The DNS issue manifests itself with two horrible behaviors. First, it thinks it is smart to tell connected PCs that the first DNS address is that of the router and not any real DNS service such as the one provided by your ISP. Second, the DNS caching table is microscopic and after a short bit of use fills up ans starts to hose the router’s ability to look up new internet addresses as well as eventually corrupting the wireless functions.

There is a solution and I finally broke down and implemented it. It’s a bit painful but if it fixes the issues, it is well worth it. Here is what you do. (Updated to be even better !)

1. get a real wireless router
2. write down your ISP’s DNS primary and secondary addresses
3. open a browser to the Actiontec
4. got to advanced settings for WAN IP
5. change the setting from “PPPoE” to “RFC 1483 Transparent Bridging”
6. click save and restart
7. set the router IP address to something “out of the way” such as 192.168.25.25 and set the IP address range to the same area such as 192.168.25.101 and above
8. turn off the DHCP
9. establish a DMZ setting such as 192.168.25.100
10. unplug all the network connections to the Actiontec and then plug them into the new “real” router
11. open a browser to the real router’s default address - usually 192.168.1.1 or 192.168.0.1
12. configure it to have a static IP address from it’s host (which is actually the Actiontec) and match it to the DMZ setting which, in this example was 192.168.25.100
13. set the DNS primary and secondary addresses to those of your ISP
14. find the basic settings where it asks if you internet connection requires a login. select “yes”
15. enter your user name and password from your ISP
16. select the necessary settings to get and IP address and DSN address(s) automaticly from your ISP
17. save your settings
18. go celebrate

The nice thing about this is that now my Linux PCs - including the OLPC XO - are happy and have healthy internet connections.

I have some options. If I look hard and plan a little, I really only need PoE on about 6-8 ports. So, if there is not an afordable 24 port gigabit swtich with PoE, I could install two switches in the utility room with just an 8 port switch supporting PoE and a 16 or 24 port switch without.

So, my question to anyone, who has some experience or knowledge, is this - What affordable options would you recomend for any of the following …

24 port gigabit switch with PoE
24 port gigabit switch
8 port gigabit switch with PoE

Thanks for any advice and pointers you pass along !

Well, I stumbled across a clip that probably never aired on the Red Bull Air Race series. My friends know I fly. My friends know I fly old stuff. I really hope my friends know I can’t/won’t do this ….

… but a guy can dream !

I learned a few important numbers today. First, the farmhouse is 10,000 feet from the nearest telephone company hub - well within the 18,000 foot range. This means I have a very good chance of quality DSL service. In this agricultural area, that’s a good thing, a very good thing.

Next, I learned that water lines must hold 50 PSI and sewer lines must hold 5 PSI to pass inspection. My well showed 55 PSI all day long but the sewer lines were only holding 1.5 PSI.

The inspector said, if I called before 9am and said the pressure held, I’d be OK. I could do that but the truth is it is not holding. It’s my house and I want it right. It reminds me of a comment my brother once made when asked about experimental / home-built aircraft. “If you are building an airplane you will fly yourself, you’re not going to cut corners.”

So, now I need to coordinate with the plumber while at the same time the concrete contractor starts to prepare the site. Ahhhh … it’s a GC’s life for me !

The internet has really helped in the areas of “decision making”. The biggest tool has turned out to be Google’s image search. The kitchen cabinets and wetroom tiling are two good examples. Here is a page of results from my search of custom kitchen cabinets. In one instance, I used the search too look for layout ideas. A later use of the same search was to investigate ideas of door and drawer styles. Lately, it has been colors. The page of thumbnails lets me quickly discard color combinations without even seeing the full size pictures. I quickly open a tab for anything that *might* be interesting. After I have 10 or 15 tabs open, I start to page through them and discard the obvious misses. I whittle the list down to a few and then bookmark those in a folder. I repeat this a few times. Then I walk away to do something else. The next time I feel like picking up the task, I open my browser again and have it “open all bookmarks in the folder”. Then I page through the tabs and discard any that no longer interest me and start making notes of the rest. I’ll usually repeat this filtering a few times until I have a very small number of choices, any of which I would be happy with.

When the time comes, I’ll use the same technique for choosing the cabinet hardware.

On side note - I found an image of a simple door, photographed strait on. This is turning out to be a huge asset. I loaded it into GIMP (an open source equivalent to Photoshop) and preceded to clean it up and make make a black & white image from it. Next, I created a series of layers.. There are four primary layers - the whole base image, just the door&drawer inserts, horizontal wood grain, and vertical wood grain. The horizontal grain is cropped to the rails and the vertical covers the stiles and recessed panels. The combination allows me to simulate any combination of colors as well as painted vs wood finishes. The grains are just alpha channel - no color. I then can copy the base and insert images and color them numerous different ways.  I can turn on/off the wood grain as well. (All of this still does not mean I have settled on the final choices.) Sooner or later I should post the process in more detail but that will have to wait.

I used this same technique when researching wet rooms. I blogged earlier that wet rooms are much more common in the UK than here in the USA. I needed to learn all I could and it turned out using Google’s image search, made it easier to distinguish the websites that had the relevant information.

It turns out (1) the system test tool lied. I did not have a supported browser. I only found out by googling for “Sametime Unyte” and “Firefox 3″.

I found this …

Q. Does Sametime Unyte Meeting support Firefox 3?
A. Currently Firefox 3 is being evaluated but is not currently a supported browser. To see the details of the browsers that are currently supported please review the System Requirements: http://www.webdialogs.com/support/system.asp

Why it is that Firefox 3 seems to be such a dillema ?

… our use of XMPP for Command & Control could also be refitted to act as a cluster / machine monitor. The cool part of XMPP is it acts as both a presence monitor, think of my list of friends who are currently online, but in our case servers who are responding. We can communicate with each server …

Using this secure messaging channel we can send encrypted details on the state of a given machine or group of machines as well as other relevant virtual machine information. If we lose a particular VM, cluster or entire region, no worries, they’re offline and won’t effect another machines in the cluster. The messages can be queued and delivered later when the machines are available again.

Source: ElasticVapor: :: “Using XMPP bot for Cloud Monitoring“

There is still the issue of hardware and operating system failures but the XMPP bot methodology provides easy server status “awareness” and command & control. Pretty slick idea.