I know it’s been a while since I posted. Busy summer, we’ll leave it at that.

I was contacted by a reader of my blog - Nolan Haycook - who uses RoadRunner with Time Warner Cable. He called them up and gave me some interesting information from a tier 3 support technician (T3ST):

• TWC really doesn’t have a net neutrality opinion
• There are no monthly bandwidth limits
• They don’t filter any traffic via port blocking, DPI or any other methods
• Their TOS is pretty open regarding activity
• The advertised speed is WYSIWYG
• RR never goes down for maintenance, everything they do is done very smoothly
• Sometimes shit happens and lines get messed up by a backhoe that didn’t call to dig
• TWC/RR probably wont be bought out, if anything Verizon FIOS will sellout RR broadband
• Bandwidth isn’t throttled by time of day, more or less it’s the network load. Look into RR boost capabilities to find out more information on how they trying to give you MORE bandwidth than advertised.
• The modem is an NAT device with an IP address of 192.168.100.1, and it allows port forwarding and DMZ, but minimal configuration otherwise.
• Residential IPs last as long as the connection is live, the T3ST was unsure about the DHCP lease times but he said his was active for about a year and a half.
• RR installs the coaxial cable needed (1 line) free of charge when you purchase their services.

Some of these sound more believable than others to me - specifically the claim that they never go down for maintenance and that their TOS is pretty open. I did a little looking around and (thanks to a link from Nolan) found their subscriber agreement and operator policy. A few interesting quotes:

(iii) If I receive HSD Service, I agree not to use the HSD Service for operation as an Internet service provider, for the hosting of websites (other than as expressly permitted as part of the HSD Service) or for any enterprise purpose whether or not the enterprise is directed toward making a profit. (emphasis added)

(d) I agree to provide TWC and its authorized agents access to my premises during regular business hours upon reasonable notice during the term of this Agreement and after its termination to install, connect, inspect, maintain, repair, replace, alter or disconnect or remove the TWC Equipment, to install Software, to conduct service theft audits, or to check for signal leakage. I agree that TWC may have reasonable access to easements and TWC Equipment located on my grounds.

(b) If I receive HSD Service, I acknowledge that TWC has the right, but not the obligation, to review content on public areas of the HSD Service, including chat rooms, bulletin boards and forums, in order to determine compliance with this Agreement and the Terms of Use.

And finally the kicker…

In using the ISP Service, you may not use an IP address or client ID not assigned to you, forge any TCP/IP packet header or any part of the header information in an e-mail or newsgroup posting or probe, scan or test the vulnerability of any system or network by the use of sniffers, SNMP tools or any other method.

So strictly according to the TOU, I can’t use nmap, and supposedly I can’t host a website. Nolan told the T3ST that he hosts a website through his connection and the tech said it was fine, and who’s gonna care if you scan a friend with nmap to help them test their port forwarding configuration or something? (Yeah, I do UDP scans for one guy all the time.) Furthermore, the information about the modem seems a little fuzzy, but they say I can use any DOCSIS-compliant modem. So if their modem’s defective by design, f*ck it, i’ll buy a better one and harp on them until they give me my money back for their modem.

A week or so ago I mentioned that I got my DSL to a point of very high reliability. There’s a fair amount of truth to that, with a bit of a sudden change today. Here’s how it all went down.

I figured out that my DSL was acting up because of issues with wiring in my house. What exactly was going on I still don’t know. But I do know that the previous owners of my house installed a second phone line, and that the physical wiring for that line is still in place. By installing a DSL filter at the service box outside and wiring the DSL side to the second phone line, I was able to filter my whole house using that one filter and ensure a clean signal for the modem.

Of course, that service-happiness high lasted for about a week.

Last night and this afternoon my ISP decided to do something to their access concentrator. I’ve been switched to yet another one, not unlike the disaster that happened back in February. No, I don’t have another $20 a month to fork over just for a static IP.

So as of now I have bigmomma running my ZoneEdit update script which is hitting the No-IP dynamic update check server every five minutes. I may have to make the interval smaller (and I will switch to using Germantown for the remote IP check if I do this) but it looks like things will work out.

Naturally my static IP hack I used on my modem isn’t working anymore. It didn’t work for a period back in February either, but then began to work again. We’ll see. I definitely won’t be seeing 98.17.59.63 again for a while.

Great news - the DSL modem came in yesterday and the Fuhry Kitchen Table is now officially high(er) speed. The transfer rates are 384Kbps and 1.5Mbps - not too bad considering the fact that 48KBps is about 16 times faster than the old dial-up line. We are well on our way to being up absolutely 24/7.

FYI: as of this writing BigMomma has been up for 4 days, 5 hours and 42 minutes. Our goal is to hit 2 months before she runs out of RAM and needs a reboot. And in that case all I have to do is switch a setting on my router so that the port is forwarded to Nighthawk, which will probably end up being a backup HTTP server or at least a MySQL server.

Ohyeah, nobody’s seen Pharaoh Atem (aka Linux Overlord?) for about 3 weeks now…pray for him…he starts choking when his connection bandwidth gets below 200KBps for more than about 4 hours straight He’s like the only guy I ever IM with for any considerable amount of time and I’m starting to wonder what’s going on.

Ok, I’m now officially a graphics designer.

Check out www.fusionnerd.com. See the logo at the top of the page? And the “link to us” section at the bottom? Yep. That’s my doing. Images were created with GIMP and animated with IconLover.

Yesterday was the exciting part - working on Midget. Today’s job? Unite all computers as if they were one, using Synergy. Unfortunately, Synergy seems to not like networks that are too cool for NetBIOS hostnames. It prevented me from using IP addresses instead of hostnames, so for a while I was stuck. Then I heard about the “hosts” file, which can be found on any Windows system in \system32\drivers\etc\hosts. I decided to give it a look, and before long I had mapped my entire network to use DNS-based “hostnames!”

A couple of days ago I downloaded and installed Synergy, but I didn’t do most of the work until today. I instralled Synergy on lapdawg and nighthawk on Wednesday and was unsuccessful in getting it to work because it failed to properly look up the NetBIOS hostname “nighthawk” (it didn’t exist, really) and it refused to let me use Nighthawk’s IP address. So I left it alone and ignored it for a couple of days, but I remembered the “hosts” file today and figured that if I put Nighthawk’s IP in there then maybe Synergy would work. So I tried it, and…TADA! it worked. Unfortunately, due to a (apparently one-time) firewall bug, Lapdawg bluescreened and I had to reboot. 0xD1 and fwdrv.sys - a.k.a. Kerio Firewall - for those who are interested (ahem, Microsoft?).

So I got the laptop to work with Synergy. But what about BigMomma? So I transferred the Synergy tarball over via FTP and *cough* compiled it myself *cough*.

Now, there is something that you all must understand about NetBIOS. It’s a Windows thing. Linux hosts do not normally have NetBIOS hostnames, and even if the Samba service is running, the firewall often blocks out the NetBIOS ports. So that’s why my network is too cool for NetBIOS. Actually, I prefer to call it “too secure” for NetBIOS. (hint hint, nudge nudge, Mr. Gate$.)

The problem with FC4 is, it has this thing with multiple hostnames (one for each network interface). So I can’t make BigMomma part of the “fuhrykitchentable” domain and have my loopback interface be localhost at the same time. And anyone who’s at all experienced with Apache web server knows that the hostname assigned to lo (that’s LO, the Unix way to refer to the loopback iface) must be “localhost.localdomain” in order to start. No different on the highly-superior-to-other-distros Fedora Core 4. So, after a little help from Neal, I taught BigMomma that 192.168.2.40 is more commonly known as “nighthawk” and that 192.168.2.39 prefers to be called “lapdawg.” Unfortunately, BigMomma still thought of herself as “localhost”, so when I tried to connect to Nighthawk using Synergy, it failed because BigMomma called herself “localhost” instead of “bigmomma.” Thank God for the guy who wrote Synergy’s documentation - I was able to use aliases to teach Synergy that “localhost” was really “bigmomma”. So finally I got Synergy to remote-control BigMomma.

And then I remembered one thing: BigMomma spends 95% of her time in text mode (to save RAM). Why in the world would I need to control her using a KM program?

I recently found out how to make GNOME look a lot like Mac OS X. As you all know by now I’m one of the lucky few that has a working installation of Xgl/Compiz on my computer (though it took me 2 months to get it working :() and ever since I got it working I’ve been crazy about customizing it even further.

So I was browsing the Compiz forums this morning and I stumbled across a thread where some guy had posted a screenie of his super Mac-ified GNOME/Xgl/Compiz desktop. You can guess what I spent the next 8 hours doing and now both BigMomma and Nighthawk have this strange Steve Jobs-ified look.

Well I’m finally back [online], people. I spent this past week taking a break from computing and instead I spent my time taking a basics in flight course. I guess I’ve always sort of enjoyed planes and I got a chance to actually fly a 1979 (I think) Cessna 172 this past week. Obviously FKT has been down, hopefully I can make it stay up for awhile. I’ll be gone for an hour or so this evening but I’m hoping to stay up and be on Gtalk.

I never really got a chance to post this earlier, but I recently overhauled my dad’s computer. He used to be a Windoze addict. Not anymore baby…I installed Fedora Core 5 and was successful in upgrading to kernel 2.6.16, installing the nVidia display driver, and enabling Xgl/Compiz. Unfortunately he’s having some problems with access - he can’t seem to write to some files in his home directory, and he can’t write to his 256MB JumpDrive Sport. But overall he seems to be having a good experience with FC5.

Cheers,
Dan

I’m currently trying to figure out how in the world you’re supposed to do this…I want to have blogs.fuhrykitchentable.no-ip.org be this blog site and www.fuhrykitchentable.no-ip.org be the main site…and I have no idea how to do it. I tried using mod_rewrite and a specialized PHP script to do it…it worked, but it was very slow and virtual directories (like in AdvancedArticles) didn’t work. I want to have a way to do this using pure .htaccess mod_rewrite rules (there is a way it can be done) but I have no idea how to do this. Once I’m done with it I’m sure it will be really great.

Update: I got it! Ironically, none of the methods on the web worked, but my own (very little) experience with regular expressions guided me towards creating a working sub-subdomain system. w00t!

Update 2: I just moved to the Linux box that’s hosting this blogsite so now I can post the contents of the .htaccess file that powers the site. Here it is:

php_flag register_globals off
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^blogs.fuhrykitchentable.no-ip.org$
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !servlet/(.*)
RewriteRule (.*) servlet/blogs/$1

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.fuhrykitchentable.no-ip.org$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^fuhrykitchentable.no-ip.org$
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !servlet/(.*)
RewriteRule (.*) servlet/www/$1 [L,QSA]

Well that wasn’t too hard we’ve finished setting up the blogsite and I’ve got a blog set up now. Eventually everything will be hosted at http://blogs.fuhrykitchentable.no-ip.org/ but for now it’s hosted on Nighthawk since BigMomma isn’t ready yet.