Category: BroadBand


File Transfer

As i am writing this i am FTPing 3Gig of Video files from my cousins house (Watford) to my place (Gloucester) over the internet, he has a decent Cable connection so it should not take too long

certianly quicker than burning a DVD and getting TNT to delivery it !.!.!.! 🙂

BTW the video files are from my recent 40th birthday bash,

Back Home

Well it got to Friday (27th) and I’d had enough of the water shortage, so we dragged the caravan out and legged it to Somerset,

I have the lovely ability to work from anywhere i can get a good broadband internet connection.
Enter the Thorney Lakes Camp site which has FREE Wi-Fi, which based on my best guess is running at about 1.5M, Prefeck….
and that is not to mention WORKING toilets and showers

Spent All week there, i think i actually managed to get more done, than i would have in the office…

Flood, pestilence and technology

Well the UK has been hit by severe rainfalls again, resulting in massive flooding and a few unfortunate accidents

my cosy little home normally manages to escape the raging torrents of flood water. this time i get taken out by an indirect event. Between 19:25 and 20:30 last night most of Abbeymead in gloucester has no power. My UPS stayed up for 35 mins and then gave up, my friends UPS , (where my main internet connection comes in) lasted 45 minutes and then shut everything down !

so along come the power and everything starts to boot back up, when the firewall goes, kernal panic follwed by bad sector and then just to finish it off disk I/O error, and never worked again.
Out of all the things on my rather large home network to fail, it would the box with no regular backups or hot spare
Some mild panic ensued as all my SMTP emails and a few??business associates??fallback SMTP goes via this firewall !!!!!!!!!!!!

The firewall was, note the past tense, running smoothwall corp 3, with smoothhost , rule and guardian modules
corp 3 is over 3 years old, do i still have the media, do i have the licence key, do we have a spare HDD.

Fortunatly my slight over zealous, dont delete anything nature plumped up the software images, and the licence key
My friend the fitted a new hard disk, and installed the basic firewall software and connected it to our green network,

Then comes the fun part, re-config the beast, so working between trying to get the kids ready for school this morning, i managed to re-key all of the PAT and NAT forwarding rules , phew,

??NOTE to self for future reference, ??GHOST the disk , just in case

Playing the Marketing call centers at their own game

By adding a Linksys spa-3102 to my existing TRIXBOX iPBX which is have running under VMWare server on windows 2003, i am now able to route inbound call based on caller id or lack there of (or the number that was dialed if I add some free SIP trunks from sipgate) to any extention in the house or group, but even better a fully featured IVR, lets see how the marketing tossers like a bit of that

I just found this too Littlewoods bombards man by phone

Technology at its best

After much google,ing and faffing, i have managed to

  • get my SIP softphone (VOIP) to connect to my asterisk box at home with out the use of a VPN
  • Get RPC over HTTP email to work
  • setup WEBDAV over SSL access to my file server

So I no longer need the VPN to do normal networky stuff to home, the only reason i need the VPN now is to trick Sky Anytime into thinking I am in the UK, and that is only the gui client, the peer to peer service does not give a stuff, so once i have requested the video, i can drop the VPN !

I am Glad i am NOT paying to the t-mobile WiFi usage !!

Well, its me again, sat in my hotel room in Seattle

due ti the fact i have NO Sci-Fi channel on the TV in my room, I thought i woudl re visit Sky Anytime, formerly known as Sky by Broadband

I??dont really like it because it is a peer to peer system and therefore a bandwidth hogger (waster if you hav to pay for it)
but he i am deperate for some decent TV, non o fthe jerry springer format stuff, which is all yoiu sem to get on network TV in Seattle

Attempt 1, Based on you IP address you are not in the UK, SOD OFF
Attempt 2, VPN to home, sorted donload starts, but how slow, competrting for bandwitdh on the 256Kb/s side of the ADSL
Attempt 3, VPN to a mates office, he has 1.5 Meg SDSL??

SORTED, still slow, but at least i get to download and watch some decent TV

following on from the bloke in the UK getting a heavy fine for using a bit of free bandwidth

this seems a touch much
Singapore teen faces jail for ‘stealing’ neighbor’s wi-fi

Perhaps he should counter sue the wifi manufactures for shipping stuff that is open by default

??

??
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thought i would have another tinker

this time I noticed there Peer to Peer software is NOT nat aware

lots of conection attempts to private IP address’s

I have recently been called to a friends house to look at an issue with their broadband connection being very unreliable, dropping out etc.

Having been on site for an hour broadband seem to work fine, line stats were good etc etc,
and then the phone rang…. and the ADSL dropped
Hmmmmm. Faulty filter? I thought, Pull out a few cupboards to get to the phone socket
?

AARRGGHH !!!?

All of the Phones etc where plugged directly into the wall socket, the only thing connected to the filter was the USB modem !!!

Apparently they had SKY+ and SKY multiroom installed, and the so called “Engineer” had added some extra sockets etc and reconnected everything in the wrong order and in the process completely screwed the ADSL connection !

?

Sky by Broadband is stealing your bandwidth

Having registered my interest in SKY by broadband on the sky.com site I was dispointed to find out it had gone live on the BBC and not by en email from sky. So just installed Sky by Broadband, after having to down load the client at work becasue it refused to download from home.
That is hickup No.2
Two microsoft downloads and a SKY client update Later i am up and running, ISH…..
I had a nose around my system, to see what was going on and where the data was coming from, only to discover several TCP connections to Random broadband address’s in the UK my first thought was i had a virus, further investigation showed the culprit to be something called KSERVICE.EXE, which appear to be a P2P program used by SKY, over which i now have no control
After a bit of googleing I found this article which only goes to confirm my concerns What a complete pile of CRAP, not only do SKY have a legal monopoly on the delivery of a decent channel line up to my house, but now they are “stealing” my bandwidth and computer resources. That SUCKS !!

Another article on this matter is available here