September 2008 Archives

This week I was tasked with putting together a virtualization solution to host a number of desktop-turned-servers whose plastic cases are aging from beige to yellow.  As trusty as the little Linux boxes are, when I cringe at the thought of a piece of hardware dying in one of those ancient machines, I know its time to be proactive. 

We use Comcast's business cable internet service at our office and I quite enjoy the cable service at home.  It really is fast.  Beyond the bandwidth, the ~20ms ping time over VPN to the office is quite nice. 

The high bandwidth made it very quick and easy to download updates, ISO images of popular Linux distributions, stream video content and keep all of my home computers up to date. 

When Ars Tecnica first published an article about this cap I got to thinking about my bandwidth usage.  I know I use a lot of bandwidth but realized I wouldn't be able to know if I was coming near that cap without a proper solution.  After spending a few hours researching and finding some interesting solutions for monitoring bandwidth I came up with an obvious question: Shouldn't Comcast be telling me how much I'm using?

Starting October 1st, Comcast will begin warning their customers who exceed 250GB in a calendar month and on the second instance of exceeded usage disallow them from the service for one year.  Without historical data or even current bandwidth monitoring there will be a number of surprised customers at the end of October. 

If you're lucky enough to be using Comcast this October, take a look at these monitoring tools:

• For monitoring a single Windows computer, Free Meter is good enough.
• For monitoring an entire network, do this at the gateway/firewall level.  A Linux box or pfSense running bandwidthd will do very nicely.

Happy downloading.

There are a ton of reviews on Google's Chrome browser out on the web.  Anybody care for a Tech Outfit perspective?  We take the browser through the paces and compare it against what we use for our day-to-day browsing habits.  Will Chrome be good enough to replace our tried and true Firefox?  Will Google shape the way we look at web pages?

Last year, The Tech Outfit opened an office in Dinkytown, an area in close proximity to the University of Minnesota's Minneapolis campus.  The office is inside of another building without a big fancy sign and little to no advertising has been performed in this area. 

Regardless of the limited visibility, The Tech Outfit has experienced a large number of college students requiring computer assistance.  While we surely appreciated the business we were curious to find out why they were not using the resources on campus. Most students respond that when they need help, they need it today.  On-campus services are often backed up or hard to find.  Unless you know a bright person down the hall who happens to be around, you're scrambling for help. 

With convenient on-site services and a handy Dinkytown location, college students are finding their own way to The Tech Outfit.

Two weeks ago my company received an influx of delayed messages when attempting to email clients whose mail servers were lucky enough to reside at Network Solutions.  After opening up trouble tickets at both our mail provider and theirs', we found that Network Solutions had been a victim of a DDoS attack and took it upon themselves to block the IP range in which our mail server lies. 

The notice from our own provider went like this:

Apparently Network Solutions was subject to a DDOS (distributed denial of services) attack, and responded rather bluntly by blocking large sections of the Internet, affecting multiple IP transit providers, including AT&T and Cogent, our primary peering partner.  Our provider advised that Network Solutions would remove the block when contacted by the individual delegated IP space owner. We have made that request twice thus far, but remain blocked. Until Network Solutions removes that block, this situation will continue. We apologize for any impact this may have on you.  If you are also a Network Solutions customer, we strongly advise you to open a technical support request with them, and open a ticket with us as well.