Lawrence "The Dreamer" Chen's Blog

Back when I first moved here, I wanted to get DSL.... they offered 3 tiers (that I knew of...) 1.5/384, 3.0/512, 6.0/768. Of course, I wanted the top one. But, they said for my area they could only offer me the lowest. But, it was better than dialup (and, I was using AT&T BusinessNet service, at the time). So, I pursued getting Cox HSI at first....because I wanted cable TV more than I wanted a landline. But, I was having trouble getting Cox at the time (though I have it now). So, I did order the DSL.

But, once I did get it...they locked me at 768/384 (for a week I did get 1.5/384, but then there was a storm and service became slow and unreliable...I called in for service and the phone tech. said nothing was wrong at their end, must be my side. During that trouble shooting they lowered locked me at 768k down. Moments before the field tech. showed up service started working again. He said something about replacing a line card or something just before coming over....I tried to get the 768k lock removed, but I couldn't convince anybody by email or phone that they had done this....and kept saying that I should get 1.5 and that it must be my line)....and efforts to upgrade weren't available. Even though DSLreports technician report tool said I could do ~2.0M down (and 690k for up).

More recently there had been upgrades in my area...and technician report had been reporting that I could get better downstream rates. Suggesting the next tier could be fully achieved. This mornings quick check say 3.1M.

So, once again I was browsing the AT&T site to see if I could order an upgrade in my speed. And, this time they showed offers of the 3.0/512 and 6.0/768 upgrade options. I wasn't that daring...I ordered the 3.0/512 tier.

Wonder how long the upgrade will take, and whether it'll mean that I can finally do VoIP over DSL (it works good now over Cox). But, the for consistency in speed and reliability...DSL has been the winner.

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Of course, I'm talking about my Ubuntu server (well, maybe not obvious....except that I'm not known for doing upgrades).

I had debated waiting for Hardy Heron's release before building this Linux server. Except that I had bought the box back in December, and delaying was preventing was delaying all that BOINC work that I've been doing.

There's other stuff I want to or have thought of doing with this server, but don't know where I actually stand on doing those sorts of things. If I had it to do over again, I don't think I would've gotten this box (it was knee-jerk response to replacing a dead server, which I was later able to resurrect...negating the ordeal of recreating things). OTOH, I probably would've continued on with buying something else....and I'm not sure if I would've been that happy with that purchase. Of course, it has delayed that purchase....and it may become too late to get it. Though perhaps Windows XP will continue to still be available after June 30th, and I'll make that one last upgrade in that department.

Anyways...other than taking much longer than expected to upgrade....either the upgrade servers are still badly hammered, or Cox is throttling me. Cox seems to be sluggish in general today. The download speed was dismal. And, then hidden in the terminal you don't see my default, it was asking if I wanted to proceed with the upgrade after everything had been downloaded.

Annoying enough when doing 'sudo apt-get upgrade', even more so here....because I wasn't expecting that I had to wait and interact (with a hidden screen) in the upgrade. Later there were dialogs that popped up on stuff that wanted input, mainly to decide if stuff I had configured in Gutsy could be unconfigured in the resulting upgrade to Hardy. Umm, I configured those services so that I could use them....

Finally it was done....it took forever to boot while it did fs checks on /home and /MMCVideo, but then everything looked fine.

Well, not totally. lm-sensors was changed, so I had to reconfigure that, and I'm not sure but the core temperatures seem to be higher now. The default is FireFox 3.0 beta....and all my extensions and themes got disabled. I've been avoiding upgrading to FireFox 3.0 on my other machines for this reason. Though people say that the new version is faster, and the memory leak is fixed, and some of the hanging/crashing problems on Mac OS X seem to be gone. But, I want it to work the way I've customized it....

So, I changed my shortcut to launch firefox-2 instead and reverted things.

Now other than network lag, which I hope will clear up on its own....the only main thing that doesn't seem to work in the update is vmware. Which probably just means I need to rebuild the kernel stuff again (or see if there's some hardy specific details to making that work). Not really a big deal though, since I never got around to running anything in vmware. It was on my list of things to try, but now I need more disk on this box.

I heard 8.04 was going to have support for PM SATA, wonder if that's true and if the PCIe PM SATA card that is in the box will now work, etc.

I survived....almost 7 hours without power. It got really cold. I was worried I'd have to sleep without heat....but I did find my old sleeping bag.

Unfortunately, I had trouble after power came back.

My Windows desktop lost its mind....guess I need a new CMOS battery for it.

My Linux server came up...but then went away. Just like its predecessor....extended power outage....the fans failed in it and it toasted itself. Hopefully it had some kind of safety shutoff, and replacing the CPU fan will get it going again. Though I don't know where I'm gonna score one....hopefully the computer store at work has one. Otherwise, I guess I'll put Amazon Prime to the test.

Not sure where things stand on improving my emergency preparedness or UPS replacement or other things....

Suppose I should figure out what I'm having for supper, just in case I lose power again....

Meanwhile Cox is still out

Looks like I experienced a nearly 24 hour outage of my Cox HSI service....

Wonder if my TV recordings for the period were affected....guess I'll find out when I get home from my business trip on Saturday.....

Apparently, they just don't care that they are unreliable....and its not just consumers, it hits KSU. (though it is especially bad because both primary and secondary DNS for the university go down, so not only are on campus sites down...but all name lookups fail, so off campus hosted sites are also unavailable).

Though KSU does kind of have an AT&T backup....actually, so do I.....but my living room is on Cox and my bedroom is on DSL....should come up with some way to do automatic failover or something

Because, line monitoring looks something like this (bottom is obviously Cox):

Too bad I can only get 768k down from AT&T/Yahoo! DSL (I'm paying for the 1.5M tier).

Now granted...it is partly my fault. I had been advised numerous times from people in this area before and after I moved here to stay away from Cox, etc. Even had somebody mention that KANREN is Cox, and its what the University....

Guess I had been spoiled by the service I had gotten from Time Warner's Roadrunner in Dublin, Ohio. Never had the choice of DSL back there, since the phone company uses linesharing in the apartment buildings (even though they were the ones that offered DSL when I ordered service from them, and said it was available, etc.)

Hopefully, there won't be any more outages like last Wednesday afternoon/evening....were everything digital was out, and analog was snow ridden. Hard to call during outages when it also takes out your phone service.... The only stuff I could watch was WIBW-DT using my OTA HDTV receiver.....

Well, I decided it was time to setup the other WRT54GS....in anticipation of getting Yahoo!DSL...which I ordered just as I was losing hope of getting Cox in time.... though I ended up getting it just in time, so I was able to check online if I needed to go into work at 12:01am or not

But, I decided not to cancel the order, even though I don't know how to live with landline again (and it is rather expensive considering that it is just basic local only service). There was a time where I thought about running a dual WAN home network, and it looks like I'm gonna do this.

So, to start this process....the first thing is to find my WRT54GS. I tried to remember which box it might have been stashed into, and hoped to myself that I at least marked on the box that it was in there. After about two hours of digging around, I noticed that it was sitting on the bottom shelf of my computer desk. Guess I had previously found it, and set it aside for this future event....

Now to check my laptop so that I can replace the firmware with Sveasoft and load in my various customizations.

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I have cable TV and broadband again!

Had to use my own modem, rather than the free one....the installer didn't have my details for what I had ordered, and therefore didn't have that equipment. But, better to get service....and he did land a HD converter (and I had that SB5101 laying around).

Now I'm just waiting for a DPH-540 to appear, so I can do phone....