PigBlog

Interesting article at The Guardian detailing how ‘councils could save at least £51 million‘ by switching to open source and open document formats.

I’m very keen on this. I like open source. I use open source, and some of the open source I use is just a damed sight better than the more commonly used alternative. Hell, given my experiences recently with a certain application (no names, no pack drill) fixed firmly in the MS world, and the crappy support, it seems there’s a good reason to go open.

Not that easy though: Both Microsoft and [quiet voice] Apple [/quiet voice] have some polished, established products (I’m looking at you, Win 7 and OSX), though my personal favourite OS Ubuntu can pretty much compete on a level field these days, rather than being a niche product for Linux geeks.

The article just touches the real issue, but smokescreens it by saying that the Government must mandate the use of ODF. That’s crap. OpenOffice can already open MS Office, and indeed save back in MS Office format.

The real issues:

Vendor lock-in and application lock-in. MS are so established and pretty much all third party commercial apps are written for the Windows world. Exchange dominates corporate email. I use Win 7 on my work laptop mostly because getting the VPN to work outside of Windows is a bitch.

Then implementation and support: there’s often more work involved in gluing together an open-source solution, but the savings are there to be made, and the software often better. For a small business especially, it’s the way to go, especially if there’s not much existing infrastructure.

Blatant plug: Black Country Open Source Society.

While browsing the web for details on an even fancier catflap (despite having an infra-red key-operated catflap, the local cats are still stealing Meowth‘s food…), I found someone that had one.

That, however, pales into insignificance with this rather lovely bit of hackery: a Internet-enabled (IPV6!) cat feeder. Wow. Even better, it’s running Linux

I’ve had this one simmering away gently for some time, but @walsallcouncil finally pushed me past the edge today with this on twitter:

Good to see the launch of superfast fibre-based broadband in Walsall. Download speeds of up to 40 mbs help with the town’s regeneration.

They’re talking about a regeneration scheme: Walsall’s [cough] Gigaport.

I have a few issues with this. First of all, mention Gigaport to me, or probably any other geek, and the first thing we’ll think of is this, or similar. Presumably the Giga bit is meant to sound all modern and hi-tech.

Well, it was. around 10 years ago, when I first started installing switches with a 1Gbit/sec backbone, or when a 1GB disk wasn’t a flash drive you’d buy for £5. Now? 1GBit/sec is the comfortable standard, with 10Gbit becoming what you’d install on a new job. Still, we’ll pass over that particular misnomer for now.

The next item that really annoys me? It’s that bit about 40mbps and high speed. Frankly, that’s not a high speed link anymore, and certainly doesn’t deserve all the balls about Fibre Optic tech. Firstly, it’s ‘up to’. Secondly, you can now get ‘up to’ 24Mbit on ADSL- that, boys and girls, is over the ancient old copper that connects your telephone and was originally designed for low-bandwidth analogue speech. Virgin Media have ‘up to’ 50Mbit service running over co-axial copper on a domestic service (despite what VM’s adverts say, the last stage to your house is not fibre), so the fibre-optic bit is frankly, smoke and mirrors. I have ‘up to’ 20MBit here at home.

In my last job, we had 100Mbit back in around 2002, and my current workplace has a 100Mbit bearer, throttled to 50. And that’s not ‘up to’. That’s tested, proven, with no contention, and it supplies one business in a semi-rural setting. Come back when the Gigaport is running 100Gbit everywhere, and then I’ll be impressed.

But what is really starting to nag at me is the lack of substance, and the hollow-sounding promises of a shiny new perfect world, all created by what sounds to me like a bit of office space, a datacentre, internet infrastructure that is somewhat less than cutting-edge and a copy of Wolverhampton Science Park, more than 10 years too late. is this really going to regenerate the town? Really? There’s lots and lots of office space around the town, and if you talk nicely to a decent ISP, any one of them will connect you to the Internet at speeds ranging from a few MBit up to 100, practically anywhere.

Finally: those of us working in networking have a quick and dirty way of checking for crap being talked. In Cisco terms, we’d do something like this:

#sh int fa4
FastEthernet4 is up, line protocol is up
  Hardware is PQUICC_FEC, address is 0019.3011.de34 (bia 0019.3011.de34)
  Internet address is 111.222.333.444
  MTU 1500 bytes, BW 100000 Kbit/sec, DLY 100 usec,
     reliability 255/255, txload 1/255, rxload 1/255
  Encapsulation ARPA, loopback not set
  Keepalive set (10 sec)
  Full-duplex, 100Mb/s, 100BaseTX/FX
  ARP type: ARPA, ARP Timeout 04:00:00
  Last input 00:00:01, output 00:00:06, output hang never
  Last clearing of "show interface" counters never
  Input queue: 0/75/0/0 (size/max/drops/flushes); Total output drops: 0
  Queueing strategy: fifo
  Output queue: 0/40 (size/max)
  5 minute input rate 2000 bits/sec, 1 packets/sec
  5 minute output rate 1000 bits/sec, 1 packets/sec
     4275131 packets input, 2252532395 bytes
     Received 167875 broadcasts, 0 runts, 0 giants, 0 throttles
     0 input errors, 0 CRC, 0 frame, 0 overrun, 0 ignored
     0 watchdog
     0 input packets with dribble condition detected
     3654406 packets output, 440792127 bytes, 0 underruns
     0 output errors, 0 collisions, 3 interface resets

See that bit about 0 input errors, 0 CRC etc? That means the line is fairly clean, though I notice there’s been 3 resets, where there has been too much crap, so the router has shut down and restarted that port. Funny that. Maybe the CRC checking isn’t working for Walsall Regeneration Company.

I touched on this some time ago, but it’s time for a revisit.

Why does so much of the world involve 9-5ish business hours, and going to an office to do so?

What first set me thinking on this was tonights commute home. 43 minutes end-to-end, steady speed (so less emmissions and more MPG), and less stress. This is (roughly) 75% of the average lately, and the difference was that I had to change a router after business hours (after a failed attempt a couple of weeks ago), so left work just after 6pm, rather than the 4:30/5:30 rush hour.

Sadly, I don’t have the opportunity to work (say) 7:30 or 8:00-18:00 every day, aviod the traffic, and take a day off a week. That would do good things for me and the environment, but my employer, like many, wants me at my desk during the day.

If we’re talking about being at your desk during working hours, why in fact be there at all? I’m a network monkey: I support networks, servers, telephony etc etc. I could do 80-90% of my work from where I’m sat now with an IP Softphone (or a mobile) and VPN. I could conceivably only go to the office 1-2 days a week.

Even for meetings there’s plenty of products that can reduce or eliminate the need for people to travel to meet: If you have a national coverage, that can save a wedge. The Webex product is robust enough to do product demos over, and as a support tool for us techies it’s incredible. For one supplier I use, the account manager works at home several days a week, and I cannot tell if she is there or in the office: the phone seamlesly re-routes. An educational establishment I know of in the Black Country uses mobiles with wi-fi connectivity and SIP together with Asterix and makes the user’s internal extension appear seamlessly on their phone if they are at work, home, or anywhere in between and saves a truckload of cash in the process. I’ve done system upgrades sat on my sofa with a beer; Lee H-W has done his (techie) job from a campsite during the Gloucestershire floods.

So then: in our connected world, with all the enabling tech we have, why does the rush hour persist, at least for those of us office-based?

Will rising traffic levels and environmental concerns see this pattern end?

Discuss.

I’ve recently read The Victorian Internet by Tom Standage. The book’s been around for a good while, but as the discussion is primarily historical, it’ still relevant.

It sets out a world where a communications revolution is in progress: there’s hackers, online communities, encryption, cheats, commercial killings being made, huge technological leaps (and failures) happened, and many other aspects that we associate with the Internet. The operators were the hackers of their day, highly skilled, scathing of newbies, and in demand. The online communities of the 19th century were formed from their ranks- social networking in it’s infacy took place in the quiet times. They had aliases or nicknames and sign-off signatures, they developed their own languages and shortcuts. This was the world of the telegraph.

Government tried to control the telegraph, at least one battle was decided by it. Encyption was banned and then allowed again, and broken. Messgages were forged, but probably not selling Viagra. Link contention and congestion was an issue at times, but I don’t think any automated traffic managment or shaping was possible- but you can bet any internal messages has the equivalent of QoS tagging. Competing technologies and companies fought for control. One today’s scammers favourites came into existence.

The book’s a good read for anyone interested: so much of what we consider new was in fact at least 100 years old….

Quite apart from the often used approach of shoulder surfing, or the modifications done to card readers, there’s a new flaw in chip and pin. Interesting attack- don’t know if it has any real-world danger *yet*, but chip and pin isn’t the flawless, super-secure thing it’s claimed to be. This particular flaw may be gone if signature verification is ended.

Suresignal is Vodafone’s wanky marketing name for a femtocell. I have one now, the excuse being evaluation for work. Vodafone’s network is overall very good, but as with anything radio, there’s holes.

The box itself is rather good actually. You attach it to your router, register it and the phones you want to use on it, and it establishes a tunnel somewhere into the depths of Vodafone, and gives you a full strength 3G signal nearby. It’s changed the patchy coverage in my house into fully reliable everywhere- but the biggest benefit is for people who have no signal at all in their home. The only slight downside was having to get in touch with Vodafone customer services when the registration played up, as they’re only slightly less fucking useless than Orange, who frankly, are such a shining turd of incompetence, it’s not even funny.

It’s supposed to only need 512Kbit/sec, and certainly doesn’t seem to be chewing up too much of my bandwidth. It does seem to get upset if the ethernet interface isn’t up when it boots, but otherwise works a treat.

I’ve installed Windows 7 on my work PC, after a few years with XP64.

[talks very quietly and looks embarrased]
It’s actually very good, and quick too. It even installs fast, and found all the hardware in my HP workstation without any fiddling.

Damn. I’m suppose to hate MS software, but there’s little to hate. It’s quicker than the (admittedly bogged down with crap I’ve installed) XP64 that was on the machine. and it just works, mostly. I think that a few people may have been told ‘must do better’ after the clusterfuck that was Windows Vistarse.

Even the copy Outlook 2010 Beta I installed is less dreadful than it could have been, even if the interface is far too cluttered. I’ve not used the rest of Office yet.

[shuffles off into a dark corner, in embarrasment]

I’ve been mucking about trying to come up with something lightweight to back up my neighbour’s computers to their NAS device. The unit comes with some software, but it doesn’t handle multiple users well, and the Mac version broke itself.

Yes, there’s a Mac involved. I wasn’t keen. I’ve never really ‘got’ Macs, and I get frustrated with them hiding some of the complexities. This is, of course, just what their fans love. Anyway, back to that in a minute.

The XP & Vista PCs are easy: a quck robocopy script along the lines of:

robocopy "%userprofile%" \\NAS\%username% /E /XJ /r:0

Does the job nicely. It will even skip unchanged files, even if it’s a bit lazy in that it just dumps the whole user profile.

On to the Mac. I borrowed an old G4 Macbook, and got frustrated with the single mouse button, but after a while the interface begins to make sense, ish.

I thought about Time Machine, the Apple-supplied utility- even finding a version that would talk to a CIFS network share. It does what it says, to be fair, but my old frustrations return- it is intended to fill up a disk with backups, then manage those backups by deleting the oldest and filling up again. This isn’t good for a shared filespace, and it’s not configurable. That’s good for a user who doesn’t care and has a drive for backups alone though- in that case it will ‘just work’.

The answer once again is the salvation of the shell prompt: OSX is after all FreeBSD with an Apple layer on the top. A bit of googling reveals you can mount a CIFS share from a command line (even if it doesn’t appear in the GUI), and unmount it afterwards.

OSX also follows the Unix-like idea of user files in a home directory, so dumping that directory does a reasonable job of a backup:

mount_smbfs //username:password@NAS/macbackup /Volumes/backup
cp -R ~/* /Volumes/backup
umount /Volumes/backup

and if you name the file backup.command (well, anything.command), it can be launched from the Finder, and it then runs in a terminal. You have to pre-create the mount point beforehand.

Result! This isn’t quite as slick as Robocopy as there’s no checking if the file exists, but hey ho.

A couple of things reminded me of about 10 years ago: first of all there was Twatter, and then Slashdot discussed the IT angle.

10 years ago, I’d spent New Years Eve on call (sadly with no special rates :-/), following a lot of audit and prep work for Y2K. There’s something I’m glad I don’t have to do anymore.

So: was it just hype, was it just all a cash cow for the IT industry, or did the media hype it?

This comment sums things up nicely, I thought. I certainly didn’t make any more money out of it, and did do a lot of work that wouldn’t usually get done. As another comment said, a lot of systems got replaced under the banner of Y2K that was due for it anyway, and yes, a lot of the fuss was media hype. Some of it, of course, was that no-one wanted to take any chances- the fear of failure or court action.