I do indeed realize there are far worse things that could have happened to me, but the past couple of days have not been good. I am a technologist, and as such, I get very uneasy and tense when the technology I own fails.
It started out during experimentation with installing Xubuntu on a Pentium II (P-II) 450 machine. What I had completed earlier this week was to take apart a failed ATX-style power supply, unsolder all its output cables, take apart a Dell power supply (which has proprietary wiring of its 20P20C plug), desolder the proprietary and solder in the standard 20P19C plug. I don't care if I blow up this P-II-450 system, because it is one of the lowliest of capable systems I have here at home, and also a bit wonky at times. So it was the natural target for testing of my power supply unit (PSU) cable transplant job.
It turns out that the wiring job went well, no magic smoke or sparks were released for either the PSU or the computer. As just mentioned, it is a bit of a funky system, and with the transplant PSU, it seemed to want to boot off optical disk OK but not hard disk (HDD). With another supply I have, it didn't seem to want to boot off optical (got to a certain point in the Xubuntu 12.04 disc and rebooted) but the HDD seemed to operate, albeit with a bootloader installation error which I was trying to remedy (hence needed both drives to operate well). For whatever oddball reasons, a brand new PSU, less than one hour power on time, finally operated the computer, HDD, and CD OK. (Since then, the other PSUs seem to work too, don't know what changed other than all the unplugging/plugging.)
The first weirdness was this ancient Intel mainboard was complaining about being able to read the SPD (???) of the RAM I put into it (had 2 x 128M DIMMS, which I was replacing w/ 2 x 256M + 1 x 128M). So I puttered around with Google and Intel's legacy support site, and managed to make up a BIOS update floppy. After flashing, the SPD error did not go away, and (probably because of that) it will no longer "quick boot" (skip the RAM test), PLUS I haven't found a keystroke which will bypass the RAM test. It checks somewhere around 10-20 MB per second, so it takes the better part of a minute before it will boot anything (CD or HDD).
After getting a working Xubuntu 12.04 set up, I tried doing the in-place 14.04 upgrade. That worked kind of OK, except the X server would not run (log showed it was SIGSEGfaulting). MmmmmKay, maybe something did not work well during the upgrade, so let's try a straight 14.04 installation (which had to be done with the minimal CD, because the full disc is more than one CD-R, so must be USB or DVD). This implies installing almost everything over the Internet. This computer is so old it doesn't boot from USB, and I don't really have a spare DVD drive, so over the Internet it was. Unfortunately, it had the same result, the Xorg server would not stay running.
On one reboot while trying some fixes, the boot just froze. I found out this was due to not getting a DHCP address (network initialization). So I arose from my basement to find my Internet router (a P-II 350) locked solid. That fortunately rebooted OK. That prompted me to get a rudimentary daemon going to drive a watchdog timer card I had installed a few months ago after my previous router went splat.
After getting home from my volleyball match last night, I found myself able to log onto the router, but off the Internet. I rebooted, and I was back online. I may have been able to get away with ifdown eth3 && ifup eth3, but I didn't think of it at the time. I also reinstated the command to send an email when booting was complete.
I awoke this morning to see that sometime after 3am it had been rebooted, no doubt due to the watchdog timer card tagging the reset line. In retrospect, this is when the system gets really busy reindexing all pathnames for mlocate. I have since adjusted my daemon to call nice(-19) to give it the highest userland priority.
I had been watching the latest EEVBlog Fundamentals Friday on BJTs and MOSFETs when I tried to leave a comment. And YouTube's little "loading the comments" icon would not disappear and show me the comments (and the blank for another one). I found out the router was routing with whatever it had in RAM, but it was spewing oodles of disk access errors on the console. Presumably it needed something on disk in order to complete DNS recursion or something. I couldn't even log onto the router. I just had to "let it ride." It immediately made me very nervous, because so much I have relies on the functioning of that router: some public DNS zones, email, Google Voice VOIP, routing between my VLANs, DHCP, Hurricane Electric's 6in4 tunnel/radvd, and on and on. The worst of it is that static IPv4 addressing is horrendously expensive (Verizon (for FiOS) charges $20/month more than a DHCP account), and while TWC's leases are a week, Verizon's are a short TWO HOURS. So let's just say, there are a whole lot of little headaches strewn throughout the Internet which require attention when my IPv4 address changes. So being inaccessible more than 2 hours could add insult to injury.
Needless to say, instead of looking forward to some YouTube watching and Google+ reading, immediately the character of the day changed radically. It was "beat the clock" time, with finding a replacement computer to use for the router, installing sufficient RAM and HDD in it, and restoring something bootable from backups. There was no easy way to see if dhclient was continuing to renew the lease for "my" IPv4 address (as it would be tryiing to write a renew notice to the syslog, which would be likely failing badly). My nerves were frazzled, my hands shaking. I kept on thinking, got to follow the attitude, stay as calm as possible under the circumstances, just work the problem one step at a time as the step arises.
Thinking that I might have to replace the whole computer, I screwed a spare 20GB HDD into computer. Later through the process, I thought it better to at least try removing the current HDD and substituting a rewritten from backup one (I thought, great, wasted time getting back online). So I booted an Ubuntu 12.04 Rescue Remix CD, laid out partitions, formatted, mounted them up into one neat tree under /mnt/rootin ("rootin" is the router's name), used rsync to copy from the backup USB disk onto this new disk (which took about 30 minutes), and do grub-install to make the disk bootable. On reboot, the kernel panicked because it cannot find init. Reading back in the kernel messages a little further, the root filesystem could not be mounted because that particular kernel could not handle the inode size chosen by the mke2fs on the Rescue Remix. ARGHH!! that was the better part of an hour basically wasted.
So I dug out the CD which I used to build the router initially, booting from it into rescue mode. I used its mke2fs all over again (wiping out my restore). Rebooted to the Rescue Remix, rsync, grub-install, reboot. This time, it worked OK, at least in single user mode. Things were looking up for the first time in two hours or so.
To add to my already frazzled nerves during this, when trying to switch from one computer to another with my KVM switch, my CRT would only display black. Humf. Suspecting this was the KVM switch's fault because it had been operating so long, I switched it off then on...no effect. For positions where I expected power-saving mode, the monitor's LED was orange, for those where I expected a picture, green, but still no picture on the tube. Indeed I do have another CRT in the basement, but it's a 19" whereas the one which was wonky this morning is a 22", so quite a visual advantage. Thankfully it wasn't totally dead, I powercycled the monitor, and it was better.
I decided I would give it one more try though. I tried Ctrl-Alt-Del on the router's console. That did not go well. It immediately started spewing more disk access errors on the console (could not write this, bad sector read that, a technician's horror show). As this kernel has neither APM nor ACPI support, hitting the power button brought it down HARD. When turning it on, I expected POST would not even recognize the disk. Surprisingly though, it booted OK.
But here are the things I'm thinking about as this incident winds down. One, I wish I did not get so worked up about these technical failures. For me, email would stop (but it would presumably queue up at its sources), and a bunch of conveniences would be inaccessible. I can't seem to put it into perspective. Wouldn't it be a lot more terrible if I were in parts of TX (floods) or Syria (ISIL)? Two, at least now I have a disk which I can fairly easily put into the existing router should its disk decide to go splat for good (such as won't even pass POST). Three, at least I have a fairly complete checklist for IPv4 address changes, I just have to calm down and execute each step. Four, I have some new practical recovery experience for my environment. In theory, that SHOULD help calm my nerves...but I can't seem to shake that feeling of dread when things go wrong. I know it's no fun being in the middle of being down, but I wish I could calm down when this sort of thing happens. Heck...I get nervous at the thought of just rebooting ANY of the computers in my environment. I would guess what tweaks me the most is not knowing what the effort will be to restore normal operation.
I think what I really need is a complete migration plan as much away from in-home solutions as I can manage. That way when stuff fails at home, there is less to lose. But that's going to cost at least some money, for example for a VPS somewhere. Sigh.
Direct all comments to Google+, preferably under the post about this blog entry.
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03 June, 2015
13 May, 2015
This is Why I Hate Being in IT Sometimes
I had multiple "WHAT THE??!!..." moments today. I noticed that one of my internal hosts was attempting to connect to my router (which runs Sendmail) via its ULA and getting "connection refused." All right...that should be a fairly easy optimization, just add another DAEMON_OPTIONS stanza to sendmail.mc, redo the M4 (with make(1)), restart the daemon, and Bob's your uncle. WELLLLLLL....not quite.
After doing that, I got the following failure on startup:
Believe me, this is one of the worst IT positions to be in, when backing out a change still results in a failure. I even started going to my backups to fish out the previous sendmail.cf. But then I thought, no, that's no help, it should be the same as that generated by the co of sendmail.mc, that's very unlikely to help any; no need to keep plugging in the USB HDD. But this is where the better IT people, hopefully myself counted in that, get the job done. Just to get "back on the air," I went into sendmail.cf directly, put a hashmark before the DaemonOptions line with address family inet6, and restarted Sendmail. Pfew! At least that worked; the daemon stayed runnning.
"OKOKOK...so what do I know?" I naturally asked myself. The error is "address in use." For Sendmail, what causes an address to be in use? Well, that'd be any DaemonOptions lines in sendmail.cf, which are generated from DAEMON_OPTIONS lines in sendmail.mc. So, next step, find all the non-commented-out DAEMON_OPTIONS lines in sendmail.mc (with grep) and go through them one by one to see if the same address shows up for more than one line. Well...there was only one line, quite on purpose, whose daemon label is "mainv6MTA" (remember, from the error message), and that is for mail.philipps.us. OKey dokey, so what is the address of mail.philipps.us?
At some time between when Sendmail had been started last and today, I did indeed manage to remove the AAAA record for "mail.philipps.us." And now I know why. As I have recently (well, back in 2015-Mar) changed ISPs, and therefore the IPv4 address I was using, I rejiggered the philipps.us zone file so that a.) I could make updates of the zone programmatic when the IPv4 address changes, and b.) it preserves the plain text zone file, with comments and such, so that precludes using a dynamic zone and updating with nsupdate. I implemented this well after changing address space, so Sendmail continued to run just fine. The implementation I chose was to $INCLUDE a separate zone file piece which is generated out of the DHCP client scripting using a template file (I get an address to use via DHCP). Sure, there was a comment in the zone file that "mail" had been moved to an $INCLUDE file, but what I failed to realize at the time was, right below what I had commented out was an IPv6 address for "mail.philipps.us!" But for compactness and less typing, I omitted the name, as is common in zone files.
became
So while doing this refactoring, I removed the A line, because it would be "covered" in the $INCLUDEd file. But of course, this "continuation" line took on the name of whatever was before the now-commented-out A record. So I had effectively obliterated the AAAA record for mail.philipps.us. Ouch.
Let's review though. The error was "cannot bind: Address already in use." It is, unfortunately, one of those bogus, red herring errors. For this particular build of Sendmail, instead of reporting the referral response for the inet6 lookup (and therefore lack of AAAA record), it (probably) used whatever garbage was in the IP address variable it uses. Chances are that was initialized to all binary zeroes, which is the address used for the wildcard address. I think at least on the kernel implementation I have on my router/Sendmail host, it would count IPv4 addresses used under that wildcard, by matching any ::ffff:w.x.y.z addresses to which I had already bound.
I really hate it when things don't work like they're supposed to work. But indeed this time it was due to my own doing, just that it was a few weeks ago. This is the sort of thing that really drives me batty about being in IT though, when reverting doesn't work.
Please direct all comments to Google+, preferably under the post about this blog entry.
English is a difficult enough language to interpret correctly when its rules are followed, let alone when the speaker or writer chooses not to follow those rules.
"Jeopardy!" replies and randomcaps really suck!
Please join one of the fastest growing social networks, Google+!
After doing that, I got the following failure on startup:
NOQUEUE: SYSERR(root): opendaemonsocket: daemon mainv6MTA: cannot bind: Address already in useHuh? NOW WHAT?????!!!! OKOKOK...so this should be simple, just back out the change. After all, I am using RCS for my sendmail.mc file, I should just check out (co) the revision of the file prior to adding the additional address to which to bind, run "make" for a new sendmail.cf, restart Sendmail. NoNoNo...some days in IT, it's never that easy. I still got the same error about the address being in use. I used "netstat -tlnp" (TCP listeners, no DNS lookup (numeric output), and show the process associated with that socket) and saw there was nothing listening on TCP port 25...another "WHAT THE...!!!!" moment.
Believe me, this is one of the worst IT positions to be in, when backing out a change still results in a failure. I even started going to my backups to fish out the previous sendmail.cf. But then I thought, no, that's no help, it should be the same as that generated by the co of sendmail.mc, that's very unlikely to help any; no need to keep plugging in the USB HDD. But this is where the better IT people, hopefully myself counted in that, get the job done. Just to get "back on the air," I went into sendmail.cf directly, put a hashmark before the DaemonOptions line with address family inet6, and restarted Sendmail. Pfew! At least that worked; the daemon stayed runnning.
"OKOKOK...so what do I know?" I naturally asked myself. The error is "address in use." For Sendmail, what causes an address to be in use? Well, that'd be any DaemonOptions lines in sendmail.cf, which are generated from DAEMON_OPTIONS lines in sendmail.mc. So, next step, find all the non-commented-out DAEMON_OPTIONS lines in sendmail.mc (with grep) and go through them one by one to see if the same address shows up for more than one line. Well...there was only one line, quite on purpose, whose daemon label is "mainv6MTA" (remember, from the error message), and that is for mail.philipps.us. OKey dokey, so what is the address of mail.philipps.us?
host mail.philipps.usThis of course triggers another "WHAT THE...!!!!" moment. How the frak did my AAAA record get deleted?? It turns out the actual reason was relatively simple.
(returns just my DHCP IPv4 address. Ummmm...)
host -t aaaa mail.philipps.us
mail.philipps.us has no AAAA record
At some time between when Sendmail had been started last and today, I did indeed manage to remove the AAAA record for "mail.philipps.us." And now I know why. As I have recently (well, back in 2015-Mar) changed ISPs, and therefore the IPv4 address I was using, I rejiggered the philipps.us zone file so that a.) I could make updates of the zone programmatic when the IPv4 address changes, and b.) it preserves the plain text zone file, with comments and such, so that precludes using a dynamic zone and updating with nsupdate. I implemented this well after changing address space, so Sendmail continued to run just fine. The implementation I chose was to $INCLUDE a separate zone file piece which is generated out of the DHCP client scripting using a template file (I get an address to use via DHCP). Sure, there was a comment in the zone file that "mail" had been moved to an $INCLUDE file, but what I failed to realize at the time was, right below what I had commented out was an IPv6 address for "mail.philipps.us!" But for compactness and less typing, I omitted the name, as is common in zone files.
mail 300 IN A 192.0.2.112
300 IN AAAA 2001:DB8:2001:2010::112
became
;;; moved to $INCLUDE file
;;; mail 300 IN A 192.0.2.112
300 IN AAAA 2001:DB8:2001:2010::112
So while doing this refactoring, I removed the A line, because it would be "covered" in the $INCLUDEd file. But of course, this "continuation" line took on the name of whatever was before the now-commented-out A record. So I had effectively obliterated the AAAA record for mail.philipps.us. Ouch.
Let's review though. The error was "cannot bind: Address already in use." It is, unfortunately, one of those bogus, red herring errors. For this particular build of Sendmail, instead of reporting the referral response for the inet6 lookup (and therefore lack of AAAA record), it (probably) used whatever garbage was in the IP address variable it uses. Chances are that was initialized to all binary zeroes, which is the address used for the wildcard address. I think at least on the kernel implementation I have on my router/Sendmail host, it would count IPv4 addresses used under that wildcard, by matching any ::ffff:w.x.y.z addresses to which I had already bound.
I really hate it when things don't work like they're supposed to work. But indeed this time it was due to my own doing, just that it was a few weeks ago. This is the sort of thing that really drives me batty about being in IT though, when reverting doesn't work.
Please direct all comments to Google+, preferably under the post about this blog entry.
English is a difficult enough language to interpret correctly when its rules are followed, let alone when the speaker or writer chooses not to follow those rules.
"Jeopardy!" replies and randomcaps really suck!
Please join one of the fastest growing social networks, Google+!
16 April, 2015
When Police Officer Reality Meets Public Perception
A lot is being made of this video, especially on local talk radio (WBEN ). Tom Bauerle in particular has explained in the monologue portion of today's show that there are reasons such maneuvers are done.
First, for an emergency vehicle, these things (surprisingly) are legal. (I thought that police were subject to the same laws as the citizenry, but this is obviously an exception.) The stated reason is that seconds may sometimes count, that parking someplace else in order to go into a restaurant for something to eat may introduce additional, arguably unnecessary, delays in responding. Explained this way, I think many if not most people would be OK with this.
But secondly, perception is reality. This is such a short clip and without much context, so it is tough to judge all of what's going on here. What Mr. Bauerle can't seem to get past (at least before I turned him off) is this simple adage. It is perceived that this officer is overstepping his authority, or at that very least unduly asserting his authority (as in, maybe holding to the letter of the law, but not the spirit). Ordinary, non-emergency folks a lot of times will do similar things, and think that by turning on their hazard flashers it somehow excuses the double parking. Mr. Bauerle calls this tone snarky; I see (hear) it more as incredulity. There was absolutely NO other place where these officers could have parked? It just seems unlikely. But again, this short video lacks that context. Considering how ordinarily the Buffalo PD are quite helpful and professional, I would guess it WAS the case that no other space was available. Plus, I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt in general.
But here's the thing...I know Tom has undergone police training, and seems thoroughly versed in V&T law, but he can't seem to back away from that today and view this like an average citizen, and see this as a (minor) abuse of authority. It's fairly obvious from this video (and how it has spread) that most folks are unaware of this exception in the law and the reasons for it. This is especially surprising to me because he is an ardent supporter of Amendments IV and V of the U.S. Constitution. In fact, he has recently spoken out about how the Erie County Sheriff's Office has used "stingray" devices to monitor cell phone activity, which to him (and me) is overstepping the bounds of Amendment IV. In principle, the perception is similar, officers of the law doing something they see as ordinary, crime-fighting procedures, but the citizens don't think of it that way.
Direct all comments to Google+, preferably under the post about this blog entry.
English is a difficult enough language to interpret correctly when its rules are followed, let alone when the speaker or writer chooses not to follow those rules.
"Jeopardy!" replies and randomcaps really suck!
Please join one of the fastest growing social networks, Google+!
13 March, 2015
Starting the Migration from Time Warner High Speed Internet to Verizon FiOS
(By the way...in the following, "TWC" means "Time Warner Cable," if you didn't already think of those letters that way.)
I think the scarier parts are done with as I post this. I was going to handle Verizon by simply creating another VLAN, but I discovered my particular router platform (a Dell OptiPlex GX1 350MHz Pentium II with some "ancient" NICs) did not support dhclient with VLANs. Whether this is a problem in the core kernel, the VLAN code, the NIC drivers, or dhclient, it's tough to say. Using tcpdump, I do see a DHCP server reply...so why this doesn't get back properly to dhclient, I don't know, and I don't much care. I solved it with hardware, by putting in another NIC.
Why scarey? The rational mind thinks, powering down a computer, partially disassembling it (OptiPlex GX1s have a riser card with the PCI slots (and ISA slots!)), adding the requisite hardware, reassembling it, and turning it back on should be normal, ordinary, and just work as expected. But of course the experienced person knows cables (e.g., IDE) get tugged, components get bumped (e.g. RAM modules), hard disks every once in a blue moon refuse to spin up or otherwise refuse to come online, and so on. This is why using a VLAN interface (e.g. eth2.105, for physical port eth2, VLAN 105...which is the ASCII code for "i", symbolic of "Internet'...I already have a 73/"I" VLAN for TWC) was preferable, because of very few if any hardware unknowns.
Complicating that was the fact that my systems room (a fancy name for what was no doubt intended by the house architect as a bedroom) does not have a whole lot of space, so the "home" for my capable but power-hungry desktop (a Dell Precision 670 which was given to me ) is on top of the router computer. That one would be expensive to replace if it got munged by moving it. The video board in it (a PCIe nVidia card) is a bit finnicky, and that was my worst worry; same concerns as twiddling with the router, of HDDs which had their last useful poweron cycle, mainboards getting flexed by the movement just enough to make them fail or become unreliable, etc. But as it turns out, I'm typing just fine on the '670 to write this post.
I know, I know...I probably sound like Boober Fraggle. But this is an unfortunate attitude which comes after years and years of experience with stuff failing for no apparent reason at all. In fact, my very first Linux router was a Dell Dimension XPS P75. One day, I did something with it, and it had to be powered down. It would not power back on. So thankfully that was as easy as taking the parts out of it and jamming them into a Dimension XPS P133. So not all was bad with that, I actually ended up with a faster router that day, so it could sustain more throughput (which was to be thrown at its way a couple of years later, from 640/90Kbps Verizon ADSL to 10/0.5Mbps Adelphia Power Link).
A certain amount of anxiety can be lessened by thinking of these things and devising, as best as you can, fallback positions or workarounds. For example, if putting the new NIC in somehow causes an electrical conflict (e.g., IRQ lines), chances are fairly good that if you just remove this NIC, things will go back to the way they were and you can figure out some other strategy (e.g., try a different NIC, or a different manufacturer's NIC). But of course, nothing like that is absolute. You may find out inserting that NIC caused a freeze, reset, kernel panic, or whatever, but in the process of removing it, you may have bumped the RAM, and now even with the NIC gone you're still down. Maybe you just go to the basement and get another computer, and try transplanting the NIC and hard disk. If the HDD fails, that's a whole new many hour kettle of fish, involving setting up a new one, restoring from backup, and such. To lessen stress/anxiety, it helps to have a copied and offline tested HDD, but that itself is a lot of work which may be totally unnecessary. (Yes, I have about a dozen old, old computers in my basement which serve terribly these days as a desktop but function just great as something like a router, or as a source of spare/repair parts.)
You might ask, "why the NIC?" That's because with most ISPs which use DHCP, the address you obtain is tied to the MAC address of the NIC which requested an IPv4 address. Not all NICs or NIC drivers support setting an arbitrary MAC address, especially older ones made before people thought of even doing such things. And if the MAC address changes, the IP address will change, and there will be a whole slew of other things scattered throughout the Internet which must be updated...DNS entries, tunnel endpoints which are administered/work by IP address, ACLs for various bits of software on the router, iptables(8) rules, DNS secondaries which must fetch my masters from a new address, and so on. So if things go as planned, none of that additional work (and accompanying stress) has to be done to be functional again. Hopefully if it's the computer dying, the HDD's and NIC's new home will "just work."
Mind you, at some point, the IP address changes will have to happen, it's just that again, there is the fallback position of "TWC still works with the current IPv4 address," and the IP address transition doesn't have to occur ASAP in order to have certain Internet stuff working...such as email.
The first go of it caused quite some tension in me because booting would hang at the eth1 (TWC) initialization. Oh, great, what now??? Was the new NIC interfering somehow, such as stealing an IRQ? Was it changing the device names so that eth1 was no longer TWC? Actually, it was a whole lot simpler. I thought I knew the color code of the Ethernet cables I used...yellow for Internet (WAN), other (in this case blue) for LAN. But as I'm staring into space contemplating what was wrong, my gaze was towards my switch. It is mounted (screwed) to the side of my desk, with two rows of ports running vertically. The top four ports are natively in VLAN 73. And as I'm thinking of how to diagnose what's going on, it dawned on me there is a blue cable in port 1/4 and a light gray cable in 1/1. Notice none of those is yellow. Ahhhh....LAN is plugged into WAN, and WAN is plugged into LAN. So trying to do DHCPDISCOVER or DHCPREQUEST on a network segment which has no (other) DHCP server is not going to work out well at all. (I say "other" because for that segment, the router itself is the DHCP server.)
So right now the new NIC is in, and in fact it's doing DHCP with Verizon instead of Verizon's supplied Actiontec router. Everything "critical" seems to be working: email, Google Voice, Web surfing, YouTube, etc. For some oddball reason, my Sipura SPA2000 wouldn't register with PBXes.org; I don't use it that much so I decided to drop that for now as it's not really critical. I have briefly changed the default route to point out the new FiOS NIC, and it tested at good speeds. I discovered that sometimes being dually homed like this causes some minor difficulties, such as somehow packets sneak out with the wrong source address, so NAT rules need to be added on each Internet interface which SNAT from the wrong to the right address. At least for residential class Internet service, reverse path filtering is in full force, and therefore asymmetric routing simply will not work. I cannot send a packet to Verizon with a TWC source address, nor vice versa. If this were perhaps a business account, I might be able to do that sort of thing "out of the box," or at least be able to correspond with network engineers at both ISPs to ask them to allow source addresses which I'm using from the "other" ISP.
UPDATE ON 15-Mar-2015: I left the SPA2000 ATA unplugged overnight. I basically think this was the SPA not sending stuff for many contiguous hours, and PBXes.org not sending any traffic responding to what the SPA was trying to do. Therefore Linux aged out the NAT entries after PBXes stopped sending stuff. So it will now function. I also turned off autoprovisioning via TFTP and connected it for a few minutes directly to TWC. Next I'll try turning autoprovisioning back on and see if it still will make/receive calls; I suspect that won't be detrimental, but we'll see.
I also might add I had my first "production" use of FiOS this morning. I had another Linux box set up as a router, and manually pointed my Nexus 7's default route to it so it would mainly use FiOS instead of TWC (I say "mainly" because other things like DNS will still use the old network path). Since the installation on Wednesday, really all I have done is speed tests at www.speedtest.net and DSLReports. But today my Titanium Backup backup weighed in at 272 MB, mainly because several large apps got updated (Google+, Angry Birds Rio, and some more). This would have likely taken the better part of an hour at the 1Mbps speed of TWC to sync to Google Drive. But with 25 symmetrical FiOS, it was only about 8 minutes. The speed was almost comparable to the rsync(1) of those files I do to a computer on the LAN!
Well, one of these days, I will finish the transition to FiOS. The whole goal was to get better Internet at less of a monthly price, and to disconnect TWC Internet (leaving just basic TV). We'll see how long this takes.
Direct all comments to Google+, preferably under the postabout this blog entry.
English is a difficult enough language to interpret correctly when its rules are followed, let alone when the speaker or writer chooses not to follow those rules.
"Jeopardy!" replies and randomcaps really suck!
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I think the scarier parts are done with as I post this. I was going to handle Verizon by simply creating another VLAN, but I discovered my particular router platform (a Dell OptiPlex GX1 350MHz Pentium II with some "ancient" NICs) did not support dhclient with VLANs. Whether this is a problem in the core kernel, the VLAN code, the NIC drivers, or dhclient, it's tough to say. Using tcpdump, I do see a DHCP server reply...so why this doesn't get back properly to dhclient, I don't know, and I don't much care. I solved it with hardware, by putting in another NIC.
Why scarey? The rational mind thinks, powering down a computer, partially disassembling it (OptiPlex GX1s have a riser card with the PCI slots (and ISA slots!)), adding the requisite hardware, reassembling it, and turning it back on should be normal, ordinary, and just work as expected. But of course the experienced person knows cables (e.g., IDE) get tugged, components get bumped (e.g. RAM modules), hard disks every once in a blue moon refuse to spin up or otherwise refuse to come online, and so on. This is why using a VLAN interface (e.g. eth2.105, for physical port eth2, VLAN 105...which is the ASCII code for "i", symbolic of "Internet'...I already have a 73/"I" VLAN for TWC) was preferable, because of very few if any hardware unknowns.
Complicating that was the fact that my systems room (a fancy name for what was no doubt intended by the house architect as a bedroom) does not have a whole lot of space, so the "home" for my capable but power-hungry desktop (a Dell Precision 670 which was given to me ) is on top of the router computer. That one would be expensive to replace if it got munged by moving it. The video board in it (a PCIe nVidia card) is a bit finnicky, and that was my worst worry; same concerns as twiddling with the router, of HDDs which had their last useful poweron cycle, mainboards getting flexed by the movement just enough to make them fail or become unreliable, etc. But as it turns out, I'm typing just fine on the '670 to write this post.
I know, I know...I probably sound like Boober Fraggle. But this is an unfortunate attitude which comes after years and years of experience with stuff failing for no apparent reason at all. In fact, my very first Linux router was a Dell Dimension XPS P75. One day, I did something with it, and it had to be powered down. It would not power back on. So thankfully that was as easy as taking the parts out of it and jamming them into a Dimension XPS P133. So not all was bad with that, I actually ended up with a faster router that day, so it could sustain more throughput (which was to be thrown at its way a couple of years later, from 640/90Kbps Verizon ADSL to 10/0.5Mbps Adelphia Power Link).
A certain amount of anxiety can be lessened by thinking of these things and devising, as best as you can, fallback positions or workarounds. For example, if putting the new NIC in somehow causes an electrical conflict (e.g., IRQ lines), chances are fairly good that if you just remove this NIC, things will go back to the way they were and you can figure out some other strategy (e.g., try a different NIC, or a different manufacturer's NIC). But of course, nothing like that is absolute. You may find out inserting that NIC caused a freeze, reset, kernel panic, or whatever, but in the process of removing it, you may have bumped the RAM, and now even with the NIC gone you're still down. Maybe you just go to the basement and get another computer, and try transplanting the NIC and hard disk. If the HDD fails, that's a whole new many hour kettle of fish, involving setting up a new one, restoring from backup, and such. To lessen stress/anxiety, it helps to have a copied and offline tested HDD, but that itself is a lot of work which may be totally unnecessary. (Yes, I have about a dozen old, old computers in my basement which serve terribly these days as a desktop but function just great as something like a router, or as a source of spare/repair parts.)
You might ask, "why the NIC?" That's because with most ISPs which use DHCP, the address you obtain is tied to the MAC address of the NIC which requested an IPv4 address. Not all NICs or NIC drivers support setting an arbitrary MAC address, especially older ones made before people thought of even doing such things. And if the MAC address changes, the IP address will change, and there will be a whole slew of other things scattered throughout the Internet which must be updated...DNS entries, tunnel endpoints which are administered/work by IP address, ACLs for various bits of software on the router, iptables(8) rules, DNS secondaries which must fetch my masters from a new address, and so on. So if things go as planned, none of that additional work (and accompanying stress) has to be done to be functional again. Hopefully if it's the computer dying, the HDD's and NIC's new home will "just work."
Mind you, at some point, the IP address changes will have to happen, it's just that again, there is the fallback position of "TWC still works with the current IPv4 address," and the IP address transition doesn't have to occur ASAP in order to have certain Internet stuff working...such as email.
The first go of it caused quite some tension in me because booting would hang at the eth1 (TWC) initialization. Oh, great, what now??? Was the new NIC interfering somehow, such as stealing an IRQ? Was it changing the device names so that eth1 was no longer TWC? Actually, it was a whole lot simpler. I thought I knew the color code of the Ethernet cables I used...yellow for Internet (WAN), other (in this case blue) for LAN. But as I'm staring into space contemplating what was wrong, my gaze was towards my switch. It is mounted (screwed) to the side of my desk, with two rows of ports running vertically. The top four ports are natively in VLAN 73. And as I'm thinking of how to diagnose what's going on, it dawned on me there is a blue cable in port 1/4 and a light gray cable in 1/1. Notice none of those is yellow. Ahhhh....LAN is plugged into WAN, and WAN is plugged into LAN. So trying to do DHCPDISCOVER or DHCPREQUEST on a network segment which has no (other) DHCP server is not going to work out well at all. (I say "other" because for that segment, the router itself is the DHCP server.)
So right now the new NIC is in, and in fact it's doing DHCP with Verizon instead of Verizon's supplied Actiontec router. Everything "critical" seems to be working: email, Google Voice, Web surfing, YouTube, etc. For some oddball reason, my Sipura SPA2000 wouldn't register with PBXes.org; I don't use it that much so I decided to drop that for now as it's not really critical. I have briefly changed the default route to point out the new FiOS NIC, and it tested at good speeds. I discovered that sometimes being dually homed like this causes some minor difficulties, such as somehow packets sneak out with the wrong source address, so NAT rules need to be added on each Internet interface which SNAT from the wrong to the right address. At least for residential class Internet service, reverse path filtering is in full force, and therefore asymmetric routing simply will not work. I cannot send a packet to Verizon with a TWC source address, nor vice versa. If this were perhaps a business account, I might be able to do that sort of thing "out of the box," or at least be able to correspond with network engineers at both ISPs to ask them to allow source addresses which I'm using from the "other" ISP.
UPDATE ON 15-Mar-2015: I left the SPA2000 ATA unplugged overnight. I basically think this was the SPA not sending stuff for many contiguous hours, and PBXes.org not sending any traffic responding to what the SPA was trying to do. Therefore Linux aged out the NAT entries after PBXes stopped sending stuff. So it will now function. I also turned off autoprovisioning via TFTP and connected it for a few minutes directly to TWC. Next I'll try turning autoprovisioning back on and see if it still will make/receive calls; I suspect that won't be detrimental, but we'll see.
I also might add I had my first "production" use of FiOS this morning. I had another Linux box set up as a router, and manually pointed my Nexus 7's default route to it so it would mainly use FiOS instead of TWC (I say "mainly" because other things like DNS will still use the old network path). Since the installation on Wednesday, really all I have done is speed tests at www.speedtest.net and DSLReports. But today my Titanium Backup backup weighed in at 272 MB, mainly because several large apps got updated (Google+, Angry Birds Rio, and some more). This would have likely taken the better part of an hour at the 1Mbps speed of TWC to sync to Google Drive. But with 25 symmetrical FiOS, it was only about 8 minutes. The speed was almost comparable to the rsync(1) of those files I do to a computer on the LAN!
Well, one of these days, I will finish the transition to FiOS. The whole goal was to get better Internet at less of a monthly price, and to disconnect TWC Internet (leaving just basic TV). We'll see how long this takes.
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25 February, 2015
'Net Neutrality MythBusting
Lately I've been hearing an awful lot of misinformation being bandied about in regards to 'Net Neutrality. I hope to bust wide open and dispel a few of these. Of course, I'm willing to listen to evidence which shows I am misinformed, but I have been involved professionally in tech for over 20 years, and have read up on certain sectors of tech outside of job-related work.
Just one small note before I begin: I have tried to get Blogger/Blogspot several times to make hyperlinked footnotes for me (using the HTML override editor), without much success. If I leave the fragment identifier alone and leave Blogger's "correction" of my hyperlink to the same document, clicking on it tries to bring the reader/surfer to an edit page for this post (and of course noone but myself can edit, so it errors). If I remove everything but the fragment identifier as many Web pages on the footnotes topic suggest, for some reason my browser won't follow them. I apologize for the inconvenience of the reader needing to scroll to near the end of the post in order to read the footnotes.
When people talk about "network throttling," (also called "traffic shaping") they are talking about classifying network traffic, either by protocol (such as TCP plus a port number), or by source or destination IP address, and programming one or more intervening routers to allow only some limited count of packets to pass through for some given amount of time (e.g., packets amounting to 200 kilobytes per second). The source (e.g. Netflix) compensates for this apparent lack of bandwidth by slowing down the rate at which it transmits those packets. Thus the viewing quality is downgraded by switching to a more highly compressed version of the video, and might also result in stutters and stops for rebuffering.
While a certain amount of this may be being done by some ISPs, current thinking is that this is unlikely. What is more likely happening is the incumbent ISPs are unwilling to increase interconnect capacity. If the current interconnects between Netflix's ISP(s) and the incumbents is run up to capacity, naturally no more streams of the same bitrate can be passed through. Everything must be slowed down.
The analogy of the Internet to pipes/plumbing is not too bad. If some pipe is engineered to deliver 600 liters per minute at 500 kilopascals, you can't just increase the pressure to try to stuff more water per minute through, the pipe will burst and would no longer be usable. One solution would be to install a similar capacity pipe in parallel with the original, thus increasing the effective cross sectional area of pipe, which would be analogous to installing another (fiber) link between routers. The other way of course is to increase the pipe diameter, which would correspond to using existing media such as fiber in a different way (such as using more simltaneous laser wavelengths or something).
As implied, incumbents such as Comcast, Time Warner (TWC), Cox, etc. have economic disincentives to upgrade their peering capacities with services which compete with their video services. So all they have to do is let existing links saturate with traffic, and it appears to the consumer like their streaming provider is being throttled. Those consumers are of course in no position to be able to investigate whether their streaming service (e.g. Netflix) is being traffic shaped or if peering points are being allowed to saturate. Only their incumbent's network engineers would have the access to the equipment and know-how to be able to answer that question accurately.
I personally cannot envision regulation which would likewise be able to discriminate between administrative traffic shaping and interconnect saturation. In my libertarian opinion, any attempt to do so would be government takeover of Internet service, because that would mandate how ISPs must allocate resources to run their core business. With government takeover would come government control, and this could quickly be used to suppress essential freedoms such as those expressed in Amendment I.
This one seems to be a favorite fear mongering tactic of Glenn Beck. Oh, believe me, I like Glenn (plus Pat and "Stu"), and agree with a lot of their views. But this one is so far out in Yankee Stadium left field that they'd be in the Atlantic Ocean. I understand the rough route how this conclusion could be reached.
The FCC required licensing of radio stations for very sound technical reasons. You just simply cannot rationally allow anyone to transmit on any frequency with any amount of power they can afford. He said at one time radio stations used to be akin to that, with people broadcasting to their neighborhoods. This will very quickly become untenable, with the next person claiming the freedom to do as they please with available spectrum, and trying to overpower their competition. It's simply not within the laws of radio physics to be able to operate that way. There needs to be some central authority to say you, you over there, you may transmit on this frequency with this modulation, this bandwidth (basically, modulating frequency or FM deviation), at this power, and you can be reasonably guaranteed you will have clear transmission of your content to this geographic region.
A weak analogy would be vehicular traffic. You simply cannot drive wherever you want, whenever you want, at whatever speed you want. You must drive on either your own property or established rights of way (roads, basically), yield to other traffic pursuant to law, and at speeds deemed safe by authorities (guided by engineers who designed the roadways). You also must prove competency with these precepts, plus physical ability, thus requiring licensure.
I didn't think I would hear it from radio veteran Rush Limbaugh, but as I was writing this (over a few days), I also heard him propose that the FCC might require licenses for Web sites to come online, comparing it to radio stations needing licensing. His thesis is that radio stations must prove to the FCC that they're serving the community in which they're broadcasting. That's true. Why would the FCC grant exclusive use of a channel1 to a station which wasn't broadcasting content in which the community was interested? It cannot allocate that channel to more than one transmitting entity.
Even reclassifying ISPs under Title II will do no such thing. Telephone companies have been regulated under Title II for a very long time, and have you ever heard of ANYONE suggesting needing a license to connect to the phone network?? NO, NEVER. Yes, it is true, for a long, long time, the Bell System insisted it was technically necessary to have only their own equipment connected to the network. This was modified eventually to type acceptance/certification.2 Still, it's an open, nonprejudicial process. If for some oddball reason the FCC suddenly decided to synthesize some objection to a device being attached to phone lines in some sort of effort to interfere in a company's commerce, the manufacturer could sue in court and plead their case that their device does indeed meet all technical requirements, and the FCC is merely being arbitrary. But the point is, this is not licensing individual users, only the manufacturers, and purely for technical reasons.
Times used to be that trunking between cities had a one-to-one correspondence between cable pairs and conversations. If we were alive back in the 1920 or so, if I wanted to talk from here in Cheektowaga, NY to my sister in Pasadena, TX, a pair of wires along the complete path from phone switch to phone switch along the way would have to be reserved for the duration of the conversation.
The first innovation was frequency division multiplexing (FDM). Phone conversations are limited from approximately 300 Hz to 3000 Hz response, which is quite adequate for speech. What you could do is carry several on modulated carriers, much like radio does, but closer to the audio spectrum, for example 10 KHz, 20 KHz, 30 KHz, etc. (not sure of the exact frequencies used).
Starting in the 1960s, after solid state computer technology was well developed, interconnections (trunking) between switching centers was upgraded from analog to digital. This is how the modern public switched telephone network (PSTN) works. Instead of transmitting voice or FDM voice on the links, the voice is digitized (analog to digital conversion, or ADC), and sent a sample at a time down the trunk, and interleaving several conversations digitally (time division multiplexing, or TDM).
Digitizing the phone system also had the benefit of getting rid of the mechanical switching. It used to be that when you dialled the phone, while the dial was returning to its "home" position, it would send a pulse down the line for each number it passed. So for example a 1 sent one pulse, 2 sent two pulses, and so on, with the exception of 0 which sent ten pulses. Every pulse would physically advance (step) a rotary switch, and the timeout between digits would pass the pulsing along to the next rotary switch. See Strowger switch and crossbar switch. With the advent of TDM, each subscriber could have a timeslot in their local switch, and each current conversation between switches (over trunks) could have a timeslot on the trunk. Instead of physically carrying voice around a switch, it was a matter of transferring data instead.
And then of course, there was the mentioned Touch-Tone (a trademark for the dual tone multiple frequency (DTMF) system). This meant instead of pulses stepping a mechanical switch of some kind, the subscriber's telephone would generate carefully engineered tones which would be detected by the central office (CO) switch, and use a computer program to collect those digits and figure out and allocate a route to the destination subscriber.
Of course, then there was the Bell System breakup in the 1980s. The effect of this was increased competition and therefore falling prices. I would think anyone old enough (I was born in 1965) remembers when it used to be quite expensive to call long distance, even as short a distance as here to Niagara Falls. Instead of a local call where someone could talk for as long as they'd like for one flat fee per month, it was charged on a per-minute basis, and the per-minute price varied based on load/demand, with daytime, evening, and overnight rates. So every once in a while, one would stay up late (past 11PM local time) to call the relatives who moved away (in my case, siblings who went to Texas, and a grandmother who lived in Closter, New Jersey). These days, due to a couple of decades of competition, long distance is included with most (although not all) flat rate priced telephone service.
Let's also not forget the development of mobile telephony. At first, it was only the very rich who had phones installed in their vehicles. Then a few decades later there were the pack phones which were a lot more affordable that I used to sell in the late eighties when I worked at Radio Shack. Then after that, there were the famous bricks. Then the mobile phone system itself was digitized, with CDMA and GSM. Then of course some of the CDMA and GSM bandwidth was dedicated to carrying arbitrary data, not just voice data. And these days, we have the next evolution in mobile communications, LTE.
So don't try to tell me there hasn't been innovation and improvement in decades. To a certain extent, even with the lack of competition before the 1980s breakup, improvements were slowly but surely made. Don't get me wrong, money was a large motivating factor (e.g., we can't charge for our long distance service because we don't have the capacity, people just won't buy it; so we have to innovate how we carry those conversations around in order to sell the service). But the key is competition since the breakup greatly accelerated innovation, because it was no longer a matter of the monopoly of getting around to it when the company felt like it, they have to innovate faster than the competition or they'll lose customers.
There is a concept of "settlement-free peering" in the ISP business. At least the current business model of ISPs is to charge to move octets from their customers to either another one of their customers or to one of their peers which services the customer on the other end of the communication. This is important and key; they charge for moving packets. Let's take two well-known ISPs to illustrate this, Verizon and Comcast. Hypothetically, Verizon could charge Comcast for all bytes delivered from Verizon's customers to Comcast, and for all bytes delivered from Comcast to Verizon's customers. But that could equally be said of Comcast; Comcast could charge for all bytes moved to/from Verizon to/from Comcast's customers. But that would be kind of silly to simply pass money back and forth, and it makes more economic and accounting sense simply to say, if you accept roughly the same amount of bytes as you give us, we'll call it a wash if you do the same, and we consider each other peers because of this.
Poor Cogent. They at least at one time had the unenviable position of being the ISP to Netflix. At the time Netflix was just starting up, they likely had all sorts of customers which would be sucking down bytes from the Internet, roughly in proportion to the bytes being sucked out of their customers over to their peers. But at some time Netflix started becoming a larger and larger proportion of Cogent's outbound traffic, eventually dwarfing the inbound quantity. The tenet upon which settlement-free peering, that you give as much as you get, increasingly no longer applied. So at least according to generally accepted practice, Cogent (or indeed any other 2nd or lower tier ISP) became a customer to their "peers" instead of a true peer. Rightfully so, at least according to common practice, Cogent, and I suppose later Netflix themselves, began to have to pay for moving those bytes because they were no longer really peers.
Now what do you suppose 'Net Neutrality would do if it mandates that there is to be no such "paying extra for a fast lane to the Internet?" I contend that would essentially abolish settlement-free peering, and regardless of relative traffic, every ISP will have to charge every other ISP with which they peer for traffic. This will incrementally increase the costs of doing business, because now there is that much more accounts payable and accounts receivable, with the same potential hassles of nonpayment/late payment and other such miscellaneous wrangling. And ISPs aren't going to "take it lying down," they'll just increase rates to their customers to cover these additional costs.
OK, you say, you don't have to deliver the content through ever more saturated wide-area network (WAN) links, simply establish a content distribution network (CDN), whereby you plop down servers with your content in the network operation centers (NOCs) of all the major ISPs. Putting up and maintaining WAN connections is more costly than providing some ports on an Ethernet switch, plus that Ethernet switch is going to be tons faster than any WAN link, so it's a win for the ISPs and the ISPs customers, and consequently, for the content provider's customers too. This could also be called a colocation (colo) arrangement. The content provider (e.g., Netflix) transmits the necessary content to its CDN servers, potentially over the WAN, once, and that content is accessed thousands or even maybe millions of times, thus in effect multiplying the "capacity" of that WAN link.
But the truth is, although providing Ethernet ports is lots cheaper, it certainly isn't free; the ISP's engineers must install such a switch, upgrade it as necessary, help troubleshoot problems which arise, and so on...definitely not even near zero costs. Plus there is power, cooling/environmentals, isolation (wouldn't want a fault in the CDN server to take down the ISP's network), security both for network and for physical access (repairs to the CDN servers when necessary), and all the various and sundry things which must be done for a colocation. Again, this is not just some minor expense which could be classified as miscellaneous overhead. They are real and substantial costs.
So no matter how you slice it, Netflix and their ilk must pay the ISPs. If they choose, they can be a customer with ordinary, conventional WAN links, or they could also opt for colo. Either way, they owe. It's not extortion in the least. They pay for the services they receive, one way or another. They might try to frame their plight some other way, but anyone can research what's happening and draw conclusions independently. I don't think they're being extorted into paying "extra" at all. As long as they're being charged the same as any other ISP customer to move the same approximate quantity of bytes, or the same as any other colo customer, it's totally fair.
I have to ask, why is it the only company I heard of or read of making a "stink" like this is Netflix? Why not Google because of YouTube? Why not Hulu? Why not Amazon for their Instant Video product? I suspect Netflix is looking for a P.R. angle, and want to lobby the public to get angry at their ISP for their current business practices as outlined in this section.
The reclassification by the FCC of ISPs under Title II of the Communications Act of 1934 from an information service to a communication service on its surface makes at least some sense. When the FCC proposed some 'Net Neutrality rules, ISPs took them to court (and won), saying their regulations could not be binding because the FCC lacked authority. However, if they can be successfully reclassified as common carriers under Title II, that would give the FCC (or at least the federal government, maybe the ICC) the authority to impose such regulations. It would also absolve ISPs of certain liabilities due to their common carrier status. (As an example, if two thieves coordinate their efforts via phone calls, the phone company is not an accessory to the theft simply because their network was used to facilitate the theft, some other complicity would need to be demonstrated.) But there's a couple of disturbing things about this.
First is the track record of the the federal government. As this essay that the Cato Institute (PDF) relates:
Second, the FCC claim they will exercise discretion in what parts of Title II they will bring to bear on regulation. Ummmm....sure....if you like your ISP, you can keep your ISP. These new regulations will save most folks $2500 per year on their ISP service fees. There's nothing to stop the FCC from using every last sentence in it. Title II has all sorts of rate-setting language in it. Much as I don't want to spend more than I really have to, I don't trust the government to turn the right knobs in the right ways to lower my ISP bill. Look at what happened to banking regulation under Dodd-Frank. Sure, banks complied with all the provisions, but because that cut into the profits they were making, they simply began charging other fees, or raising others not covered by the new regulations.
I guess it also goes without saying that anytime government inserts itself to control something else, there is ample potential for abuse of that power, such that, yet again, essential liberties are curtailed.
Yes, on occasion, regulation has served some public good. If it weren't for the 1980s divestiture, we'd probably still be paying high, per-minute long distance rates, and have differing peak and off-peak rates. But the government has propped up the telco monopoly for decades, and has attempted to compensate for their missteps. For example, the Telecommunications Act of 1996 amended the 1934 Act in several ways, probably the most apropos to this discussion would be forcing telcos to share their infrastructure (the "unbundled network elements") so that competing companies could lease out CO space for switches and lease the lines to customers...thus creating competitive local exchange carriers (CLECs).
On the flip side of that though, just as video providers who also have roles as ISPs have an economic disincentive to carry Internet video streams unencumbered, so too the ILECs would seem to have disincentive to help CLECs. If some CLEC customer's loop needs repair, from an operational/managerial standpoint, why should it come before their own customers' repair needs? I can't say for sure, but it did not seem like Verizon were trying their best to help Northpoint when I had Telocity DSL. Sure, I would have a few weeks or a few days of good service, but then I would have trouble maintaining sync for many minutes or sometimes hours. Wouldn't you know? After Telocity and Northpoint went out of business, and I transitioned to Verizon Online DSL, things were pretty much rock solid. (OK, maybe the comparison isn't quite exactly equal. Telocity was 768K SDSL, whereas Verizon was 640/90 G.dmt ADSL.)
One thing I distinctly heard Pat Gray and Steve "Stu" Burguiere say when Glenn was out is that if you don't like your ISP, you can just switch. The reality is though that in the same price range, people usually have only two "last kilometer" choices, the telephone company (telco) or the cable TV company (cableco). And for some, it's down to one choice. I wouldn't count cellular Internet access because noone offers a flat rate, so-called unlimited plan. The industry norm is around 5 GB for $100/month, which is more than I'm paying ($58) for 15/1 Mbps but unlimited. Someone could chew through 5 GB in only a few hours of HD streaming video viewing, with huge overage fees after that. Satellite likewise is most decidedly not competition either. It's at least twice as expensive for the same bitrates, is limited by a fair access policy (you're throttled after so many minutes of full usage), and has latency which makes several Internet applications (VOIP for example) totally impractical to impossible to use. There are a few wireless providers (WISPs), but again their price points are very high compared to DOCSIS, DSL, or fiber, and are mostly only for rural areas underserved by either a cableco or telco. No other technology is widely available. Put very simply, there are one, maybe two economically viable choices; an oligopoly. Sorry, Pat and Stu, you're way off base here. It's not like drugs, where I can go to the pharmacy at K-Mart, or at Walmart, or at Walgreens, or at RiteAid, or at CVS, or at Tops, or at Wegman's, or... That has a sufficient number of competitors to really be called "competition."
Competition (lack of an oligopoly) is essential to improving service and lowering prices. Look at what happened in the AT&T Mobility/T-Mobile USA case. Four competitors for mobile phone service (AT&T Mobility, Verizon Wireless, T-Mobile USA, and Sprint) is barely enough competition, if that. Going down to three would have made the competition landscape worse; that's why the merger was denied (and is why the Comcast/Time Warner merger should not be allowed either). Everywhere Google Fiber goes, the incumbents lower prices to try to retain customers.
So would forcing telcos and cablecos to share their infrastruture help foster competition? I'm unsure. It sounds good, because it's unlikely people would tolerate many additional sets of cables on their utility poles which would be necessary to provide alternate services. It'd be really ugly. Plus the incumbents have a several decades head start. Laying new cable is expensive and will require lots and lots of time. So maybe cable and office sharing like is done with phone service might help.
One thing the FCC (or some other part of the federal government) could do is to annul and void any local laws which limit or even outlaw competition. Such is the case with some municipalities wanting to string their own fiber optic networks. The whole reason they even consider it is, the telcos and cablecos refuse to provide the level of service the community seeks. But no, instead of upping their game and meeting the challenge, once again the telcos and cablecos use their lobbyists to enact laws making muni broadband illegal.
Of course, this isn't really 'Net Neutrality. The real issue is a need for increases in local competition.
If you've never heard of it, let me try to explain "committed information rate" (or CIR). That is the rate of information transfer your ISP will guarantee you have, let's say 3 Mbps. This means that no matter what, the ISP is guaranteeing connections through your link which add up to that 3 Mbps will stay at that rate. That implies, in order to meet that guarantee, for each peering connection they have, 3 Mbps of it must be reserved exclusively for that customer. The customer's connection is often capable of much faster than that, say 100 Mbps, so it can have burst speeds of up to the technology's (or the provisioned) limit. So basically, any rate between the CIR and the provisioned rate is best effort. As you can imagine, dedicating bandwidth on multiple WAN links is an expensive proposition, as it means during some times, there is bandwidth on the link which is just sitting idle, not being used at all. Therefore, what the customer requesting the CIR is charged is priced commensurately.
CIR is typically only engineered for businesses because that CIR may be critical to providing their service (e.g., an HD video stream may require some CIR to work at all, and HD video streaming is the company's product/service). For what most folks have, there is no CIR, and it is all best-effort. It says as much in the terms of service. This leads to a commonly accepted ISP business practice called oversubscription. It simply means that the ISP counts on not every one of their customers utilizing their provisioned rate simultaneously. A typical ratio in the dialup Internet days was 10 to 1 (meaning for every 10 customers they had dialing in at 56Kbps, they would have 56Kbps capacity to their upstream Inernet provider); I'm not sure what common practice is for residential broadband.
So, let's apply this to 'Net Neutrality. Some residential "propeller head" type is going to see their connection sold as 50 Mbps only going 30 due to heavy use at the time, and is going to start shouting "throttling!" to the ISP/FCC/courts. Of course, if they wanted a CIR of 50 Mbps, it ain't gonna be no $80/month because theoretically it's not going to be shared with their neighbors on the same CMTS or DSLAM, it's going to be a guaranteed 50 Mbps. The cost to provide most service is kept really low by oversubscription and no CIR. If customers think they are consistently getting under their advertised rate, their existing remedy is something like suing for false advertising or fraud.
So there is no need for extra "you can't charge extra for an Internet 'fast lane,' or throttle my connections" regulation. Attempting to do so is just going to push everybody's monthly rate through the roof because the ISPs will be forced to do away with the oversubscription, best effort model and to a CIR model, lest they be accused of throttling or providing preferential packet treatment.
This is the latest uninformed rambling by Mark Cuban and parroted by Glenn Beck. Bandwidth and frequencies are allocated ahead of time. Some channels will be dedicated to video delivery, even if it is SDV. Some bandwidth will be dedicated to telephony if the MSO decides to offer that service. It has to be. Otherwise stuff like E911 could never work; the bandwidth must be available, it can't be reallocated for something else. And finally, it is just not techincally possible to take bits being transmitted as video QAM and have them magically start being used by DOCSIS modems. DOCSIS will also have channels dedicated to it. Even if it were physically feasible to start taking video QAM bandwidth and use it for DOCSIS instead, more CMTSes would have to be deployed to do so, it can't just magically start to happen.
Besides, there is very little "buffering" in a video QAM stream. The receiving equipment very simply is not engineered to do so. It is engineered to assume that the stream is (fairly) reliable and continuous, so only a few tens of milliseconds is ever inside the TV waiting to make its way to the screen. This is a far cry from the multiple seconds of buffering which is typically done for an Apple TV, Roku, Chromecast, Amazon Fire TV, smart TV, etc. The worst that will happen if a stream is interrupted is picture macroblocking and sound dropout; there will never be any "buffering" or "rebuffering." It was just totally ignorant of Glenn to even say that.
Imposition of 'Net Neutrality will have precisely ZERO effect on delivering cable TV video streams.
Some footnotes:
1A channel is a range of frequencies. When a transmitter transmits, it is said to be transmitting with some frequency, say WBEN-AM at 930 KHz. Physics reality is that WBEN-AM is actually occupying 920.5 KHz to 930.5 KHz, which assumes their modulating frequencies are held to 0-5 KHz. The very process of modulating the carrier causes frequencies in that range to be emitted by the transmitter. (In reality, the FCC and the CRTC probably will not allocate 920 nor 940 KHz and allow WBEN-AM to modulate with better fidelity than 0 to 5 KHz.) As another example, WBFO-FM is said to transmit on 88.7 MHz. But as FM implies, the frequency is varied +/- 75 KHz, thus really occupying 88.625 to 88.775 MHz. An additional 25 KHz "guard band" on either "side" is used for spacing (to reduce interference), thus making FM broadcast channels 25 + 75 + 75 + 25 = 200 KHz wide.
2 meaning any manufacturer of equipment could submit their products to the FCC for testing to meet certain technical requirements, such as sufficient isolation of power from the phone line so that it won't zap the phone company's equipment or technicians. It also must not emit any interfereing radio waves.
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Just one small note before I begin: I have tried to get Blogger/Blogspot several times to make hyperlinked footnotes for me (using the HTML override editor), without much success. If I leave the fragment identifier alone and leave Blogger's "correction" of my hyperlink to the same document, clicking on it tries to bring the reader/surfer to an edit page for this post (and of course noone but myself can edit, so it errors). If I remove everything but the fragment identifier as many Web pages on the footnotes topic suggest, for some reason my browser won't follow them. I apologize for the inconvenience of the reader needing to scroll to near the end of the post in order to read the footnotes.
Myth: Netflix (or any other streaming content provider) is being throttled (or blocked) to make incumbents' video services seem attractive in comparison to streaming.
Truth: No, they are not being throttled per se. So passing some sort of neutrality regulation or law likely won't help much, if at all.
When people talk about "network throttling," (also called "traffic shaping") they are talking about classifying network traffic, either by protocol (such as TCP plus a port number), or by source or destination IP address, and programming one or more intervening routers to allow only some limited count of packets to pass through for some given amount of time (e.g., packets amounting to 200 kilobytes per second). The source (e.g. Netflix) compensates for this apparent lack of bandwidth by slowing down the rate at which it transmits those packets. Thus the viewing quality is downgraded by switching to a more highly compressed version of the video, and might also result in stutters and stops for rebuffering.
While a certain amount of this may be being done by some ISPs, current thinking is that this is unlikely. What is more likely happening is the incumbent ISPs are unwilling to increase interconnect capacity. If the current interconnects between Netflix's ISP(s) and the incumbents is run up to capacity, naturally no more streams of the same bitrate can be passed through. Everything must be slowed down.
The analogy of the Internet to pipes/plumbing is not too bad. If some pipe is engineered to deliver 600 liters per minute at 500 kilopascals, you can't just increase the pressure to try to stuff more water per minute through, the pipe will burst and would no longer be usable. One solution would be to install a similar capacity pipe in parallel with the original, thus increasing the effective cross sectional area of pipe, which would be analogous to installing another (fiber) link between routers. The other way of course is to increase the pipe diameter, which would correspond to using existing media such as fiber in a different way (such as using more simltaneous laser wavelengths or something).
As implied, incumbents such as Comcast, Time Warner (TWC), Cox, etc. have economic disincentives to upgrade their peering capacities with services which compete with their video services. So all they have to do is let existing links saturate with traffic, and it appears to the consumer like their streaming provider is being throttled. Those consumers are of course in no position to be able to investigate whether their streaming service (e.g. Netflix) is being traffic shaped or if peering points are being allowed to saturate. Only their incumbent's network engineers would have the access to the equipment and know-how to be able to answer that question accurately.
I personally cannot envision regulation which would likewise be able to discriminate between administrative traffic shaping and interconnect saturation. In my libertarian opinion, any attempt to do so would be government takeover of Internet service, because that would mandate how ISPs must allocate resources to run their core business. With government takeover would come government control, and this could quickly be used to suppress essential freedoms such as those expressed in Amendment I.
Myth: The passage of 'Net Neutrality would lead to a government takeover of the Internet where connection to the 'Net will require a license.
Truth: Take off the tin foil hat, that is simply preposterous. There is noone (in government) I know of which is even proposing such a thing, not FCC commissioners, not legislators; noone.
This one seems to be a favorite fear mongering tactic of Glenn Beck. Oh, believe me, I like Glenn (plus Pat and "Stu"), and agree with a lot of their views. But this one is so far out in Yankee Stadium left field that they'd be in the Atlantic Ocean. I understand the rough route how this conclusion could be reached.
The FCC required licensing of radio stations for very sound technical reasons. You just simply cannot rationally allow anyone to transmit on any frequency with any amount of power they can afford. He said at one time radio stations used to be akin to that, with people broadcasting to their neighborhoods. This will very quickly become untenable, with the next person claiming the freedom to do as they please with available spectrum, and trying to overpower their competition. It's simply not within the laws of radio physics to be able to operate that way. There needs to be some central authority to say you, you over there, you may transmit on this frequency with this modulation, this bandwidth (basically, modulating frequency or FM deviation), at this power, and you can be reasonably guaranteed you will have clear transmission of your content to this geographic region.
A weak analogy would be vehicular traffic. You simply cannot drive wherever you want, whenever you want, at whatever speed you want. You must drive on either your own property or established rights of way (roads, basically), yield to other traffic pursuant to law, and at speeds deemed safe by authorities (guided by engineers who designed the roadways). You also must prove competency with these precepts, plus physical ability, thus requiring licensure.
I didn't think I would hear it from radio veteran Rush Limbaugh, but as I was writing this (over a few days), I also heard him propose that the FCC might require licenses for Web sites to come online, comparing it to radio stations needing licensing. His thesis is that radio stations must prove to the FCC that they're serving the community in which they're broadcasting. That's true. Why would the FCC grant exclusive use of a channel1 to a station which wasn't broadcasting content in which the community was interested? It cannot allocate that channel to more than one transmitting entity.
Even reclassifying ISPs under Title II will do no such thing. Telephone companies have been regulated under Title II for a very long time, and have you ever heard of ANYONE suggesting needing a license to connect to the phone network?? NO, NEVER. Yes, it is true, for a long, long time, the Bell System insisted it was technically necessary to have only their own equipment connected to the network. This was modified eventually to type acceptance/certification.2 Still, it's an open, nonprejudicial process. If for some oddball reason the FCC suddenly decided to synthesize some objection to a device being attached to phone lines in some sort of effort to interfere in a company's commerce, the manufacturer could sue in court and plead their case that their device does indeed meet all technical requirements, and the FCC is merely being arbitrary. But the point is, this is not licensing individual users, only the manufacturers, and purely for technical reasons.
Myth: The phone company (or companies) has/have not made any substantial improvements (except maybe Touch-Tone) in almost a century (since the Bell System).
Truth: There have been plenty of innovations during the "reign of," and since, the Bell System.
Times used to be that trunking between cities had a one-to-one correspondence between cable pairs and conversations. If we were alive back in the 1920 or so, if I wanted to talk from here in Cheektowaga, NY to my sister in Pasadena, TX, a pair of wires along the complete path from phone switch to phone switch along the way would have to be reserved for the duration of the conversation.
The first innovation was frequency division multiplexing (FDM). Phone conversations are limited from approximately 300 Hz to 3000 Hz response, which is quite adequate for speech. What you could do is carry several on modulated carriers, much like radio does, but closer to the audio spectrum, for example 10 KHz, 20 KHz, 30 KHz, etc. (not sure of the exact frequencies used).
Starting in the 1960s, after solid state computer technology was well developed, interconnections (trunking) between switching centers was upgraded from analog to digital. This is how the modern public switched telephone network (PSTN) works. Instead of transmitting voice or FDM voice on the links, the voice is digitized (analog to digital conversion, or ADC), and sent a sample at a time down the trunk, and interleaving several conversations digitally (time division multiplexing, or TDM).
Digitizing the phone system also had the benefit of getting rid of the mechanical switching. It used to be that when you dialled the phone, while the dial was returning to its "home" position, it would send a pulse down the line for each number it passed. So for example a 1 sent one pulse, 2 sent two pulses, and so on, with the exception of 0 which sent ten pulses. Every pulse would physically advance (step) a rotary switch, and the timeout between digits would pass the pulsing along to the next rotary switch. See Strowger switch and crossbar switch. With the advent of TDM, each subscriber could have a timeslot in their local switch, and each current conversation between switches (over trunks) could have a timeslot on the trunk. Instead of physically carrying voice around a switch, it was a matter of transferring data instead.
And then of course, there was the mentioned Touch-Tone (a trademark for the dual tone multiple frequency (DTMF) system). This meant instead of pulses stepping a mechanical switch of some kind, the subscriber's telephone would generate carefully engineered tones which would be detected by the central office (CO) switch, and use a computer program to collect those digits and figure out and allocate a route to the destination subscriber.
Of course, then there was the Bell System breakup in the 1980s. The effect of this was increased competition and therefore falling prices. I would think anyone old enough (I was born in 1965) remembers when it used to be quite expensive to call long distance, even as short a distance as here to Niagara Falls. Instead of a local call where someone could talk for as long as they'd like for one flat fee per month, it was charged on a per-minute basis, and the per-minute price varied based on load/demand, with daytime, evening, and overnight rates. So every once in a while, one would stay up late (past 11PM local time) to call the relatives who moved away (in my case, siblings who went to Texas, and a grandmother who lived in Closter, New Jersey). These days, due to a couple of decades of competition, long distance is included with most (although not all) flat rate priced telephone service.
Let's also not forget the development of mobile telephony. At first, it was only the very rich who had phones installed in their vehicles. Then a few decades later there were the pack phones which were a lot more affordable that I used to sell in the late eighties when I worked at Radio Shack. Then after that, there were the famous bricks. Then the mobile phone system itself was digitized, with CDMA and GSM. Then of course some of the CDMA and GSM bandwidth was dedicated to carrying arbitrary data, not just voice data. And these days, we have the next evolution in mobile communications, LTE.
So don't try to tell me there hasn't been innovation and improvement in decades. To a certain extent, even with the lack of competition before the 1980s breakup, improvements were slowly but surely made. Don't get me wrong, money was a large motivating factor (e.g., we can't charge for our long distance service because we don't have the capacity, people just won't buy it; so we have to innovate how we carry those conversations around in order to sell the service). But the key is competition since the breakup greatly accelerated innovation, because it was no longer a matter of the monopoly of getting around to it when the company felt like it, they have to innovate faster than the competition or they'll lose customers.
Myth: Netflix (or other streaming content providers) are being extorted into paying more in order to have a "fast lane" to their customers by the likes of Comcast.
Truth: Settlement-free peering does not apply; Netflix or their ISP is a customer and not a peer. Nor should they be afforded free colocation. 'Net Neutrality should have no effect whatsoever on these private business relationships.
There is a concept of "settlement-free peering" in the ISP business. At least the current business model of ISPs is to charge to move octets from their customers to either another one of their customers or to one of their peers which services the customer on the other end of the communication. This is important and key; they charge for moving packets. Let's take two well-known ISPs to illustrate this, Verizon and Comcast. Hypothetically, Verizon could charge Comcast for all bytes delivered from Verizon's customers to Comcast, and for all bytes delivered from Comcast to Verizon's customers. But that could equally be said of Comcast; Comcast could charge for all bytes moved to/from Verizon to/from Comcast's customers. But that would be kind of silly to simply pass money back and forth, and it makes more economic and accounting sense simply to say, if you accept roughly the same amount of bytes as you give us, we'll call it a wash if you do the same, and we consider each other peers because of this.
Poor Cogent. They at least at one time had the unenviable position of being the ISP to Netflix. At the time Netflix was just starting up, they likely had all sorts of customers which would be sucking down bytes from the Internet, roughly in proportion to the bytes being sucked out of their customers over to their peers. But at some time Netflix started becoming a larger and larger proportion of Cogent's outbound traffic, eventually dwarfing the inbound quantity. The tenet upon which settlement-free peering, that you give as much as you get, increasingly no longer applied. So at least according to generally accepted practice, Cogent (or indeed any other 2nd or lower tier ISP) became a customer to their "peers" instead of a true peer. Rightfully so, at least according to common practice, Cogent, and I suppose later Netflix themselves, began to have to pay for moving those bytes because they were no longer really peers.
Now what do you suppose 'Net Neutrality would do if it mandates that there is to be no such "paying extra for a fast lane to the Internet?" I contend that would essentially abolish settlement-free peering, and regardless of relative traffic, every ISP will have to charge every other ISP with which they peer for traffic. This will incrementally increase the costs of doing business, because now there is that much more accounts payable and accounts receivable, with the same potential hassles of nonpayment/late payment and other such miscellaneous wrangling. And ISPs aren't going to "take it lying down," they'll just increase rates to their customers to cover these additional costs.
OK, you say, you don't have to deliver the content through ever more saturated wide-area network (WAN) links, simply establish a content distribution network (CDN), whereby you plop down servers with your content in the network operation centers (NOCs) of all the major ISPs. Putting up and maintaining WAN connections is more costly than providing some ports on an Ethernet switch, plus that Ethernet switch is going to be tons faster than any WAN link, so it's a win for the ISPs and the ISPs customers, and consequently, for the content provider's customers too. This could also be called a colocation (colo) arrangement. The content provider (e.g., Netflix) transmits the necessary content to its CDN servers, potentially over the WAN, once, and that content is accessed thousands or even maybe millions of times, thus in effect multiplying the "capacity" of that WAN link.
But the truth is, although providing Ethernet ports is lots cheaper, it certainly isn't free; the ISP's engineers must install such a switch, upgrade it as necessary, help troubleshoot problems which arise, and so on...definitely not even near zero costs. Plus there is power, cooling/environmentals, isolation (wouldn't want a fault in the CDN server to take down the ISP's network), security both for network and for physical access (repairs to the CDN servers when necessary), and all the various and sundry things which must be done for a colocation. Again, this is not just some minor expense which could be classified as miscellaneous overhead. They are real and substantial costs.
So no matter how you slice it, Netflix and their ilk must pay the ISPs. If they choose, they can be a customer with ordinary, conventional WAN links, or they could also opt for colo. Either way, they owe. It's not extortion in the least. They pay for the services they receive, one way or another. They might try to frame their plight some other way, but anyone can research what's happening and draw conclusions independently. I don't think they're being extorted into paying "extra" at all. As long as they're being charged the same as any other ISP customer to move the same approximate quantity of bytes, or the same as any other colo customer, it's totally fair.
I have to ask, why is it the only company I heard of or read of making a "stink" like this is Netflix? Why not Google because of YouTube? Why not Hulu? Why not Amazon for their Instant Video product? I suspect Netflix is looking for a P.R. angle, and want to lobby the public to get angry at their ISP for their current business practices as outlined in this section.
Myth: 'Net Neutrality is not needed because of competition. If you don't like your ISP, you can just switch. Problem solved; the other ISP should have more favorable policies or prices because they're competing for customers.
Truth: It is true that no new regulation is needed for what I'll term the Internet core. Competition there is fine. The last kilometer (or last mile if you must), or the edge, is the problem area however.
The reclassification by the FCC of ISPs under Title II of the Communications Act of 1934 from an information service to a communication service on its surface makes at least some sense. When the FCC proposed some 'Net Neutrality rules, ISPs took them to court (and won), saying their regulations could not be binding because the FCC lacked authority. However, if they can be successfully reclassified as common carriers under Title II, that would give the FCC (or at least the federal government, maybe the ICC) the authority to impose such regulations. It would also absolve ISPs of certain liabilities due to their common carrier status. (As an example, if two thieves coordinate their efforts via phone calls, the phone company is not an accessory to the theft simply because their network was used to facilitate the theft, some other complicity would need to be demonstrated.) But there's a couple of disturbing things about this.
First is the track record of the the federal government. As this essay that the Cato Institute (PDF) relates:
The telephone monopoly, however, has been anything but natural. Overlooked in the textbooks is the extent to which federal and state governmental actions throughout this century helped build the AT&T or “Bell system” monopoly. As Robert Crandall (1991: 41) noted, “Despite the popular belief that the telephone network is a natural monopoly, the AT&T monopoly survived until the 1980s not because of its naturalness but because of overt government policy.And a little further on, there is this other notable passage:
After seventeen years of monopoly, the United States had a limited telephone system of 270,000 phones concentrated in the centers of the cities, with service generally unavailable in the outlying areas. After thirteen years of competition, the United States had an extensive system of six million telephones, almost evenly divided between Bell and the independents, with service available practically anywhere in the country.The referenced monopoly would be to that created by Bell's patents in the mid to late part of the 19th Century. I'm not against patents; inventors and innovators need the assurance that their work, for some limited amount of time, will provide a return on the investment made. (The current patent system is in need of overhaul though. Some of its applications, even those granted, are ridiculous.) Once again, it is proven that competition improves service and lowers prices. The government though seems to have been in the Bell System's pocket, thus squeezing out competitors and strengthening their monopoly. The AT&T folks convinced regulators that their size and expertise made them ideal to establish universal phone service, and that needing to accommodate competitors' systems would only slow them down and was duplicated effort; that having one, unified system would be the best. They falsely argued telephone service was a natural monopoly, despite evidence quite to the contrary in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries.
Second, the FCC claim they will exercise discretion in what parts of Title II they will bring to bear on regulation. Ummmm....sure....if you like your ISP, you can keep your ISP. These new regulations will save most folks $2500 per year on their ISP service fees. There's nothing to stop the FCC from using every last sentence in it. Title II has all sorts of rate-setting language in it. Much as I don't want to spend more than I really have to, I don't trust the government to turn the right knobs in the right ways to lower my ISP bill. Look at what happened to banking regulation under Dodd-Frank. Sure, banks complied with all the provisions, but because that cut into the profits they were making, they simply began charging other fees, or raising others not covered by the new regulations.
I guess it also goes without saying that anytime government inserts itself to control something else, there is ample potential for abuse of that power, such that, yet again, essential liberties are curtailed.
Yes, on occasion, regulation has served some public good. If it weren't for the 1980s divestiture, we'd probably still be paying high, per-minute long distance rates, and have differing peak and off-peak rates. But the government has propped up the telco monopoly for decades, and has attempted to compensate for their missteps. For example, the Telecommunications Act of 1996 amended the 1934 Act in several ways, probably the most apropos to this discussion would be forcing telcos to share their infrastructure (the "unbundled network elements") so that competing companies could lease out CO space for switches and lease the lines to customers...thus creating competitive local exchange carriers (CLECs).
On the flip side of that though, just as video providers who also have roles as ISPs have an economic disincentive to carry Internet video streams unencumbered, so too the ILECs would seem to have disincentive to help CLECs. If some CLEC customer's loop needs repair, from an operational/managerial standpoint, why should it come before their own customers' repair needs? I can't say for sure, but it did not seem like Verizon were trying their best to help Northpoint when I had Telocity DSL. Sure, I would have a few weeks or a few days of good service, but then I would have trouble maintaining sync for many minutes or sometimes hours. Wouldn't you know? After Telocity and Northpoint went out of business, and I transitioned to Verizon Online DSL, things were pretty much rock solid. (OK, maybe the comparison isn't quite exactly equal. Telocity was 768K SDSL, whereas Verizon was 640/90 G.dmt ADSL.)
One thing I distinctly heard Pat Gray and Steve "Stu" Burguiere say when Glenn was out is that if you don't like your ISP, you can just switch. The reality is though that in the same price range, people usually have only two "last kilometer" choices, the telephone company (telco) or the cable TV company (cableco). And for some, it's down to one choice. I wouldn't count cellular Internet access because noone offers a flat rate, so-called unlimited plan. The industry norm is around 5 GB for $100/month, which is more than I'm paying ($58) for 15/1 Mbps but unlimited. Someone could chew through 5 GB in only a few hours of HD streaming video viewing, with huge overage fees after that. Satellite likewise is most decidedly not competition either. It's at least twice as expensive for the same bitrates, is limited by a fair access policy (you're throttled after so many minutes of full usage), and has latency which makes several Internet applications (VOIP for example) totally impractical to impossible to use. There are a few wireless providers (WISPs), but again their price points are very high compared to DOCSIS, DSL, or fiber, and are mostly only for rural areas underserved by either a cableco or telco. No other technology is widely available. Put very simply, there are one, maybe two economically viable choices; an oligopoly. Sorry, Pat and Stu, you're way off base here. It's not like drugs, where I can go to the pharmacy at K-Mart, or at Walmart, or at Walgreens, or at RiteAid, or at CVS, or at Tops, or at Wegman's, or... That has a sufficient number of competitors to really be called "competition."
Competition (lack of an oligopoly) is essential to improving service and lowering prices. Look at what happened in the AT&T Mobility/T-Mobile USA case. Four competitors for mobile phone service (AT&T Mobility, Verizon Wireless, T-Mobile USA, and Sprint) is barely enough competition, if that. Going down to three would have made the competition landscape worse; that's why the merger was denied (and is why the Comcast/Time Warner merger should not be allowed either). Everywhere Google Fiber goes, the incumbents lower prices to try to retain customers.
So would forcing telcos and cablecos to share their infrastruture help foster competition? I'm unsure. It sounds good, because it's unlikely people would tolerate many additional sets of cables on their utility poles which would be necessary to provide alternate services. It'd be really ugly. Plus the incumbents have a several decades head start. Laying new cable is expensive and will require lots and lots of time. So maybe cable and office sharing like is done with phone service might help.
One thing the FCC (or some other part of the federal government) could do is to annul and void any local laws which limit or even outlaw competition. Such is the case with some municipalities wanting to string their own fiber optic networks. The whole reason they even consider it is, the telcos and cablecos refuse to provide the level of service the community seeks. But no, instead of upping their game and meeting the challenge, once again the telcos and cablecos use their lobbyists to enact laws making muni broadband illegal.
Of course, this isn't really 'Net Neutrality. The real issue is a need for increases in local competition.
Myth: If it's written into 'Net Neutrality that extra charges for a "fast lane" will be disallowed, my Internet bill will be kept lower.
Truth: Practically any way it's worded, it won't preclude the possibility of either speeding up or slowing down some class of traffic.
I'll bet dollars to donuts some "propeller head" is going to look at 'Net Neutrality regulations, see that no throttling (or its inverse, preferential packet treatment) is allowed, and that charging extra for a "fast lane" will not be allowed, then sue their ISP claiming they don't have the 100Mbps tier, they only have the 15Mbps tier, and they're illegally charging extra to get the 100Mbps service. Still others will see a slowdown in their service because of some poor bandwitdth management by their ISP, and sue because they think they're being throttled.
If you've never heard of it, let me try to explain "committed information rate" (or CIR). That is the rate of information transfer your ISP will guarantee you have, let's say 3 Mbps. This means that no matter what, the ISP is guaranteeing connections through your link which add up to that 3 Mbps will stay at that rate. That implies, in order to meet that guarantee, for each peering connection they have, 3 Mbps of it must be reserved exclusively for that customer. The customer's connection is often capable of much faster than that, say 100 Mbps, so it can have burst speeds of up to the technology's (or the provisioned) limit. So basically, any rate between the CIR and the provisioned rate is best effort. As you can imagine, dedicating bandwidth on multiple WAN links is an expensive proposition, as it means during some times, there is bandwidth on the link which is just sitting idle, not being used at all. Therefore, what the customer requesting the CIR is charged is priced commensurately.
CIR is typically only engineered for businesses because that CIR may be critical to providing their service (e.g., an HD video stream may require some CIR to work at all, and HD video streaming is the company's product/service). For what most folks have, there is no CIR, and it is all best-effort. It says as much in the terms of service. This leads to a commonly accepted ISP business practice called oversubscription. It simply means that the ISP counts on not every one of their customers utilizing their provisioned rate simultaneously. A typical ratio in the dialup Internet days was 10 to 1 (meaning for every 10 customers they had dialing in at 56Kbps, they would have 56Kbps capacity to their upstream Inernet provider); I'm not sure what common practice is for residential broadband.
So, let's apply this to 'Net Neutrality. Some residential "propeller head" type is going to see their connection sold as 50 Mbps only going 30 due to heavy use at the time, and is going to start shouting "throttling!" to the ISP/FCC/courts. Of course, if they wanted a CIR of 50 Mbps, it ain't gonna be no $80/month because theoretically it's not going to be shared with their neighbors on the same CMTS or DSLAM, it's going to be a guaranteed 50 Mbps. The cost to provide most service is kept really low by oversubscription and no CIR. If customers think they are consistently getting under their advertised rate, their existing remedy is something like suing for false advertising or fraud.
So there is no need for extra "you can't charge extra for an Internet 'fast lane,' or throttle my connections" regulation. Attempting to do so is just going to push everybody's monthly rate through the roof because the ISPs will be forced to do away with the oversubscription, best effort model and to a CIR model, lest they be accused of throttling or providing preferential packet treatment.
Myth: Since all TV is just bits these days, 'Net Neutrality could mandate that cable TV providers who are also ISPs (so, virtually all of them in the US) will be forced to reallocate video bandwidth to Internet servicing, lest they be accused of not treating all bits as equal. As a result, your TV will start "buffering" like your Netflix, Amazon Instant Video, iTunes, etc. does.
Truth: This is also just utter nonsense, and is proposed by those who are totally ignorant of how cable TV infrastructure is electrically engineered. Bandwidth used for video delivery cannot be arbitrarily reallocated to DOCSIS or vice-versa. It's just technically impossible. Both TVs and cable modems would have to be totally reengineered to have that capability.
This is the latest uninformed rambling by Mark Cuban and parroted by Glenn Beck. Bandwidth and frequencies are allocated ahead of time. Some channels will be dedicated to video delivery, even if it is SDV. Some bandwidth will be dedicated to telephony if the MSO decides to offer that service. It has to be. Otherwise stuff like E911 could never work; the bandwidth must be available, it can't be reallocated for something else. And finally, it is just not techincally possible to take bits being transmitted as video QAM and have them magically start being used by DOCSIS modems. DOCSIS will also have channels dedicated to it. Even if it were physically feasible to start taking video QAM bandwidth and use it for DOCSIS instead, more CMTSes would have to be deployed to do so, it can't just magically start to happen.
Besides, there is very little "buffering" in a video QAM stream. The receiving equipment very simply is not engineered to do so. It is engineered to assume that the stream is (fairly) reliable and continuous, so only a few tens of milliseconds is ever inside the TV waiting to make its way to the screen. This is a far cry from the multiple seconds of buffering which is typically done for an Apple TV, Roku, Chromecast, Amazon Fire TV, smart TV, etc. The worst that will happen if a stream is interrupted is picture macroblocking and sound dropout; there will never be any "buffering" or "rebuffering." It was just totally ignorant of Glenn to even say that.
Imposition of 'Net Neutrality will have precisely ZERO effect on delivering cable TV video streams.
Some footnotes:
1A channel is a range of frequencies. When a transmitter transmits, it is said to be transmitting with some frequency, say WBEN-AM at 930 KHz. Physics reality is that WBEN-AM is actually occupying 920.5 KHz to 930.5 KHz, which assumes their modulating frequencies are held to 0-5 KHz. The very process of modulating the carrier causes frequencies in that range to be emitted by the transmitter. (In reality, the FCC and the CRTC probably will not allocate 920 nor 940 KHz and allow WBEN-AM to modulate with better fidelity than 0 to 5 KHz.) As another example, WBFO-FM is said to transmit on 88.7 MHz. But as FM implies, the frequency is varied +/- 75 KHz, thus really occupying 88.625 to 88.775 MHz. An additional 25 KHz "guard band" on either "side" is used for spacing (to reduce interference), thus making FM broadcast channels 25 + 75 + 75 + 25 = 200 KHz wide.
2 meaning any manufacturer of equipment could submit their products to the FCC for testing to meet certain technical requirements, such as sufficient isolation of power from the phone line so that it won't zap the phone company's equipment or technicians. It also must not emit any interfereing radio waves.
Direct all comments to Google+, preferably under the post about this blog entry.
English is a difficult enough language to interpret correctly when its rules are followed, let alone when the speaker or writer chooses not to follow those rules.
"Jeopardy!" replies and randomcaps really suck!
Please join one of the fastest growing social networks, Google+!
28 January, 2015
Google Chrome, do NOT insist I sign in
I'm putting this here so that I won't forget this one tip. The "sign in" dialog for Chrome is really, really annoying, and it's not easy to find the way to turn it off.
I am pretty sure I made a Google+ post about this. But no amount of what I think would be great Google search terms seems to point me to it, even adding site:plus.google.com was of no help. Even such (to me) obvious questions such as "get rid of chrome sign in" turned up plenty of hits but with nothing practical to try. I could go through all my posts, but I'm sure that would be many months and pages ago...in other words, tedious to find. And no, as much as you try to insist by your "Do you mean" stuff, my name is not "Phillips," so I wish you wouldn't try so hard to suggest I messed up my search term. Even a general Web search (stuff written by others) didn't turn up much useful. So, I know I don't post here a whole lot, so it should be easier to find the next time I have this issue and want to get a clue as to how to fix it.
Once upon a time, Google had some great ideas: a Web browser that is fast, doesn't take up gobs of RAM, is standards compliant, and sandboxes windows/tabs from one another so that if one goes down, it doesn't drag the others down with it. They also have IMHO some pioneering work in bringing video conferencing to the masses with Google+ Hangouts. But then, they got a little greedy. They want everyone to use all their service(s) as much as humanly possible. And on occasion, they step over the line. Here's where they made some grievous errors.
Do NOT slap something up on my screen with no window decorations for merely invoking your application. When I start Chrome, I most assertively and emphatically do NOT want anything but the main Chrome window to appear (on my desktop). I don't care if I'm not "signed in" or anything. I'll take my chances. I just want a freaking browser, OK?? There is a specific reason I set my startup pages to about:blank : I don't want to wait for anything to load, or to enter anything; I just want to "get to work" for the reason I opened a browser, which is to visit Web pages. Don't stick this stuff in my face. It's extremely rude.
The absolutely most annoying part is the lack of window decorations. There is no apparent way to move your monstrosity, because you took away any title bar. Therefore even if somewhere in there you DID provide this functionality, it was not immediately apparent. These things need to be immediately apparent. They should not be hidden, or apparent only on hover. I don't know where you folks get the notion that such lack of discoverability is a Good Thing(tm). It's insane. It's not like you're replacing things like the Google+ post options menu popping widget with other content, you're just hiding it until hover. But I digress to things wrong with G+. There's also no window decoration containing a close button (y'know, like [X]). I was shooting down your sorry asses by using xkill(1). You know it's UI/UX epic failure when the user resorts to xkill(1).
I figured it was one of the plugins (such as Google Talk) which was causing this dialog to appear. So I went into chrome://plugins and disabled some of them...no change. I went down the entire list, and disabled them all...no change. I finally found an [x] by hovering over one spot of your abomination, and clicked it. It was then I saw the message about if I was sure I wanted to get out of Hangouts that I became a lot more clueful. If Hangouts is not a plugin, it must be under chrome://extensions . Eureka. I have only 3 extensions, so this was easy to spot.
I disabled the Hangouts extension, and bingo, no more necessity to "sign into" Chrome (or anything else for that matter) when opening your Web browser.
English is a difficult enough language to interpret correctly when its rules are followed, let alone when the speaker or writer chooses not to follow those rules.
"Jeopardy!" replies and randomcaps really suck!
Please join one of the fastest growing social networks, Google+!
I am pretty sure I made a Google+ post about this. But no amount of what I think would be great Google search terms seems to point me to it, even adding site:plus.google.com was of no help. Even such (to me) obvious questions such as "get rid of chrome sign in" turned up plenty of hits but with nothing practical to try. I could go through all my posts, but I'm sure that would be many months and pages ago...in other words, tedious to find. And no, as much as you try to insist by your "Do you mean" stuff, my name is not "Phillips," so I wish you wouldn't try so hard to suggest I messed up my search term. Even a general Web search (stuff written by others) didn't turn up much useful. So, I know I don't post here a whole lot, so it should be easier to find the next time I have this issue and want to get a clue as to how to fix it.
Once upon a time, Google had some great ideas: a Web browser that is fast, doesn't take up gobs of RAM, is standards compliant, and sandboxes windows/tabs from one another so that if one goes down, it doesn't drag the others down with it. They also have IMHO some pioneering work in bringing video conferencing to the masses with Google+ Hangouts. But then, they got a little greedy. They want everyone to use all their service(s) as much as humanly possible. And on occasion, they step over the line. Here's where they made some grievous errors.
Do NOT slap something up on my screen with no window decorations for merely invoking your application. When I start Chrome, I most assertively and emphatically do NOT want anything but the main Chrome window to appear (on my desktop). I don't care if I'm not "signed in" or anything. I'll take my chances. I just want a freaking browser, OK?? There is a specific reason I set my startup pages to about:blank : I don't want to wait for anything to load, or to enter anything; I just want to "get to work" for the reason I opened a browser, which is to visit Web pages. Don't stick this stuff in my face. It's extremely rude.
The absolutely most annoying part is the lack of window decorations. There is no apparent way to move your monstrosity, because you took away any title bar. Therefore even if somewhere in there you DID provide this functionality, it was not immediately apparent. These things need to be immediately apparent. They should not be hidden, or apparent only on hover. I don't know where you folks get the notion that such lack of discoverability is a Good Thing(tm). It's insane. It's not like you're replacing things like the Google+ post options menu popping widget with other content, you're just hiding it until hover. But I digress to things wrong with G+. There's also no window decoration containing a close button (y'know, like [X]). I was shooting down your sorry asses by using xkill(1). You know it's UI/UX epic failure when the user resorts to xkill(1).
I figured it was one of the plugins (such as Google Talk) which was causing this dialog to appear. So I went into chrome://plugins and disabled some of them...no change. I went down the entire list, and disabled them all...no change. I finally found an [x] by hovering over one spot of your abomination, and clicked it. It was then I saw the message about if I was sure I wanted to get out of Hangouts that I became a lot more clueful. If Hangouts is not a plugin, it must be under chrome://extensions . Eureka. I have only 3 extensions, so this was easy to spot.
I disabled the Hangouts extension, and bingo, no more necessity to "sign into" Chrome (or anything else for that matter) when opening your Web browser.
English is a difficult enough language to interpret correctly when its rules are followed, let alone when the speaker or writer chooses not to follow those rules.
"Jeopardy!" replies and randomcaps really suck!
Please join one of the fastest growing social networks, Google+!
25 October, 2014
Goodbye, Computer, and Thank You to Richard
oh, fudge. My most heavily used, electricity-efficient computer died
today. It was an Athlon 64 X2 5400+ system with 4GB RAM and 160GB of
used disk space (it's a 320G disk, but I eventually wanted to try things
like Win7/8/10, so I left some space unpartitioned). Of that, about
70G were in use. I got it for $10 from a guy, Richard, that was once into
computer building and tweaking, but just didn't want to deal with its
instability anymore. He said basically, if you want to see if you can
get something useful out of it, here you go, have at it. It was a
slightly unstable upgrade from the 10.5 year old Dell Precision 360,
whose class is 2.4GHz Pentium IV, 2.5GB RAM. As you can imagine, the
'360 is excruciatingly slow by today's standards, and for various
reasons is still running what's basically FC 5 with a custom-built
2.6.17 kernel. (Yeah, I know, it's bad, I should have kept up with
upgrades, so at least the software worked with modern stuff...water
under the bridge which cannot be fixed without the aid of something like
a TARDIS.)
I knew something was probably radically wrong with the Athlon system because mid-this past week, I had it shut down due to the ACPI thermal threshold being exceeded. This is the first time this has happened since I got the system, so that was odd thing number 1. When it initially happened, I thought this is the hardest I have probably driven this system since I got it. It was doing real-time video decoding of HD video (I think w/o GPU assistance) to full screen, so scaling it too. It was stuttering some, which I would expect for having to do both decoding and scaling
Odd thing number 2 is that after working stably for I'd guess 6 weeks or more, I started getting "processor context corrupt" panics, which honestly was nothing new. As long as they don't bootloop or occur more than about 3 times a day, I could deal with it. Most times if I just wiggled the (PCIe) video board a little, those sorts of errors would not occur for a while.
Odd thing number 3 was yesterday when I had what I think were thermal trips while just idling (!!!), and the system would shut down, I thought I would see what was going on in the BIOS setup "PC Health and Status" page where it allows you to set the ACPI thermal threshold from 60 to 90 degrees (in increments of 5), and every half second or so see the fan tachs, system temperature, and CPU reported temperature. I am pretty sure bulk silicon even as small as an Athlon 64 X2 cannot rise in temperature 12 or more degrees in a second. If anything it will rise maybe a degree or two per second. I would see the reported CPU temp idle along at a normal-looking 38 degrees, but then jump to 42, then back to 38-ish, then 50, then 47, then 40, then 52, then 54, then 52, then 48, ...well I think you get the picture, temperatures which are going wildly all over the place.
I tried unscrewing the fan from atop the CPU heatsink, and vacuumed out as much dust as I could (and reinstalled it of course). But that really didn't help much, especially since the first power on did not POST. Again, for this system, that was unusual but not super unusual; often I would just drop a GB of RAM or something, and wiggling the RAM modules would restore sanity somewhat. So I just shut off all power, pressed on the modules, wiggled the video board, and such-like things, and the next power on did POST. That seemed to work OK, except for one or two more ACPI thermal trips.
This morning I had more troubles with the system. I don't remember now whether it was more kernel panics, thermal trips, or whatnot, but the telling thing that something was just about irretrievably wrong was that the boot firmware detected something wrong in the CMOS or bootin, and had to use fail safe, default, etc. clocking. I had never, ever seen that message out of this system, but once again, being a system which was given to me due to its instability, I figured it was yet another episode of wanting to be challenging to me. But at some point, the entire system froze, unresponsive, on the Xorg screen, a with a handful of browser windows open. I think that had not happened for a few months at least. So i hit the reset, and went into setup to double check that this "defaults programming" didn't mess with stuff like Cool 'n' Quiet which I knew would lock up the system; it apparently did not, CnQ was still off. I assumed since that had not been turned back on that everything else which I may have tweaked in order to have it not freeze was likewise left alone.
Well, it worked for a while longer, but eventually, it would turn on the fans, but nothing else would happen. No amount of pressing on the CPU heat sink, wiggling the video board, or tapping the RAM would make this board even light the third of its diagnostic LEDs (it ordinarily only takes about a second for it to light that 3rd LED, and if it's having trouble initializing the video, it'll blink that one at about 1/2 Hz).
OK, so what else can I try? I went and got a spare PSU; no change. I know some systems don't even function unless they have a viable CR2032 installed, so I fetched a fresh one of those. The old one was at about 1.8V (for those unfamiliar, it's supposed to be 3V); no change. I got out the manual PDF, looked at how to reset the CMOS, did that; no help. It was about as dead as a doornail, but not quite because the fans would still spin.
So, although there is still that rock-solid workhorse of a '360, it only has really limited usefulness. But there is at least a little hope without having to spend any money (on hardware anyway). Again, through the kindness of someone who was just going to toss a lot of computing hardware on the recycling heap because he has stuff that's better in certain ways, (see my post on Google+ about how I was quite blessed back in March) and it's a real hummdinger of a system (a Dell Precision 670, which is dual Xeons (which /proc/cpuinfo says are 3.4G yet cpuMHz says 2800...dunno, so either 3.4G or 2.8G), 4GB of ECC RAM), could have computed rings around that Athlon system, but the problem is, I measured the wattage draw of both at idle. The Athlon was 70W or a touch under, this one is more like 150. Ouch. So it's good hardware, just a touch on the expensive side to run.
But I pretty much have very little choice. I have lots of systems around here on the shelf (which work, and a few more which don't and I don't know what's wrong with them), but they're all from Pentium Pro through <= 2GHz Pentium IV/Celeron. I could try installing Xubuntu onto one of these "tiny" machines, but ultimately, I don't have much hope that it'd be any better than hobbling along on my '360. The only thing which would improve is interoperability with the world (such as Google+). Just about every Web page these days demands at the extreme minium a dual core something or other, and the only (working) specimen in my collection is the power chugging dual Xeon computer on which I'm typing this.
My thought though is, I have been wanting to get another computer since Phenom was a thing (then Phenom II, then Bulldozer/Zambezi...well, you get the idea I think, continuously thinking about it but not doing it). Although I am currently out of work, computing is (or at least was) my chosen profession, so it's probably a good thing to spend the money to upgrade to something stable, powerful AND energy-efficient. I still have considerable savings, it's just a question of how long I have to make it last until I'm working again.
But there is a glimmer of hope on that front. I just got a call from one of my friends who thinks I may be able to work with him relatively soon. So we shall see. That would at least take some sting out of spending $1200 - $1500 on a new system.
Direct all comments to this Google+ post.
English is a difficult enough language to interpret correctly when its rules are followed, let alone when the speaker or writer chooses not to follow those rules.
"Jeopardy!" replies and randomcaps really suck!
Please join one of the fastest growing social networks, Google+!
I knew something was probably radically wrong with the Athlon system because mid-this past week, I had it shut down due to the ACPI thermal threshold being exceeded. This is the first time this has happened since I got the system, so that was odd thing number 1. When it initially happened, I thought this is the hardest I have probably driven this system since I got it. It was doing real-time video decoding of HD video (I think w/o GPU assistance) to full screen, so scaling it too. It was stuttering some, which I would expect for having to do both decoding and scaling
Odd thing number 2 is that after working stably for I'd guess 6 weeks or more, I started getting "processor context corrupt" panics, which honestly was nothing new. As long as they don't bootloop or occur more than about 3 times a day, I could deal with it. Most times if I just wiggled the (PCIe) video board a little, those sorts of errors would not occur for a while.
Odd thing number 3 was yesterday when I had what I think were thermal trips while just idling (!!!), and the system would shut down, I thought I would see what was going on in the BIOS setup "PC Health and Status" page where it allows you to set the ACPI thermal threshold from 60 to 90 degrees (in increments of 5), and every half second or so see the fan tachs, system temperature, and CPU reported temperature. I am pretty sure bulk silicon even as small as an Athlon 64 X2 cannot rise in temperature 12 or more degrees in a second. If anything it will rise maybe a degree or two per second. I would see the reported CPU temp idle along at a normal-looking 38 degrees, but then jump to 42, then back to 38-ish, then 50, then 47, then 40, then 52, then 54, then 52, then 48, ...well I think you get the picture, temperatures which are going wildly all over the place.
I tried unscrewing the fan from atop the CPU heatsink, and vacuumed out as much dust as I could (and reinstalled it of course). But that really didn't help much, especially since the first power on did not POST. Again, for this system, that was unusual but not super unusual; often I would just drop a GB of RAM or something, and wiggling the RAM modules would restore sanity somewhat. So I just shut off all power, pressed on the modules, wiggled the video board, and such-like things, and the next power on did POST. That seemed to work OK, except for one or two more ACPI thermal trips.
This morning I had more troubles with the system. I don't remember now whether it was more kernel panics, thermal trips, or whatnot, but the telling thing that something was just about irretrievably wrong was that the boot firmware detected something wrong in the CMOS or bootin, and had to use fail safe, default, etc. clocking. I had never, ever seen that message out of this system, but once again, being a system which was given to me due to its instability, I figured it was yet another episode of wanting to be challenging to me. But at some point, the entire system froze, unresponsive, on the Xorg screen, a with a handful of browser windows open. I think that had not happened for a few months at least. So i hit the reset, and went into setup to double check that this "defaults programming" didn't mess with stuff like Cool 'n' Quiet which I knew would lock up the system; it apparently did not, CnQ was still off. I assumed since that had not been turned back on that everything else which I may have tweaked in order to have it not freeze was likewise left alone.
Well, it worked for a while longer, but eventually, it would turn on the fans, but nothing else would happen. No amount of pressing on the CPU heat sink, wiggling the video board, or tapping the RAM would make this board even light the third of its diagnostic LEDs (it ordinarily only takes about a second for it to light that 3rd LED, and if it's having trouble initializing the video, it'll blink that one at about 1/2 Hz).
OK, so what else can I try? I went and got a spare PSU; no change. I know some systems don't even function unless they have a viable CR2032 installed, so I fetched a fresh one of those. The old one was at about 1.8V (for those unfamiliar, it's supposed to be 3V); no change. I got out the manual PDF, looked at how to reset the CMOS, did that; no help. It was about as dead as a doornail, but not quite because the fans would still spin.
So, although there is still that rock-solid workhorse of a '360, it only has really limited usefulness. But there is at least a little hope without having to spend any money (on hardware anyway). Again, through the kindness of someone who was just going to toss a lot of computing hardware on the recycling heap because he has stuff that's better in certain ways, (see my post on Google+ about how I was quite blessed back in March) and it's a real hummdinger of a system (a Dell Precision 670, which is dual Xeons (which /proc/cpuinfo says are 3.4G yet cpuMHz says 2800...dunno, so either 3.4G or 2.8G), 4GB of ECC RAM), could have computed rings around that Athlon system, but the problem is, I measured the wattage draw of both at idle. The Athlon was 70W or a touch under, this one is more like 150. Ouch. So it's good hardware, just a touch on the expensive side to run.
But I pretty much have very little choice. I have lots of systems around here on the shelf (which work, and a few more which don't and I don't know what's wrong with them), but they're all from Pentium Pro through <= 2GHz Pentium IV/Celeron. I could try installing Xubuntu onto one of these "tiny" machines, but ultimately, I don't have much hope that it'd be any better than hobbling along on my '360. The only thing which would improve is interoperability with the world (such as Google+). Just about every Web page these days demands at the extreme minium a dual core something or other, and the only (working) specimen in my collection is the power chugging dual Xeon computer on which I'm typing this.
My thought though is, I have been wanting to get another computer since Phenom was a thing (then Phenom II, then Bulldozer/Zambezi...well, you get the idea I think, continuously thinking about it but not doing it). Although I am currently out of work, computing is (or at least was) my chosen profession, so it's probably a good thing to spend the money to upgrade to something stable, powerful AND energy-efficient. I still have considerable savings, it's just a question of how long I have to make it last until I'm working again.
But there is a glimmer of hope on that front. I just got a call from one of my friends who thinks I may be able to work with him relatively soon. So we shall see. That would at least take some sting out of spending $1200 - $1500 on a new system.
Direct all comments to this Google+ post.
English is a difficult enough language to interpret correctly when its rules are followed, let alone when the speaker or writer chooses not to follow those rules.
"Jeopardy!" replies and randomcaps really suck!
Please join one of the fastest growing social networks, Google+!
02 December, 2013
UPS, I Think You Need to Rethink Your Agreement
UPS, I think you need to rethink your end-user agreement.
Every now and then, I order something online and it gets shipped via UPS. (More often, it gets mailed or sent FedEx, but it depends on the vendor...in this case it's Monoprice.) In other words, I get maybe 4 or 5 delivered packages per year. So...you have this wonderful-sounding service where you'll send me an email (or an SMS) when the status of my package changes. That's a WONDERFUL idea!
But let's see...in order to do that, I must register as a user with your Web site. That's not so unusual. A lot of sites want visitors to identify themselves, for all kinds of reasons...in this case, the least of which is so that we don't have 5 different people wanting to know what happens for a specific package so they can go steal it from outside my door :-). But...in order to do that, I'm supposed to agree to your terms...also not unusual in our litigious society, you folks just want to limit the no doubt steady stream of angry hornets who think they've been somehow harmed by you providing a service which pretty much benefits them, but of course something went awry. It's just the way things happen these days, because "everyone" always wants someone else to blame, someone else to take the hit, because they want their lives to be a utopia. They'll find a way to link their misfortune to your big, (theoretically) money-soaked corporation. I get that, I really do. But...
I decided to follow the link on your registration page, which goes to another page with a PDF of the agreement text, which I downloaded. Are you serious? Seventy-nine pages? I'm supposed to read through 79 pages in order to receive an email telling me about arrival scans, departure scans, destination scans, out for delivery, and delivered? I get it, this is to turn the polling (refreshing the page over and over) to push notification when the events are actually posted to your system.
I know I don't have a job right now, but do you honestly think, for a few uses per year, I'm going to read through seventy-nine pages to do this? Sorry, no, I'm not that bored. I have better things to do. I think I'll continue to load down your servers by refreshing the package tracking page. Even if I refresh 200 or so times, it's likely I'll have spent far less time doing that than reading through your agreement. Isn't there anything you can do to simplify it? Please?
Direct all comments to Google+, preferably under the post about this blog entry.
English is a difficult enough language to interpret correctly when its rules are followed, let alone when the speaker or writer chooses not to follow those rules.
"Jeopardy!" replies and randomcaps really suck!
Please join one of the fastest growing social networks, Google+!
30 September, 2013
New York State Strikes with Stupidity (Again), Moreso Than Just That of the ACA
NYS is ludicrous (well, that's not news, but I digress). I just thought I'd look in on what I theoretically could pay for NYS "marketplace" health insurance, at http://www.nystateofhealth.ny.gov/PremiumEstimator. What do they have there? They have an Excel workbook. So let's see...they were too lazy (or too pressed for time) to put up some HTML forms and have a server give me some answers. No, instead I'm expected to buy proprietary software (or subscribe to Office 365) to find this information. Let's not forget that any time the State wants to update anything in this workbook, a new workbook must be (re)published, thus leaving potentially thousands if not millions of people with outdated information ("well...what are you talking about? I downloaded the file, and running the file told me this is what companies are there and what the premiums will be"). Heck, the file name itself contains "9-23-13 update". OKOKOKOK...don't say, "but Joe, there's ((Star)|(Open)|(Libre))Office." I know about the free/libre *Office suites.
When I opened this "wonderous" workbook with LibreOffice, it (rightfully so) complained that the file contained macros, and that they would be disabled, and to run them, I had to go into a specific place in the settings.
Are you going to tell me seriously "normals" are going to understand what's going on, let alone how to run these macros appropriately without compromising the security of their LibreOffice installation? Besides, this advice does not completely describe the things which need to be selected (they missed the name of the button "Macro Security"). I mean, being a computing professional, I know exactly how to handle this and remain safe.
OK, take two: I'll just use Google Docs, and import it into a spreadsheet, like I've done on numerous occasions with other workbooks. "This file could not be imported. Supported formats: .xls, .xlsx, .ods, .csv, .txt, .tsv, .tab." Ummm....OK, so I fibbed a little, and renamed it from a .xlsm file to a .xls file, and retried. "The uploaded file is password-protected and could not be imported. Please remove the password and try again." As I didn't put the password there to begin with, I obviously can't remove it.
As if this workbook monstrosity wasn't bad enough, after going into the macro security and setting the level to "medium" (prompt to run macros, but don't turn them off entirely), I discovered I have to enter in my county. I'm sorry; what's that? I thought the whole underpinning of a national health care law (combined with Amendment XIV) was that I should be able to get health insurance just the same as someone in LA, CT, CA, MO, MT, NJ, or any other state for that matter, let alone some subdivision of NY such as a county. I also thought a major principle behind this law was to break down the state border barriers when it comes to selling health insurance. Why am I going to NYS? Why am I not going to some federal entity (HHS?) for this?
As I really don't want to spend any money at all on health insurance at this point, but my nation tells me (theoretically) I must, I selected the "Catastrophic" option, figuring that's lowest on the list and will probably have the cheapest premiums. This "wonderous" workbook then informs me "This plan is only available if every person in the household is under the age of 30." Again, ummm....sorry, what? So just because I was born in 1965, I cannot simply insure myself against catastrophic illnesses and injuries? Hello! Amendment XIV? Or how about 10 CFR Part 1040, Subpart E? As a 48-year-old, I feel denied and limited as an individual for the opportunity to participate in an insurance program which receives federal tax subsidy as financial assistance.
Let's just put all this NYS silliness aside for a moment. I'd like to know just how our "salescritter" (BHO) could think he was not lying. (Well, we know now quite well he was, but we're stuck for another 3.5 years or so.)
I want to know, what is the magic pixie dust which is supposed to fix insurance magically? After all, this law was "sold" to the American public as reducing premiums substantially, while at the same time adding roughly 30 million more people to the health (insurance) system, not all of them necessarily paying people, insuring "kids" until they're 26 years old, total exclusion of denial based on preexisting conditions, with no mention of tort reforms. I suppose the slice of the American public who supported this law figured it was just the cruel, heartless, greedy insurance companies which could take the money they were all receiving with the system before law enactment and offer these incredibly enhanced services just because they have been so incredibly "greedy."
Look, don't get me wrong. There are some areas in health insurance which could be improved which would parallel other laws in the respect that noone should be discriminated against based on what they are. We have many such laws, such as against discrimination based on color/race, gender, age, and so on...what we are, something about which we can't really do anything.
For example, preexisting conditions is a really tough nut. I'm talking about Crohn's disease, diabetes, lupus...any number of conditions/diseases which are caused totally or partly by genetic factors; again, it's what those affected are, often nothing to do with what they do or did. If for example one develops adult onset diabetes, as long as one has had insurance, it's covered. But some poor schlub who, for whatever reasons, has some sort of lapse in insurance coverage is either denied or must pay sky-high premiums? It makes no rational sense to me. I'm also not saying they shouldn't pay something additional, just that they shouldn't be denied, and there should be some sort of limit on the premium differential. I mean, as many have pointed out, making everything the same is unfortunately not a workable solution, because all someone has to do is not buy any insurance at all and then waltz in after something happens and say, "hey, I need this." A good analogy people often cite is going to buy homeowners' insurance right after one's house burns. There needs to be some disincentive against doing that sort of thing, so maybe disallowing denial plus some percent cap on premium differential would suffice.
Tort reform could go a long way towards curbing lavish, arguably unjust malpractice awards. Malpractice premiums could potentially be reduced substantially, therefore prices charged for medical services, therefore the amount insurance companies have to pay out on claims.
Do we really need 50 different health insurance regulatory jurisdictions? Just like the NYS Do Not Call registry got subsumed by the national DNC, couldn't some laws be passed which trump individual States' insurance laws so that insurance companies can sell in all states and eliminate the compexities of selling in all 50 States? This is a noted exception to States' rights, simply because the larger the pool of people served, the more inexpensive the system becomes, by combining the risks over a much wider area.
It's all so much hooey. I hope it somehow gets repealed and completely rewritten. Moreso, I would like to see a NYS law passed which states open standards must be used for all externally accessible media...meaning no Microsoft anything, no Flash, nothing proprietary.
Direct all comments to Google+, preferably under the post about this blog entry.
English is a difficult enough language to interpret correctly when its rules are followed, let alone when the speaker or writer chooses not to follow those rules.
"Jeopardy!" replies and randomcaps really suck!
Please join one of the fastest growing social networks, Google+!
When I opened this "wonderous" workbook with LibreOffice, it (rightfully so) complained that the file contained macros, and that they would be disabled, and to run them, I had to go into a specific place in the settings.
OK, take two: I'll just use Google Docs, and import it into a spreadsheet, like I've done on numerous occasions with other workbooks. "This file could not be imported. Supported formats: .xls, .xlsx, .ods, .csv, .txt, .tsv, .tab." Ummm....OK, so I fibbed a little, and renamed it from a .xlsm file to a .xls file, and retried. "The uploaded file is password-protected and could not be imported. Please remove the password and try again." As I didn't put the password there to begin with, I obviously can't remove it.
As if this workbook monstrosity wasn't bad enough, after going into the macro security and setting the level to "medium" (prompt to run macros, but don't turn them off entirely), I discovered I have to enter in my county. I'm sorry; what's that? I thought the whole underpinning of a national health care law (combined with Amendment XIV) was that I should be able to get health insurance just the same as someone in LA, CT, CA, MO, MT, NJ, or any other state for that matter, let alone some subdivision of NY such as a county. I also thought a major principle behind this law was to break down the state border barriers when it comes to selling health insurance. Why am I going to NYS? Why am I not going to some federal entity (HHS?) for this?
As I really don't want to spend any money at all on health insurance at this point, but my nation tells me (theoretically) I must, I selected the "Catastrophic" option, figuring that's lowest on the list and will probably have the cheapest premiums. This "wonderous" workbook then informs me "This plan is only available if every person in the household is under the age of 30." Again, ummm....sorry, what? So just because I was born in 1965, I cannot simply insure myself against catastrophic illnesses and injuries? Hello! Amendment XIV? Or how about 10 CFR Part 1040, Subpart E? As a 48-year-old, I feel denied and limited as an individual for the opportunity to participate in an insurance program which receives federal tax subsidy as financial assistance.
Let's just put all this NYS silliness aside for a moment. I'd like to know just how our "salescritter" (BHO) could think he was not lying. (Well, we know now quite well he was, but we're stuck for another 3.5 years or so.)
I want to know, what is the magic pixie dust which is supposed to fix insurance magically? After all, this law was "sold" to the American public as reducing premiums substantially, while at the same time adding roughly 30 million more people to the health (insurance) system, not all of them necessarily paying people, insuring "kids" until they're 26 years old, total exclusion of denial based on preexisting conditions, with no mention of tort reforms. I suppose the slice of the American public who supported this law figured it was just the cruel, heartless, greedy insurance companies which could take the money they were all receiving with the system before law enactment and offer these incredibly enhanced services just because they have been so incredibly "greedy."
Look, don't get me wrong. There are some areas in health insurance which could be improved which would parallel other laws in the respect that noone should be discriminated against based on what they are. We have many such laws, such as against discrimination based on color/race, gender, age, and so on...what we are, something about which we can't really do anything.
For example, preexisting conditions is a really tough nut. I'm talking about Crohn's disease, diabetes, lupus...any number of conditions/diseases which are caused totally or partly by genetic factors; again, it's what those affected are, often nothing to do with what they do or did. If for example one develops adult onset diabetes, as long as one has had insurance, it's covered. But some poor schlub who, for whatever reasons, has some sort of lapse in insurance coverage is either denied or must pay sky-high premiums? It makes no rational sense to me. I'm also not saying they shouldn't pay something additional, just that they shouldn't be denied, and there should be some sort of limit on the premium differential. I mean, as many have pointed out, making everything the same is unfortunately not a workable solution, because all someone has to do is not buy any insurance at all and then waltz in after something happens and say, "hey, I need this." A good analogy people often cite is going to buy homeowners' insurance right after one's house burns. There needs to be some disincentive against doing that sort of thing, so maybe disallowing denial plus some percent cap on premium differential would suffice.
Tort reform could go a long way towards curbing lavish, arguably unjust malpractice awards. Malpractice premiums could potentially be reduced substantially, therefore prices charged for medical services, therefore the amount insurance companies have to pay out on claims.
Do we really need 50 different health insurance regulatory jurisdictions? Just like the NYS Do Not Call registry got subsumed by the national DNC, couldn't some laws be passed which trump individual States' insurance laws so that insurance companies can sell in all states and eliminate the compexities of selling in all 50 States? This is a noted exception to States' rights, simply because the larger the pool of people served, the more inexpensive the system becomes, by combining the risks over a much wider area.
It's all so much hooey. I hope it somehow gets repealed and completely rewritten. Moreso, I would like to see a NYS law passed which states open standards must be used for all externally accessible media...meaning no Microsoft anything, no Flash, nothing proprietary.
Direct all comments to Google+, preferably under the post about this blog entry.
English is a difficult enough language to interpret correctly when its rules are followed, let alone when the speaker or writer chooses not to follow those rules.
"Jeopardy!" replies and randomcaps really suck!
Please join one of the fastest growing social networks, Google+!
04 September, 2013
Stealing from YouTube Content Providers? Hardly
I just had another thought which goes out to those folks who state that doing whatever I can to block online ads is somehow immoral or indecent:
So, you think it's reprehensible that I have BIND set up on my Linux router so that it answers authoritatively for domains like doubleclick.net and admob.com with ::1 and 127.0.0.1. You think it's bad that I would even consider using youtubeskip.com. You really wish I would take down my Squid or Polipo cache which does URI inspection and substitutes a PNG of Tux the Pengin for certain URIs. You think that I'm somehow burglarizing the people/orgs/sites who put ads on their site (especially YouTube), and that the people who put up that content will basically refuse to produce more content if those ads don't get viewed. I see. So...
Are you going to come to my house, go through my recycling bin (the actual one, not any metaphorical, computer desktop one), and extract all the ads which come via the USPS? Are you going to insist I need to read each one? After all, companies have paid to produce those ads, to print those ads, and to deliver those ads, not to mention make the products or do the services they're meant to promote and sell. Sorry, e.g. ValPak, you aren't my bank, you aren't my credit card company, you aren't the Erie County Water Authority, you aren't the NYS DMV, you aren't my insurer, nor are you any of the other mailers I actually care about. Unfortunately, in this economic time, I really don't have much spare cash to spend on anything I've seen in your previous mailings, so your envelope goes, unopened, into the recycling bin.
Oh, cruel-hearted me; I just did in the physical world what I do in the virtual world every day. I examined the envelope (URI), made a judgement based on past experience (found the content at that URI or URI prefix of litte value or outright annoying), and discarded (blocked) the unwanted materials. Oh, and BTW, especially in mobilespace or certain ISPs (notably in Canada), viewing these ads could actually cost me real money because they could make me go over my monthly quota, so no thank you.
I guess this also means I'm not allowed to reject any emails either based on spam filtering. It's the same paradigm, really. It's electronic stuff I do not want.
I guess this also means I'm not allowed to reject any emails either based on spam filtering. It's the same paradigm, really. It's electronic stuff I do not want.
Again...if you are depending on 100% presentation of ads delivered that way, you're doing it wrong. Use product placement deals, or, like TWiT does, live reads. Make deals with another content distributor, such as Amazon or Netflix (I don't know...just not necessarily YouTube).
Direct all comments to Google+, preferably under the post about this blog entry.
English is a difficult enough language to interpret correctly when its rules are followed, let alone when the speaker or writer chooses not to follow those rules.
"Jeopardy!" replies and randomcaps really suck!
Please join one of the fastest growing social networks, Google+!
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