Erik’s Weblog

I’ve moved the this blog from work to my own site in preparation for decommissioning some systems. Hopefully everything will follow, as I’ve got a bunch of permanent redirects in place. If not, http://erik.labianca.org/blog is my new official location.

For some reason in the last 2 weeks I’ve been confronted with resolutions to a couple of ‘in-your-face’ long term compatibility problems. What is particularly annoying is that I’ve had the hardware in question for the better part of 3 years and just placed blame elsewhere. In any case, I’m just throwing this out there in case anyone is searching the web the way I was. Basically, the Tyan s2885 (Thunder k8w) dual opteron board has a buggy AGP chipset and/or windows drivers. I’ve had intermittent problems with various video cards culminating in purchasing a brand new Geforce 6800XT just so I could run Windows Vista with Aero enabled. I installed Vista just fine, and tried to boot it up for the first time, and the machine hung EVERY time it tried to enable Aero during the login. No amount of tweaking was able to get past the login screen.

A coworker of mine with the same machine had the exact same problem with Vista. After reinstalling back down to windows XP, he’s getting intermittent screen freezes throughout the day. I seem to only get them when I try to activate the intellimouse ‘zoom’ feature it so helpfully bound to my mouse button directly under my pinkie. Trying to start directX games will keel the machine over immediately as well.

Lending credence to the problem being in the chipset itself, last time I tried to run a linux desktop with FC5 or CentOS 4 I was basically unable to use it effectively due to screen lockups. At the time I was inclined to blame the x.org drivers for my video card. In any case, hopefully this saves some poor soul an hour or two of troubleshooting an intermittent display lockup problem.

I’ve got a RAZR v3c and alltel, and have enjoyed the prevalent 1xRTT data tethering for the last year or so whenever I’m out and about, even in the car. However, recently I upgraded my laptop and lost the configuration settings, and forgot the specific details. As of today, the needed settings are as follows:

Phone Number: #777
Username: nxxnxxxxx@alltel.com
Password: alltel

where nxxnxxxxxx is your Alltel mobile number.

Also, for ease of reference, heres the skinny on Alltel data plans,
from the [Howardforums Alltel Data Thread](http://www.howardforums.com/showthread.php?t=1026028)

SPEEDS
1XRTT: Gives you about 100k down speed and is supported by all phones and running in most areas

EV-DO: Gives you about 500k down speed and is currently supported by only some models, this speed is only available in some places but is rapidly expanding and is indicated by a EV icon next to the signal strength on your handset
QNC: Gives you about 10k down speed and is supported by all phones but this is being discontinued in some areas

PLANS
FST1: This allows unlimited 1xrtt and evdo data usage for anything you want and minutes are used just as they are in a phone call (so that means ulimited on nights and weekends!). You must have this on your plan/account for 1xrtt or evdo to work at all, it comes on most but if you do not have this it can be added for free with a call to *611

Axcess My Mins: This gives you unlimited 1xrtt and evdo when it is used for on-phone axcess services (sorry, no dialup allowed on this plan) and it does not use your minutes and is for normal handsets only. Cost: $10/month per line

Axcess Data Connection: This gives you unlimited 1xrtt and evdo for anything you want without using your mnutes and is only for normal handsets. Cost: $25/month per line

Smartphone: This gives unlimited 1xrtt and evdo to smartphones only for anything you want without using your minutes. Cost: $30/month per line

Axcess National Unlimited: This gives you unlimited 1xrtt and evdo for your PC card. Cost: $80/month per line, $60/month per line if you already have a current voice plan

NO DATA IS CHARGED PER KILOBYTE!

I’ve had FST1 on my phone for over a year, and have had great luck just using data against my minutes, and for my usage pattern its absolutely perfect. Usually, I’m just on 1xRTT which usually ends up giving around 128kbps, which makes for a pretty decent web browsing experience. Ping times to the office under 400ms under PPTP makes for reasonably usable ssh sessions, but really slow RDS.

Today, however, I’m connected using EVDO in ohio, which appears to be able to saturate my ‘Motorala USB Modem’s 1Mbit maximum serial connection speed downloading. I was able to get 128kB/sec downloading the Python 2.5 installer for windows, which is pretty darn impressive for a cell phone connection in my book. I’m getting consistent sub 200ms pings under PPTP also, which is resulting in darn near usable RDS sessions.

Smoothwall came through with a demo license for me in just a matter of minutes, and I spend a couple hours playing with it. It has a fairly complete web interface, but unfortunately even with all its fancy features I saw absolutely nothing that would allow me to operate it as a layer 2 firewall (bridging my static ip addresses into a dmz) nor does it have support for routing said static ip address without NAT. Given we have clients and servers on static IP addresses and a class C address block to boot, it seems a waste to have to static nat them all and deal with that complexity when a dual dmz solution with layer 2 support would take care of it. So it’s back to the drawing board.

Given none of the software firewall packages seem to support 4 or more interfaces well, nor do many support layer 2 firewalling, I’m looking at hardware solutions. Going with a hardware appliance type solution seems to open up the options significantly with respect to high availability, as well, which actually seems like a really intelligent thing to do since I really can’t afford for the system to be down as long as it would take to get a replacement.

Currently, my top pick seems to be the
[netscreen 25](http://www.juniper.net/products/integrated/ns_2550.html). It offers the features I need, and at a retail price around $2500 it seems like a solid deal.

Other units I’m looking at are the [WatchGuard Firebox x750e](http://www.watchguard.com/products/core-e.asp) and the
[sonicwall 2040 or 3060](http://www.sonicwall.com/products/vpnapp.html)

So, as it happens, I’ve been doing a lot of ‘research’ lately. Such that it is, a lot of my ‘research’ ends up being on the web, and a lot of information comes from blogs, so I decided I’d best get with the program and start posting what I’ve been up to on the web as well. Not that I expect it to be interesting to anybody else, but at least I’ll start to accumulate the stuff I find somewhere more useful than a browser cache!

Right now, the primary areas of my ‘research’ are storage and virtualization. The last time I went around this merry-go-round it was VOIP, so perhaps I’ll get around to trying to consolidate some of what I’ve picked up on that front as well. We’ve recently been nailed with some hardware failures at Interlink and I’m really hoping that the latest round of storage and virtualization hype will help me to insulate us from service outages and spending the amount of time I have attempting to resurrect systems with a soldering iron and box of new fans. Interlink is a pretty small company, but we’re more and more dependant on the Internet. This puts us in an interesting position, in that we don’t really have the bankroll to play with ‘Enterprise’ hardware, but our dependance on the internet (and computing services in general) is high enough that we really can’t afford to take the usual small business ‘buy a dell and stick it in the corner and hope it doesn’t die’ route.

As it happened, VMWare had just released the final version of the their newly free ‘VMWare Server’ product when one of my machines died in the rack, and I’d been evaluating it for a while, so I got a crash course in ‘putting VMWare into production’. Unfortunately, in my case, just about every issue I’ve had with VMWare seems to be IO related, so the interest I’d had in moving beyond our Dell Windows Storage Server NAS to a real storage system was piqued.