Tag Archives: fiber

Network

Fiber breakage, day 4

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Aaaaaaah.

Warning to sensitive viewers, this is seriously scary stuff. So this happened Monday and I’m still to see any service people show up here to help me restore my life (I of course requested help within minutes). What you see here is a fiber that’s been cut off – the fiber that goes into my house. Turns out even a small excavator can do great damage. Who knew?!

We’re now forced to survive on LTE only and the household suddenly has gotten a much bigger appreciation for the regular 1000/1000 mbit connectivity…

Friday 14th: a service guy was here, repaired the “cable” but failed to “blow in” a new fiber into the tube. According to him, there’s some kind of dust/rubbish now in the tube that’s in the way so it became a larger issue. He had to take off again and says they need to come back next week…

Network

Now at 1000 mbit

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A little over six years since I got the fiber connection installed to my house. Back then, on a direct question to my provider, they could only offer 100/100 mbit/sec so that’s what I went with. Using my Telia Öppen Fiber and Tyfon (subsequently bought by Bahnhof) as internet provider.

In the spring of 2017 I bumped the speed to 250/100 mbit/sec to see if I would notice and actually take advantage of the extra speed. Lo and behold, I actually feel and experience the difference – frequently. When I upgrade my Linux machines or download larger images over the Internet, I frequently do that at higher speeds than 10MB/sec now and thus my higher speed saves me time and offers improved convenience.

However, “Öppen Fiber” is a relatively expensive provider for little gain for me. The “openness” that allows me to switch between providers isn’t really something that gives much benefit once you’ve picked a provider you like, it’s then mostly a way for a middle man to get an extra cut. 250mbit/sec from Bahnhof cost me 459 SEK/month (55 USD) there.

Switching to Bahnhof to handle both the fiber and the Internet connection is a much better deal for me, price wise. I get an upgraded connection to a 1000/1000 mbit/sec for a lower monthly fee. I’ll now end up paying 399/month (48 USD)  (299 SEK/month the first 24 months). So slightly cheaper for much more speed!

My household typically consists of the following devices that are used for accessing the web regularly:

  • 4 smart phones
  • 1 iPad
  • 4 laptops
  • 3 desktop computers
  • 1 TV computer

Our family of 4 consumes around 120GB average weeks. Out of this, Youtube is the single biggest hogger with almost 30% of our total bandwidth. I suppose this says something about the habits of my kids…

Out of these 13 most frequently used devices in our local network only 5 are RJ45-connected, the rest are WiFi.

Switch-over

I was told the switch-over day was May 15th, and at 08:28 in the morning my existing connection went away. I took that as the start signal. I had already gotten a box from Bahnhof with the new media converter to use.

I went downstairs and started off my taking a photo of the existing installation…

So I unscrewed that old big thing from the wall and now my installation instead looks like

You can also see the Ethernet cable already jacked in.

Once connected, I got a link at once and then I spent another few minutes to try to “register” with my user name and password until I figured out that my router has 1.1.1.1 hardcoded as DNS server and once I cleared that, the login-thing worked as it should and I could tell Bahnhof that I’m a legitimate user and woof, my mosh session magically reconnected again etc.

All in all, I was offline for shorter than 30 minutes.

Speeds and round-trips

These days a short round-trip is all the rage and is often more important than high bandwidth when browsing the web. I’m apparently pretty close to the Stockholm hub for many major services and I was a bit curious how my new operator would compare.

To my amazement, it’s notably faster. google.com went from 2.3ms to 1.3ms ping time, 1.1.1.1 is at 1.3ms, facebook.com is 1.0ms away.  My own server is 1.2ms away and amusingly even if I’m this close to the main server hosting the curl web site, the fastly CDN still outperforms it so curl.haxx.se is an average 1.0ms from me.

So, the ping times were notably reduced. The bandwidth is truly at gigabit speeds in both directions according to bredbandskollen.se, which is probably the most suitable speed check site in Sweden.

A rather smooth change so far. Let’s hope it stays this way.

cURL and libcurl, Development, Mozilla, Open Source, Work

My home setup

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I work in my home office which is upstairs in my house, perhaps 20 steps from my kitchen and the coffee refill. I have a largish desk with room for a number of computers. The photo below shows the three meter beauty. My two kids have their two machines on the left side while I use the right side of it for my desktop and laptop.

Daniel's home office

Many computers

The kids use my old desktop computer with a 20″ Dell screen and my old 15.6″ dual-core Asus laptop. My wife has her laptop downstairs and we have a permanent computer installed underneath the TV for media (an Asus VivoPC).

My desktop computer

I’m primarily developing C and C++ code and I’m frequently compiling rather large projects – repeatedly. I use a desktop machine for my ordinary development, equipped with a fairly powerful 3.5GHz quad-core Core-I7 CPU, I have my OS, my home dir and all source code put on an SSD. I have a larger HDD for larger and slower content. With ccache and friends, this baby can build Firefox really fast. I put my machine together from parts myself as I couldn’t find a suitable one focused on horse power but yet a “normal” 2D graphics card that works Fractal Designfine with Linux. I use a Radeon HD 5450 based ASUS card, which works fine with fully open source drivers.

I have two basic 24 inch LCD monitors (Benq and Dell) both using 1920×1200 resolution. I like having lots of windows up, nothing runs full-screen. I use KDE as desktop and I edit everything in Emacs. Firefox is my primary browser. I don’t shut down this machine, it runs a few simple servers for private purposes.

My machines (and my kids’) all run Debian Linux, typically of the unstable flavor allowing me to get new code reasonably fast.

Func KB-460 keyboardMy desktop keyboard is a Func KB-460, mechanical keyboard with some funky extra candy such as red backlight and two USB ports. Both my keyboard and my mouse are wired, not wireless, to take away the need for batteries or recharging etc in this environment. My mouse is a basic and old Logitech MX 310.

I have a crufty old USB headset with a mic, that works fine for hangouts and listening to music when the rest of the family is home. I have Logitech webcam thing sitting on the screen too, but I hardly ever use it for anything.

When on the move

I need to sometimes move around and work from other places. Going to conferences or even our regular Mozilla work weeks. Hence I also have a laptop that is powerful enough to build Firefox is a sane amount of time. I have Lenovo Thinkpad w540a Lenovo Thinkpad W540 with a 2.7GHz quad-core Core-I7, 16GB of RAM and 512GB of SSD. It has the most annoying touch pad on it. I don’t’ like that it doesn’t have the explicit buttons so for example both-clicking (to simulate a middle-click) like when pasting text in X11 is virtually impossible.

On this machine I also run a VM with win7 installed and associated development environment so I can build and debug Firefox for Windows on it.

I have a second portable. A small and lightweight netbook, an Eeepc S101, 10.1″ that I’ve been using when I go and just do presentations at places but recently I’ve started to simply use my primary laptop even for those occasions – primarily because it is too slow to do anything else on.

I do video conferences a couple of times a week and we use Vidyo for that. Its Linux client is shaky to say the least, so I tend to use my Nexus 7 tablet for it since the Vidyo app at least works decently on that. It also allows me to quite easily change location when it turns necessary, which it sometimes does since my meetings tend to occur in the evenings and then there’s also varying amounts of “family activities” going on!

Backup

For backup, I have a Synology NAS equipped with 2TB of disk in a RAIDSynology DS211j stashed downstairs, on the wired in-house gigabit Ethernet. I run an rsync job every night that syncs the important stuff to the NAS and I run a second rsync that also mirrors relevant data over to a friends house just in case something terribly bad would go down. My NAS backup has already saved me really good at least once.

Printer

HP Officejet 8500ANext to the NAS downstairs is the house printer, also attached to the gigabit even if it has a wifi interface of its own. I just like increasing reliability to have the “fixed services” in the house on wired network.

The printer also has scanning capability which actually has come handy several times. The thing works nicely from my Linux machines as well as my wife’s windows laptop.

Internet

fiber cableI have fiber going directly into my house. It is still “just” a 100/100 connection in the other end of the fiber since at the time I installed this they didn’t yet have equipment to deliver beyond 100 megabit in my area. I’m sure I’ll upgrade this to something more impressive in the future but this is a pretty snappy connection already. I also have just a few milliseconds latency to my primary servers.

Having the fast uplink is perfect for doing good remote backups.

Router  and wifi

dlink DIR 635I have a lowly D-Link DIR 635 router and wifi access point providing wifi for the 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands and gigabit speed on the wired side. It was dead cheap it just works. It NATs my traffic and port forwards some ports through to my desktop machine.

The router itself can also update the dyndns info which ultimately allows me to use a fixed name to my home machine even without a fixed ip.

Frequent Wifi users in the household include my wife’s laptop, the TV computer and all our phones and tablets.

Telephony

Ping Communication Voice Catcher 201EWhen I installed the fiber I gave up the copper connection to my home and since then I use IP telephony for the “land line”. Basically a little box that translates IP to old phone tech and I keep using my old DECT phone. We basically only have our parents that still call this number and it has been useful to have the kids use this for outgoing calls up until they’ve gotten their own mobile phones to use.

It doesn’t cost very much, but the usage is dropping over time so I guess we’ll just give it up one of these days.

Mobile phones and tablets

I have a Nexus 5 as my daily phone. I also have a Nexus 7 and Nexus 10 that tend to be used by the kids mostly.

I have two Firefox OS devices for development/work.

cURL and libcurl, Network

Monitoring my voip line

Ping Communication Voice Catcher 201EMy “landline” phone in my house is connected over voip through my fiber and I’m using the service provided by Affinity Telecom. A company I never heard of before and I can only presume it is a fairly small one.

Everything is working out fine, apart from one annoying little glitch: every other month or so my phone reports itself as either busy to a caller (or just as if nobody picks up the phone) and the pingcom NetPhone Adapter 201E voip box I have needs to be restarted for the phone line to get back to normal (I haven’t figured out if the box or the service provider is the actual villain).

In my household we usually discover the problem after several days of this situation since we don’t get many calls and we don’t make many calls. (The situation is usually even notable on the voip box’s set of led lights as they are flashing when they are otherwise solid but the box is not put in a place where we notice that either.) Several days of the phone beeping busy to callers is a bit annoying and I’ve decided to try to remedy that somehow. Luckily the box has a web interface that allows me to admin it and check status etc, and after all, I know a tool I can use to script HTTP to the thing, extract the status and send me a message when it needs some love!

Okay, so I just need to “login” to the box and get the status page and extract the info for the phone line and I’m done. I’ve done this dozens if not hundreds of times on sites all over the net the last decade. I merrily transferred the device info page “http://pingcom/Status/Device_Info.shtml” with curl and gave it a glance…

Oh. My. God. This is a little excerpt from the javascript magic that handles the password I enter to login to the web interface:

    /*
     * Get the salt from the router
     */
    (code gets salt from a local URL)

    var salt = xml_doc.textdoc;
    /*
     * Append the password to the salt
     */
     var input = salt + password;
    /*
     * MD5 hash of the salt.
     */
    var hash = hex_md5(input);
    /*
     * Append the MD5 hash to the salt.
    */
    var login_hash = salt.concat(hash);
    /*
     * Send the login hash to the server.
     */
    login_request = new ajax_xmlhttp("/post_login.xml?user=" + escape(username) + "&hash=" +
         escape(login_hash), function(xml_doc)

    [cut]

Ugha! So it downloads a salt, does hashing, salting and md5ing on the data within the browser itself before it sends it off to the server. That’s is so annoying and sure I can probably replicate that logic in a script language of my choice but it is going to take some trial and error until the details are all sorted out.

Ok, so I do the web form login with my browser again and start to look at what requests it does and so on in order to be able to mimic them with curl instead. I then spot that when viewing that device info page, it makes a whole series of HTTP requests that aren’t for pictures and not for the main HTML… Hm, at a closer look it fetches data from a bunch of URLs ending with “.cgi”! And look, among those URLs there’s one in particular that is called “voip_line_state.cgi”. Let me try to get just that and see what that might offer and what funny auth dance I may need for it…

curl http://pingcom/voip_line_state.cgi

And what do you know? It returns a full XML of the voip status, entirely without any login or authentication required:

<LineStatus channel_count="2">
  <Channel index="0" enabled="1">
    <SIP state="Up">
      <Name>0123456789</Name>
      <Server>sip.example.org</Server>
    </SIP>
    <Call state="Idle"></Call>
  </Channel>
  <Channel index="1" enabled="0"></Channel>
</LineStatus>

Lovely! That ‘Idle’ string in there in the <Call> tag is the key. I now poll the status and check to see the state in order to mail myself when it looks wrong. Still needs to be proven to actually trigger during the problem but hey, why wouldn’t it work?

The final tip is probably the lovely tool xml2, which converts an XML input to a “flat” output. That output is perfect to use grep or sed on to properly catch the correct situation, and it keeps me from resorting to the error-prone concept of grepping or regexing actual XML. After xml2 the above XML looks like this:

/LineStatus/@channel_count=2
/LineStatus/Channel/@index=0
/LineStatus/Channel/@enabled=1
/LineStatus/Channel/SIP/@state=Up
/LineStatus/Channel/SIP/Name=012345679
/LineStatus/Channel/SIP/Server=sip.example.org
/LineStatus/Channel/Call/@state=Idle
/LineStatus/Channel
/LineStatus/Channel/@index=1
/LineStatus/Channel/@enabled=0

Now I’ll just have to wait until the problem hits again to see that my scripts actually work… Once proven to detect the situation, my next step will probably be to actually maneuver the web interface and reboot it. I’ll get back to that later..

Network, Technology

decopperfied

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copper

Today I disconnected my ADSL modem through which I still had the landline telephone service running. I’ve cancelled the service so at the end of the month it will die and I’m now instead signing up to one of them lesser known companies that offer cheap IP-telephony that is network independent: Affinity telecom. Staying with only phone service over the copper was not a good idea since the cheapest service is still expensive over that medium.

Why have a landline phone at all? I’ve decided to stick with a landline telephone for a few reasons: first, our phone number is distributed widely and it is convenient to keep it working and keeping it reach our house instead of a specific person. Secondly, we have two kids who like to phone at times and they can use this fine and it’ll end up cheaper than if they’d use their own mobile phones. And thirdly, the parents-in-law factor. My parents and my wife’s parents etc like calling landlines instead of mobile phones, I think partly due to old habits but also partly because it is cheaper for them…

Ping Communication Voice Catcher 201E

When I researched which service to pick I discovered that not a single operator exists in Sweden that only charges for usage. They all have a minimum monthly fee, so I went with one of the cheapest I could find on prisjakt for my usage pattern.

I simply yanked the RJ11 from the ADSL modem and inserted into my new “Ping Communications Voice Catcher 201E” device (see picture) that I received. The instructions that come with the device say I should connect it directly to internet and then let my existing LAN traffic route through it. I don’t want to add yet another box between me and the internet and I fear that a cheapo box like this might cause problems in one way or another if I do, so I just plugged this new toy into my router and after I while I could happily confirm that it worked just as nicely. It got an IP from my DHCP server and I can call my old-style analog phone now (I love number portability) and I can use it to call out to my mobile.

I’m curious to see how good/bad this is going to work…

Update: It didn’t work to make the box a regular DHCP client. Even if I made it into a DMZ it still wouldn’t work to accept calls. I would only get a signal and everything, but once I answered the phone there was no sound. In the end I moved it to sit between “internet” and my local router and now my phone seems to be doing fine.

Network, Open Source

What, me over-analyzing?

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fiber cableI got fiber installed to my house a few months ago. 100/100 mbit is very nice.

My first speed checks using the Swedish bredbandskollen service were a bit disappointing since it only showed something like 50mbit down and 80mbit up. I decided to ignore that fact for the moment as things were new and I had some other more annoying issues.

I detected that sometimes, on some specific sites I had problems to get HTTP! The TCP connection would get connected and data would get sent, but it would stall somewhere and then get disconnected. This showed up when for example my wife tried to download a Spotify client and my phone got trouble to download some of my favorite podcasts. Some, not all. Possibly one out of ten or twenty sites showed the problem. Most of the sites I use frequently worked flawlessly and I would only ever see the problem when I tried HTTP.

Puzzling!

I could avoid the problem by setting up a SSH connection to my server and running that as a SOCKS proxy, and so I could still get service even from the sites I apparently couldn’t quite use. I tried to collect the problematic sites and I tried traceroute etc on all the ones that failed in order to get data that would help me and my operator to pinpoint the problem. I reported this problem to my ISP really early on, but they too were puzzled and it never got far in their end.

I was almost convinced they had some kind of traffic shaping thing in the middle that was broken for HTTP somehow.

Time to fix it once and for all

Finally one day I stopped being nice with the support people and I demanded that they would send over a guy and fix it. It wasn’t good enough that they would find that everything is OK from remote. I clearly had problems and I could escape the problems by switching over to my old ADSL so I knew it wasn’t due to my computers’ configs or due to my own firewalls or routers.

I was also convinced my ISP would get me some cable guy coming over when the problem wasn’t really in the cable, but sure it would be a necessary first step towards finding the real error.

They sent a cable guy, and it took him like three minutes to detect a bad signal level on the fiber, meaning that the problem was certainly not in my house anyway. He then drove down to the “station” that terminates my fiber, and after having “polished” that end of the fiber connection too he called me and said that he couldn’t spot any problem anymore and asked me to verify…

Now my checks showed me 80-90 mbit in both directions and the sites that used to give me problems all worked just fine.

It was the cable all along. Bad signal level. “A mystery it worked at all for you” my cable person said.

I’m left with my over-analyzed problem suspecting all sorts of high level stuff. But why did this only affect some sites? How come I could circumvent this with SOCKS? Gah, my brain hurts trying to answer these questions…

Anyway, now it all works and the family is happy again.

Network

Fixed name to dynamic IP with CNAME

Notice: this is not an advanced nor secret trickery. This is just something I’ve found even techsavvy people in my surrounding not having done so its worth being highlighted.

When I upgraded to fiber from ADSL, I had to give up my fixed IPv4 address that I’ve been using for around 10 years and switch to a dynamic DNS service .

In this situation I see lots of people everywhere use dyndns.org and similar services that offer dynamicly assigning a new IP to a fixed host name so that you and your computer illiterate friends still can reach your home site.

I suggest a minor variation of this, that still avoids having to run your own dyndns server on your server. It only requires that you admin and control a DNS domain already, but who doesn’t these days?

  1. Get that dyndns host name at the free provider that makes the name hold your current IP. Let’s call it home.dyndns.org.
  2. In your own DNS zone for your domain (example.com) you add an entry for your host ‘home.example.com‘ as a CNAME, pointing over to home.dyndns.org
  3. Now you can ping or ssh or whatever to ‘home.example.com‘ and it will remain your home IP even when it moves.
  4. Smile and keep using that host name in your own domain to your dynamic IP
Network

lighting up that fiber

Exactly 10 hours and 34 minutes after Tyfon sent me the mail confirming they had received my order, the connection was up and I received an SMS saying so. Amazingly quick service I’d say. Unfortunately I wasn’t quite as fast to actually try it out…

Once I got home from work and got some time to fiddle, I inserted an RJ45 into port 1 of my media converter and the other end in my wifi router and wham, I was online.

My immediate reaction? First, check ping time to my server. Now it averages at 2.5 ms, down from some 32 ms over my ADSL line. Then check transfer speeds. Massive disappointment. Something is wrong since it goes very slow in both directions, with no more than 5-10KB/sec transfers. I emailed customer service at once, less than 24 hours after I ordered it… bredbandskollen.se says 0.20 mbit downlink and 75 mbit uplink! Weird.

They got back early this morning by email, and we communicated back and forth. For them to be able to file a report back to the fiber provider I need to report a MAC and IP address of a direct-connected (no router) computer, which of course had to wait until I get back home from work.

At home, when connecting two different windows-running laptops they don’t get an IP address. I’m suspecting this is due to packet-loss and thus it taking several DHCP retries to work and I didn’t have patience enough. I switched back to my ADSL connection again and emailed Tyfon the IP and MAC I believe my router used before…

Network

A network provider for my fiber

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In late May I finally got my media converter installed inside my house so now my fiber gets terminated into a 4-port gigabit switch.

Now the quest to find the right provider started. I have a physical 1 gigabit connection to “the station”, and out of the 12 providers (listed on bredbandswebben.se) I can select to get the internet service delivered by, at least two offer 1000 mbit download speeds (with 100mbit upload). I would ideally like a fixed IPv4-address and an IPv6 subnet, and I want my company to subscribe to this service.

The companies are T3 and Alltele. Strangely enough both of them failed to respond in a timely manner, so I went on to probe a few of the other companies that deliver less than 1000mbit services.

The one company that responded fastest and with more details than any other was Tyfon. They informed me that currently nobody can sell a “company subscription” on this service and that on my address I can only get at most a 100/100 mbit service right now. (Amusingly most of these operators also offer 250/25 and 500/50 rates but I would really like to finally get a decent upstream speed so that I for example can backup to a remote site at a decent speed.)

So, I went with 100/100 mbit for 395 SEK/month (~ 44 Euro or 57 USD). I just now submitted my order and their confirmation arrived at 23:00:24. They say it may take a little while to deliver so we’ll see (“normally within 1-2 weeks“). I’ll report back when I have news.

(And I’ve not yet gotten the invoice for the physical installation…)

Network, Technology

Digging the fiber

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Finally the installation of my open fiber is moving along.

Roughly two weeks ago the team responsible for getting the thing from the boundary of my estate to my house arrived. They spent a great deal of time trying to piggyback the existing tube already running under my driveway for the telephone cable – until they gave up and had to use their shovels to dig a ditch through my garden. Apparently the existing tube was too tight and already too filled up with the existing cables. A little strike of bad luck I think since now they instead had to make a mess of my garden. Here’s a little picture of the dig work they did:

a ditch for the fiber through the garden

They aim at a depth of 25 cm for the cable while going through people’s estates, while outside of my garden they need 50 cm depth underneath the road and sidewalk down my little suburb street.

Once they were done we could see this orange cable sticking up next to my mailbox:

the outer end of the cable by my mailbox

… and the other end is sticking up here next to my front door. I expect the next team to get here and do the installation from here and pull it in through my wall and install the media converter etc possibly in the closet next to my front door. We’ll see…

the end of the cable next to the stairs by my front door

Today, when I arrived home after work the team that were digging up the sidewalk had already connected the cable side that was previously sticking out next to my mailbox (the middle picture).

Of course, they did their best at putting things (like soil) back as it was but I’ll admit that my better half used some rather colorful expressions to describe her sentiments about getting the garden remade like this.

I’ll get back with more reports later on when I get things installed internally and when the garden starts to repair.