How I un-bottlenecked my network

Sooooo...... I have an old wrt 54g wireless router that can do the 54mbps wifi stuff, and has a 4 port 100-base T switch builtin. I just upgraded my internet connection to some sweet comcast, and I was getting some surprisingly slow download.

Initially my speedtest.net test that I ran earlier in the day topped out at about 28Mbps (I must have not been going through the wifi router for the initial speed tests), which pleased me because the old centurylink was giving me about 3. Hours later I started doing a steam download which was topping out at about 1.4MB/s (multiply by 8 and it's about 11.2 Mbps) which was unimpressive. Then my iTunes download was being slow too, my windoze performance manager said I was pulling about 5 Mbps.... which seemed way off. Time to troubleshoot.

My setup was Comcast modem -> WRT54g -> gigabit switch -> computers. No biggie right, since the WRT54g has a 100-base T connection right? Plus it's already where it is, and moving it would be annoying.

Well, did some googling on "wrt 54g switching speed" (since it's a switch and not a hub, and hubs would be really sad). So anyway, some people were saying their wrt 54g tops out at about a combined 13mbps, which is really really sad.

Anyway, bypassed the WRT54g and went straight to the gigabit -> computers, and my "3 hour" download dropped down to 9 minutes, and network performance says 30Mbps, which I'm a lot happier with. Going to Tee the wifi off the gigabit router so the wifi people can go be slow together. Funny thing is I always had wondered why advertised 54Mbps wifi was only getting about 20% usage.... guess the wrt54g internals are only intended to be used with the 11Mbps older wifi and it got some new protocols it can't really handle. I may or may not care enough to replace it, but anyway, was a maddeningly insightful night.

Wired still better than wireless?

At some point in the past 5-9 years or so, I decided wireless wasn't so bad and it must be improving with age. I forgot that I used to despise wireless, somewhat because I'm elitist but also because having a cable solves some security issues inherently.

Well, at night my connection started just getting unusable. This started happening about 3 months ago. My new computer with the USB dongle wifi connector was much worse than my previous computer that had a PCI card wifi NIC. So I got suspicious, and started doing ping tests.

My two computers would periodically drop packets, but would alternate between about 45-60 ms latency to my local router would drop down to 5-10 latency, then skyrocket up to 500, etc. My USB-dongle machine worse than my PCI-nic machine, but some evenings it would be unusable. The next morning it would be fine, consistently. In the past, I've run into issues with my ISP getting overloaded at night and having to call them to get me a better connection, so I plugged a cable into my router.

My laptop on a wired connection got a solid 1-2 ms latency to my router.... what a difference. I tried pings to google and compared it against my wifi connection, and the cable was getting ~35ms where the wifi was 80-150ish.

So, I got googling. I found http://www.inssider.com/ and did a scan on my neighborhood. Found that as long as people use channels 1, 6, and 11, three networks can coexist. Well, the first day I switched my channel to 11 and sailed smooth. But then the neighbor's networks "intelligently" would change channels periodically, and the airspace would get saturated and everything would die again.

So, do I look into wireless AC, buy new NICs for all my machines, deal with ACs less capability to go through solid objects? Or do I just buy a long cable and run it from my router to a switch by my devices (3 computers, apple tv)? I also had to consider that the wife would think running a cord is "ugly", since I did this once before and she wasn't a fan.

A quick trip to the store showed that a wireless AC setup would probably cost me 200-500 depending on how fancy of router I want to buy, since the "shotgun" technology lets a single network hog up a bunch of channels at once. This doesn't really make me feel much better, since my neighbors probably all have these too and are already saturating the airspace.

So looking at Best Buy and the local Wal-Mart, I can pay $30 or $50 (I forget exactly now) for a 50' ethernet cable. Checking Wal-mart.com shows a price of $10, but then I'd have to pay shipping. Do they really expect me to pay over triple the price just for the "convenience" of driving to the store and getting it now?

Anyway, after consulting with the boss we both think spending $8 on a cable is better than 200-500 for a wireless setup that wouldn't be as good anyway, so I get the green light to buy a cable. Well, I order the $8 version off amazon so I can get free shipping and get a few other things for free (like a copy of the Numenera Roleplaying system, which I didn't have yet) if I can only be patient for a few days (Ended up borrowing a couple cables from people at work to get through the week).

All I can say, is totally converted. I can play League of Legends again whenever I want to and have the time, and also my movies stream to my apple TV at ~80mb/sec and don't clog up our wireless network for 5 minutes while buffering. So basically, totally win-win situation. Also my download speed is about 50% faster, I'm getting up to 1.8MB/sec sometimes (usually 1MBish) where before I would cap out at around 800KB/sec.

So ya... sometimes old technology is just better. Plus wired internet can do full-duplex, so it's faster even if you don't have wifi hogs living nearby.

Windows 8.1 review

So, windows 8.1 was supposed to be this giant success because it brought back the start menu. But no, they brought back the start button, not menu. They added a stupid button to take us back to that useless start screen? It's a slap in the face to be treated like a mouth breather who saves all their crap to the desktop. Please.

Will 8.2 bring back the start menu, or is this just me being forced to Linux? I'm only waiting for all my software to be Linux and I'm gone.

Rating = 0/10

Update: Ended up reverting back to windows 8.0 due to weird mouse-input lag bugs. Apparently in making certain things work better for tablets, stuff was broken in the process for regular computers. I'd give 8.1 a -5/10 rating.

Dual-booting part two

So you know how I fought with my two crappy USB wireless devices for ever? I found that the Netgear was having crappy performance in windows (had trouble with the driver) so I plugged in the smaller cisco device which is probably newer since it's smaller.

Well, I accidentally booted into ubuntu while leaving the previously not working in ubuntu cisco device, and the wireless is magically working now. So I'm completely boggled.

But anyway, in the evenings all three non-overlapping channels (1, 6, 11) get saturated to the point that I get massive packet loss. So I'm thinking of just running a wire now, since those are better anyway.

Update: Ran a wire. Much happier person now.

My take on the usefulness of time zones

Slashdot had this discussion two years ago: http://ask.slashdot.org/story/11/08/27/1819203/ask-slashdot-could-we-deal-with-the-end-of-time-zones?sbsrc=thisday

Since I work at a company that is open 24 hours, and has international offices around the world, I may see this differently from some people. It seems that the most common argument for keeping time zones is that we still need to know when people's awake/sleep/available time are. At a company that is open all the time, with multiple locations, I find timezones only to be a hassle. I don't think there is much of a good reason to keep DST around except to complicate things, and for some people to opt-out of further, and for fun time-travel twice a year.

The only thing that really seems to be a true issue is that having the date change in the middle of the day kind of sucks. However, there are people on the graveyard shift where I work who start at approximately 10:00 p.m. and end at 6:00 a.m. the next day have to deal with it.

When working on my own local times, and thinking about what time people on the other side of the world work, I generally just memorize something like "Oh, Bob gets in at 5:00 and leaves at 1:00, and Mark works from 6:00 p.m. until whenever. I really don't care what time it is where Bob or Mark live, I just memorize a local time. It's a pain in the butt to memorize what days of the week people have off, and whether those days of the week are the same as mine, but in a 24/7 shop there will be someone else to work with those days anyway.

If we all used UTC or something, I would still memorize a number, but the number wouldn't arbitrarily change. And I wouldn't have to ask people what stupid time zone they are in. We could all just change our mail signatures or status messages to something like Bob - 13:00 - 21:00  Mark 3:00-11:00 and then people would know immediately when I'm working and contactable. It would be easy for someone to tell me when I can call them up, we wouldn't have to calculate off meaningless values that we can never remember anyway because of DST (but I don't think there's anyone who thinks DST is a good thing) which is extra confusion that doesn't help either method.

The complaint I have with using UTC is why should the folks in England get to use their current time? Seems a little unfair to me. I vote that whatever time zone I happen to be in right now (or ever) is the standard. I think to be fair, we need to pick a neutral place to be considered the "center of the world" or maybe use a completely new measurement system that doesn't favor any single location. How about epoch time http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epoch_time ? Can't get more arbitrary than that. Anyone know of a way of keeping time for the whole world at once (or, what about multiple worlds? What then?) that makes sense and doesn't play favorites to a single place? Maybe just make a 25 hour clock, since one of my professors one time said our bodies naturally fall into a 25 hour cycle, so everyone could take turns having noon be noon?

Update: Did some searches on "metric time". I decided it makes more sense to come up with arbitrary identifier names (which could easily be changed), but a day can stay the same.

1 day
10     ticks = 1 day (1 tick = 144 minutes )  (1 tick = 8640 sec)
100    Eep = 1 day   (1 eep = 14.4 minutes)   (1 eep = 864 sec)
1000   Creep = 1 day (1 creep = 1.44 minutes) (1 creep = 86.4 sec)
10000  Jig = 1 day   (1 jig = .144 minutes)   (1 jig = 8.64 sec)
100000 snap = 1 day  (1 snap = .0144 minutes) (1 snap = .864 sec)

Found this: http://www.metricclock.com/

Now to figure out how to divvy up a days. The restriction being ~365ish days is a year if we still care about revolutions around the sun, and the lunar cycle being approximately monthish.

Dual-booting Ubuntu and windows 8

So a couple weeks ago I snagged one of the extra drives out of my previous computer that my son mostly uses now (I had done a reinstall and didn't actually use the extra drive) and decided to dual boot into ubuntu on my new machine.

After figuring out that the old CD I had burned was a 32 bit version and I really wanted 64 bit ubuntu, I re-downloaded and reinstalled. Wireless support is always a challenge, and I just couldn't get Ubuntu to work with my (newish?) Cisco AE1000 (Ralink 3572). After a couple days of struggle I remembered I had another old device in my drawer - NetGear, Inc. WN111(v2) RangeMax Next Wireless (Atheros AR9170+AR9101). While the Ralink would almost pretend to work (it had actually worked on 32bit Ubuntu, and during the installation of 64bit, but after the "real" bootup it wouldn't fully initialize), Right when I plugged in the older Atheros, it immediately just "worked" out of the box.

So I eventually reboot into windows, and the Netgear/Atheros seems to have nonexistent support. Netgear has a driver on their website that seemed to almost work, and windows update teased me in that it found a driver, but wouldn't install. After a day or so of struggling I gave up and just decided to swap the USB devices depending on the OS I'm in, which is very annoying.

A couple weeks later, I'm so tired of it that I revisit the Atheros win7(8 actually) issue. I found the two same drivers as before, but also decided to look for a generic atheros driver from atheros. Well, it seems atheros got boughtout by Qualcomm who doesn't seem to care about the older stuff, but I found a random link that hopefully isn't malware. I guess I took a chance with it and just installed it, and my wireless works now! yay. I also uninstalled as many USB devices from device manager as I could as in the past having windows rediscover things does random fixes. Which makes me sad that my keyboards are all USB. My next purchase will definitely be ps2, since people finally realized it's the superior interface since if the hardware is right it can handle more than 6 keypresses at once.

Anyway here's that link: http://www.wireless-driver.com/atheros-usb-11n-wireless-win7-driver/ I might upload it to google drive too. I'll probably do that for now on, since searching for drivers after a reinstall is really annoying.

Tech support for kids

Today when I got home from work, my son came to me in distress letting me know that he can't attack in Guild Wars 2. "What do you mean?" I asked.

"When I push 1, I don't attack."

"Okay. Do any of the other keys work?"

"I don't know."

I press some keys, and they don't work.

"Did you unplug it and plug it back in?"

"no." (I unplug it and plug it back in, still doesn't work)

"Did you turn it off and on again?"

"no."

Of course, after that everything works.