None of the Above

yea NF!

So Netflix and a clue went out on a date... and she won them over! Yea!

Yeah, profiles are staying and I resumed our subscription.

Letter to netflix

to: publicrelations@netflix.com
cc: lkilgore@netflix.com
cc: reed.hastings@netflix.com
subject: Netflix profiles feature

To whom it may concern:

As a direct result of the email I received from Netflix last night regarding the elimination of the profiles feature, I have just placed my Netflix account On Hold.

For us, profiles are the most important feature differentiating Netflix from its competitors like Blockbuster Online. Profiles are integral to our Netflix experience. We are not interested in trying to merge queues or manage reviews and recommendations for three different people on a single profile/account.

My subscription is currently set to resume on 07 September 2008, but rest assured that if profiles disappear on 01 September I will instead cancel my subscription outright.

pissing me the FUCK off

What a lovely evening.

First of all, around midnight tonight some fucker rings our doorbell and runs off.
Great. So now I get to wonder whether it was just punk kids, or someone checking to see if anybody was home so they could rob the place. I might not be as concerned if someone hadn't rang the bell earlier today as well. I didn't answer it then because I was busy and I wasn't expecting anyone. But I can't help but wonder if someone was canvassing the neighborhood looking for unoccupied houses to return to at night.

Then, when I come back inside I'm greeted by an email from Netflix that says they are removing profiles. WTF. Their profiles are in my opinion one of their best features. We have three profiles on our account. Their email tells me they are eliminating profiles to "help [them] continue to improve" their site. If this is a taste of "improvements" to come then I guess it's about time to "upgrade" my Netflix account... to the ZERO discs plan. I'm canning their asses to let them know what I think.

GRRRRR. FUCK. THAT IS ALL.

broken cables, leaky switches

I had one hell of a networking problem crop up at a client the other day. I was called in to troubleshoot an odd problem where some machines suddenly could not get to the internet... sometimes.

Damn I just LOVE problems that start like this. I poked around and checked their router and rebooted their shittier-than-turds Dell VLAN switches and came up with nothing.

The router has several interfaces and the only ones being affected where those which have VLAN's on them, so I was fairly suspicious of those Dell switches since they've given me trouble with VLAN's before, but the symptoms here were downright bizarre.

I did some packet monitoring and some other experimentation and came up with the following observations:

- Local internetwork traffic is mostly passed just fine (there was one case where we saw some packet loss from one VLAN subnet to another but it could have been a fluke)
- From the affected machines, Internet bound traffic goes in the switch and never comes out-- doesn't even make it to the router.
- Moving devices from one switch port to another would sometimes make them work--or if they were working, fail to work. But the problem was never static across any given ports.

After several hours of troubleshooting and headscratching, I had but one pathetically weak theory. I knew that new device had been connected to the network, and we eventually found that after unplugging this device, the problem seemed to gradually clear up, however plugging the device in did not reintroduce the problem, at least not within a reasonable period of time. The new device was connected across a hallway using a patch cable that was getting walked on. The cable under the hallway rug was stupid yes, but I didn't immediately associate it with this strange network-wide problem, but that became my main hypothesis, because everything else had been eliminated.

So we tested it. We went and started jumping up and down on the cable and sure enough, some of the machines on the network lost Internet connectivity. And unplugging the cable and rebooting the switches restored it.

So there you have it. Bad patch cables can seriously fuck up your network, especially if you're using Dell switches. But wait, how does one broken cable connected from a switch to just one device cause only certain packets with certain destinations to disappear? I HAVE NO FUCKING CLUE!

more than a phone

I've come to rely on my phone for much more than just calls. It is my morning alarm clock. I take pictures with it all the time. It is my wristwatch and calendar. It is my modem when I have no ethernet/wifi.

So that I am still carrying an original RAZR makes me feel just a bit crippled. I do get along OK with it, but the VGA camera is killing me, the lack of even EDGE for data use sucks, and bluetooth on this thing drives me fucking nuts (want to use bluetooth headset? might as well reboot first since 4/5 times it won't work otherwise. Want to send 20 pics via bluetooth? You have to select the recipient device before sending each one --UGH). So I'm thinking it's time for a new phone.

I had been kicking around the idea of a smartphone for a while but I've been really unexcited by everything out there. I've defiantly kept my PDA (Palm TX) and phone separate all this time but I think I'm prepared to relent, if I can only find the right device. The truth is my Palm is dying. Maybe it has cancer of the touchscreen, I don't know; but what's clear is that it is getting less reliable and less usable all the time. On the bottom half of the screen, my pen touches register about 1 mm above or below where they really are. This throws off my graffiti at times, and makes using the onscreen keyboard nigh-impossible. Then there are the crashes. I didn't used to experience them much, but now they happen all the time. Blazer is the biggest culprit but earlier I simply ticked an option in the system prefs and it abruptly reset on me.

My mind made up, now I just need to find this mythical device that will combine and improve upon the capabilities of my RAZR and TX.

Uh oh. It doesn't seem to exist. I wouldn't consider windows mobile anything unless I were to first get a lobotomy, so that's out. I want to like the Treos, but this is 2008 and I can't bring myself to buy a NEW phone running Palm OS 5. The iPhone is cool, but is more or less incompatible with my Linux desktop/PIM. Anything else I've found (which isn't much) just doesn't move me. At this point I think there is only one hope.

Android. I am watching and waiting, with great anticipation, for the first Android-powered phones. I don't know if they will fulfill my every desire, but they certainly have the most potential, and I really hope they live up to the hype because they are pretty much my last hope.

SOIP

Kind of like VOIP, but the voice is mostly replaced by silence.

I put together my awesome Asterisk server last year, bought five SIP phones on ebay, and was ready to rock. I guess I was thinking "if you build it, they will call" but it's been a bit lamer than that.

It's not all bad though. Despite that hardly anyone dials our VOIP number because they already have our cell numbers, it's nice to have for emergencies if teh cell network is doing the suckage, or battery is dead, etc. Most of our calls are internal (call downstairs from the bedroom, etc), which is certainly convenient, even if it seems a bit silly at times.

I have been racking up some minutes on my home-office VOIP line however, which rings only at my desk and the softphone on my laptop, so I don't feel that my PBX is not going to waste, even if it is underutilized.

I still need to finish hacking my PAP2 ATA (ugh., still haven't broken in) and I'm going to play with conference calling when I get a chance, and oops-- I still need to arrange to test 911 dialing; but in the mean time my little Asterisk server is doing everything I need and much, much more.

license to route

OK, I'm back and I'm going to try not to let my blog rot, like almost EVERYONE else's I know...

Recently I've had a awful pain in my side, and it turned out to be a pointy Cisco license restriction.

It started with sporadic trouble at the client as they began to use their VPN's more heavily. They had purchased a Cisco ASA 5505 to use as their VPN router, on my recommendation, and everything had been fine until we added another IPSEC tunnel and had more people accessing the remote sites. After some experimentation, we found the magic number to be 10 users, after which no one else could connect to anything across the VPN's.

Whoa... that sounds just like the "user" limit on this device! I hate user limits. Artificial restrictions on the capability of some hardware tends to piss me off. But I digress... This user limit restriction was a complete surprise because although we purchased a "10 user" ASA, I had talked to two different Cisco reps before the purchase to clarify the meaning of this and had been assured that this "user" limit did not pertain to users/IP's connecting over the IPSEC tunnels, and we didn't care about anything else as this device is strictly a VPN-gateway--they already have a m0n0wall in use as their primary internet gateway router.

So, Cisco screwed up. Fortunately I am a digital pack-rat and could produce a year-old email proving that the rep told me that the "user" limit meant 10 IPSEC tunnels with no limit on number of users. The truth is that there were two limits: 10 tunnels AND 10 users/IP's. Unfortunately, it took about two and a half weeks of dealing with assorted Cisco people to finally get a resolution, in the form of a free unlimited user license upgrade.

The outcome is satisfactory, but it really pisses me off that I had to waste so much time troubleshooting and getting it resolved after I tried hard to avoid this very problem by contacting them before buying. Furthermore, based on my conversations with half a dozen Cisco employees I can say that most of them didn't really understand the licensing terms of their own product, which is pretty sad. How am I supposed to understand if they don't? The less clear the license terms, the more likely that someone is going to get surprised by some restriction at the worst possible moment, and then swear off ever buying that brand again.

oh neglected blog

I've been super busy with various projects and crap for... a long while, but I'll summarize what I've been doing while I've been not blogging.

- Laid 46 sq meters (500 sq ft) of laminant flooring from Ikea in the living room, dining room and hallway.

- Installed (with help) new pre-hung front door. Looks MUCH nicer than the old, plain, crappy steel door we had. And, I installed a door bell! Our house didn't have one before for some inexplicable reason.

- Went to Ohio LinuxFest 2007 in September. My first time; it was very cool. My favorite talk was an intro to Python by Catherine Devlin.

- Setup a MythTV box, put in a bluetooth receiver and configured our Wiimotes to act as input devices for the system so they can navigate the Myth frontend. Still working on this as the box is starved for memory and I drop lots of frames if I try to watch HD (broadcast only, we don't have cable tv), but the system is quite usable. I recorded/watched some cool programs on PBS not long ago.

- Setup an Asterisk server, bought a few IP phones and an ATA and got cheap VOIP service. I tried out Trixbox initially (well, for about an hour), but I didn't like being insulated from the guts of the config so I just went with a Xubuntu server running regular Asterisk instead. I learned a lot more that way; configuring SIP, custom dialplans, voicemail, etc.

- Tore a hole in the wall between dining room and front room and put in a new doorway. Destruction with a sledgehammer: FUN! Drywall/plaster work: eh, not so fun. Also a lot of electrical work there, as I had to move wires for two circuits. This is almost finished, pending final coat of plaster and then paint.

- And most recently... I obviously got a new domain name for my blog!

Those are the highlights anyway. I'll soon share more details about various sub-projects and stuff.

and so they did

It looks like someone at Palm was listening, and they've managed to hear AND respond to the lackluster response (like my own) to the Foleo announcement. Yup, the Foleo's been folded up. Canceling it flashes a glimmer of hope in my mind, that Palm may just be able to turn things around and get some positive momentum going. I would say it all hinges on their next Treo/smartphone-by-any-other-name offering.

freeradius on debian

The other day I was setting up a RADIUS server on Debian Etch for EAP-PEAP wlan auth. Or at least I was trying to. It didn't take long to find out that the freeradius binary from the etch repository had no EAP-TLS/TTLS/PEAP support, due to licensing conflicts between freeradius and openssl. I looked at several guides on rebuilding freeradius to get around this but none of them quite met my needs.

This is all that was required in the end:

apt-get source freeradius

:edit configure options in /debian/rules to enable tls, ttls, etc:
cd [src dir]/
:apt-get install missing dependancies:
dpkg-buildpackage -d
dpkg -i freeradius-*.deb

And now implementation of the eight-PoE-AP WPA2 wireless network with EAP-PEAP auth is complete. I'm fairly impressed with myself for this one.

the multihomed house

I mentioned in a previous post that I had, for a time, both DSL and cable internet; but I didn't go into detail about how had my router hooked up to both lines, routing traffic over them concurrently. It's time to rectify that omission. Although this multihomed configuration did not last long, I'm still using pretty much the same tools/config to take advantage of the multiple IP addresses I've managed to snag from my ISP.

This is how I've setup my Linux 2.6-based router using 'ip route', 'ip rule' and iptables to get WAN-bound traffic coming from the local subnets to exit one of several WAN links depending on different criteria; mostly source IP.
Continue reading "the multihomed house"

dynamic host control playtime

During the past couple months of Internet service switching I was hoping to get some type of service that would allow me one or more static IP's. But in the end I found myself back on cable again, with nothing but DHCP. Static addresses wishes dashed, I then wondered if it was possible to get multiple IP's, even if they were randomly assigned.

Basically I wanted to see if it was possible to get multiple DHCP-allocated addresses on a single machine and from the same physical network/DHCP servers. This may sound unusual, impossible or pointless, but I had some uses in mind... and since my router is a PC running Linux rather than some proprietary device, I figured there was probably a way to do it. One of the appeals was the idea that I could have traffic from my public (open wireless) originate from a different public IP than my private local networks. So I set about playing with DHCP to see what I could do.
Continue reading "dynamic host control playtime"

pa favorites

I've become a really big fan of Penny Arcade this year. I read it like... three times a week. Sometimes I look through the archives to see what I missed back when I didn't know of PA's existence. These are a couple of my absolute favorites.

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2005/07/29

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2005/09/26

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2006/04/05

switch it

My router had been begging for a VLAN switch for some time. With seven ethernet interfaces, things were getting a little out of hand.

While designing a wireless network for a big client and spec'ing out the hardware, I found just the thing. The Netgear FS726TP. Like many people, I've been burned by the crappy plastic-encased Netgear consumer grade stuff in the past, however I'm a big fan of their higher quality ProSafe gear, especially the WG302 and WG102 access points which comprise my home wireless network.

I was impressed with the specs of the FS726TP, for the price, and had tentatively planned to buy one for myself once the client's project was complete and I had verified the switch would meet my own needs as well. As soon as the gear for the project came in, I put the switches to the test.

Continue reading "switch it"

unSUCKing believable

So I ~~have~~ had been enjoying my DSL internet connection, and my cable co-free life. And then my ISP apparently decided they had been much too nice to me.

Over the past weekend, my DSL seemed to be suffering from brief hiccups. Brief enough that when I checked to see why my connection just went down, it was already back up. That was a small annoyance that I planned to call Cincinnati Bell about Monday morning.

But come Monday morning I had bigger problems. By then my DSL connection would not stay up for any more than 30 seconds at a time. It was essentially unusable (I did try however, loading webpages in between disconnects -- what fun).
Continue reading "unSUCKing believable"