Recently in networking Category

Recently I had some serious problems with wi-fi at home - especially one of the laptops was dropping off and couldn't come back. Quick survey using Kismet and other tools to scan what's flying around has proven that my network is in less populated part of the spectrum (at least here) but still, problems are getting worse and worse.

I was fully aware of Wi-Spy by Metageek, seen it in action previously but never had a chance to buy one. Part of the decision was the price back then, maybe now it would be another game, but anyway - I got myself another device, made by well known wi-fi vendor Ubiquiti and it's called AirView2.



What's so special about this one? Why it's better than Wi-Spy?

First of all I didn't say it's better. It's different, woks with Linux, Mac OS X and Windows, has a nice price tag and does pretty much the same as Wi-Spy. Let's have a closer look then, shall we?

Quite recently I had a chance to travel by train from London towards Manchester and back. The journey was not bad in fact - first class on Virgin Trains does the trick... even more when you have free wi-fi included and power sockets for almost all seats.

As we all know Google had a rough day yesterday - massive "outage" on one of their products... actually a key product - Google Mail. Both, Gmail and Google Apps users (including paid ones) had problems accessing their mail via web interface, but ONLY via web interface. SMTP/POP/IMAP all seemed to work - at least for me - alongside calendars, docs, etc.

Leaving the media hype surrounding this situation (and people saying that google is evil) there is a few things to keep in mind... The situation that happened yesterday leaves no doubt that even the best brains and the best people money can buy, they DO MAKE MISTAKES - as we all do. It happened to Google this time, it may happen to your company tomorrow (or has already happened but you don't want to talk about it).
Yes - I got my part of 'grief and complaints' from my own users, it's perfectly normal situation I would say, so I wasn't even annoyed. I've called Google Support Team, got connected immediately to a very nice guy that confirmed that they have a wide-spread problem running for about 20 minutes now... and that all engineers are already on it (sounds like 'all hands on deck') and offered a callback when it is sorted. As a matter of fact, about 30-45 minutes later webmail access was quite slow but was working again.

Now let's wrap it up:

1. they had a problem - big deal, who hasn't?
   
2. they admitted it - there was no fooling around
3. they got really good response time and fixed the problem
4. ... and I would say they will have no problems keeping up to their SLAs (only one access channel was down - webmail, IMAP/POP/SMTP worked for me all the time), so can we say that Google Mail was down? Not really!
   

So if you are crying/moaning about the situation yesterday, then think again and get over it - it could be much worse! To get you in a better mood - think about calling one of those big telecoms and speaking to 5+ consultants before they put you through to the right department, where you will hear it's a problem on your side, not theirs. How does that sound? Did I hear "8 phone calls, hours wasted on the phone and then 2 weeks to get it fixed"?

As promised - here comes the solution for 'moody link throughput' problem :-)

Over the last week I had a lot of work bringing to live our new dedicated line from our data centre to our office. As this is a fibre and is set to work at 10mbit/sec everything looks quite promising but not everything goes well - as usual. This is a short story about testing the line, some problems I had and some reflections I came across during this time.