Super-Networking Blog

FBI agents have seized millions of dollars of equpiment from a hosting provider named Core  IP Networks.  This has left nearly 50 businesses without access to their email and data. Some of those clients provide internet services to car dealers and other companies.

Also some residents in the are have lost access to 911 is  because some of Core IPs primary customers include telephone companies.

Link to News Story

One of the big challenges of starting up a new UMTS network in the U.S. is that supported phones are not easy to find. UMTS or 3G GSM is quite new to the U.S. and most of the phones out there are exclusive or locked by the major carriers such as At&t.

So where is a good place to start looking? GSMArena

This site gives a great breakdown of all the latest handsets and up and coming handset by frequency and features. Keep a sharp eye because it doesn’t always tell you if the phone is locked.

Some phones I am looking at right now for our network:

Glofiish X800

HTC TyTN II

HTC s740

Motorola a3100

Nokia 5800 xPress

Nokia e66

Nokia e71

Nokia n85

Palm Treo 750

Sony/Ericsson k850i

I am testing a sweet little UMTS/HSDPA/HSUPA router this week called the Option Globalsurfer III. This is a wi-fi enabled router that will be available on the NCW networks. This is one of the best cellular routers I have ever seen.

Speeds (Maximums not offered everywhere) : Upload 5.76Mbps, Download 7.2Mbps

Features:

Wi-Fi - Supports WPA2

2 Ethernet Ports - 2 Port Ethernet Switch

USB for Storage Server or Printer Server - Can connect a USB hard drive and use as file server or a USB printer for printer sharing

SMS - Send and receive SMS messages from your desktop

Phone - Plug in any landline phone and you are ready to start sending and receiving phone calls

Firewall - Built in firewall

External Antenna Port - Can add external antenna in low signal areas

The best part is it works anywhere you have signal from a NCW network and soon nationwide

Well after 6 months without a blog at all and a year since I have posted a new blog entry I have brought back Super-Networking with the help of Steve. The main reason I got rid of Super-Networking to begin with, money, trying to save some extra money and I have now moved to a cheaper hosting provider.

The main reason I am bringing it back is need, I am working at a new company called Core Wireless/NewCore Wireless. I have been working my butt off and learning a ton of new things. I like to share my experiences with others to help them along and for myself to look back 6 months from now when I run across a problem I know I figured out before.

I have found that Twitter has taken up most of my day to day updates but will try to blog on a regular basis as well. If you want to follow me on twitter go here:

http://twitter.com/csuper163

More entries to come soon.

So I have been on the Internet for quite sometime. Back in the early 90s I was a chatter on the Internet. I used a chat room service called mIRC most of the time. I had a 28.8 Kbps modem and dialed up to the Internet. I then chatted hours on end with people across the country and world. It really isn’t a big deal these days but back then it wasn’t nearly that common.

I really got a lot of my geeky roots back then, setting up chat rooms with bots to monitor and enforce it. Running DOS attacks against people you didn’t like, was pretty easy to drop someone’s connection to the IRC service and if you could get it right you could disconnect their modem connection too.

You would meet people in large public chat rooms and I made a lot of long term friends that we would all come online at the same time everyday to talk for hours.

I haven’t used IRC in years, typically now I use one-on-one programs like ICQ or MSN.

I hadn’t even thought about it in years until earlier this year I got contacted by and old friend from IRC. She found me on Myspace, then just in the past couple of days another friend from ages ago contacted me on Facebook. It is crazy that after all these years people are looking up and finding long lost friends using social networking sites.

For those of you who maybe talked to me back in the day this is Superboy signing off.

Anyone else have memories of the Internet back in the early 90s?

I have never had problems with my SD cards in the past. I have had Sony SD cards, SANDisk etc… I have run them for years in my phones, cameras, MP3 players, PDAs. It is one of those things you just take for granted, there isn’t much to them they should just work.

Well for Christmas I got a digital picture frame and needed an SD card to have it read the pictures from. I went to Walmart and bought the cheapest one I could find, I mean come on it is just an SD card right? Well I bought a 1GB Lexar SD card for like $15. Everything worked fine for a while, of late I have been noticing that some of my pictures were turning weird colors, getting lines through them. Not all of them so I knew it wasn’t the frame’s screen or anything, but since rebooting the frame and reinserting the card didn’t help I thought maybe the files were getting corrupt. I came in this morning and there was just a ? on the screen. I put the SD card in my laptop’s SD card reader and it won’t read it anymore.

Can you believe that crap? 1 month and the thing burns out. Junk! I guess I won’t go for the Lexar brand anymore. Anyone else have experiences with SD cards burning out like that?

So for the past couple of days I have been playing cable monkey at work. I found a hub in our server room that was running 12 servers with one uplink to a switch. Keep in mind this is a hub. Hubs should never be put on a business network now a days especially with servers plugged into them. So I got a Cisco 2960 48-port switch and ran 16 runs of new cable to replace the hub.

Everything was going pretty well, got the cable ran and the switch installed and running. I then started to terminate all of the cables which is never fun but typically not an issue. Today it was an issue, 75% of the cables I terminated were not testing out. I replaced the ends and still would not test out. It was typically the same pairs of wires that were having the issues too.

My first though besides me going crazy and forgetting how to cable was that the spool of cable I had used for the runs had bad cable in it. I also thought maybe the cable tester went bad. I was about to rule that out by testing some patch cables. After many attempts at trial and error I had a Sysadmin, who knew how to cable, check it out. He noticed that on the bad cables some of the metal prongs were not going down. He tries to reclamp down on the ends with no luck either. It appears that the crimpers I was using had gone bad, I wasted a lot of Cat 5 ends. Tomorrow I will get a new crimpers and hopefully be able to finish the job.

I did have a personal pair in my laptop bag but they are currently missing.

This story brought to you by Wired

“The Federal Trade Commission issued a staff report Wednesday on Net Neutrality, coming firmly down in the wait-and-see-if-ISPs-begin-acting-badly camp, cautioning lawmakers to be careful about creating rules that interfere with competition.

The FTC’s Internet Access Task Force’s report, which the five-member commission approved unanimously, describes the debate, the internet’s architecture and the issues around competition in broadband.

Based on what we have learned through our examination of broadband connectivity issues and our experience with antitrust and consumer protection issues more generally, we recommend that policy makers proceed with caution in evaluating proposals to enact regulation in the area of broadband Internet access. The primary reason for caution is simply that we do not know what the net effects of potential conduct by broadband providers will be on all consumers, including, among other things, the prices that consumers may pay for Internet access, the quality of Internet access and other services that will be offered, and the choices of content and applications that may be available to consumers in the marketplace.

Proponents of Net Neutrality want federal regulators or lawmakers to prohibit Internet Service Providers, which are increasingly offering their own content and services such as internet telephony from degrading their competitor’s traffic — whether that be Vonage or YouTube.  They also fear that ISPs will divy up their pipes into fast lanes and slow lanes and charge content providers to get into the fast lane.  Opponents of Net Neutrality, which include free marketers and ISPs, argue that people will benefit from dedicated lines for important traffic and regulations will stymie investment into fatter internet pipes.

The FTC’s conclusion is that they just don’t know:

Even assuming discrimination against content or applications providers took place, moreover, there remains the question � also unanswerable in the abstract � whether such discrimination would be harmful, on balance, to consumer welfare. For example, such discrimination may facilitate product differentiation, such as the provision of Internet access services designed specifically for certain population segments or other audiences with specialized preferences.

Such prioritization may provide benefits to broadband providers, content and applications providers, and end users. Prioritization may allocate resources to their highest-valued uses by, for example, allowing content and applications providers that value higher-quality transmission services, such as VoIP or online gaming providers, to pay broadband providers for such services.

Prioritization may enable broadband providers to obtain income streams from content and applications providers and other users of broadband networks besides the broadband providers� own customers, resulting in increased investment and innovation in such networks. Prioritization may aid innovation in applications or content, such as streaming video and other real-time applications, that require higher-quality transmission to operate effectively. Prioritization may provide a dimension for both content and applications providers and broadband providers to differentiate their offerings, to the benefit of competition and consumers. Prioritization also may lower prices for less affluent end users, whose access fees could be partially subsidized by prioritization revenues, much like advertising-supported e-mail services now provide free e-mail accounts.

But on the other hand the commission says :

Prioritization could enable exclusive deals for priority that, if combined with inadequate delivery of non-priority data, would hinder the traditional ability of every end user to reach every content and applications provider through a single Internet access agreement. As with data discrimination, we are unable to determine in the abstract the net effect on consumer welfare of the various forms of data prioritization that may be pursued in the marketplace.

But it’s clear from the 170 page report (.pdf) that the FTC has no immediate plans to step in on its own, which likely makes one side of this debate happy.”

Ok so this is a sweet test. HP setup two datacenters, a primary and a backup datacenter, then they blew up the primary datacenter to see failover times. I would have liked to be involved in that, to be able to blowup a bunch of server racks and see it failover in real time. SWEET!

Here is the video

Today is the last day for citizens and corporations to file comments on Net Neutrality with government regulators. The topic of Net Neutrality is basically if a law should be passed that would force equal ISP service to all instead of allowing ISPs to potentially play favorites. They may choose to offer faster or better service to those companies that benefit the ISP and less service to those who don’t.

FCC Document on this Topic

Past Posts on Net Neutrality