Trev's place

Category: Computers and networking

  • New better Internet – 200Mbps symetrical bandwidth

    New better Internet – 200Mbps symetrical bandwidth

    The earlier days of the Internet here in Adelaide, we had quite good internet. Starting with SENET we progressed quickly from 14,4kbps to 28.8kbps, then 56kbps. We where paying $1/hour which was common among many. It was also true local with Camtech, Internode, Edge, Boldweb, Kern and a few more.

    When we moved into our house in Banksia Park, we moved to Internode’s ADSL but that was not to good as we where a long way from the exchange meaning at best we had 1.5mbps but normally closer to 900kbps which was still faster than 56kbps.

    It was about 2 years and we connected to Telstra’s cable internet which gave us 10Mbps. One thing to note, it was symetrical, ie 10 down and 10 up. After about a year we dropped the Internode ADSL connection as Telstra was quite reliable at the time.

    Anyway not long before NBN, Telstra increased the speed of the cable where we would regulary get 120Mbps down and 55Mbps up. Once NBN took over our cable went down to 100/40 with Telstra. Then Telstra really mucked up, they quitly changed the upload in thier T’s and C’s to what we see today and they introduced the 700/40 as the fastest available. 100 down is more than enough for what we do.

    When they changed that in a sly way, we dropped them after being customer for 20+ years and went to Internode with thier 100/36 (advertised as 40). Internode where an Adelaide based company which is what drove me to use them. But now they have closed up in Adelaide so no more loyalty from me. Time to find something new.

    So started looking at NBN Enterprise Ethernet 100/100 offering which is $400/month for 36 months with no setup. In my hunt I stumbled on Telair who are selling Telstra Business Fibre. They had a special offer if you sign up, you get 200Mbps/200Mbps for the price of 100Mbps/100Mbps. which is $382/month. Not much to think about! Sold! So looking forward to the speed boost, especially the upload. It’s also dedicated fibre to me, it’s not shared with anyone else. AND we’re no longer using NBN. This is a great leap forward.

  • Simple tricks on passwords

    Hackers are getting smarter. They have learnt that most people will have one password that does it all. So once they get it from one place, it can be put into the automated robots to try it on every other site on the internet. Imagine if it’s your banking password as well as your Facebook password.

    This article is not going to guarantee that you will never get hacked, but it will provide some idea’s to increase your protection from being hacked.

    Rule 1: Your email password is the most important and should not be used for anything else. Reason: When this is hacked, all the thief needs to do is use the forgot password link on all other sites and they get your password for what ever you may be registered for.

    How to come up with an easy to remember but hard to crack password. You use a phrase instead of a word. So think about where you went on holidays, or where your partner was born. Lets use the holidays one for the example. “Love Sydney” is the phrase that came to my mind. It really could be anything. You want to write it with correct case as well. So capital L for Love and capital S for Sydney. That gets 2 of the often required things for passwords. Now the spaces in your password. Some systems don’t like them so probably better to replace them. Decide on what you are going to use as the space. It might be the hash or a comma. We’ll use a hash for the example, so now our pass phrase is “Love#Sydney”. So we’ve got upper case and lower case. We’ve got special characters. Now we just want some numbers. Easiest one there is where you have a L and a O change them for a 1 and 0 except for the first character (some systems don’t like to start with a number). “L0ve#Sydney”.

    Passwords should be at least 8 characters. An 8 char password takes a little over 2hrs to brute force crack. 10 characters is over 2,000 hours. Out example password will take 50,000 hours.

    Now a way to have a unique password for each web site and be able to remember easily.

    Use your password as a base and select characters from the web address to add into your password. Here is a example:

    web site facebook.com. We’ll use from the right, the 2,5,6 letters. Always do from the right as some domains are very short which will break this. Remeber it’s always the same for every web site. So facebook the letters are oko. So use our space character and add the 3 chars to the end. “L0ve#Sydney#oko”.

    It’s like anything new. It will take a little while to get used to it.

    Remember, your email password needs to be unique and strong. I would make it at least 12 characters and I’d use a mixture.

  • DIY Rudder Pedal USB controller interface

    Coming soon.

    Rudder pedal controller using USB (part number 204-TV-B). This board will interface your home made DIY Rudder Pedals to Flight Simulator using USB. It’s inputs will be 3 x 10k ohm pots, one for the rudder and one each for the left and right toe brakes which connect with provided Molex connectors. USB is via a B type connector which also provides the required power for the interface board.
    The prototype board is about 52mm (2inch) x 35mm (1.4inch) x aprox 20mm (0.8inch) high with the Rudder/Toe brake connectors connected. It will be available pre-built and tested with or without pots. It uses the standard Human Interface Device (HID) USB specifications for a Rudder Pedal Control meaning it should work on any operating system using this specification (Windows, Linux and MAC).

    Prototype USB Rudder Pedal Controller
    Prototype USB Rudder Pedal Controller

  • Trevor’s Electronics Blog

    Trevor’s Electronics Blog

    Are you interested in Electronics? Or embedded electronics? Or any of the Microchip PIC microcontrollers like the PIC18, PIC24, the dsPIC33 or the latest PIC32? So am I so I’m writing about my adventures with these devices in my blog called Trevor’s Electronics Blog. The drive to do this was my adventure in learning the PIC24 and doing it using the Explorer 16 board. I got a book that uses different chip and board configuration so I’ve added to the book for others the steps needed to run the excersises in the book on the Explorer16.

    Here’s a picture of my Explorer16.

    Microchip Explorer 16 Development Board
    Microchip Explorer 16 Development Board

    Visit Trevor’s Electronics Blog

  • Outlook problem

    When you recieve an email message as an attachment to another email, you can’t open it. No messages are displayed or anything. It’s probably becuase you have Google Desktop installed. You need to remove Google Desktop and the problem should resolve. It happens with both Outlook 2003 and Outlook 2007.

    Dont believe me, try this. Hold down CTRL key while starting Outlook. You should get a dialog asking if you want to start in Safe Mode. Say yes. Now try opening the attachment. It opens? Yes – because Google isn’t loaded. No – Sorry but this fix probably won’t help, however feel free to try un-installing Google Desktop.

  • DNS and what to watch for

    Trev’s suggestions on the best way to manage your domain name

    Domain names are a vital part of your hosting and mail system and is often forgotten as it’s the part that sits in the background quietly working until one day it does not. This is meant as a plain english guide to help would be web masters understand how to set up the management of their domain name to reduce the impact of outages on the internet.

    First, what is DNS

    DNS stands for Domain Name Service.

    Human’s like to use names. A name has a meaning. The internet can’t use names, it needs numbers. So we have an issue.

    DNS is the translator between the human name and the internet number. So my web site here is called “trev.id.au”. That’s what you type in your browser to get here. Your web browser asks the DNS for trev.id.au internet number address. The DNS returns the number (in this case 61.14.187.198). The browser now can ask the networking system of your computer to go fetch the page for the address that the Internet can work with.

    Email works in a similar manner. You address an email to user@domain.com.au. The email program first asks the DNS where it should send mail for domain.com.au and what is the number address or IP address. It then tries the address and if it works, it sends the mail.

    The key problem with incorrectly managed domains.

    The real problem is around email. If an email server cannot resolve your domain name because the DNS is down, it will return the email to the sender with an error that makes it look like you don’t exist. If it’s just a hobby system, not so bad, but if it’s your business, it can be severely damaging.

    What needs to happen

    You should have at least two physical servers in different parts of the internet doing the resolution of your domain name (the translating between name and number and the telling where to send mail). It’s also a good idea for these servers to be different from your domain name registrar and your hosting provider. I have used both http://www.zoneedit.com and http://www.dyndns.org.

    So with two seperate servers capable of answering DNS queries for your domain and email, and these in two different physical locations, both have to be down for your domain to be down. Chances, well I’ve been hosting this way for about 7 years now. My site goes down because my server does, but my domain has never and mail always works.

    You can host the domain name at zoneedit for free on 2 servers (as per their site at time of writing this)

    Email when your server is down

    Servers go down. That’s life. What happens to email if your server is down? If the domain name resolves, the sending mail server will generally hold and keep trying for a short while. This overcomes the occasional network outages. For longer periods, the sending mail server bounces the mail back to the sender.

    This can be overcome by using a mail forwarder which is a server on the internet that is defined as being the second server if the primary server is not available. It holds a lower priority than your main mail server. This allows your server to go down with no impact to mail from the outside world.

    I use this service and have been happy to pay the small amount it costs me each year.

    Summary

    Separate functions to provide resilience.

    1. Register the domain name with a domain registration authority. Seehttp://www.auda.org.au/registrars/accredited-registrars/ for a list. I’d recomend using a AUDA accredited organisation.

    2. Register with a DNS hosting organisation like www.zoneedit.com or www.dyndns.org and set up your domain name. Note this is not registering the name, but it’s getting it ready. You will be given some info from the DNS hosting company in the form of a name and ip address for each of the two servers that are going to host your domain name.

    3. With the server information, go back to the registrar and manage your account/domain. Find where to enter the domain name server information and change it to the names and ip addresses provided in step 2.

    4. Now sign up with a hosting company. The hosting company will give you an IP address to use for your domain name. You should use the manage interface of the DNS hosting organisation to configure the name and number for domain.com, www.domain.com and optionally, but usually good, mail.domain.com. These 3 names should all point to the IP address provided by the web hosting company in step 3.

    Detailed configuration example
    [This is under construction]

    There are many providers of these services. I’m going to provide the detail around setting this up using www.enetica.com.au as the Domain Name registrar, www.zoneedit.com as the DNS hosting organisation and www.mdwebhosting.com.au as the web and mail hosting company.

  • Not getting the distance with your Wireless network?

    Well why not use a tin can. Yes, the enthusiasts from Air-stream Inc in Adelaide put together a beam antenna to concentrate the wireless signal in a particular direction. And yes, it was made out of an everyday tin can, a small piece of stiff copper wire, a connector and a couple of screws. They should be able to get a couple of kilometers range clear line of site.