Category: Rants

Why no links posted yesterday? I was dealing with troubleshooting Internet connectivity for a local real estate company (and we all know realtors, no matter the company, panic when things don’t work exactly right or how they’re used to), so it tied up most of my day yesterday. And what made it even more difficult was the car mechanic problem: You know how when you take your car to a mechanic and it suddenly stops making the noise you were bringing it in there for? They’ve been complaining about this ‘net connection for several days, but every time I’ve been there, everything’s been working fine. And since I was getting vague “The internet is broken”-types of notes stuck to my desk on my days off, it was like looking for a needle in a haystack.

After several days of troubleshooting and testing I was finally able to recreate the errors they were getting (after basically making an agent in the office my MLS guinea pig and having her run a bunch of tests for me) in a controlled environment (meaning my laptop versus their laptops or desktops systems that typically have 500 icons on the desktop and about a dozen toolbars installed in the browser). I came to found out that there were random packets that were getting dropped between the expensive Sonicwall firewall and the Cisco 2300 T1 router, as I could connect directly to the T1 router and not have the issues I was getting. Taking down their Internet connection for about five minutes sure bugged everybody — boy, what would the world be like without being wired up all the time!?!?</sarcasm> — but that was the only way I could test it was to give all the bandwidth to me temporarily.

To prove my theory, I went in to town and bought just a cheap Linksys router/firewall that would route everything, configured it, plugged it into place, and suddenly things started working again.

At least that’s what I’ve been told — I haven’t heard any complaints today. The router has a basic firewall on it, which is basically all their were using the other firewall for, so it’ll work until I can price out a cheap Smoothwall box to build for them (as I’ve had great luck with my Smoothwall boxes, having installed four of them).

More links coming today as soon as I get caught up from ignoring the world and hiding in a network closet yesterday.

I was in our local Best Buy the other night. I can’t remember why, but I was in the hard drive aisle, just glancing at prices. An older woman came in, said she wanted to return her hard drive, as it’s given her nothing but trouble and her geek friend said that it was an incompatibility with her hard drive and her motherboard. The Best Buy “Geek Squad” sales droid said that “these are all standards parts and should work fine together.”

For the most part he’s right, until the lady mentioned she was trying to return a Maxtor hard drive. At this point, if the geek knew what he was doing, he would asked what processor she was running — AMD or Intel. Why is this important? Because it’s a very well known and very well documented problem with Maxtor hard drives and the nForce4 chipset that powers many newer AMD motherboards. But the “geek” had no idea about this, despite the fact that this problem has been out there for many many months and only recently has some fixes (many of which still don’t quite work, according to some forum threads).

But since the “geek” didn’t ask this question, the lady started walking out of the store feeling dejected. I walked and caught up to her, explained that the guy was full of crap, and brought her back into the store. I walked back into the store and I found a guy behind the counter that I went to high school with back in the day and who knew I was a die-hard geek. He was one of the “geek” managers. I explained to him the situation, the stories behind the data corruption, and while it was news to him too, he took care of the refund, probably because he was an old friend of mine.

So what’s the easiest way to solve Maxtor hard drive problems? Pick other companies for your hard drives. I’ve always had good luck with Western Digital hard drives, and I know Simone’s liking her system I built for her that has three of them. Just avoid Maxtor like the plague.

That, and don’t trust anybody at Best Buy.

For the last two days, I’ve been racking my brain on a port routing issue on my old Watchguard firewall. Folks were complaining that they couldn’t make online bookings. I ping the server internally, and it appears to be responding on the port just fine. I go off-network to a few different sites to test it, and the SSL port isn’t routing on the firewall, despite the firewall logs saying it was. So I resetup the port forwarding on the firewall, still wasn’t going through. Since you have to pay a great deal of money to get upgrades to an older Watchguard firewall, or even to look at the support pages I need, I just took the firewall offline and things worked again. Since I’m not about to let the network sit open without a firewall, I had to get a new one up and running fast (as we do a good deal of business with online bookings).

I scrounged around for some parts. I managed to find an old Slot1 Pentium 2 motherboard, and I had an old Celeron 333 sitting in a closet. Found a few sticks of ram, grabbed a couple of old network cards, found an old 2-gig hard drive and CD-ROM drive in my desk drawer (I really need to clean out my desk), burned the SmoothieMods Fix 1-7 ISO, grabbed an old Dell case from the closet and built myself another Smoothwall box (which I’ve had good luck with before). After about 45 minutes of building and installing, the thing was up and running, and ports were routing perfectly. After a few more hours of tweaking, I’ve got a bunch of modifications, tweaks, and features installed that my Watchguard never had, performance is great, and management is easy (and actually works in Firefox, which I can’t say about the web interface for my Watchguard).

So Watchguard, you’ll never be in this office again, or any other office I deal with. If it can’t be done with an Smoothwall box and a bit of hacking, it can’t be done, so I’m not about to encourage anyone to pay for those things again.

When you do what I do for a living, there are just times that you want to completely just step away and turn the computer off for a while. That why you frequently don’t see posts on this site on Fridays or Saturdays. It’s my days off work, and my days to just avoid my computer, chill out with my family, and take a break so that when I am forced to sit in front of this machine again, I’m in a better mood.

After the events of today (including the mess that inspired my earlier post), I had to step away. I turned off my laptop here at work, packed it up in my bag so I didn’t have to even look at it. I went outside, took a quick walk around the block, and came back to my office. Upon arriving at the office, I realized how little I wanted to turn that computer back on and I realized how dirty my desk and office were since I didn’t have my laptop covering up things. So I went back to our housekeeping department, grabbed some rags and some sort of all-purpose cleaner whose name I can’t remember, and started cleaning. I cleaned up my whole office, even scrubbing down my phone (there was a lot of gunk on there). I dumped out my desk drawer on the floor, realized I probably have more writing utensils than anybody in the building, and cleaned it out, too. I got out some business cards I was looking for, put them in an area where I could actually see them, and now my desk is much more organized and clutter free.

Now, a couple hours later, my office is sparkly, I’ve put up with the crap from the girls in the office who think I’m a slob, and I’m back to work.

So what do I do first? I blog this entry. Now maybe I’ll get something done. Really. I promise.

Maybe I should just shut this thing off again…