ze avatar *
It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.
- Theodore Roosevelt
I hope that no one will claim to know the final answers; no good comes from prophets. But even when acknowledging our falibility, we must nevertheless continue to think about these matters and give the advice to others that intellect and conscience dictate. And let God be our judge, as our grandparents used to say. - Sakharov
Baka ni tsukeru kusuriwa nai (There's no medicine to cure stupidity) - an old Japanese Proverb
|
Home  Blog Archive Geeking Out Silicon Valley DSL still sucks... My Solution
|
Silicon Valley DSL still sucks... My Solution |
|
Tuesday, 12 July 2005 |
I live in Silicon Valley, in the heart of it no less and my internet
connectivity is a total joke. The modem loses sync all the time.
Reguler DSL only became available in this area about 2 1/2 years ago
too... I mean, my parents who live in the boonyland of the Big Island
of Hawaii (Puna District) get it even. They are surrounded by
lava and can't even see the rooftop of the closest neighbor?
Silicon Valley = Hi-Tech? Yeah Right. I even had to resort to
using a premium ISP (speakeasy, who has awesome tech support btw), to
help me diagnose all the issues to get any sort of
semi-reliability. Originally I was using SBC ADSL (which was a
major PITA) after finally switching from IDSL (IDSL is limited to 144K
syncronous) since that was all they offered, the performance was
decent but I was using PPPoE which sucks because I couldn't host
anything without using dynamic DNS.
After switching to Speakeasy, we went through all kinds of
diagnostics and tests to try to get everything sorted out. Tried 3
different modem models, tested and retested the line quality, etc etc.
I had to get Covad tech which is sub-contracted by Speakeasy to do the
servicing to come out over 3 times. What made it even more lame was
that apparently Speakeasy doesn't have access to the remote extention
module that the DSLAM is connected to, which is owned and operated by
SBC. Still, that doesn't explain or justify why internet connectivity
to my home should be so bad. Originally I ordered 6Mbit downstream /
768K upstream... I used it like that for approximately 9 months
tolerating losing modem sync about every other day... I would have to
walk to my server room (more like corner of my dining room), and turn
the modem off then back on. Retarded. It was extra bad because I host
my own mail, dns, and web server here. I had started to suspect that
the lack of sync capability was due to the high bandwidth requirement
and there may be a way to change the settings on the dslam to lower it
to 3Mbit / 768K. I had been paying $140 / month for the 6Mbit / 768K
which is a ton for just personal use and personal websites... but hey,
I'm a geek I gotta have my IPs. After diagnosing the issue with
speakeasy and got them to tune the dslam to use 3mbit I requested them
to lower my rates... they offered to $90 / month + misc fees. Not good,
but not bad considering I keep all my IPs and same upstream bandwidth.
At first I was excited with the increased reliability, but still I
found the modem losing sync about once or twice a week. I finally had
enough of this crap and decided to take matters into my own hand. I
looked on Ebay and bought a RPB+ 115
remote booting box with serial input control. I hooked that up to my
FreeBSD firewall router and wrote a perl script to detect when I lost
connectivity and issue serial port commands to the box to reboot the
correct power slot which in turn the modem was connected to. Wala,
problem sorta solved. Of course the modem still loses sync
occasionally, but even if I'm off traveling somewhere it will recover
itself within 5 minutes. Not bad. Here is the script I wrote to control
the RPB+ 115, not elegant at all, but it works. My power cyling script: http://kenji.kenjim.com/pub/powercycler.pl |
|
