I have a buddy Craig who retired not long ago and has always been a true nerd at heart no matter how hard his job at Kaiser stressed him out. Craig loves to tinker and is great at it. He was also great at every thing he would do in his carrier while at Kaiser but he just let it get under his skin to much if you ask me.
Well the other day Craig (who I have been trying to get into blogging) decided to move off of Ubuntu for a couple of days and try the new Fedora 15. The rest of this post is his comparison of the two. This is just from an email to me but he should really be posting his rants for the world to read. Read the rest of this entry »
This is pretty cool I am bloggijg from my g-tablet that I have loaded Cyanogenmod 7 on. With the WordPress client. This is so much better than the default build from ViewSonic.
This week is the last week of work for a good friend of mine. Mr. Craig Swanson will be retiring this week and after a bout 11 years working in cloth covered boxes one wall away from each other our time as coworkers has come to an end. I can still remember my early days working with Craig as a lowly newbie to the corporate dog eat dog world of a network engineering. Craig sported a look at the time of a balding head with long gray hair pulled into a pony tail and a gray beard very George Calrinesk.
Craig and I carpooled into Pasadena once a week being my house was on his way there. I have to admit that the time spent in the car on the 210 was well worth everything I could learn in life from Swanny. Not only the life lessons but the traffic laws that I am sure will prove to be priceless as I continue in daily drives. I would of never thought that pulling across the double lines into the carpool line in front of a CHP would be against the law. I have to admit in the last year I have realized how much I really missed those weekly trips to Pasadena.
Like I have said I have worked with Craig for years now. It is the longest I have worked side by side with someone that I can call a true friend. I will miss the advice and guidance you have given me over the years buddy. Please don’t be a stranger and I myself will try my hardest to do the same.
So after running on Windows 7 for several months now I have decided to go back to GNU/Linux. In particular Ubuntu once again. For the record I had no issues with W7 because “it was my idea”. I just have a preference for running Linux I don’t feel like you get the full experience from a device unless you use Linux. So yes ladies and gentlemen my Windows 7 experiment is over.
Alright if I get anything done today I think this will be it. I worked on this for a while last night and couldn’t really nail it down. I guess it was the fact I was trying to get ahead of the game. First off this posting is just to talk about Rails 3.0 Beta on Ubuntu 10.04. After searching the web and really coming up with nothing but a couple of errors posted to developer forums. I found Mohammad Kotb’s blog on installing Ruby on Rails (current release) on Ubuntu 10.04.
Today while at the office and after weeks of putting up with the constant rebooting of the Cisco WRVS4400N I have decided to move on. My wife is working from home and has to reload the device daily to keep her connectivity up thus killing any IPSec VPN connections she has back to work. I guess this is why Cisco is moving to SSL as their preferred method of VPN connectivity. SSL allows for more fault tolerance than IPSec for home or remote user that want that seamless connectivity feeling.
Any which way the WRVS4400N is now being switched out for a Netgear WNR3500L. The only feature I can see that is missing on it will be VPN and I didn’t even us the 5 client limited VPN that the Cisco Device had to offer. I needed to add access ports to my home network also so I purchased a Netgear GS116 10/100/1000 switch so now my whole house should have 1000 Mbps interfaces up and running (zooming). If things work on the right way tonight after I install and configure all of these I will be back to being a happy camper and working on the new fish tank.
Alright I not sure if I just purchased a bad device but since I have owned this thing its one issue or another. I only use it in my home and I really couldn’t picture using this thing in a small business as it is sold. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: home networking, Networking, suck, wireless
As many know I have worked in technology for a long time now (almost 20 years wow). In particular in the areas of networking and the Internet. I have worked on just about every network you can think of in that time. Currently my position finds me in more of a planning role but I like to keep my hands in on things I have in the past implemented. One of things that interest me is the types of bandwidth that has been consumed by streaming Video/Audio service across the internet. In the past the Internet was just text and some images these days with flash and the fact you can strip down a full blown wave file into a smaller form and stream it to a media player on a workstation.
These media players want to by nature take up as much bandwidth or a stream that is available to them. So it leads corporate networking people to figure out ways of blocking it. You can just black hole domains like Pandora or Youtube which is not a problem this will keep your users off of these sites. In my network currently we block Pandora for the reasons of wasting bandwidth. But users have a nack requesting access to sites you have blocked. Well today this lead me to visit Pandora and actually dig into it. Not really the technology behind it but the “Term’s of Usage” agreement. The 3rd bullet item says this “Pandora is for personal use only, that means you can’t play Pandora for the patrons in your bar, coffee shop, etc.”
This portion of the Pandora Term’s of Usage is very important. This keeps Pandora running like a radio station where they pay royalties to the record companies for playing their music. Now in my working in networking over the years I have had my share of dealing with phone systems and installing PBX devices for employers. Phones aren’t my strong point but it is a road I have traveled down once or twice. Working for corporations who might keep a customer or two on hold throughout the day you may want to give them something to listen to this is known as “music on hold”. Years ago we would just plug in a AM/FM radio put it on the easy listening station and plug the audio out into the phone switch. Now this has been deemed illegal because the Raido Station’s have the rights to broadcast the music but not rebroadcast the music. Your PBX would be rebroadcasting these transmissions which then makes your company liable. There is a great write up of this whole issue here.
So Pandora covers its back by saying “for personal us only”. This keeps Pandora out of hot water with the RIAA and puts the responsibility all upon the user of such service. I am sure you will find such Term’s of Usage agreements with every streaming media provider on the web. This is where the RIAA now has an open door into any company any America that allows their users to stream licensed media across their corporate networks. I am sure the marketing (money) side of these providers of streaming media do not want the legal side of it to get in the way of making money. So as long as no one points at the elephant in the corner the marketing guys can say hey look we have X million numbers of hits a day and you should pay us more money to place your ads with our content. The day they decided to tell corporations they can’t allow their users to enjoy their streaming media I am sure they will take a hit on the amount of views the marketing guys can show to their customers.
Its is all very interesting but in the end of it all just by the very nature of the Terms of Usage on these sites you should have enough of a leg to stand on in your corporate network to block all traffic going to these sites unless there is a business case.
So I have reached one snag with my ISP Dreamhost. Setting up a Jabber server so I can communicate with my friends that are still on google chat. I might be missing something but the DNS SVR setup seems pretty straight forward in the directions both provided by Dreamhost and Google. I just can’t seem to figure it out. Oh well I will try more later..
One of my biggest hurdles in moving off of Google has been to get a centralized news/rss feed reader. I love Google Reader and it took me a couple of days to figure out what to do. I loaded a couple of RSS Feed apps on my netbook and it bugs me that I couldn’t sync them between devices without using something like DropBox.
After doing some research I have found Rnews it is a Open Source Server Based RSS Feed Aggregator that was very easy to configure at DreamHost my ISP. You have to have a database that it can use (MySQL here) but once you have done that you can export your RSS feeds from Google Reader into an OPML XML file and then import them into your Rnews server. Now I can access my feeds from everywhere over a browser and they stay in sync. I have a feeling the Rnews project at SourceForge will be getting a donation from me soon.