David Morris – brassedoff.net

…a narrowboat for their birthday!

The blacking needs a bit of attention though :)

This is as much as anything a reminder for me, but you never know, someone mind find it useful…

We had an issue at work with a Cisco router today (an 877) and we wanted to force it to bring a VPN tunnel up. There was nothing on the router side though and it was remote from us, so plugging something in wasn’t an option.

What we didn’t know is that we could use ‘extended ping’ to ping an address inside the VPN concentrator with a source address of the LAN side of the router. It’s pretty simple to use: just type ‘ping’ without any further options and follow the prompts. When you’re asked for a source address, enter the LAN address for the router and make sure the destination address is something on the other side of the tunnel. Lo and behold, up pops the VPN tunnel.

One of those little snippets to file away until needed…

Hopefully my broadband woes are now at an end. We appear to have a stable DSLmax service which is ticking away nicely at just under 3Mb/s. It’s been a two stage process. The first stage was actually achieving a stable connection with my Cisco 877 router. This took some time and effort on my part and a considerable degree of persistence because a stable connection was exactly what the router didn’t want to know about. We were occasionally getting a good high sync speed, but not for very long, and then the router would give up and the speed would start to drop. Eventually, we ended up with a ‘chronic cap’ on the line of 512kb/s as BT deemed our line was incapable of supporting anything any faster. The irony was that this was in fact a DSLmax service because we had an upload speed of 448kb/s. You can see what the speed profile looked like in the picture.

Actually getting to this stage involved a bit of luck I hit on a thread on a comp.dcom.sys.cisco which gave out a good hint: upgrade the dsl firmware on the router. (The Cisco routers’ DSL firmware can be upgraded separately from the IOS – the router OS, and was available from here at ftp://ftp.cisco.com under public/access/800 – there are installation instructions there, but it’s a relatively easy job using something like pumpkin tftp to upload).

Ok, I’d now got a router with a stable connection, but I’d still got lousy speeds due to the BT-imposed service cap. This now required several days of support desk tennis with my ISP. It wasn’t their fault. They were dealing with the faceless mass of BT Wholesale who kept saying that the cap had been lifted and when I tested, it clearly hadn’t been

Eventually I got to talk to someone who knew a different rout into BT and he informed my that he’d had a BT engineer logged on to my local telephone exchange to remove the cap directly (it was something obviously that couldn’t be done through other systems) and guess what? Well, you can see the effect on the graph above. It’s been there now for a day or so, the noise margins on the router look good and the error rate is low.

For the record, the router is now running DSL firmware code AMR-3.0.010 and I’d recommend anyone that has problems with the supplied embedded 2.54 firmware to consider upgrading. It doesn’t need an IOS upgrade – mine is running IOS c870-advsecurityk9-mz.124-4.T6.bin. The highest level of firmware that’s available on the ftp site does require an IOS upgrade in my case and seeing as I don’t have Smartnet on my router, I can’t get at that. I’m not bothered though. This is now doing the job for me and I’m a happy bunny.

I’m lucky enough to be able to work from home on odd days. I normally try to aim for one day a week, and this week it looks like I’ve picked the best of the bunch because the weather looks set to make a downturn after today. Consequently, I’ve had the study window open and been listening to the sounds of grass being mowed and the birds singing.

I know the leylandii hedge at the bottom oft the garden is way way too big, but we can’t do anything about it now until the birds have finished nesting. There are certainly pigeons nesting in there…

…and possibly blackbirds and greenfinches too. Ok, it’s not much, but it’s our own little menagerie and it’s nice to watch. I’ve even seen the neighbour’s cat have a go at climbing the hedge so there must be something up there of interest.

On a completely different subject, my evenings have been taken up recently with the development of a new web site. Through my Canal Trust voluntary work, I’ve got involved with the organising committee for the 2009 Inland Waterways Association Campaign Festival which the Trust are gong to be hosting at Kiveton. For my part, I’ll be helping with event publicity and the first task is to get a web site up and rolling.

I know in the past, when talking about the Seth Ellis web site, I discounted the idea of writing my own content management system (CMS) in favour of a ready-to-roll open source one and implemented Joomla for that reason. Now however I’m having second thoughts because nice as Joomla is, it is rather overkill for my requirements. Also, I don’t really have the time to work out the templating that goes along with it.

So, I’ve thrown the proverbial baby out with the bath water and started off designing and writing a CMS from scratch to support the Rally. I can see me also using this to replace the current Seth Ellis web site and probably provide a portal for Killamarsh as well because I’ve got some ideas based around the forum.

It’s already been a significant learning experience for me because I’ve never really delved much into using CSS to this extent to control look and feel, always being more of the ‘less is more because I can’t be bothered to work out how to make it look really professional’ which is a pretty sad admission really!

So, what do you think for a first attempt?

It’s gong to take a bit more work, but already the templating system works, I’ve got a WYSIWYG text editing interface up and running (courtesy of the unfortunately named FCKEditor which is an absolutely cracking GPL-licenced lump of code) and ideas for a host of other plugin-type functionality. I do intent making the CMS available for others once I’ve got it to a reasonable stage of development. The main aim though is to try and keep it lightweight (although FCKEditor is hardly lightweight…!).

I’ll wrap up there for the time being, but there’s more on the broadband speed saga which I’ll probably share later on in the week.

A couple of days ago, our broadband was mostly happy at 5Mb/s download. Then it dropped to around 4Mb/s. No worries… that was fine. I’ve just checked and it’s languishing at the super speed of 532kb/s. That, for the record, is what it was when we first went on to broadband around five years ago, and a quarter of what our connection speed was two weeks ago.

Quite frankly, it’s pants, and at the moment there’s nothing I can do about it. We’re within the 10 day connection retraining period which means BT won’t accept a fault on the line. The sync speed is currently showing as 3000kb/s on Plusnet’s system. The way things are going at the moment, I’m ready for dumping the whole lot out of the window.

This is just a very quick post before I set off to work…

The saga of the broadband speeds seems, hopefully, at last to be at an end. As I write this, our broadband speed appears to be stable at 5152kb down, 448 up with a noise margin of 11dB. Compare this with with 2272kb down, 288kb up before we made all the changes and you can see this is a great improvement. THe new surround sound system has exonerated itself!