Mike Pelley's Musings

Here is an update post-FibreOp install. The installation started about 9:00-9:30-ish and ended just before 4:30. There is a fair bit of work required. The fibre has to be run from the utility pole to the house. Then the UPS (battery to be added later, right now Bell-Aliant will apparently use copper for telephone until mid-summer when voice will also be added to FibreOp and the battery will be needed to support voice during a power outage), the ONT and the ActionTec router. The ONT is the “Optical Network Terminal” that simplistically converts the fibre (light) to copper (electrical).

A word on the ActionTec router: It seems like a pretty good device. It does have “true” NAT ability – e.g. single source IP or “all”, TCP or UDP port or port range and the destination (internal) IP – which is something that I have not seen on any home-grade routers. It, ironically, does not have the ability to statically assign DHCP IPs to specific MACs. Well, you can’t have everything (and a CentOS-based virtual machine running DHCP fixed that up).

Bell-Aliant prefers to use UTP in their installation. They will use good (e.g. digital cable-grade) coax but will want to replace the router-to-PVC run with UTP. They also re-terminate any coax runs. I don’t blame them – nothing worse than having to come back post-install to re-terminate a run that someone else did. The television service is quite good. I noticed that the “jagginess” that I was seeing on another coax-based provider even on the high definition channels and the overall quality seems better. I do miss a couple the old coax-provider set top box features – or maybe I have to re-discover them 😉

Oh, yes: a post of the new SpeedTest results is needed. I have used the same provided in San Francisco (nice to see what a “real” end-to-end test will look like) but there is a difference in time-of-day and day-of-week – ADSL was a Thursday around 7:30 AM-ish while FibreOp was run on a Sunday around 10:30 AM-ish – but that shouldn’t matter too much other than absolute throughput.

Today is the day that we are upgrading to Bell-Aliant FibreOp.  I have been on Aliant ADSL since, well, almost forever – whenever they brought out ADSL in the St. John’s metro area.  It was call Warp 3 service that was rated at 1024 mbit/s down and 768 mbit/s up.  Here is the last SpeedTest I did before it was replaced:

I’m still having problem with USB 3 and Linux Mint; version 12 in this case.  I’m going back and trying the

pci=nomsi

option once again.  This is really, really annoying since all my VMware Workstation virtual machines reside on the external Seagate GoFlex Pro USB 3 hard disk which decides to disappear…  While the VMs are running…  The latter makes no sense given that the drive shouldn’t go to sleep while they are being accessed…

Frankly, this is a stupid, stupid bug that should be have been fixed many kernel revisions ago.

Anyway, more once I figure out if this works with the 3.0.0-13-generic kernel.

I received notice today that, after submitting my audit information, I am now, officially a CISSP.  That is, I am a Certified Information Systems Security Professional.  Now all I have to do is read, read, read and attend conferences to keep my accreditation.

And, after the CISSP exam, I will be doing everything to keep my accreditation!

FibreOp is finally to my neighbourhood!  I have my appointment booked for the first part of January to get it installed.  I am really looking forward to it because:

a) it gets me off Rogers Cable services.  Not only is FibreOp cheaper but I won’t have to listen to the “We are experiencing higher than normal call levels” – even at 2:00 AM – only to have them tell me to reboot my digital cable box;

b) it upgrades me from Warp 3 – yes, the original 1.5 MB down/ 768 KB up service – to 30 MB down/30 MB up.  The CSR I was talking to said that I would notice a speed increase.  No 5h1t!  Ha, ha!

This means, however, that my nice multi-zoned and firewalled home network setup is toast.  For now at least.  Others have told said, and I have done far too much Googling on the subject, that “yes” I can host my web server on FibreOp but I really do not like the way that you have to use the FibreOp supplied router.  It seems like a nice home router but it is not up to the level of my SonicWall routers.  Maybe things will change but…

I have a server hosting provider out of Montreal.  I wanted to keep it in Canada as I prefer to stay national if possible.  Not that I don’t trust U.S. PATRIOT Act laws.  No, not at all…

My sites have been moved to the new hosting service.  The weather station was a little challenge as I had to move everything over to SCP and Cumulus doesn’t support SCP yet.  Anyway it is working now.  And so is the blog which you are reading now.  I actually didn’t have to read too much to remember how to backup and restore a database and permissions 😉

After running Linux Mint 11 for about four or five months, Mint 12 has come out following Mint’s usual release cycle of six months.  As I posted previously, I moved from Ubuntu after they moved to Gnome’s Unity with Oneiric (11.10).  Suffice to say, I seriously dislike Unity – even on my old Dell Mini 10V netbook.

One of the guys at work mentioned that he was using Linux Mint 11 (Katya) and that since I like Ubuntu I should give Mint a try.  I did and I like it.

Since I get bored with sticking with one version I have to update when the new version comes out.  Hence, my upgrade to Lisa.  I am quite intrigued with Gnome 3.  I sort-of miss being able to add and/or configure the

It was a little different from Ubuntu where you just do a “upgrade distribution” but that being said, doing a clean upgrade does have something to be said about it.  I always perform a clean upgrade with Microsoft Windows between versions.  Not that Linux is anything like Windows!  😉

So far, I really like the interface.  Gnome 3 (without Unity – I could go on about the love-in that seems to have developed for Apple Mac OS X and the homage some developers are having – but I digress…) is rather interesting.  I sort-of miss not being able to customize the panels or add a new panel but not all that much.  The install went well – it even found my Dell XPS 15 (L501X) wireless card without having to resort to a wired connection and then downloading the updates to get the WiFi to work.  I always found that a pain in the butt.

[Another aside: Why are we still getting the

vesamenu.c32: Not a COM32R image

error when creating a bootable USB memory stick?  I have to search on how to fix it just about every time…  It really bugs me…]

The only got-ya I have found so far is that the Totem Coherence UPNP is broken (see here) and there does not seem to be very many Google posts about it.  [Yet another aside: for some reason VLC Player broke a couple of versions ago (hence my move to Totem Coherence…) whereby it would find my Synology DLNA NAS (a REALLY nice box – so nice I want to buy a bigger one!) but I couldn’t actually get any media.]

If you are interested in another Linux distribution, give Mint a try.  Mint also has a LiveCD version as well.

My son saved up his money (and did chores like blowing the snow out of the driveway) and decided that he wanted to buy an Air Hogs Hawk Eye Blue Sky remote control airplane.  This thing is pretty neat – it can take videos.  You can see more information here at the Air Hogs website. Here’s my son’s first video: First Hawk Eye Flight.

The plane is really, really, really light.  It was not all that windy during the first flight (we are in the lea of a hill) with the winds being 12 km/h gusting to 17 km/h.  You can see what the gentle breeze did when Cameron tried to turn the plan around and come back to us.

Anyway, it seems like it is going to be a interesting toy…. if the wind doesn’t take it away!

Okay – I’ve had my Seagate GoFlex Pro 500 GB external hard drive for some time now. It is USB 3 and I run Linux Mint 11. Like many others using Linux Mint (or Ubuntu) after some time, about an hour or so, the drive simply disappears. Unplugging and plugging it back in doesn’t work nor does plugging it into another USB 3 (or USB 2 either in my case – a Dell XPS 15 L501X) will allow the drive to be seen again. Apparently, the issue is with the Seagate firmware in the drive and the fact that there are different “wake up” mechanisms being used. And, Seagate apparently does not publish how wake up is being done. Here is apparently how to fix the problem:

sudo gedit /etc/default/grub

Modify (basically adding “pci=nomsi”)

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash"

to read

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash pci=nomsi"

Then run

sudo update-grub

I found this at http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1817164 after much Googling.

[UPDATE] This does not seem to work.  I was uncompressing a very large file to the GoFlex and left the room.  When I came back an hour level the drive went “missing” and nothing could get it back except a reboot.  It seems that this does not happen under Windows 7….

Well, I actually triumphed over the CISSP exam!  Our instructor said in our CISSP CBK boot camp that everyone would likely feel that they had failed (and, boy, was he right about that!) but that we also wouldn’t remember anything on the exam as well (also right about that, too!).  Now I just have to get my endorsements sent for review and then I am certified professional…

I upgraded my iPad “Classic” to iOS 5 yesterday. It took a fairly long time to download but at the time that I downloaded it it was fairly early.

Once the upgrade was downloaded, the upgrade itself didn’t go too smoothly. First, I kept getting this error about not enough space to upgrade. Hunh? Anyway, I tried a couple more times and iOS 5 installed.

Then the reboot. ALL my applications were REMOVED from their folders. As I automatically put newly downloaded apps into folders I was shocked into finding NINE (9) pages of apps! Grumble, grumble… Fifteen minutes of life lost forever cleaning that mess up.

All my apps were still there. Great! I would have had to have been really patient to download all of those apps again. Especially given the overload on Apple’s servers.

Okay, now that everything has been tidied up, time to actually use the damn thing. Oh, oh… Why have all my passwords – not only passwords, usernames too! – have disappeared. These aren’t “critical” usernames and passwords, just junk ones that I’ve set up to access various web sites. Ones that I haven’t actually entered in months… Grumble, grumble…

Anyway, after getting these annoyances straightened out I was pleasantly surprised that my data, or at least what I’ve looked for, was still there. All of my movies were still there. Each app still had to be reconfigured – e.g. VLC didn’t have any settings.

Oh, and restoring from backup didn’t work either.