit Ethernet cards, I just haven’t ever had the motivation since my network’s plenty fast with the 1 gigabit Ethernet for the things I do with it.
Regarding the router, I strongly suggest *not* running antivirus on it. Also, I’m not sure about your exact router configuration (mine appears to be the same hardware but without the DSL port), but make sure it has the latest firmware on it, the latest firmware for our Yank version at least is a WRT derivative that has some really cool stuff in it, especially if you flash the Merlin variant. I actually bought the router a couple of years ago and put it aside because the firmware at the time didn’t have the features I wanted. I brought it out of retirement recently, flashed it with the new firmware, and it was like night and day. Now it has all the features I wanted — the secure encrypted VPN (all different sorts), ability to authenticate against a RADIUS server, ability to do PoE to turn on systems remotely, etc. — so I’m happy. You just have to keep in mind the limits of this hardware. It is quite powerful for a home router, but it really isn’t powerful enough to run a modern antivirus.
Here in California AT&T, Comcast, and PG&E have teamed up into a consortium to deny access to utility poles to any possible competitor. We’re likely to get Google Fiber here in Santa Clara before any of our surrounding neighbor cities. Why? Because we have a municipal utility company and we own all the utility poles. In the surrounding communities Google is having to sue the consortium, claiming that as the consortium is regulated by the State, thus as a utility company it’s illegal for them to be denied membership in the consortium and thus access to the poles. AT&T, Comcast, and PG&E in return claim that Google Fiber is not a utility and thus they don’t have to admit Google to their phone pole consortium and thus give Google access to the poles. And those of us with our eeevil Communist power just laugh and laugh and laugh… not only we get our electricity for 40% cheaper than the surrounding PG&E areas, but we’re going to have super-fast Internet soon too!
ISP’s… I remember those. Too bad they don’t exist anymore. It’s either Comcast, AT&T, or nothing at all if you want Internet service here, they’ve managed to deny access to any other competitors. Sigh.
You’re probably right about being an Acton design. I was Aus. distro for Accton in the 90’s in a company called Prophecy Technologies, before I joined HP. A huge error on my part. I still have a couple Accton mugs! LOL I was also the only re-seller in the World for Tektronix! 😀
I was going to get a HP 1950-24G which had a faster switching speed of around 128Gbps & higher throughput + lifetime warranty (thought having worked for HP I discovered that their definition of “lifetime” was extremely variable, including “It’s dead Jim. That’s EOL.”) The XyXEL came up with a very attractive deal around 50% off, which made it about a third the price of the HP & others in that class I looked at. Plus, I really didn’t think I’d need more performance than the XyXEL has. And so far, it’s performed admirably. I’ve also found it easy to manage with a wealth of features. 🙂
The AEI GbE adaptors have been excellent also! And AEI support very good. I had a weird problem on the server when I upgraded to CentOS 7, and they showed me the error of my ways (I’d screwed something up) quickly and I haven’t had a problem since.
I was looking at the new Asus RT-AC3200 Tri-Band Wireless-AC3200 Gigabit Router which was on sale for the same price as the AC68U! But has no modem. It’s an evil looking piece of gear! Has 6 vertical antennas on an aggressive looking unit. LOL
First thing I did when internet became active was d/l the router FW update (after first d/l the backup local FW update package just in case the ADSL dropped out during the online update! Lessons learned the hard way!) At least this router seems more robust and harder to brick! 😀 I’d seen that ASUS had several updates for this router, a couple per week it seems!
I am using the TrendMicro AV & FW on the router, since I don’t have my AV installed on the 3 W10 systems yet. I have licenses for both F-Secure Internet Security & BitDefender IS. I know both well, used BD for years & was a beta tester for F-Secure for the past 4 years (3 years really as I had no internet the past year, I couldn’t do much). They gave me a 3 PC, 5yr license for IS since I helped test & gave some good feedback & suggestions they liked. 🙂 However, I also have a perpetual 60% discount for BD. So, I’ll try both and see which works best on W10. 🙂
I just downloaded what for me is probably the most important piece of S/W to make any Win behave as a decent OS should! Bitsum’s Process Lasso Pro. Can’t live without it! (Nor SandBoxie for that matter). 😀 They will be especially invaluable on my new build-from-hell system! 🙂
On another note, not really impressed with the 256GB M.2 SSD on the Dell Venue. It’s a Lite-ON LJH-256V2G-11, which seems to be an OEM only part. But I’ve had nothing but trouble with Lite-ON products over many years, and it’s performance is not impressive. Think I might see if my spare Samsung 950 512GB SDD will work. I don’t think the M.2 port on the venue supports NVMe, but the SAmsung should still be a lot faster. If it works, I’ll get an 850 EVO 512GB M.2 SSD for it. I’ve already used half of the 256! So a bigger drive will be good. It also has a Lexar Pro 128GB uSDXC card, which was horribly expensive even with a discount (AU$265, usually around $350)! But it’s amazingly fast for an SD! (Tested: R/W 229/211 MB/s). 🙂
Last ISP I worked for in ’98 as Security Manager (called Quantum Springs Internet) was bought out bu iPrimus. They only wanted the customers. Which was funny, since they screwed up so badly pretty much all the customers left anyway! LOL Morons. But because of that, a few of us decided to start our Security biz that was doomed from the start. Oh well. Kept me busy for a few years. 🙂 And we did develop plans and some designs for an SOE (Secure Operating Environment) incorporating an SOS (guess)! lol IT was no joke. We had 3 VC’s turn up without asking offering up to $25m to fund a feasibility study, for a low 35-40% stake in the biz! Not bad for 2000. I even had the office designed! LOL
Hahahaha… I’m trying to d/l a 902 MB file, and watching the d/l time alternating between 1 & 2 days! LOL Brings tears to my eyes… really!
I feel like I’m back on dialup. Good thing I bought all those games now! Looks like I’ll have plenty of time to play them!
Not. Happy.
Getting XP patches on dial-up was one of the major reasons I got DSL. Updating the machines by wireless is a real pain, but I don’t want to run wire everywhere.
Kryten, when I bought my AC68U it was the fastest router Asus had. That was a few years ago. How progress flies :).
I looked at a combined wireless router and cable modem, but my research showed that the best cable modem I could get that was certified to work with Comcast was a standalone Arris, a SB6183, so I decided I’d continue with a standalone router. AT&T claims they have U-Verse in my neighborhood — i.e., a fiber POP a few blocks from here and ultra-high-speed DSL from there to here — but even their “ultra high speed” DSL is nowhere as fast as Comcast’s “standard” cable Internet. It’s cheaper, but (shrug).
Lite-On? They’re still in business? LOL! My first experience with Lite-On was their crappy clone of the DEC Tulip ethernet chip, the PNIC, which was incapable of sustaining a connection. I mean, literally incapable. It had fundamental hardware bugs that caused massive packet loss under load, and nobody on any OS could ever get it to work right. This was around 1999 or so. Ever since then I’ve operated on the principle that the only thing Lite-On gear was good for was target practice at the shooting range. Thus far I haven’t been proven wrong :).
For antivirus, F-Secure is awesome. It had a perfect score fending off risks in the latest AV Comparatives test, but fewer false positives than the other AV products with perfect scores. BitDefender was also very good with no false positives and a high score but did not have a perfect score. I’d go with either of them in a heartbeat if I was in the market for an antivirus. But the free (for personal use) Avira was as effective as BitDefender, although had a few false positives, so (shrug).
Oh… I sure do remember those days Bryan! In fact, I’m having constant pangs & flashbacks currently m8! 😉 LOL
Your comment above about starting an ISP & my job at Quantum Springs have had me reminiscing. 🙂 You are quite right about the differences in cost/performance in only 15 years. 🙂 I remember we bought some specially designed dialup rack units that supported 16 lines per unit because we’d run out of space in the equipment room with 2 large bookcase sized units full of modems & other equipment & cables all over the place! lol We leased a Sun Microsystems ‘ULTRA Enterprise 450’ server w/ Quad UltraSPARC II CPU’s / 2GB RAM / 12 hot-swap SCSI HDD bay’s (that we named Goliath) for around $300k that today would probably cost about $5k! lol We paid a lot for security systems as the company had been hacked several times (hence why I was hired). I installed a Check Point FireWall-1 system & a new security appliance CP had, that was just a re-badged security appliance from Nokia. The FW-1 was the only FW appliance at that time that had stateful inspection We also used the VPN-1, the only VPN system at that time. I worked closely with both Schwed (who started CP & developed the VPN-1) & Kramer (who developed the stateful inspection system among other things). It was… Interesting, working with an Israeli security company! But they sure knew their stuff! It all worked very well. 🙂 They were not big on ‘credit where it’s due’ or financial compensation for other’s ideas they used either! The term ‘Intellectual Property Rights’ seemed to escape them completely, unless they were their own! But… Israeli’s! *shrug*
I bought out the lease on the Sun server when they were selling to iPrimus for $48k (from memory) for the new security Biz. When I closed the biz down on ’02, I sold it for a small profit. 🙂 I also got the FW-1 & VPN appliances cheaply and some other stuff. Was a good fire sale for me! 😀
Hahaha… Out of curiosity, I did a search on eBay and found someone has a working Sun ULTRA Enterprise 450 on sale for AU$1,773.57 (it’s in the USA, eBay converts to AU$ when I look at anything as I have an account, so that’s about US$1,330)! LOL
I’ve been d/l the latest BitDefender TS 2016 (I meant TS – Total Security in the above post) for an hour, it’s about half way! *SIGH*
** Yayyyy! BD d/l just finished the d/l! lol I made dinner while I was typing this. Started this comment over an hour ago, so that’s about right. 😀 The installer has a nice useful message for me: “Your download speed is low. This may cause a delay in the product installation.” Noooo, really??! Understatement much? *SIGH*
I really like the firewall in BD TS, and I use the online ‘Safe’ feature it has. Works with my VPN & has very high security (I questioned BD mercilessly in 2014 when I was considering using it!) I found that BD is less of a resource/performance hog than F-Secure, but both are quite good. 🙂 Going to install BD on the Tablet (because of the lower resource/performance hit), & F-Secure on my ‘build-from-hell’ (I’m getting so used to calling the damned thing that! Might paint it on the case!) Then decide which to use on the DELL notebook. LOL
Ah well, back to the fun of slooooow internet! :/
Well, I did some checking & the basic config of W10 is woeful (unsurprisingly!) So many drivers loaded that will never be used (and can’t be used on this tablet in any case), and would you believe the MTU was set to 50 & RWIN to 100??! Fixed all that. Performance has improved a little, but still bad. The router has had a stable connection with 9457 DN/809 UP all day (and that’s about the best I can expect given I’m about 4km from the exchange & lines are questionable. So I should be getting up to around 7-8 Mbps on a download from a known fast site! But the most I get is around 100kbps! Have to call support I guess & get them to do a line quality check.
Maybe you can help with something badtux. 🙂
I’m looking for a good Apache HTTP server manager/config tool. Most of the free ones I’ve tried are either very limited, slow or just badly written (ApHeMo for eg.) I don’t mind paying, but finding decent reviews seems difficult. I’d like to be able to easily manage & edit the apache.conf & .htaccess/.htgroup files, & manage logs on local & remote servers (securely) with 1 tool. There is one called ApacheConf for $75 & I have the free version, but the free version is missing several features of the paid version & only works on local files! Very annoying. Do you have any experience with it, or any others I should consider? 🙂
Thanks m8. 🙂
oops! That should be 100 KBps. Case matters! 😉 lol It actually seems to vary a lot between around 40-100 KBps.
Hmmmmm! Not sure what to make of this yet… But it seems the problem may have something to do with W10.
I decided to do something I never do, connect my CentOS Linux server to the internet! I d/l a large file from M$ (W10 version of .NET Frameworks 3.5 SP1) 243MB. D/l this on the W10 system took over 3 hours. Using Wget on CentOS took 55 min’s!
I tried a few different d/l managers I’ve used with good results on W7, with little if any difference. I grabbed the Win CLI version of Wget… It d/l the file in 58 min’s on W10!
What. The. Hell.
You can officially color me *confused*
Regarding the D/L time, if you’re doing it via FTP via an “active” FTP connection, it may be that your firewall is seriously overloaded trying to do both firewall stuff and antivirus stuff. Remember, “active” FTP connections have to be proxied via stateful inspection by the firewall. Just sayin’ :). wget defaults to passive FTP (and HTTP of course is passive), so.
Everybody doing configuration management today uses Puppet or Chef, where you edit the file on a test system and when you have it the way you want it, you pop it onto the Puppet / Chef server and it propagates around the globe. I can reconfigure our entire production cloud from one place that way. I use Puppet because it’s easier to write Puppet rules, but Chef rules are more powerful. Pick your poison. This doesn’t address your file editor question though. My file editor is /bin/vi 🙂 .
For log management Splunk is “the” gold standard but is horrifically expensive. The best easy-to-use “free” tool right now appears to be GrayLog. I have all my client nodes configured with syslog to point at the Graylog server which is running syslog-ng to put the syslogs into nice by-system dated directories and files, and which then forwards the syslogs to Graylog. I can then use Graylog to search for a specific error message that I’m interested in and then check the specific syslog-ng log file to look at the context surrounding the error message to see if I can figure out why it got triggered. Splunk was capable of doing that without going to the specific flat file, but sigh.
It was fairly complicated to set up, I set up an ElasticSearch cluster running on three different virtual machines on three different hunks of physical hardware then set up Mongo and Graylog on the server that was going to process logs (and then I had to alter the Puppetry to point all my production servers at the graylog server of course), but it wasn’t horrifically so. At least not on Centos 6. Centos 7 is a nightmare and I don’t want to think about Centos 7.
BTW, you do know that you can ssh into your router and run ‘top’ to see its CPU usage, right? Or maybe you have to run a hacked firmware to do that… if that doesn’t appeal to you, it also support SNMP, so turn on your PUBLIC in your internal and run your favorite network management tool to see what’s happening.
Yes, I did know that. 😉 Thanks for the suggestion.
One of the reasons I went for this ASUS router was that it seemed to have a good set of monitoring tools, which I have been making a lot of use of. 🙂 The CPU usage has been reasonably low, It’s the RAM usage that’s been concerning me. However, now that I have disabled their ‘AiProtection’ (Trend Micro) as I have finally installed BD TS & F-Secure IS on my ‘puters, the RAM usage is more reasonable also. currently d/l a 900 MB file & RAM is 68 MB compared to yesterday when it was hovering around 200MB! CPU usage on 1 core is an insignificant 3% now, compared to around 30% yesterday. You would think that if they include such fancy tools, they would provide the resources needed to make use of them! Sad really, as the AiProtection did provide useful services. And Trend Micro are my 3rd choice for AV etc. Kaspersky is my 4th. 🙂 Here’s a FAQ if you’re interested:
http://www.asus.com/us/support/FAQ/1008719/
All downloads have been over HTTP (or more accurately HTTP over TLS SSL). I have done as much tweaking as I am able to on the PC & network, even disabling anything & everything possible to see if anything was contributing. Performance has improved slightly, I’ve been getting a sustained d/l speed of between 65-80 KB/s. So I think there is an external network issue.
I though perhaps it might be the internal WiFi network, but that’s working quite well. Tablet is on the 5GHz WiFi & according to the router the radio is working at an average of 887 Mbps Tx, 780 Mbps Rx over the past several hours.
I transferred a large file from the Tablet to the DLNA Server directly connected to the Router GbE port. It transferred quite fast, quicker than I expected actually. 🙂 The DLNA server has a 4TB 5,900 RPM NAS HDD in it.
Only good thing today is it’s far more stable than yesterday. So something good happened. lol
As far as Apache… Yeah, Log management is the big one! I’ve noticed the logs can get very big quickly, especially on the cloud servers @ Prometeus. We tried a few of the cheaper log managers, and they get so slow! Even the log on my dev server here is several thousand lines/mth! lol
I’ll check out those tools you mentioned. 🙂 But I really want to manage everything from the Win w/s. I’ve collected some useful tools for just about everything else, the Apache web server has been the sore point! 😀
LOL Just for a laugh… I just received an eMail with a special offer I thought might amuse. 😀
Just when I thought that the Asus RT-AC3200 was crazy and that new tech arrives a little too fast & furious… ASUS now has the RT-AC5300! Delivering (they claim) 5334 Mbps over Wi-Fi! With 8 antennas! And I thought the AC3200 looked a bit evil, this thing looks positively deadly! Looks like some kind of giant black spider on it’s back. All you have to do is make the antenna’s wobble around a bit, & you’ll be scaring woman and children for days! LOL
Oh, and my special price as a loyal customer? AU$529 (though they do throw in a free ROG Sica Gaming mouse -RRP AU$79 – for *free*)! Why anyone would want one now given there aren’t even any computer adapters that support 3200 let alone 5300 is beyond me! By the time any become available, the thing will be obsolete! The industry is crazy, and so are consumers.
Oh! It has twice the RAM too (512 MB). From my experience, it’ll need it! And dual 1.4GHz processors. It better have some good cooling! 😀
Heh, yeah, cooling is the Achilles heel for these little WiFi routers. I already noted how I have to mount my AC66U vertically in its stand to keep it from overheating. On the other hand, I don’t have air conditioning, so (shrug).
Right now, the syslog-ng / Graylog combo is handling around 2500 log messages per *SECOND* for me. There is also a Graylog collector which will collect Windows logs and ship them into Graylog for easy searching, but I have not installed that yet. I guess I should do so.
Most of the tools for managing large scale networks are based on Linux because, well, because that’s what the cloud is based on, duh. I don’t know anything about Chef, but the Puppet server from whence Puppet clients auto-configure themselves has to be Linux, though it has an agent to manage Windows systems. To access Linux servers I use a product called MobaXterm which includes a bundled Cygwin environment (ssh and friends) as well as an X11 server so you can remotely display graphical Linux programs such as virt-manager. You could also install VirtualBox on your Windows system and install Linux inside the VirtualBox to have a test environment, I do that a lot because the VirtualBox “screen” is faster than remotely displaying X11 programs.
Do you know of this Firewall badtux?
Glasswire
It looks pretty good. There is a free version, which is a lot better than any Win standard f/w, & a few paid versions. I d/l the free version and been playing with it a couple days. I like it. 🙂 I’m looking at the Pro edition for US$99. It has some additional features that would be useful for me, & support for 3 client PC’s (which I have). Extra features:
1 year history, 10 remote connections (I can monitor my 3 remote servers, plus any others I use for Prometeus), Ask to connect, Lock down mode, Monitor who’s on your WiFi or Network.
Might be worth having a look at the free edition Bryan. 🙂
I have to say, I am loving this KB & mouse! lol
I got a Gigabyte Aivia Osmium keyboard with Cherry red switches. It’s so good to use a *real keyboard* again! I also have the Gigabyte Aivia M8600 v2 mouse which is a combination wireless/USB mouse. Came with 2 large batteries that are actually part of the mouse casing & plug into the butt end, they are rated to last over 50 hours continuous use & can be quickly swapped. Came with a charger station, or charge while connected to USB port. They are high quality SANYO NP 80/ 3.7Vdc 1500mAh batteries! Probably why it cost me almost $90 with discount! However, it’s a bit heavy and a bit large at the back. I actually prefer using my Tesoro Gungnir-H5. It uses a high-end optical tracker rather than the laser tracker in the Gigabyte, which I find has a faster response and tracks a little better. It is also smaller & lighter. And I prefer the color! lol It’s a nice shade of purple & silver-grey, as opposed to black! Though the newer V2 has a rubberized black surface to help with grip. But I haven’t had a problem, it’s probably the most comfortable mouse I’ve had! 🙂
I haven’t gotten around to the Apache management/logging stuff badtux. Too many other things to deal with on my sloooow internet! *sigh* But I will eventually. Thanks for the help. 😀
I’m currently d/l my two RDBMS management/development packages, EMS SQL Manager for PostgreSQL/mySQL & PremiumSoft Navicat Premium (for mySQL/MariaDB, PostgreSQL/EnterpriseDB & SQLite). Then I have to d/l all my other tools, which will take awhile. 🙂 Good think I have plenty of coffee, 18yo Scotch, good music, & movies! LOL And games, which I haven’t had time to play much anyway. 😀 The PC is in bit’s on my old desk because I decided to make a few changes, for reasons.
Funny thing, I was concerned that the noise of 4 3,000 RPM fans would be bad. But I run them up to 2,700 (no point in running them faster currently) & they are pretty quiet. The two fan’s on the Radeon 390X on the other hand, get quite loud when the card is pushed moderately to hard! Not impressed actually. Thinking about getting a water cooler for it, but that will cost over $150. Not sure it’s worth it. *shrug* Well, I have 2 set’s of good headphones, so that will take care of that! LOL I got a Gigabyte Force H3X Gaming Headset as part of a really good Xmas bundle deal for the KB, mouse & headset. I have to say, they surprised me! They sound quite good (they have 50mm neodymium magnet driver units), with a good bass & are quite comfortable to wear! Maybe even a little more comfortable than my Sennheiser HD 598’s which cost about AU$180 more! Though the Sennheiser’s do sound better, as they should! LOL But they are 600 ohm & the Gigabyte’s are 32 ohm, so work with pretty much anything. I only got the deal because it was cheaper than buying the KB & mouse, & the Sennheiser’s aren’t really good for gaming. Sometimes, you get a win. 🙂
On the IDS front I have a Linux system sniffing via a reflector port. I will not talk more about that.
The heat issues with the R9 are one reason why I stopped with the top of the line R7, which is fine for me since I play strategy games, not first-person shooters. The 390X GPU all by itself uses more power than my entire dual CPU twelve-disk NAS box. It doesn’t surprise me that the fans sound like howling banshees. That’s about the only possible way to cool the bloody thing short of water cooling…
This Firewall/IDS is for home/office for now. At Premeteus, the boys are pretty good. I helped with setting up a custom security systems some years ago. The biggest threat to security is complacency & a false sense of safety. They get it. Constantly monitor & update. They have never been successfully penetrated, though there have been many attempts. A hosting company in Italy is a prime target. 🙂
I have a R7 760x that I got a couple years ago . Gigabyte GV-R726XWF2-2GD. It’s actually not a bad card. I wanted a card with 2GB VRAM & this was one of the very few. It has 2 fans but I’ve never heard them spin up. The power/fan profile I had them on meant that they were usually idle, even playing games. 😀 The problem with the 390X is that Gigabyte decided people wanted a smaller card, so only put 2 instead of their usual 3 fans on it to shorten the card! I thought it might be an issue, but it’s worse than I hoped. Also, having 8 GB VRAM doesn’t help (and is stupid! It’ll NEVER get used, even with 4 4K displays! According to a review, with 3 4k displays, VRAM usage was up to 4GB.)
I pulled apart the 390X and got rid of the barely adequate thermal pads. Replaced them with the Thermal Grizzly Kryonaut thermal paste I got for the CPU (made by a German company. Really excellent stuff!). Just got the system reassembled, and the thermal sensor I have on the VRM’s is reporting idle is about 3C lower, which will help. Haven’t tested flat out yet, other things to do. I also installed another Noctua 140mm 3,000 RPM fan on the side case mount which is right *above* the GPU. That will help I hope.
One of the problems I had, is they lie (well, they give a false implication, same thing) about the Motherboard. It has 5 4-pin headers and imply they are all PWM. In fact, only the CPU header is PWM! All the other are standard 3-pin voltage controlled. Turns out, pretty much all the MoBo manufacturers do the same thing. When one has spent a lot on high-end PWM fans, it’s more than annoying! The Noctua’s cost about $39 each because they are extremely well made & have a very precise custom PWM control chip in them. I got a Corsair Link Commander Mini which is one of the few that has a good PWM system with 6 1A PWM headers. Plus I have a Corsair PSU, Watercooler & RAM. So I need the commander for the digital Link connectors to monitor & control them. I hope they’ve fixed their s/w. It was crap.
The 260X is destined for a custom linux security appliance I intend to build eventually, along with a good PSU & some other parts I have. Just need a decent, reliable, DDR3 MoBo, CPU & small case really. I’ve been busy the past few days catching up on a years worth of security email list messages! They have been busy the past year. I still on the Apple internal list from when I was Svc manager. Which is handy! 😀 I saw with amusement a couple on the iPhone 5’s & iOS recently. 😉 If you ever want to know what the current Apple vulnerabilities are when they happen & what steps are being taken, let me know. 🙂
Oh well, back to it! 😀
Ahem. Since this thread is entitled “This & That”… Only in Florida, Bryan? 😉 🙄 👿
NYPost: Stripper Performs at 8-year-olds Birthday Party
UK METRO: Mum hires stripper for 8-year-old’s birthday party
And no. It’s not an April Fools joke! But it should be. 😉 😀
Hmmm! Maybe you should move that to your April Fools thread Bryan? 😉
I’m afraid that the New York Post fell victim to an acquisition by Australopithecus rupertus™ along with the Wall Street Journal and has had a problematic history with reality since becoming part of News Corp. It is no more or less reliable than any other Murdock paper.