Crumpled Thoughts

I’ve used a lot of different broadband Internet service since 2000. In 2000 I got DSL from Micron.net at an apartment. I got Qwest DSL in 2000 when I bought my house. Switched to cable in 2004 when it became available at my house. Switched back to Qwest DSL in 2008. I’ve also supported Clearwire wireless, Satellite ISPs, and data T1s from numerous providers for local businesses.

Qwest DSL is the best option right now for a residential ISP, for the following reasons:

Price: 

If you can get Qwest’s fiber service, you can get 12M down, 896k up for $55/month. Qwest offers 7M down, 896k up for $38/month. CableOne charges $49 for 5M down, 500K up, or $59/month for 10M down, 1M up. I know it doesn’t seem like a big difference on the higher plans, but what CableOne doesn’t make obvious is how they throttle bandwidth. It’s the thing that made me move back to Qwest. After you download a couple of gigabytes in a day, CableOne will drop your speed significantly. It will stay slow until midnight, then go back up. Say a new Linux distro comes out that you want to download, and you’re on the 5M plan. After you download 3GB CableOne will drop you from 5M download to about 1.5M. Keep downloading, it keeps falling. At Midnight it goes back up. Even on the 10M plan, they drop your speed after downloading 5GB. At 10M you can download 5GB in about an hour. Say hello to slow until midnight. With Qwest, you get your 1.5M, 7M, 12M, or 20M all day, every day as long as you have service. I’ve downloaded over 40GB in a day and not slowed down.

Uptime:

In the past 10 months of having Qwest fiber 12M service, I have had zero downtime. DSL is typically more stable than cable. With CableOne at least every 2—3 months I would have an outage. I have actually had better uptime with my DSL than we have had with our 3 data T1s at the office (thunderstorm took out a repeater and we had 2 circuits go down). Cable is more finicky.

Network tampering/management:

CableOne tampers with your internet access. They won’t let you connect to TCP port 25 on any mail server but theirs. If they think your bandwidth is being used for BitTorrents, or newsgroups they will restrict your speed. They decide what traffic gets priority. Qwest doesn’t do that. If you pay for your service, they’ll provide it. I think CableOne has a right to do that, it is in their Terms of Service. I, as a customer, have a right to think it sucks and go to another provider.

Acceptable Use:

If someone complains to CableOne about how you’re using the Internet, they will shut you off before asking you about it. It can take from several hours, to several days to get service back. I had just travelled to Portland to set up a remote office for a client when CableOne shut off my Internet connection at home. Someone had hacked a Linux box on my home network and was using it for bad things. I called from my hotel in Portland, but couldn’t do anything about it because they shut the connection down. I was going to be there for 3 days before returning home. It really pissed me off. If they had at least emailed me before shutting down the connection I could have remotely powered down the box and still had internet at the house. Their policy of terminate first, ask questions later bothers me.

I’ve been very happy with Qwest DSL since switching back. It is the only Qwest service I use, even though my girlfriend works there. I run Asterisk at home for phone service and pay $1.50/month plus 1 penny per minute for my calls. It’s usually about $4 per month.

That is my opinion. Feel free to leave a comment if you think I’m wrong

Well, the 2008 election is coming to a close, and I feel really good. Though the electoral college was a landslide (more so than I predicted) - the popular vote appears to be Obama 52%, McCain 47%.

I have been a lifelong Republican. I still believe in small government, low taxes, fiscal responsibility, individual freedoms, and state’s rights. I supported John McCain in his 2000 bid for the Republican nomination for president. In 2000 I voted for Ralph Nader, in 2004 John Kerry. These days I consider myself independent. This year I voted for Barack Obama.

I feel that the last eight years have been disastrous for America. The national debt has gone from $5 trillion to $10 trillion under Republican leadership. The new Republican mode of operation seems to be “Tax Less—Spend More”. I have also been disgusted by the Bush administration’s “If we want to do something unpopular, scare the hell out of the American people.”

The 2008 presidential race has been fascinating to watch. We got to see Obama try to inspire his supporters, while McCain tried to scare his supporters. This was not the John McCain I saw in 2000.

I truly respect everyone’s political opinions. I won’t say I’m right and you’re wrong. I will say that my opinion, and my vote is as valid as yours—and yours as valid as mine.  I think the Republican’s have passed some pretty crappy legislation (Patriot Act), and so have the Democrats (NAFTA comes to mind). But as far as who I trust more right now, to lead us out of the terrible shape we are in as a country right now, it is Barack Obama.

It surprises me to see that some people still think that he is Muslim, or that he “pals around with terrorists”, but they are free to think what they will. I think that the McCain/Palin scare machine kicked in to high gear to try to pull this thing off. I’m glad that at least 52% of the population saw through it.

The thing is, that we all want what is best for America. We sometimes disagree on what that is. I hope that we can all move forward with that in mind. Let’s turn off Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, Kieth Olberman and Rachael Maddow and try to have honest, open discussions about issues… that don’t include William Ayers or the Alaskan Independence Party.

God bless America.

I thought I’d make a prediction on how this race will end up, mostly to see how close I call it on November 5th.  I really think it’s shaping up to be a landslide.  The Obama campaign has been incredibly well organized and gaining ground in many swing states.  I gave Obama Florida because I think the Real Estate market (or crisis) there is giving him an edge over McCain.  I also gave Obama Colorado because I think there is a large group of people not being represented in the polls which tend to be more likely to support Obama (the younger voters).

Here’s my prediction.  Obama 320, McCain 218

This is how it breaks down:

Of course, there is a real possibility I’m completely wrong.  History will be the judge of that.

Make your own prediction with the CNN Electoral Map Calculator

Dear CNN,

I watched the 2nd presidential debate on your network last night. I found the following graph to be distracting and annoying. It really added nothing to the debate, except to make me wonder how people were going from ‘committed’ to ‘uncommitted’ so rapidly.

Please don’t use this in the coverage of the final debate, or I may be forced to watch it elsewhere.

I’m discouraged when I see the voter turnout every two years. With as much as people complain about local and national politics these days, you would think more people would get out to the polls when they have a chance. This year I’m instituting a new personal policy; I won’t discuss politics with people who didn’t at least take the time to vote.

So there you have it. If you don’t vote, you waive all rights to have a political discussion with me. If you don’t vote and still wish to discuss politics, you’ll have to accept a slap to the face before the discussion.

If that’s not motivation, I don’t know what is. And despite the outcome of tomorrows elections, there is one thing we know we can look forward to. Relief from political yard signs and misleading television ads.

A couple of months ago I started having some serious issues with my cable modem. The modem would randomly disconnect and reconnect throughout the day. I called my ISP, and they would tell me everything seemed fine. Then sent a guy to the house who redid some of the connectors on the outside of the house, but it did not help at all.

In a fit of frustration, after it had done this ten times in a 30 minute period, I ran off to Walmart and bought a new modem. Things seemed to be better for a couple weeks, then it started again. When the cable company was of little help, I found that Motorola modems provide some data through a web interface at http://192.168.100.1. I started plotting graphs of Power Level, and Signal/Noise ratio using rrdtool. I was hoping to find a correlation between the disconnects and these values. Today I was looking at the graphs and noticed a strange boost in the upstream power level:

I’m not sure what these values mean, but I would think that higher is better. I didn’t notice any disconnects during the period of improved upstream power level. Anyone know what these values mean?

This past month has been a little crazy, and the bloging has suffered. I imagine most of you all understand. Let me tell you though, that I’m coming back with a vengence. Expect to find a load of upcoming posts on a new PC Build, some IT frustrations, and a bathroom remodel. Till then, entertain yourselves with this:

Chuck Norris Jokes

So funny, and so true.

Today I had to set up a Treo 650 to access a user’s Exchange mailbox over the web. I did not imagine it would be as difficult as it turned out to be.

At this site we run a Linux router/firewall that handles all traffic coming into, and leaving the network. We use Apache’s mod_proxy to proxy web connections from the internet to IIS servers on the private network. Having had more than a couple 36+ hour days cleaning up viruses due to exploited IIS servers, I feel much more comfortable having Apache handle the web requests.

One of the “Gotcha’s” to using mod_proxy is that you have to disable “Integrated Windows Authentication” on any sites you proxy with Apache. Apache doesn’t understand the headers involved. No big deal, because these requests are typically coming from the internet over SSL.

I started the setup at about 12:00 noon today. The first thing I did was add the following bits of code to the Apache configuration file to Proxy the ActiveSync connections:

#ActiveSync
ProxyPass /Microsoft-Server-ActiveSync https://webmail.example.com/Microsoft-Server-ActiveSync
ProxyPassReverse /Microsoft-Server-ActiveSync https://webmail.example.com/Microsoft-Server-ActiveSync

I then put the appropriate settings into the Treo, and tested connectivity. This is where things started to piss me off.

The software on the Treo has terrible, non-intuitive error codes. The documentation is even worse. This is what I discovered (over about 4 hours of trying to get it to work):

• For the ProxyPass directives to work, you can not use Integrated Windows Authentication on the IIS site.
• For the Treo VersaMail app to use Exchange ActiveSync it must use kerberos authentication, which requires enabling Integrated Windows Authentication.
• Palm’s software engineers don’t really give a shit whether the error message you get is in any way helpful, just as long as you understand it’s not working.

So the thing that sucks about this is that we run “stuff” on the gateway which requires us to use Apache on Linux. It provides remote access for employees through a web interface, and dynamically modifies iptables firewall rules when folks need access.

This was my fix, which I think is as good of a fix as is possible.

• Exported the IIS web site that handled OWA, OMA, and ActiveSync to a file.
• Created a new web site from the exported file.
• Changed the TCP ports for HTTP and HTTPS to obscure, high ports.
• Modified the document root on the IIS site, as all the magic happens in Virtual Directories.
• Requested/Installed a new SSL certificate from an internal enterprise CA with a common name matching the internet FQDN.
• Enabled “Integrated Windows Authentication” on the “Exchange” virtual directory in this new web site.
• Forwarded the obscure, high SSL port from the firewall into the Exchange server.

Now the Treo works… just had to set the obscure high port in the advanced settings on the Treo. I didn’t want to go down the forwarded port road, because it seems like a compromise in security. All too often I see people bypass security measures in order to get things to work, and I hate it. This seems like a small compromise I’ll have to settle for.

Got a better solution? Let me know.

-Chris

It’s Sunday night and we’re back in Boise. McCall was really nice, even though it was a bit chilly at times. Paula & Kairi went up to McCall with Paula’s parents last Monday… and I joined them Wednesday afternoon. I took three days of vacation from work and it felt really nice. My boss insisted that I leave my cell phone and laptop in Boise to make sure I had a true vacation. Last year at this time I kept my laptop on a constant VPN connection to the office to monitor email and stay in touch. This year I cheated once and checked my email Thursday night.

It’s funny… I need an internet connection to stay sane. If I’m without internet access it feels like being without electricity. I use the internet for everything. I haven’t opened a phone book in probably 4 years, when my cable internet access was down and I needed the number to call the cable company. I order pizza online, bank online, shop online, pay bills online, get movies, books, and software online. For better or worse I need internet access, and it has to be fast.

I saw a job posting for an IT position at the Tamarack Resort in Donnelly Idaho and just about sent a resume over. Then I thought about how internet access in Donnelly would probably be. I’m thinking slow, with frequent outages. I couldn’t handle that. It would kill me.

So, we’re back in Boise. As much as I’m not looking forward to going in to the office in the morning, it was great to get home to my cable modem. Downloaded a movie to watch tonight… transferred a full DVD in 4 hours. If you haven’t seen Failure to Launch, I recommend it. It wasn’t the typical Matthew McConaughey chick flick. It got terrible reviews, but I really enjoyed it.

Anyhow… I guess I’m rambling at this point, better go unpack

Today everyone has been going on and on about the potential evil activities which will undoubtably occur today. TODAY IS NOT 6/6/6. Today is 6/6/2006. Get your head out of the book of Revelations long enough to realize today is just another day.

Anyone who tells you that today is 6/6/6 is a liar, and you can tell them I told you that. It was that kind of thinking that got us in to the whole Y2K mess.

Discuss.