ADSL & Networking Archive

Sony Vaio and the BT HomeHub

By
Andy
 – December 23, 2008Posted in: ADSL & Networking, Hardware

If, like me, you’ve finally decided to review your position and admit that BT has been forced through the impressive competition to provide a well priced, reliable and competant ADSL product in the form of BT Total Broadband, hold your horses.

They are still a bunch of useless money grabbing incompetant pillocks!

I just moved house and then had to get my phone line connected to BT as this is the main way of getting ADSL in the UK. While I was at it I thought I’d save time and paperwork by getting my interweb from them as well. Easy enough – “Your BT HomeHub will be sent through the post and your broadband will be available from the start of next week. Excellent.

However, when the hub arrived, I set it up and it worked fine – with everything except my laptop. My laptop is nothing unusual – a Sony Vaio Z1-SXP. After a bit of investigating I found that the response from BT in this case is usually:

Have you got an Intel wireless card? Yes? Oh, we are aware of the issue but can’t provide a solution. You can either:

  1. Get a new wireless adapter
  2. Buy another router
  3. Cancel your broadband subscription

So tempted to take them up on number 3!

Windows SBS vs Fedora Core

By
Andy
 – January 31, 2008Posted in: ADSL & Networking, Email & Spam, Hardware, Linux, Software, Windows

Before I start this is not intended to be the usual argument between the Microsoft and Linux camps but more a desription of my findings when I had to evaluate the two products for use within our office as the main server. Our office network is currently of the usual standard you’d find in a small 5-10 person company that doesn’t have an in-house IT person:

  • All internet traffic is routed through the ADSL router with no management and for the large part, static IP addresses
  • Printers shared on which ever PC they were configured from first
  • PCs with no password on the user account
  • A random mixture of different versions of Windows and Office

I know this shouldn’t be the case with me being the in-house IT “professional”, but my main job is to develop and maintain several enterprise quality websites. This leaves me with very little time to devote to my additional role as IT Manager and Sys Admin so up until now as long as everyone good do their job on that particular day and as long as none of the office IT equiptment had smoke and flames billowing out of it then I considered that part of my job a success.

Unfortunately the MD has thrown a spanner in the works by setting us all a set of goals that will allow our company to function at it’s best and also to grow over the next year or so. This is normally fine by me as it’s the kind of mission critical memo that I lovingly file away in the “Deleted Items” folder before getting on with some serious Ajax coding. This time is a little different though as he’s made our bonuses dependant on the goals being acheived. There’s a few bits and bobs in here that I’m not going to include here but for the most part they boil down to:

  • Reliable uptime of printers, file storage and internet connection for all office PCs
  • Backup of all files and email that can be recovered with 1 working hour
  • Document collaboration for both onsite and offsite staff

Now my initial reaction was to head off to Dell and spec up a shinny new server running Windows Small Business Server 2003 to take advantage of the combination of Exchange and SharePoint but after taking into account some of the PCs are running old versions of Office (there may even be an odd Works and Outlook Express installation) and a few Windows XP Home, by the time everything was upgraded to XP Pro and Office 2003/2007 plus the server it was a bill upwards of £2000!

For a small business of 6 employess that is a bit steep by anyones standard so I did the obvious and headed off into the Linux world. I’m not a die hard linux fan by any means. I like it a lot – where it’s appropriate, but I don’t use it on my desktop – I’m on XP Pro. Neither will I use windows all the time – I don’t have a single IIS or SQL installation (L.A.M.P all the way!) but Linux is cheaper if you can do it yourself. That’s where businesses of our size have to find the trade off: you don’t want to be paying a consultant or your IT staff more than it would have cost to get a Windows server up and running.

In the end I weighed up the pros and cons and made the following decision: Linux this time based on the following:

  • Fedora Core 8 running on a P4 1Gb box
  • Leave the email running on our Web Hosts SMTP/POP3 servers
  • Configure all the usual DNS, DHCP, Samba, Firewall and routing servers so that they worke just as though we’d forked out £2000 on Windows SBS
  • Install OpenOffice and O3Spaces (or similar) on every machine

So thats the plan. The moral of this (as usual) long winded rambling and unnecessary story? Find the solution that fits your needs and budget. Time to implement it and then report back!

Access Network Shares over the Internet

By
Andy
 – September 2, 2007Posted in: ADSL & Networking, Hardware, Linux, Software, Windows

Note: I tend to ramble and build up to the point by painting a wonderful picture in words… Straight onto The Point

I tend to have a slightly complicated setup at work as far as my files go. For the most part, it’s the same as anyone else’s. Email in my email client, documents in My Documents and shared stuff on the central network share. Bu the files I spend most of my time on are stored on another server. The setup is something like this:

  • Desktop running Windoze XP with a Network Share mapped to X:
  • Linux box running Redhat with Samba and a username/password protected share with all my web files on it
  • Dreamweaver accesses the network share and FTPs to a range of production servers when ready

There’s a couple of reasons for storing everything on a central Linux box and not on a local drive:

  1. They get included in an automated backup routine that backs up all remote and local files into one archive to be moved offsite on my laptop
  2. The root directory of the Samba share is also the root directory of the Apache installation so I can test stuff locally

When away from the office I tend to FTP to the production server I want and make any changes, FTP them back and then either email myself a reminder to download them when I get into the office or Remote Desktop in and download them straight away. This has always worked and although it’s a bit of bind, noone likes working on the weekend so it means I don’t fire up my laptop to do little bits of bug fixing or whatever on a quiet Sunday.

This morning though I got an email off the MD saying I could do with a new desktop and he’d a catalogue through with a few offers in. I put the kettle on and headed over to www.dell.co.uk to see which ones he was on about. Unfortunately by the time I’d added the options I wanted (RAM, Dual Screen) it was about twice what it was to begin with. I’m now trying to convince him on a nice single monitor spec but with a 22″ wide screen TFT instead, but that’s a bit off point (I haven’t even got to the point yet, but hey!).

While I was waiting to see if he was willing to re-mortgage his house just to buy me a new PC, I thought I’d have a look at improving the rest of my work setup and that’s when I decided to find out if I could access the network share from home as well. I so couldn’t be bothered with a VPN so after a bit of Googling about other options I decided the easiest optikon was to set up a SSH tunnel and send all SMB (port 139) traffic through that.

The Whole Point Of This
Here’s a step by step guide of how you do this in case you want to access Network Shares accross the Net. If some things are called slightly different things on your machines, don’t worry, that’s just because I couldn’t be bothered to look at what they were called, I’m just doing it from memory.

  1. Boot up the PC that you want to access the Network Share from, i.e. accross the Internet (call it the client)
  2. Go to Start > Control Panel > Network Connections
  3. Open any of your connections and go to Properties. Click on “File & Print Sharing” and hit Unistall
  4. Reboot (only time, honest)
  5. Download and save Putty
  6. Open it up and enter the address of the server which has the network share on it*
  7. Go down to SSH > Tunels and in the Source box put 139, then in Destination put yourdomain.com:139 and hit Add
  8. Go back to Session and Save. This just makes it a double click to load up next time
  9. Connect, enter your username and password for the server
  10. Go to My Computer and go Tools > Map Network Drive
  11. Choose any drive letter you want and then in Folder put \\127.0.0.1\sharename (plus any username and password info you need

You should now have access to your remote Network Share from wherever you are! The speed will depend on the internet connections at both ends plus how busy the net inbetween is. For loading up and editing the 12K PHP files I use, it’s perfectly fine. I’ve also copied accross a 22M zip file but was writing this so didn’t see how long it took. I’m now copying across a 540M zip file to see how long that might take (I’m guessing about 20 times faster than doing it through Remote Desktop) [took about 3 and 1/2 hours on 512kb connection].

I haven’t mentioned security here. SSH means that while copying files across you’ll be pretty safe but I’ve gone the whole hog and blocked SSH acess to everywhere but my home IP just to make sure (no, this isn’t my work or home server). It’s up to you how far you go on the security.

* I’m assuming you’ve got a share running, a SSH server running and can open up SSH traffic to it through your firewall as well as all the necessary security/authentication

BT nicked my internet connection

By
Andy
 – January 25, 2007Posted in: ADSL & Networking

Well…. not really….

What they have done is gone and bought Force9, our current office ISP.

This is a pain because I like Force9, the customer support is shit but I don’t need to use it because they’re reliable and have been pretty good for the last couple of years.

Just have to wait and see if BT go and screw things up now!

TInternets working

By
Andy
 – October 5, 2005Posted in: ADSL & Networking

After pissing around for an hour or so I finally got my new ADSL modem/802.11g access point/router working. After going through the helpful setup programme a few times I thought, sod it I´m going advanced so fired up the web admin panel thing and started playing there.
 
After changing all the settings from the defaults (like the VCI from 35 to 38) I finally got it to give me a Force 9 IP address in the status window. Problem was that nothing would go through. All ping requests were coming up as Detination unreachable.
 
I headed back to the beginning to check I wasn´t doing something stupid and turns out I was. Instead of using PPPoA as you should for ADSL in the UK, I had left it on PPPoE. I changed this, restarted and the nice yellow "Internet" light came on router. Excellent!

Downloading a bit slow

By
Andy
 – September 5, 2005Posted in: ADSL & Networking

Someone asked me over the weekend why their downloads are always a lot slower than the speed of their internet connection. They are on a 2 meg adsl connection but said that they could only download at a maximum of 256KB/s (ish). Thing is, this is absolutely correct.

 
The speed of the adsl connection is given in Kb/s (Kilo Bits per Second) and the speed that Windoze reports the download going at is in KB/s (Kilo Bytes per Second). Since most people don´t even notice the capital B, let alone know what it means, so here goes. There are 8 bits in a byte so to find out how fast you should be able to download just divide your connection speed by 8. Either that or search for a large file on microsoft´s site (they always download as fast as possible on most connections) and download a bit to see how fast it is.

Phew! No more printer troubles

By
Andy
 – July 21, 2005Posted in: ADSL & Networking, Web Development, Windows

Our automatic invoicing system has been having problems recently due to the power cuts. The server has been downloading the PDFs and sending them to print but they were never getting printed out.
 
After investigating what was going on it became apparent that it was nothing to do with the network and internet being down while the power was off, but the delay in the Windoze print server booting up. Since the server sending the print jobs was on a UPS and doing it by sending "smb" commands to the windows server which were just getting lost as it wasn´t responding.
 
As a fix, I´ve now set it to run off a different printer that is a network printer with it´s own IP address. As far as queuing, the jobs get stored on the download server until the printer confirms the document is printed. That way we won´t loose any jobs and I won´t have to go through the database looking for invoices that should have been printed and haven´t.

Now Wannado is changing name!

By
Andy
 – July 19, 2005Posted in: ADSL & Networking

It used to be Freeserve, then they changes it to the French parent companies name of Wannado and now next year it will be changed again to Orange!
 
I´ve no idea whats going on with current users email addresses but I hope this is the last change as its starting to get confusing

Printing problems? Thatll be the power cuts

By
Andy
 – July 14, 2005Posted in: ADSL & Networking, Linux

We´ve got a system that gets used for most of our online projects that allows companies to sign up for a service and then automatically creates a pdf invoice to send them. This then gets downloaded by the office server and then printed out once an hour.
 
We were going through the last days invoices and noticed that there was a big gap in invoice numbers. I checked the database and found that a load hadn´t been printed. This was probably because the power had been off so the download server was running but the print server was still turned off so they were just disappearing into nowhere.
 
Luckily we have another networked printer that I can use and if the download server can´t directly contact it, it will keep it in its print queue until it comes back up again. Sorted. Just got to make sure we don´t run out of toner or nothing´ll get printed until we get more.

Power cuts are annoying the shit out of me!

By
Andy
 – July 14, 2005Posted in: ADSL & Networking, Hardware

So thats now the third power cut we´ve had in the last few weeks and its really starting to piss me off! I don´t know whats going on with our power company but whatever they are doing doesn´t just cause a blackout but seems to be causing power surges as well that keep taking out the fuses on the power leads for my servers.
 

The most important one is hooked up to a UPS with surge protection so that always lives but I´m quickly running out of spare kettle leads for the others that keep dying. Plus as an added bonus, the internet keeps going down for no reason. I don´t think its our ISP because I keep seeing a BT van outside at the exchange when it happens.
 
This week just gets worse and worse…

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