home :: admin

Big changes

eBox e-mailed me tonight to let me know that my new vCable 400 Internet connection had been activated.

So after watching the hockey game on TV, I connected my new technicolor TC4400-AM modem onto the coax cable with my old Videotron modem used to me connected, and within a few minutes my new internet connection was indeed up and running.

So after checking that everything was up and running properly, I ran the olde Ookla speed test to see if the speed was as advertized.

Whoa! I now get 454 Mbps download and 56 Mbps upload. This is nice.

It's also almost 3x the speed I had before for 30% less money monthly (to be fair, I've also changed some services, but rather minimally).

This is a nice upgrade... only thing left to change is the outgoing SMTP server in my Thunderbird connection, and then I'll be done with the internet connection.

Later on tomorrow, I'll configure the eBox TV app on my Sony Bravia Android TV: apparently, I will no longer need a set top box and my TV will be able to manage the eBox TV connection directly. I can't wait to try this out and see, but now it's late so time to go to sleep.

Oh, and until I cancel my Videotron contract, my old TV service still works, so no huge rush to migrate (except for the fact that as of today, I'll be paying twice for the service).

Good night all!

PS. Ah ha. There was more to do: not only did I need to fix the /etc/hosts.allow files on my internet servers to allow access from home, but I also needed to fix the SPF records for both of my domains to authorize e-mail coming from eBox's SMTP servers. I've cleaned up the hosts.allow file pretty heavily, so I may need to go back and authorize my mobile phone and such... Sigh, there are always little things left and right.

/admin | Posted at 01:24 | permanent link

Big changes

So, this is the last day of 2020, and what a year it has been. The COVID-19 global pandemic has certainly been extremely disruptive to most people's daily lives. Many of us found ourselves having to set up semi-permanent home office spaces for teleworking, and the companies that didn't have proper remote work infrastructures found themselves facing significant difficulties.

And that's not even mentioning industries such as restaurants, travel, and hospitality where entire companies have found themselves in dire straights and people have lost their jobs in droves.

Through all of this, I found a new and fascinating job running the IT department at my alma mater, so overall 2020 has been a good and positive year.

From a technical point of view, we're just about to leave our current internet (and TV) provider to adopt ebox. We'll be moving up to a 400 Mbps connection, which is great. Hard to believe that our first permanent internet connection in 1995 was a 0.014 Mbps modem link (a 14.4 kbps modem connection) to Interlinx that connected our little Unix machine to the Internet for real for the first time.

EBox seems like a solid outfit. I'll let you know more in 2021 once I've completed the connection and activated the TV and Internet services.

Cheers to all of you, and here's hoping that 2021 is less quirky than 2020!

/admin | Posted at 16:33 | permanent link

I despise 'Automatic Private IP Addressing'

The number of times where a Mac, an iPad, or a Windows machine has caused me grief by chosing to self-assign an "Automatic Private IP Address" is becoming annoyingly large.

I would much rather have these machines inform me that there is a problem with the DHCP server on the local LAN and that I should fix it, rather than trying to self assign an IP address in the range of 169.254.x.y, which generally doesn't work and doesn't let the machine talk with any of the other devices on the network... and of course, because the machine that tried to helpfully self assign an address thusly will not notify me of this, meaning that it will take longer to find out what has gone wrong.

Sometimes, especially on Apple devices, it will also be annoyingly hard to make the device snap out of this mode and actually request a brand new IP address from the local DHCP server. Argh! In addition to that, it is usually distressingly hard to disable this behavior in devices, as they all try to be simple and auto-configurable. Argh again!

Another woe of DHCP address assignment are home routers that do not provide options to manage the list of assigned DHCP addresses or their corresponding leases, and which therefore run out of assignable addresses with leases running well into 2021 or something! Recently, my Livebox from Orange ran out of available DHCP addresses, and therefore stopped giving them out... which caused various networking equipment to fail in interesting ways.

So yes, I know: "use static IP addresses". I do that most of the time, but still have my various mobile devices configured for DHCP, simply because that's what ones does when travelling with ones' mobile devices.

Anyway, here's hoping for:

1. a simple way to disable 169.254 addresses in Windows, IOS, and Mac OS X
2. a simple way to edit the DHCP leases table on the old Sagem Livebox

So yeah, I'm not holding my breath :-)

/admin | Posted at 18:52 | permanent link