Mike Pelley's Musings

This is a really funny article in The Globe and Mail on 2012 May 12th entitled “What would Canada look like in 2015 if Harper is still Prime Minister?” by Denis Smith.

Sarcasm at its best, for example:

“When the drone attack and parachute drop on Parliament Hill by U.S. Special Forces occurred, no one expected Canada’s vigorous raid on Washington, which ended in the burning of the White House.”

“Planning and building the new [national capital] city [of Three Hills, Alberta] proceeded in deep secrecy under direction from the Prime Minister’s chief of staff. The Defence Department assisted by designating most of central Alberta as a restricted military zone, accessible only by special permit from the PMO.”

LOS ANGELES – May 11, 2012 – Carroll Shelby International, Inc., announced today that Carroll Hall Shelby, a man whose vision for performance transformed the automobile industry, has died at age 89.

In the 1960’s Shelby’s company created the Shelby GT500 Super Snake, Shelby GT350 and Shelby GTS, Shelby 289 “street,” 289 FIA, 427 S/C and Daytona Coupe Cobras.

The 427 Cobra’s specs were (from SuperCars.net)

The 427, which I seem to recall held the 0-to-100-to-0 record of 13.8-seconds until Porsche’s 959 (four-wheel-drive flat-six twin-turbo) beat it in 1986 which was twenty years later.

I have been looking for how to set up OpenVPN with Network Manager under Linux Mint 12.I think that everyone has found that you cannot use the client.ovpn configuration file that OpenVPN.  After much searching I found the following guide as for OpenVPN client setup:

You can manually insert the configuration parameters in network-manager-openvpn

OpenVPN Client via Network Manager

Hopefully once Google searches this others having trouble installing the Brother MFC-490CW printer/scanner will find the solution to getting the printer to work. Now, this may be documented elsewhere but the Brother documentation isn’t quite clear on the libc6 per-requisite. Brother lists the requirement as requiring ia32-libs or lib32stdc++ to be installed. However, this will not work – at least for me – despited repeated attempts at installing.

….And repeated Google searches…

Here is the solution: First install:

libc6-i386

This likely comes as no surprise to those who are older than myself, but as as passed my 35th birthday – more than a couple of years ago now – I have noticed that the “famous” people start to, well, expire. The first name that I grew up with was Peter Gzowski from CBC Radio’s Morningside in 2002. I can remember as a young boy with my father in the garage working on something with Gzowski on in the background. Next came Andy Rooney in 2011. I really liked his wry humor – and the number of times his maybe not so objective view hit the nail right on the head.  On Friday Ferdinand Porsche, designer of the Porsche 911, pass away.  Today, it was announced that Mike Wallace had passed to the great hereafter.

I have just upgraded the Cumulus weather station software to version 1.9.2 Build 1032 from 1029. As I was upgrading the software I was reading the release notes (yeah, not a good practice: One should always read the release notes before upgrading! However, I always have a good backup so it isn’t that bad. Or so I keep telling myself…) and is a fix for my Oregon Scientific WMR-200 weather station to fix a wind chill issue but that was fixed in 1031.

The problem continues to be, seemingly, with the StarTech USB1000IP as I have noted previously. There seems to be two issues:

1) The USB1000IP “disappears” from the network. The more interesting thing plugging the device into a 10/100 Mbit/s switch seems to somewhat alleviate the issue in that it decreases the  frequency that the device drops off the network. Of course, to have the device get back onto the network requires a power supply unplug/replug – no remote option seems to be available to me.

2) The USB1000IP seems to occasionally reboot. What this means is that I have to manually have to connect to the WMR200 using the USB1000IP software. Then I have to restart the Cumulus software.

Herein seems to be the problem: Cumulus does not “know” how to deal with a) the device connecting and disconnecting and b) recovery from CRC errors. It is hard to contact the software author when he is providing the software for free…

On the USB-over-IP front there seems to be some commonality between the various vendors. From previous posts you can read that I have had problems with the SIIG device as well with the same problems. The same software seems to be used by all the vendors with only cosmetic changes to the driver. I asked both SIIG and StarTech if they were working on a Linux version or would release the source code. Both, not surprising me in the least, simply stated that they were not working on a Linux version, had no intention of doing so and had no response on releasing the source code. Grrr….. Gut feeling: the same chip is being used by all the vendors supplying the USB-over-IP products (the Ethernet controller not withstanding; e.g. the StarTech is 1.0 Gbit/s and the other are 100 Mbit/s) and they are the only ones supplying the software driver.

BBC has outdone itself with this year’s April Fool’s Day gag web page!

Here’s the link  http://t.co/oApV9Yjx by Greg Stekelman.

Yes – I am just as bad as I always am in posting….

Wikikpedia has blacked itself out in protest of SOPA and PIPA – the anti-piracy legislation by the U.S. Government. I can’t think of another country that would put such restrictions in place. I mean, tampering with the world wide DNS system if someone makes the statement that a site has pirated material or pointers to where you could get pirated material. Hmmm…. what would the next thing to be  blocked? Maybe the U.S. could get a strong, fundamentalist Christian government and they could block access to any sites on Islam because they may have some link to religion-based terrorism? No where else in the world would do something like that. I mean, censor information, really? Oh, maybe I’m wrong here. Don’t we already have an example of this – The Great Firewall of China?

The wonderful techs from Bell-Aliant stopped by today to replace the smoked router. That still did not fix the problem with the televisions but I suspect what follows is a coincident.

Once they replaced the smoked router – and, yes, it did smell like something popped which could have happened when on Saturday we had a fair “blow” of wind causing a power outage that actually put two generators at the Holyrood thermal generating station off-line; the power outage does play a role here, too – we could not get ANY of the televisions to work. Their calls to level 3 support wasn’t working to get the televisions back online when Mark, the original lead installer, dropped by. He was in the neighborhood and seen the Bell-Aliant van outside our house and wanted to see what the issue was. (A BIG pat on the back for Mark – he said that it was his install and he took ownership of any problems. Bell-Aliant: You need to give a big deal of credit to guys like Mark. They set the standard for customer service!) Mark remembered during his time of configuring the ActionTec routers that they had do ensure that the DHCP server was running. (Another BIG pat of the back to Mark for remembering that!)

I have a rather more complicated network than most people do. Given that I am in I.T. I tend to do things that others don’t want to be doing. (Maybe I’m channelling Jerry Pournelle from the old days. He had the saying that went along the lines of “I do stupid things that most people don’t do” or similar.) Thus, I have a DHCP server with static IP assignments and an internal DNS server so you can find things on the network. This being the case, the second thing I did, after turning off the WiFi in the ActionTec, was to turn off Bell-Aliant’s DHCP server. And hence the relationship with the power outage: when the set top boxes powered up they were looking for a DHCP server and found one – mine.

Well, since we weren’t sure about the need for DHCP I turned Bell-Aliant’s off again. If you think about it, the televisions work on a different VLAN – 34 in their case and use the 10.0.0.0 subnet (you can see this in the advanced setting of the set top boxes) with QoS for video. (You can see more information at this post “Some tidbits on the FibreOP infrastructure” at Digital Home – quite an interesting read if you are a tech-head.) First, I would have thought that the LAN DHCP server would be separate from the IPTV DHCP server. Second, given that the IPTV is on a different VLAN than the data LAN the set top boxes wouldn’t see my DHCP server. Apparently I am wrong on both counts.

There is two additional items that may be coming into play. To try and “fix” the DHCP issue I enabled the Bell-Aliant router to only provide two IP address in the pool. I think that the number of IPs in the range may have a direct impact on the IPs made available to IPTV set top boxes. Second, I have the Bell-Aliant DHCP server handing out Bell-Aliant DNS addresses. I can’t confirm either and I’m in no mood to test this out tonight. (The Motorola IPTV set top boxes take longer to boot than my BlackBerry – and that is saying something!) This will likely cause some issues for me.

I’m not the first one to find this out. After some pretty intense Google searches I found this great post “Running an Internal Windows 2008 DHCP Server and Bell Aliant FibreOp” where Ryan Groom had the same problem. Hopefully my blog will highlight this issue.

Now I have to figure out what to do here. I have my old reliable SonicWall TZ180. I could put that between my LAN and the Bell-Aliant router. But that SonicWall is only 100 Mbit and I found that it was a real bottleneck. I might have to use my Netgear WNDR37AV router to separate my LAN from Bell-Aliant’s. But the Netgear can’t do proper NAT and that will cause me complaints down the road.

I will have to think this one out some more….

Looks like it was too good to last: part of the video feed has failed. Suddenly during the middle of Sunday afternoon – when I was about to watch the Huston Texans-Baltimore Ravens game, how ironic is that – the Ethernet-based video failed. I could get the schedule but no video. No problem, thought I, I will just reboot the digital terminal. The boot took what seemed “forever” at the “System is starting. Please wait”, not unexpected as it seems like my BlackBerry or iPad takes “forever” as well to cold boot. However, when it finally came up I was presented with a “Network connection error” message.  With a “Quit client” button to press. Oh, oh… Did I have a failed digital terminal? Let’s check another terminal. It works just fine, but it is using the old coax-based system. Hmmm… Let’s try the other Ethernet-connected television – the one with the PVR.  Not good…  It has the same problem: the program guide shows up but no picture.  The Internet is working just fine as well. This is rather interesting in the worst sense of the word.

I then call Bell-Aliant. The tier-one tech is fine. He does a few things. I then go and look at the ActionTec router to see if there are any errors there. All lights are green and flashing (IPTV on ports 1 and 3, data on port 2 – weird) and then I noticed the dreaded electrical smell. You know the one and like me probably fear it. He tells me I have an appointment for Tuesday and it will be an all-day appointment. Something about having to re-run the wiring. Tuesday ?!?!?!? All day !?!?!?!

I was a little P.O.’ed as you may expect. Maybe speaking to a supervisor will help. I mean, we know that it is likely the router why not get someone in to simply swap out the router? A simple quick hit. If it is right you don’t have a tech scheduled for all day and you have a fairly satisfied (or is the pacified?) customer. But no in no uncertain terms will the be able to do anything like that. And Tuesday is the earliest. But I’m on a “priority” list.  [You can insert several dirty words here – I am proud of myself that I left them unsaid in my conversation with the supervisor. I may send a note to customer service on this. I really hate when people have to stick to the “script”.]

On an observational diagnosis: I do not think that the problem is with the Ethernet ports. The digital terminals have green link lights as does the ActionTec router. Data still works and the ActionTec GUI shows data flowing to the digital terminals. A port swap to the one unused Ethernet port also gives good link lights at both ends. I think that some bridge chip failed. Which is not unexpected. My experience is that most electronic devices fail in the first 90 days. But why did it have to be my 90 days?