Who Dun Broke ‘Ma Internet?

If there’s one technology glitch that gets me ticked off, it’s when there’s a networking problem somewhere outside my home, but also outside the network centre where my servers are. For the past three days, I’ve seen atrocious performance when trying to download files off my servers. I have two dedicated servers, each in different locations, yet on both when I tried to download large files I couldn’t get anything faster than 40 KB/s. I’m used to seeing speeds in the 1500 KB/s range, so this was a real shock. At first I suspected a problem with my cable modem (again), but a quick test showed that my connection from the modem to the ISP’s server was pounding at 9 mbps. I then thought maybe there was a bandwidth or load problem with both of my servers, but checking them both showed me that they weren’t overloaded nor were they saturated in terms of bandwidth. Even accessing the Web was flaky – some sites came up fast, some didn’t. Outlook 2007 was locking up on me because it would lose connection to my Exchange server/IMAP accounts and freak out (it’s so ungraceful when dealing with connection problems). Just an hour ago I was trying to post a message to the Microsoft NNTP server and Windows Mail was locking up on me.

I was deeply puzzled and decided to finally call my ISP (Shaw). I knew it would be tough going because trying to convince a tech support person there’s a problem outside their immediate network is almost impossible. While waiting on hold I fired up my FTP program to try again, fully expecting to see 40 KB/s download rates…and instead I saw 800 KB/s downloads. Wouldn’t you know it, somewhere between here and there someone turned the SUCK knob down from 11 to zero and everything is fast again. I pulled down some files from my server at 1300 KB/s – nice and fast.

Thanks to whoever dun fixed ‘ma Internet. 😀

Only in Calgary…

This is what I woke up to this morning:

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Two days ago I was mowing my lawn because it had grown so much the week before – and this morning I’m shovelling heavy, wet snow. If you look at the tree on the far right, you can see it’s bent – the snow was so heavy it bent all the trees and shrubs in our backyard in half. Only in Calgary…

The Facebook

People that know me understand that sometimes I find the little things in life utterly hilarious. One such thing is how some people add the word “the” in front of online companies and services. People will say things like “I was on The Google”, as if it were a broad term like “The Internet”. I’ve heard “The YouTube” and several other amusing names. But here, today, I have proof that Facebook (which is all the rage now in case you’ve been living under a digital rock) is really…The Facebook! Here’s a screen shot of a purchase I made (gift credits) and look at the name:

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So now apparently I can’t laugh when someone calls it “The Facebook”. And interestingly enough, www.thefacebook.com resolves to www.facebook.com. Excuse me while I’m off to go check my profile on The Facebook…

Manually Updating Printer IP Address When Swapping Routers

I’ve been swapping out routers lately (the D-Link 624 was incompatible with the Vista wireless drivers on my Fujitsu P7010), but I ran into a fresh problem that I haven’t seen before: now that I have the hp 2600n networked laser printer connected, when you swap routers and IP addresses change, the clients (PCs) that need to print don’t magically find the printer at the new IP address. You need to re-configure the IP address of the printer port on every PC that you want to print to the networked printer. Here’s how (and remember this is under Vista, but the procedure is very similar under XP):

  1. Open up the Printers panel under Control Panel (or just hit Start then type Printers)
  2. Right-click on the printer you want to fix, select Properties
  3. Switch to the Ports tab
  4. Find the port that is the IP address – it will likely be 192.168.1.32 or something similar
  5. Select that port, then click on Configure
  6. On the line that says”Printer Name or IP Address”, change the IP address listed to the IP address of your printer (which you’d get either from the printer itself by printing a status report, or from your router’s list of connected clients)
  7. Ignore the binging sound that occurs when you type in any of the new IP address. Ignore the fact that the Port Name is the old IP address, it has no effect.
  8. Click OK to save the settings
  9. Click back to the General tab and click Print Test page to make sure it works

Here’s what step six looks like:

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A Good Day for Customer Service

Today was not only a holiday across Canada (and thus a good day), but I managed to score back-to-back customer service wins: first, over the weekend Ashley and I tried to assemble a Boltz Multimedia Rack…only to discover that I ordered a stand-alone MM-252 rather than the expansion unit that I should have ordered to link up with the four units we already have. The stand-alone unit was more expensive, and lacked the connector bolts that we needed to connect it to the other units. The unit came up from Arkansas, so shipping and brokerage/taxes were a bit pricey and it wasn’t practical to ship back. Thankfully when I phoned Boltz today I was able to order the parts I needed, with shipping, for around $30 or so – I was afraid they were going to tell me to return it at my cost. Score one for the consumer!

Here’s the big win: I have a Dell W2600 LCD TV, which is a 26″ monitor that I purchased back in November of 2004. In my office I used it with Vista Media Center to watch recorded TV, DVDs, and listen to music. Unfortunately for the past six months or so it’s been flaking out on me: the power button wouldn’t reliably turn it off or on, nor would using the off/on button on the remote. I’d have to disconnect the power plug, leave it for a few minutes, then re-connect and try to get it powered up. I felt like Han Solo punching a control panel on the Millennium Falcon (I watched Empire Strikes Back this weekend). I already had it replaced one for a similar problem in late 2005. Since that’s so much hassle, I’ve left it turned on for months now, only allowing it to go into a suspend state. That’s worked really well, until last night when we had a power outage at 2 AM and the monitor turned off. I tried for 15 minutes this morning but was unable to get it turned on.

I decided to phone Dell to get the name of a local authorized repair shop, but instead they shocked me by saying they’d replace the whole LCD TV and ship me a brand new one. I was shocked because it was long out of warranty, but they’ve apparently had abnormal failure rates with some of their TVs and are replacing them if the customer calls in. I’ve had my problems with Dell monitors in the past – boy have I ever – but I’ve always thought highly of their products and this situation certainly made me feel loyalty as a Dell customer.

So by the end of the week I’ll have my DVD/CD collection back together again in our TV room, and I’ll have a brand new Dell LCD TV (that I’ll promptly purchase an extended warranty for). It’s starting off to be a great week!

The Location of Internet Explorer RSS Feeds

I made the mistake of importing my OPML file (with about 150 feeds) into Internet Explorer 7 because I wanted to read my RSS feeds using Outlook 2007. That didn’t turn out so well, because Outlook 2007 has next to no tools for managing feeds – it looks like a last-minute add-on, lacking even basic features such as marking feed item as being read when you exit the feed. So I decided to switch back to using Feeddemon. Outlook 2007 and Internet Explorer 7 have a symbiotic relationship to feed items – meaning that whatever you import into IE7’s RSS feed items will also show up in Outlook 2007. As Shakespeare would say, here’s the rub: there’s no way to select all the feed items in IE7. If you want delete them, you have to right-click on each item and delete each one. I thought there had to be a faster way, so after some research I discovered that the IE7 feed items are located here (you’ll need to turn on hidden files to see them):

C:\Users\Jason Dunn\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Feeds

Now here’s the ugly part: Outlook 2007 creates a one-time, not a permanent link, with the RSS items in IE7. Meaning that even though I deleted all of the RSS items from IE7’s data store, they all still existed in Outlook 2007. 🙁 The slightly better news is that pressing the Delete and Yes key in rapid succession allowed me to get through them all pretty quickly. The ultra-ugly news was that even after deleting all the feeds, I still had 8500+ unread mail items in Outlook – and the only way to delete them was to delete them in groups, feed by feed. What a completely screwed up scenario this is…I hope I don’t have to repeat all these steps with Outlook on my main workstation (I did this all on my laptop).

When Good Hardware That’s Never Supposed to Fail Goes Bad

When you work with computer hardware on a regular basis, building machines and swapping components in and out, you start to see patterns of hardware failure. Generally most hardware is reliable, but you’ll see more failures with components related to movement, power, and heat. Hard drives, system fans, power supplies and optical drives seem to have the highest failure rates, but video cards are failing more often than they used to as they run hotter, faster, and need more cooling. Things you don’t see spontaneously fail very often include CPUs, RAM, motherboards, and cables – sure, they can fail, but they usually require “help” from the owner or local power outlet.

Imagine my surprise when this week I had not one, but two bizarre failures of hardware that I’d never expect to fail. I booted up my Fujitsu P7010 laptop, a little 10.6″ screen job, that has 1 GB of RAM (2 x 512 MB) that I installed over a year ago. It’s run fine since then, but this week when I booted it up Vista wouldn’t load – I’d get a blue screen of death and an error related to memory. Because I had been running this hardware for so long (the laptop is a bit over two years old now) hardware failure was the furthest thing from my mind. I ran the Vista repair process (which is quite impressive) because that’s what the OS instructed me to do, but that didn’t work so I figured I’d run memtest86 and see if something was wrong. Below is a photo of what I saw (hint: red is bad).

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I ran the test two more times, each with one of the 512 MB memory modules installed, and isolated it to one of the chips. I phoned Kingston, and was happy they had a lifetime warranty. The warranty process was amazingly fast and painless: no waiting on hold at all, the technician listened to me explain what I did and immediately agreed it was bad memory. A few minutes after that I had spoken to an RMA tech who took my credit card number so they could cross-ship me new RAM immediately, and as long as I return the defective RAM within ten days they won’t charge my credit card. Oh, and they also gave me their FedEx account number so I wouldn’t have to pay for return shipping. You never want RAM to go bad, but when it does happen, you can’t ask for anything more than a company that’s willing to make the replacement as fast and painless as possible.

Ok, so RAM can and does go bad. But when is the last time you heard of a coaxial cable spontaneously failing? Yesterday I was having massive trouble with my Internet connection, and I blamed it on my Netgear WPN824, which has been flaky since the day I bought it (mostly giving me random network failures that persist until I reboot it). I swapped in a D-Link DI-624, power-cycled everything including my cable modem, and assumed everything would work fine. I’ve swapped those routers in and out several time, with a Netgear router thrown in for good measure, because I can’t never seem to find one that’s stable 100% of the time. At any rate, my connection kept failing, so I looked at my SHAW cable modem with a critical eye. I have a 10 mbps downstream connection that’s been amazingly solid for the past two years (it was a bit rocky before that). Sure enough, I checked it and it wasn’t online. I’ve had a cable modem connection since 1995, so I’m very familiar with how they behave and know when something isn’t working right. I called SHAW tech support, he confirmed that it was disconnecting and re-connecting from the network, so I power cycled it one more time, and saw it lock in – and thought my problem was solved. I went back to work, only to lose my connection again. I went to my wiring area and watched the cable modem – it would lock in, all lights lit, then it would lose the network connection and everything would start blinking. And it would repeat that cycle every minute or so. What was going on?

I phoned SHAW tech support again, they said it must be a local problem with the wiring or the modem itself, and they’d have to book a service call – the best date they could do was a week down the road. I told him that if that was the case I’d be ordering DSL the next day – that rattled him, although I was mostly bluffing trying to get more immediate service (although I do still wonder about running cable and DSL together and bonding them together for a redundant and faster connection). I was suspicious of the cable modem rather than the household cable connection, because my SHAW digital phone (basically a private VOIP service) was working perfectly, as was my cable TV. My loving wife Ashley volunteered to drive to her parents house, borrow their cable modem, and bring it back so I could try a known good modem. I did, and it didn’t work. At this point I was starting to get really frustrated, and Ashley said “Did you try changing the cable that goes into the wall?”. I gave her one of those “Don’t be silly, that couldn’t possibly be the problem” looks, but having nothing to lose, I gave it a try – and it worked. What the hell…?

The cable in question is five years old, having been installed when we moved into our house. It’s plain old copper cable – how could it possibly fail? I don’t know how, but it did – and thanks to my wife, looking at a problem with a fresh set of eyes unfettered by assumptions, I’m back online.

Note to self: always check the obvious points of failure, even if you think they couldn’t possibly fail.

Facebook: Population Uptake

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There’s a little over one million people living in Calgary, the city where I live, and according to Facebook there’s 121,519 people in the Calgary, AB network. If that statistic is correct – and it’s not just people who once lived here or something similar – that has to be the highest level I’ve ever seen of a population using the same online service. 12% of a major city all signed up for the same thing? That’s crazy when you think about the numbers, especially when you factor out the people not likely to use Facebook at this point in time (perhaps under age 10, over age 50). What’s the Facebook penetration like in your city as compared to the population?