DSL down and out

My DSL line went out today around 10:30 CST. I called BellSouth, or “The new AT&T”, to find out what the problem was. The nice automated voice told me there was a network outage. The expected repair was to be 3:34 p.m. (specific enough?).

Move forward to 4 p.m. and I still didn’t have a connection. Another call to AT&T gave a new repair time. The new repair time was 10:37 p.m.! What the…..

Obviously, by my post time, you can see the tubes got reconnected before 10:37 p.m. To bad you can’t find out the specifics of what happened. “Uh, yeah, Earl went down to the substation and a bird done gone and built a nest in thar. He went to swat it out and danged if he didn’t knock a circuit out and broke it.”

17.May.07 Internet Comment (1)

Surfing with DSL

My DSL modem arrived the other day. According to the BellSouth tech that attached my phone line, I had a perfect signal for the 6 Mb service. He wasn’t kidding. I’m actually getting speed test results of 6.5 Mb.

There is one problem with the setup. I have the single computer Westell modem. I requested that one instead of the home networking model (4 port, wireless). The problem comes into play when I set the DSL modem to bridge mode and connect it to the router (Linksys BEFSX41). My download speed drops to 3.2 Mb consistently. The upload speed is still around 512 Kb.

I tried resetting the Linksys router to factory default but that didn’t help. I also tried setting the DSL modem back to PPPoE and enabling IP Passthrough to the router. It still would top out at 3.2 Mb. That is weird because the router has a throughput rating of over 30 Mb.

For now, I have the DSL modem in PPPoE mode connected to a 5-port Netgear 10/100 switch. Everything is just running to the switch until I can find out why the router cuts the download speed.

One of the problems I have with using the DSL modem’s built in routing feature is the port forwarding. You have to setup a NAT service for each forwarded port or range. That’s fine but when you enable the service a pop-up with two buttons, OK and Cancel, comes up. If you hit OK, that allows you to set an incoming NAT. If you hit Cancel, that only sets up an outgoing NAT. Why not just mark the buttons Incoming and Outgoing? Better yet, why not just have a separate page for incoming/outgoing NATs?

Minor things aside, the service is working great. I’m now just waiting on Dish Network to show up and I can cancel all my Charter services.

A wise man learns by the mistakes of others, a fool by his own. - Latin Proverb

07.Mar.07 Hardware, Internet Comments (3)

We know where you are

One of the projects I’m helping on is a web based work order system. The site won’t just log work orders. It will also keep track of inventory as well as time sheets. Everything is being written in ASP using a Microsoft SQL Server 2005 backend. Because of my (lack of) knowledge of ASP, I’m only working on the SQL portion.

The IP address for the PC the person is connected from is being logged whenever they clock-in and clock-out. The request was made to be able to click the IP address in the report and see if the person was actually at the location they picked from the drop down menu. That would require the IP ranges of each location to be stored in the SQL database.

To accomplish the task, I created a table in the database that holds the following information:

• Location ID (there’s already a location table)
• IP Range Start (e.g. 10.0.10.1) - stored as varchar(15)
• IPRange End (e.g. 10.0.13.255) - stored as varchar(15)

Every location has at least 4 subnets hence the third octet of the end IP being higher than the start IP.

It should be noted that a more efficient way of storing IP’s is storing each octect as a tinyint instead of storing the entire IP address as varchar(15). This helps in the storage size of the table in which the IP’s are being stored. Since this particular table is not holding many IP ranges, the storage size of the table doesn’t really matter.

The next step was to create a SQL table function that would pull the third octet from the IP being passed from the workstation, find it within the IP ranges and return the location data. I did this by using the parsename function. The function I created compares the third octet from the IP address being passed from the workstation to the third octet in the start and end IP’s. I only have to compare the third because the first two, 10.0, is always the same. The table function I created can be viewed here. An explanation of how the function works is included.

The web developer will probably start using the function in order to automatically set the location instead of the user choosing a location. This would simplify the clock-in/out process. For now, we’re just going to use it as a check up to see if they really were where they said they were.

We never really grow up, we only learn how to act in public. - Bryan White

12.Feb.07 Microsoft SQL, Web Apps Comments (0)

Removing password change ability in Psiphon

I downloaded Psiphon, the web based proxy I wrote about yesterday, in order to try it out. One thing I noticed off the bat was that the user(s) have the ability to change their passwords.

You can’t disable that in the Psiphon program so what happens if you want all users to use the same login? If one person changes the password, and doesn’t tell anyone, everyone else will be locked out until you change the password back.

The following steps are how you can prevent users from changing the password in the Windows version:

• Browse to C:\Program Files\CitizenLab\psiphon\html.
• Open the directory pertaining to your language settings (en for this example).
• Edit all files that begin with login in your editor of choice. Notepad will work fine.
• Delete or comment out the following line:
  
Click here to change your password

• Move or delete all files that start with reset.
• Repeat the above steps in the other language directories.

If you add languages in the future, you will need to edit the files for that language.

02.Dec.06 Web Apps Comments (0)

Psiphon is here

A new web based proxy has been released by CitizenLab that makes it easier to bypass restrictive web filters in countries like China. The program is called Psiphon and here is how it works.

• Psiphon is installed on a host computer located in a country that does not censor the Internet.
• The psiphonode administrator forwards port 443* (HTTPS) on their router to the psiphonode IP.
• A user, psiphonite, in a country that censors the Internet connects to the psiphonode through a web browser using https://yourip or https://yoursitename if the psiphonode admin uses a service like DynDNS.
• The psiphonite must accept a security certificate in order to connect to the psiphonode.
• The psiphonite then sees a login page and logs in using the username/password provided by the psiphonode admin.
• After successful login, the psiphonite sees a web page with a toolbar at the top. The toolbar is where they will type in the address for the site they wish to visit.
• Web pages are served to the psiphonite from the psiphonode. As long as the psiphonode is not blocked, the psiphonite can view previously blocked sites (e.g. Wikipedia).

All traffic between the psiphonite and psiphonode is encrypted. This does not mean that information passed through the psiphonode is anonymous. Psiphonode admins can monitor the traffic passing through the node.

Psiphon is a decentralized system. That means that psiphonodes do not communicate with each other nor do psiphonites need to connect to the main Psiphon web site. That also means you can’t take the login for one psiphonode and connect to another psiphonode. You must be invited to use the psiphonode by the psiphonode admin.

Psiphon is free and open source. Currently, only a Windows installer is available. Mac and Linux ports are in the works.

To see how it works from a psiphonite point of view, click here.

*Psiphonode admins can change the port number. 443 is the default.

01.Dec.06 Web Apps Comments (2)