Every now and then I surf over to Verizon’s FiOS page to see what their latest speeds and rates are. It turns out that they have upped their speeds yet again, this time to either 50 mbs down / 25 mbs up or to a symmetrical 35mbs up/down. I love high upload speeds so I decided to upgrade from my 20/20 plan. The cool part is that this new plan is actually around $15 a month cheaper than my previous plan that was half the speed. Now I can run my Tor node at the same speed as my old plan and still have bandwidth to burn. Verizon may be doing some questionable things as a corporation by selling off their rural DSL lines, but I must say that I’ve never had a problem with my FiOS connection since after it was installed.
I plan to use the truck primarily as a mobile computer networking center with the additional use of functioning as emergency relief. The idea for the networking setup is to be able to drive just about anywhere and instantly have a computer network setup to play video games with a bunch of people. Using some Linux scripting, a custom router, a portable server, and my cell phone it is even capable of having an internet connection. Eventually John and I plan to have all of the internet acquisition function automatically and add the ability to be a mean War Driving machine.
I got a new tablet computer / netbook last week for taking notes in class. I really like this tablet, but it has a few quirks that really need to be ironed out. I’ll get to the complaints in a moment.
The first thing I noticed about this computer once it arrived is that it is very small and very light. It has an 8.9 inch LED backlit display and weighs around 2lbs; it is very portable. It only has 32GB of hard drive space, of which the operating system accounts for nearly half. Asus makes up for the small drive by having TWO SD card slots, which is wonderful. One of the slots is protected by a semi-permanent cover and is labelled “Expansion Slot” while the other slot is the more traditional front facing open access design. Both slots are spring loaded.
They key asset that this netbook leverages is that Read more…
Not the most interesting video, but some people requested that I post what video I had of the most recent LAN party. The game of choice was Warcraft III with DoTA, Castle Fight, Line Tower Wars, and Battle Tanks. There were about 12 people (depending on what specific time). We had 5 people in the Deuce and a Half and another 5 people in my computer room.
I wonder if I will ever be able to beat this record…
Today is the day that I finally had to reboot my Linux router. It was able to stay running for 390 days and 57 minutes. I was able to keep it running through multiple hour long power outages, migrating ISPs, and countless other daily issues. Alas, a problem with the hard drive caused the system to start haning any time it needed to access the drive, causing the internet to become practically unuseable. It took a reboot, disk check, and some error correction to get it working again. It worked fine after that for 15 minutes or so, but now I’m back to the same problem. A temporary solution might be cutting the bittorrent sharing of the new ubuntu release. There might be too many open connections for the router to handle in ram, or it might be trying to cache something. I’ll update when I’ve figured it out.
I was curious how much data I’ve had on my computer network over the span of its existence, so I decided to plug a few data points into open office in order to visualize it. This is what I came up with. I started when I got my first personal computer, a monster of a laptop that had dual hard drives, totaling 100GB of storage. I also had a 120GB external hard drive connected to my first Linux server, and then later attached a 160GB internal drive to it as well. Two 500 GB hard drives later I had a server crash, which caused me to lose just over 1TB of data. I jokingly refer to it as “The Great Server Crash of 2007″. Ever since then I always buy hard drives in pairs. One for actual data storage and the other for backup. If it hadn’t been for that crash, the trend line would actually be really accurate.
I ran a test today to make sure that all of my servers could be run off of my truck’s electrical system without any downtime. I simply ran a long extension cord from an outlet in the truck to my server closet. I then unplugged the server closet UPS from the wall outlet and plugged it into the extension cord. The UPS in the closet beeped a few times, but kept on running. I then unplugged the shore power umbilical from the truck, the closet UPS beeped a few times, and then was running off of the truck’s UPS. Everything went off without a hitch. The trucks 6.6KWhr of usable battery life should give me about 16 hours of run-time, plus whatever the closet UPSs provide on their own. The closet draws around 415W of power. This includes all of my servers, switches, and routers, except for my surveillance system.
The only downside to this setup is that I have to manually unplug the closet UPS from the wall and then plug it into the truck. In order to get around this I may just run it from the truck system all the time (with the truck’s umbilical connected to shore power) and then switch the closet over to the local outlet whenever I drive the truck.
It turns out that the power supply itself on the old server was not defective. The power cord was the cause of the problem. I plugged it into the wall with a different cable just to be absolutely sure… and it fired right up. I lost my “reliable” status, but I should have that back again within a few days. I’ve also upped my alocated bandwidth to a full 5 mb/s, so I’ll be helping out even more.
My Tor server just went offline(power supply failure). So much for the free Tor t-shirt
I could probably repair the system, but it was made around 10 years ago. It’s served me well enough, but I’m not going to resuscitate it. On the downside, I now am basically required to build/purchase a new computer. I’m planning on using a Fit2 PC as the new Tor server, since it has more than enough CPU power for the job. All of my other spare systems are out of commission. Oh well.
