travis' brain dump

Well, I’ve successfully gotten myself un-hooked from the Comcraptic network and I must say I’m quite pleased with my decision. Yes, I will end up paying a little more in taxes on my Qwest line but you know what? It’s WORTH EVERY DOLLAR!

I’m getting twice the speed down and twice the speed up consistently! For a few bucks less per service and a few bucks more in taxes, I have a full 7mbit (6Mbit after overhead) down instead of throttled 6Mbit and 900Kbit (768K after overhead) up instead of the throttled 384Kbit I had before. I mean c`mon, after throttling I was getting maybe 2-3Mbit down and 128-200Kbit up… So why was I paying for throttled 6/384?

Oh yeah, and did I mention that Qwest doesn’t care if I host stuff out of my house and they let me have a static IP for almost nothing? Not to mention they still at this time believe in giving you what you pay for. 

I’m most definitely not alone on this one… (for another rant, click here) It inspired me to write my rant up as well. 🙂 Congratulations on shedding the bandwidth throttling and coming over to the greener pasture.

Now, keep in mind that doing some network-management is ok when the occasional users abuses the “fat pipe” they are paying for but to be consistently throttling someone based on a specific protocol or a blanket policy on the user account for all time is a little overboard. IF a such abuse occurs then balance the equation based on a specific time duration on a SINGLE SESSION and ONLY if it is impacting other network traffic sessions competing for the same allocated hardline…. do some real network-management or something instead of sticking a customer in “time-out” indefinitely…

When I first heard about these issues people were having with Comcast I decided to run some tests…

The first week I downloaded some files from my test server and capped my pipe. I was pulling stuff from this server in particular at 4-5Mb a second without a single hitch. I personally thought people posting up complaints were insane. But I continued testing. Within a matter of *DAYS* my download test DROPPED to a matter of Kbit download speeds from my system. Assuming a possible problem with routing or other traffic, I tried the same test on multiple occasions on different days only to find that it was capped dead at a specific level. Excuse me?! Not only were my speeds affected directly to this system but they were everywhere… my bandwidth speed tests to other locations had also dropped dramatically for my once a day test to three seperate sites over the course of a few days.

Way to go chuckleheads.

At least things are better now… all is well. 🙂

So this weekend I switched out my internet connection at my house from Comcast to Qwest DSL.

a) it was cheaper
b) i’m getting twice the speed up & down as i was with comcast
c) i wasn’t really diggin the phone service over comcast… *shrug*

So anyway… I’m running a FreeBSD firewall here at the house that’s handling some network address translation and firewall stuff (natd & ipfw) so that I can have my sbs server listen for all the mail transfered from my primary server at the co-location facility as well as linking in my pda phone to my exchange server here… enough with the details…

After a long weekend of fighting with the configuration on this thing and finding that there were no resources on the internet, I dug in and got it working on my own. To remedy this for anyone else who may be running a similar setup here’s the solution:

DSL modem being used: ActionTec M1000
FreeBSD version: 6.3

First and formost, get your PPPoE login information from Qwest. This is your username and password you would use to manually activate your modem and set it up without using the disc. It entails the usual going to http://192.168.0.1 and going through the usual screens and such. Get this all done and make sure your modem syncs up and is online before doing ANYTHING below. Otherwise you’ll be banging your head into the wall.

Assuming you’ve done that, head on back out to the modem mangement page (http://192.168.0.1) and select the Advanced setup. On the left-hand side you will see a series of menus. Click the following sequence.

a) WAN IP Address
b) On the screen that appears on the right, select ‘RFC 1483 Transparent Bridging’
c) Click ‘Save’

That’s it, the modem is set. Now it should disconnect you from the internet and the Internet light will disappear on the modem and you’ll be left with just Ethernet, DSL and Power. Now plug your FreeBSD external NIC into the DSL modem and complete the following:

a) edit the file /etc/ppp/ppp.conf and add in the following lines. Comment out everything except what is listed below for the ‘default’ field:

default:
 set log Phase tun command

qwestdsl: set device PPPoE:fxp0
 set authname username@qwest.net
 set authkey password
 set dial
 set login
 add default HISADDR

b) edit the file /etc/rc.conf and add in the following lines:

# QWEST DSL
ppp_enable=”YES”
ppp_mode=”ddial”
ppp_profile=”qwestdsl”

c) make changes to your existing natd.conf file, wherever it may be. 🙂 You will have to change the interface line from whatever external interface you were using (rl0,fxp0,xl0,etc) to tun0. The reason is that ppp creates a tun interface (tun0 first, tun1 second, etc) in order to bind the public ip address to an internal interface. Wierd, but this is what it does.

d) make changes to your existing rc.firewall script or whatever script you’re calling for use with ipfw. Any instance of your previous external interface (just like in natd.conf) should be replaced with tun0.

That should do it.  Reboot your system and you should be up and running. If you have any issues, take a good look at your ‘ ifconfig -a ‘ and make sure a tun0 is present and assigned an address. If you need to do further troubleshooting, take a look at /var/log/ppp.log.

For more information on natd, take a look here:
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/books/handbook/network-natd.html

For more information on ipfw, take a look here:
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/books/handbook/firewalls-ipfw.html

Fore more information on pppoE, take a look here:
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/books/handbook/pppoe.html

If you have issues, leave a comment and I’ll make up for whatever I may have missed… this is just a quick blurb to drop down the basics of how to do this. I assume it could be used for any provider which utilizes the M1000 modem or similar setups so use this information at your own risk.  🙂
 

From an email issued by my counterpart Myke:

As of Monday there is an upgrade available for LeftHand SANiQ version 7 and I am going to start that process tomorrow. I am going to get this one done before Monday so we are on track for the new release of their software this fall.

If anyone has any issues with that please feel free to stop by and bang your head on the wall so I can watch and laugh at you hysterically

Thank you for your time, that is all…goodnight.

“…ladies and gentlemen, Elvis has left the building…”

Can you tell it’s almost Friday? I tell ya, this is one of those days that I just love my line of work…

Ahhh… the end user. What a wonderful compilation of pure ignorance and misdirected rage. I’m not talking about every end user, don’t get me wrong… I’m talking about those retarded few who fall into the hall of fame category category of Darwin award candidate or are poster children for a PEBKAC union.

PEBKAC is an acronym which stands for “Problem Exists Between Keyboard And Chair”.^[1] The phrase is used by computer experts as a semi-humorous^[2] way to describe user errors.

Being a perfect examples of how these choice few individuals wreak havoc on IT personell across the globe and show their true colors of idiocy, one of our LAN Admins took a ticket yesterday that has sense turned ugly…

Normally when a ticket is claimed by one of our Admins, it can take anywhere from a few minutes to a week to process the request depending on what is requested… In this particular intance a request was made for some operation to be completed to which not more than 24 hours later was treated as if it was a request that had been placed and unanswered for a period of days bordering on a week. This person is ranting and raving because someone hasn’t been given access to a particular application when a) the request form hasn’t even been filled out and signed off on and b) the request wasn’t even 24 hours old. Long story short this Admin is being harassed from all different directions based off misinformation being fed to people by this dumb user.

To the retarded users:

IT personell are *NOT* your personal servants waiting patiently for your request to come in so they can service you. They, unlike you, have other duties to perform which sometimes are of way more importance than your obviously (mostly only to you) trivial request. They will be dealt with in the order in which they were either a) received or b) classified as more urgent. Seriously, I bet you’re the kind of person who wants to be in front of the gunshot wound victim at the ER for your tiny splinter huh? Just STFU and GTFO!

*rant over*

I feel for this individual, I really do. I’m just glad in our organization we have a good communication string up the ladder and can usually resolve issues like this with an echo back down the chain which lands in their lap and leaves them with an icky taste in their mouth.

As for the user, I think this individual has lost the concept of time completely… This user actually submitted a ticket to IT concerning the fact that said individual’s watch consistently “lost” time when in the facility. LOL I think this person needs to be fitted for a slighlty larger helmet, it’s a little too tight.