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Tuesday, August 19 2008, 2:04 AM

I'm really tired of needing to apologize to Comcast. They're evil. I know this. But I'm really getting annoyed with having what I perceive to be their problems actually be problems on my end.

I've been having a lot of problems with random cable modem disconnects due to lack of signal over the past few weeks. I know this because I'm a dork and wrote a script that plugs into my Cacti installation and logs the signal levels displayed in my cable modem's admin interface. I did this years ago because - you guessed it - Comcast is evil and their stuff cut out on me enough for me to want to be able to monitor it. There has been a steady and constant trend of ever-dropping signal levels that has made itself apparent since the beginning of the year. I've had the same general layout in the apartment in terms of devices and number signal paths, so I could only assume that the problem was upstream on Comcast's side. I was so confident that this was yet another Comcast screw-up that I ordered DSL.

Well, it wasn't.

I had a service appointment scheduled with Comcast on Friday. The guy did some tests outside where my line plugs in, and he said he noticed a lot of signal "reflection", and said that my splitters and/or wiring were probably bad. He looked around, and also noticed that I was running my cable through the Monster way-too-much-money power strip, and called that a no-no as well. He replaced three splitters with two nicer ones, and ran custom length cables to each one of my devices. The result?

As you can see, the signal levels improved dramatically. The downstream power, which is what I receive from Comcast, is up by at least 10dBmV (depending on the time of day). 10dB corresponds to a ten-fold signal power increase. Signal-to-noise ratio is also better than it was, but not by as striking of an amount.

What's are the lessons here? Use good splitters. Use good cable. Don't assume Comcast is at fault because they're evil.

EDIT: My dad has corrected me. The 10dB increase probably only corresponds to around a 3.1 fold increase in power. I think I read the wikipedia chart wrong.

comcast frustrations

Sunday, July 13 2008, 1:18 AM

It's been a pretty crazy couple weeks, for sure. I've been super busy with multiple projects at work, with each one demanding lots of attention. I tend to have a hard time changing directions once I get going on something, so having so many things to do can be pretty stressful. In addition, a system I take care of at work also had some kind of a nervous breakdown, and required a ton of attention in order to correct. A ton of attention while I was on vacation. Totally weak. It's mostly fixed now though, so it's back to being pulled in multiple directions by other stuff. Sigh.

There hasn't been a lot going on outside of work recently due to a general lack of energy and motivation to do anything. All of the stuff happening at work leaves me with no desire to do anything when I get home. It's pretty depressing, in a way.

One relatively fun thing happened though. For the first time since around 2000, I built myself a brand new computer. I got myself a quad-core AMD Phenom processor clocked at 2.3GHz, 4GB of PC2-8500 RAM, a Biostar TPower N750 motherboard, a power supply, and new case from Newegg. I also got a couple of SLI-capable Nvidia GeForce 7600 GS video cards from a coworker. Combine all the parts together and I've got myself a pretty beefy machine. A hell of a lot more beefy than my other desktops. I've been installing some of my old games on it, and they absolutely scream.

amd biostar frustrations nvidia work

Wednesday, June 11 2008, 12:51 AM

Even though they're an over-priced pseudo-monopoly with a track record of shitty customer service and only somewhat better service uptime, I owe Comcast an apology. My internet was down for most of the past weekend, and for most of Monday as well. I figured it was due to the storms that rolled through on the night of the outage (Saturday), but after a couple of days with no service, I started getting mad. I was cursing their name and anything related to them. I was particularly unhappy when I found out that a coworker that lives in my apartment complex had no interruptions in service. After I heard that, I started thinking of ways that my setup would be sabotaging the process.

And then it hit me. As part of my process to convert my firewall machine into a Xen instance, I altered the physical networking layout so my cable modem would plug directly into my "Core Switch", an old Cisco 2924XL. I gave the cable modem service its own VLAN, which would be accessable via my firewall instance running on a Xen machine. What I failed to consider is that managed switches tend to have features that allow for communication with other switches in order to facilitate ease of management and network health. This communication is typically broadcasted to any device that is listening on regular intervals.

These broadcasts are what caused my issue. In a normal residential cable modem service (with Comcast at least), the cable modem latches on to the first network device it hears traffic from, and assumes that it will be the one it deals with when connecting to the internet. By having my cable modem plugged directly into the switch, it was receiving the switch's broadcast messages before my firewall instance had a chance to make itself heard. Because of this, my firewall's attempts to connect to the internet fell on deaf electronic ears.

This was remedied easily enough by disabling spanning tree protocol on the VLAN that my cable modem connects to, and disabling Cisco Discovery Protocol broadcasts on the port it connects to. I don't like disabling spanning tree, because quite frankly, network loops suck. The chance that somehow make a loop in that VLAN is pretty damn low though, so there's not much to worry about.

Let this be a lesson to those with way too much time on their hands, like myself.

cisco comcast frustrations linux networking stp vlan xen

Thursday, May 08 2008, 11:13 AM

The situation with my apartment complex has been resolved. Apparently they misplaced the payment records for around 30 residents, so i wasn't the only one that came to them completely pissed off. Everything is kosher again, but I took my opportunity to tell the rep I was dealing with how dissatisfied I was with the customer service in their organization. I still can't understand how they wouldn't attempt to make a phone call before initiating legal procedures to kick someone out of their home. Perhaps that's a reason I'm not in the apartment renting business.

apartment frustrations

Tuesday, May 06 2008, 8:43 PM

They did it to me again.

I came home from work today in a pretty decent mood. I was jamming out to some good old viking metal, with little on my mind but conquering ancient lands using nothing but sword and shield. Okay, I really wasn't thinking about conquering ancient lands, but it fit. Sue me. Anyway, I get home and check my mail, since I'm expecting my Dream Theater/Opeth tickets to show up soon. No tickets, but I did find a letter from the apartment complex.

They fucked up my payment again, and once again sent me a legal-looking document stating that I owe them money. The problem is that I don't. I checked my bank statement, and they debited my account on 5/1, the day it was due. I've got a confirmation from their online billing system stating that I did indeed schedule payment for that date.

I really don't understand how they could screw that up. My account with them is directly tied to my apartment. When I go to make a payment, the interface has my address and unit number right there at the top next to my name. I started making payments this way because I figured it would be harder for them to screw up. Apparently I have underestimated them.

To make things more aggravating, I couldn't go deal with it today. I got home and opened the letter at about 7:05, and their office closed at 7:00. I went up to their office anyway to see if anyone was lingering, but no. At 7:12, the place was completely deserted. Its probably good for them though. After listening to that viking metal, I was ready to do battle - verbally at least.

apartment frustrations

Friday, May 02 2008, 11:15 PM

Touching on a few things from my last post...

Moving the bed to the other bedroom seems to have helped. I've slept pretty well the past few days. This is a good thing.

I was finally able to get the firmware on my RAID card updated. It only took about 5 hours worth of time, 5 wasted CD-ROMs, and a lot of annoyance. The result? The RAID array rebuilt itself for two days (pretty damn long for an array of that size), and the card promptly kernel panicked upon reaching 100% on the rebuild process. At least it didn't start over again like it had in the past.

I think I might need professional help. This morning, I built a small cardboard baffle (?) to direct air out of a HVAC duct towards the servers in my closet. People more sane than myself would probably say things like "you should have fewer computers", "why do you have so many computers?", or even the dreaded "you're freakin' weird!" I, however, build cardboard ducting.

I also caught this guy outside my window the other morning. I'm surprised the picture came out so clear... the window I took the picture through is dirty as hell.

frustrations hp photography raid

Tuesday, April 29 2008, 11:14 PM

So, I'm sitting here in my newly reconfigured den/office/computer room/whatever (more on that later) waiting for CD images to download. Multiple CD images. I'm trying to upgrade the firmware for a SATA RAID card I eBay'd a few weeks back to handle the new 2TB RAID array I was building. It seemed to work fine, but after some use, it showed a nasty habit. The firmware seems to be buggy somehow, as I receive messages in my server's dmesg output about the adapter kernel panicking. I found it strange that a RAID card could kernel panic, but it makes sense when you consider the fact that firmware is just software for a hardware device. The card seems to recover itself about 80% of the time, but that other 20% involves hardware hangups, and hard reboots. No fun... especially when this box is providing storage for multiple other machines.

Back to the firmware. I'm trying to download the latest firmware for this card, but HP isn't making at all easy. Instead of putting a link to a specific file, or set of files, they just have links to their "Firmware Maintenance" CDs, which contain updated firmware for damn near everything they've unleashed upon the world in the past X years worth of product releases. Thing is, there's no documentation anywhere I can find about what each CD covers, what firmware versions are present, or anything like that.

Case in point - I downloaded the newest CD listed on the support page for the RAID card, and it didn't have any firmware for the card listed whatsoever. 650MB downloaded and a CD wasted, all for nothing. I try the oldest CD they have listed, and sure enough, it has firmware on it for my card. I was left wondering if there was a newer firmware somewhere on one of those intermediate CDs though. So here I am, downloading more CD images, and wasting more CDs. Grand! What's really great is that if I want to actually install one of these firmware updates, I need to find three working floppy disks that I can use to actually perform the upgrade because the embedded boot process won't install things automatically. Why? Even though the server is a HP-branded server, it's not of the proper vintage, so the boot loader/installer thing won't work. What a pile of crap.

Now that I'm done venting about stupidity (while downloading yet another CD)...

I've been feeling pretty run down over the past month or so. I attribute it mostly to what I would consider poor sleep. I typically sleep for a good 7-8 hours, but I haven't woke up feeling rested in quite a while. I have one working theory as to why, and it involves the server I'm working on right now, strangely enough. The simple fact is that the thing is loud. It's buried in my walk in closet with my other server gear, but it still had no issue polluting my bedroom (which is attached to said closet) with gratuitous amounts of noise. It seems like my poor sleep roughly coincides with the introduction of that machine into my closet, so I decided to shift things around a bit to see if it would help. I switched the roles of my two bedrooms - the larger bedroom became my office/computer room/underground lair, and the smaller room became the bedroom. It remains to be seen whether it will help much, but I liked this arrangement better when I used to have it. It also allows me to move the second cat litter box out of the bathroom, which is reason enough to move everything around in my opinion. They've never really been very good at keeping litter off the tile, which sucks. I'm not really a fan of walking on cat litter, especially when I'm fresh out of the shower and my feet are wet.

cats frustrations hp raid

Sunday, January 13 2008, 11:40 PM

Once again, I have reason to be unhappy with myself. Don't worry though mom, I'm fine. I'm not going to go into it here, but it has once again served as motivation to get shit done. I've been playing the guitar a good amount over the past few days, and I feel like I'm starting to get some of my chops back. I've learned a few new songs, including one that I wrote off years back because I thought it was too fast for me to play ("Trapped Under Ice" by Metallica). It's always cool to pull off something you had previously written off. I also hit the exercise bike again tonight for the first time in a while. I found the key - reading! It makes the time pass so much faster. I might run out of reading material pretty quick though. I'm going to try to do my best to stick with it this time as well.

I also made a pretty cool monitor mount that attaches to my desk. I'll post some pictures when I feel like resizing them. Perhaps tomorrow.

exercise frustrations goals guitar

Saturday, December 08 2007, 11:45 AM

The saga with my receiver is over. Circuit City finally decided to give me a new receiver. This was after yet another trip back to their repair facility (its fourth total). I got lucky and had one of the Circuit City folks on my side. I dealt with the same guy on my previous three trips in there, so he was quite familiar with my issue. This meant he was as confused as I am when he brought my old receiver up to me at the customer service desk and it had a "cancelled" sticker on it, indicating that the repair order was cancelled at the repair facility. Apparently they couldn't find the defect. I have to wonder exactly how they tested it, because it was clear as day to me. Attach a video device to a S-Video input, attach display to S-Video monitor out. Observe broken picture. Done.

Anyway, the Circuit City guy agreed that it was pretty shitty that they couldn't find my problem, so he said that if I could demonstrate the issue to a tech there, he would honor the replacement clause of the service plan I bought for the thing. He grabbed one of the senior associate types (who was also very cool), and I showed the issue to him. He agreed that a receiver shouldn't do that, so a new receiver was mine. The replacement plan gave me a $500 store credit, so I got the newest Onkyo receiver model in the same vein as my previous model (TX-SR605), which was $499. This one has a few more goodies like HDMI support, which is cool. I ended up getting the replacement plan on that one as well, since having to go through this whole deal without it would have sucked even more.

frustrations onkyo-tx-sr603 onkyo-tx-sr605

Tuesday, November 06 2007, 2:26 PM

So, in an eerie repeat of what happened approximately 9 months ago, my receiver decided to die. It died in the exact same fashion as it did previously, with all S-Video related video channels going south. I'm really getting tired of this crap. I have all of my Home Theater crap running through one of those overly expensive Monster surge supressing and line conditioning power strips, so I can't really believe that my stuff keeps dying due to bad power. Whatever it is, it's pissing me off.

I took it into Circuit City today to get it fixed. This is the third time that it's been taken in and subsequently sent off to their repair centers for the exact same issue. I told the lady at the desk that I wanted a replacement, and as expected, she said that she couldn't do that without receiving a notification from the repair center that it was beyond repair. Talk about crap.

Does anyone know if there is some sort of lemon law that covers stuff like this?

frustrations onkyo-tx-sr603

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