Pulp Free

As spoke about a few weeks ago concerning my Charter Bandwidth upgrades – I suppose it wouldn’t be fair to assume “it just works” with anything Charter related. There has always been a Yin Yang relationship with Charter and I, this time still taking only a few days to come full circle. So what ails me this time around you ask? Here’s my story (and I will admit that only part of the story is the oddness that is Charter – the rest will unfold itself…)

With my old DOC SIS 2.0 modem everything has been happy go lucky for the last few years. Hooked up to my trusty Linksys WRT54GS wireless gateway which has proven remarkably stable and useful (while having used the Tomato firmware) – I probably would have gone on using wireless G networking for quite some time. However, I soon was prompted to upgrade my cable modem to a DOC SIS 3.0 modem as part of Charter’s free bandwidth upgrade… even though I was even getting my full 25 Mbps with the old one. Okay – sure… Why not.

New modem comes via FedEx… Plug it it, swap it out with the old one, Linksys won’t get a DHCP address. Hmmm. Plug my laptop directly in and see that it’s redirecting me to register my new modem. Cool. Get that done and I’m blazing at even faster speeds.

Now I’m pretty sure those speeds include Charter’s PowerBoost technology but I clearly wasn’t getting that with my old modem. Yeah.. I’m liking this. Until I plug the modem back into into my Linksys. The modem won’t assign the Linksys an IP address via DHCP.

A call into Charter Tech support tells me that they don’t support third-party gateways and that I’m on my own. If it works with a computer directly it’s good enough for them. Grrr… So I’m stuck a bit here… Faster speeds directly plugged in, router won’t get a connection. I’m back and forth with resetting the modem, the router – both at the same time, one and a time, different orders… Then after about 30 minutes – voila! The Linksys gets an IP address!! What is odd is that the laptop plugged directly into the modem gets a 24.x.x.x IP address, the Linksys always gets a 72.x.x.x address. Oh well. At least it’s working, right??

Sort of.

Now for part 2…

I start running bandwidth tests and they’re coming out quite random. 10 Mbps, 13, 17, 12, 9, 20, 21 down… But always 3 Mbps up. I start hunting around for lots of different testing Web sites. Still the same. Even stranger is that the tests are fraught with peaks and valleys during the tests. They would jump up to 10 then down to 4 then up to 12 and hang out for a bit… With the old modem the tests would hit up to 25 Mbps and stay there the whole time. I do a direct connection back to my laptop – rock steady. This is just strange.

Next up is to work with Charter Technical support (oh no…) and eventually get them to swap out the modem. However, same issue. Except that this time I’m never able to get a DHCP address for the Linksys. (Come to find out that you need to do MAC address cloning now… Maybe. At least it worked for me and some others… I’ll experiment more with hard resetting both modem and router to use the built in MAC addresses…)

Now it’s time for me to do some research and my own technical support. I start thinking about what else could be the issue. All has been well up to now… Bandwidth is pretty fast up to 25 Mbps with the original modem and gateway… But I never got the greater than 25 Mbps speed boost until the new modem was directly connected to my laptop. Lots of variables – but let’s dive into Linksys first…

My first hunch proved fruitful… When really pushing bandwidth or connections through this gateway I would get pretty high CPU spikes:

So if that was happening even before the 25 Mbps upgrade, I started to wonder just how bad is it now? Especially with PowerBoost potentially pushing 60+ Mbps spikes…

A quick look at running the top command during some of the bandwidth tests showed me right away… 100% CPU utilization on downloads, uploads were around 20%. My poor little Linksys just couldn’t keep up with managing the bandwidth. Whew! Now we’re on to something – and so not a Charter issue… a router issue!

Taking into account that that Linksys WRT54GS was now probably 7+ years old, I decided to spend a little bit of time looking at the newer Linksys gateways as a replacement – leaning towards a WRT320N. Essentially needing a more powerful processor it seemed to fit the bill. Also trying to keep under $100 with Gigabit ports I poked around a few other Web sites to get some reviews. Actually not bad but it seemed to be a bit shaky on running my favorite firmware Tomato. Next up was now looking at the Netgear WNR3500L. While I’ve been pretty loyal to Linksys for the last 10+ years, I started to stray more for something that was open, extensible – and I knew could run Tomato. Similar specs and “mostly” open source, a quick order to Newegg on a Monday and it was delivered by Tuesday!!

With the WNR3500L now plugged in and configured (along with that nasty MAC address cloning work-around) – my bandwidth testing was spot on. Very low (if any) CPU usage during the bandwidth tests provided the 58.69 Mbps download benchmark and I couldn’t be happier! Well, at least about getting steady bandwidth back into my home Internet network. I’m still working through the wireless features since it seems that signal strength isn’t as strong. The Netgear now has Tomato 1.27 firmware running on it but taking only Wireless-N clients (which is only my work laptop and it’s mostly docked into my wired network). The old Linksys is now serving the Wireless-G crowd on a second SSID and doing quite well (those devices connected to Wireless-G on my network aren’t heavy bandwidth consumers).

So I learned a few lessons through this effort…

• It’s not always Charter’s fault.
• Sometimes you do need to hardware to take advantage of new technologies
• Troubleshooting can be fun
• Still derive a little bit of satisfaction hunting down issues and finding root cause
• I still love my Cacti graphs
• I’m more grateful when it just works

Now it’s time to cleanup the messy wires on the network and cable distribution wall in the basement and put everything back together… What a clutter that is!

As part of my new work-from-home efforts, I received an HP All-in-One OfficeJet 6310 for my printing, scanning, and faxing needs. For a retail price of around $150, I was pretty skeptical. However, after a few days of using it I have to say I’m quite impressed with it’s printing abilities and my need for an occasional copy of a hotel receipt.

So I was recently saddened when a needed reinstall of my desktop Windows XP started throwing up errors when trying to print a test page to it. I’ve installed the network drivers several times… It’s a pretty straight forward effort. (And printing to my Brother HL-5250DN worked just fine…)

setup.exe -h HostName

Heck – that’s if you use the corporate drivers. The “home” drivers will even scan your network for the printer.

So – XP’s firewall was disabled, virus software was disabled – no errors messages on the printer driver install. I couldn’t even share to it when I was successfully able to install it on a different machine. What’s going on here?

Well – yes. I did one thing differently. I installed Windows XP SP3. Love the service packs.

A removal of SP3 left my computer is a bit of a mess since I had already installed a lot of programs and drivers after the SP3 install… But I was able to print. Instantly.

A quick Google the first time around didn’t show much promising hits. But I was searching specifically for issues related to the 6310. Come to find out that others are having the issue if you search for “network printing issues sp3” you’ll get a few stray users with similar problems… All inconclusive in the fix.

Well – I just didn’t have the problem to keep looking. I’m sticking with SP2 for now. I’ll let somebody else troubleshoot the problem this time around… (I’m guessing that my Brother laser printer is working since the printer itself has a network spooler built into it… I just connected to it via HTTP rather than through the HP software…)

I, like many of you, have started moving into Microsoft Windows Vista territory now that it’s been released. I’ve tried it back when the release candidates were out just to see what was coming up. Sure looks pretty! But there wasn’t a lot more that I found personally useful. I was thankful that my MOTU UltraLite had drivers even during the Beta period. Nice work! However, I’ve slipped back to XP for my daily needs only because of what most people have found – driver and application support just isn’t there.

So this mention of Vista isn’t about the daily computing needs, it’s really about the Media Center aspect and watching HDTV via my XBOX 360 as an extender. For me it was atrocious. I couldn’t watch anything. The screen would blank, network would go bonkers and I’d see ehshell.exe at 100% CPU for (what I would consider) no reason at all! I have a pretty decent dedicated system, a P4 w/ 2GB memory and 2 TB of disk space. And besides, MCE 2005 didn’t have an issue at all… Played everything smooth as silk. That meant… ** gasp ** it’s probably networking!

So Vista changed everything under the covers with how it handles the networking stack. Fine – no big deal. Vista networking in general hadn’t been a problem so far. I could copy files back and forth between my desktop and other servers on my network without an issue (mostly – look at the bottom of the page). I was even able to push my gigabit network upwards of 58MB/second (which was pretty sweet in itself…). But there in lies the magic keyword… Gigabit.

After much searching online after including “Vista” and “Media Center” as well as “XBOX 360″ I finally discovered what seemed like my solution:

You experience poor video quality or slow performance when you use Windows Media Extender features on a home network that uses a Gigabit Ethernet switch on a Windows Vista-based computer (MS KB929707)

Basically Vista handles A/V network streaming for XBOX 360 over UDP instead of TCP as how XP does it. Doesn’t seem to be a big deal, or does it? In my case – it does. I have a 16-port gigabit router that everything in the house is connected to. However, the XBOX is 100 Mbps. So I tried the following:

Method 2: Manually enable flow control in the receive (Rx) direction

1. Click StartStart button, type ncpa.cpl in the Start Search box, and then click ncpa.cpl in the Programs list.

User Account Control permission If you are prompted for an administrator password or confirmation, type the password, or click Continue.

2. Right-click the Gigabit network connection, and then click Properties.

User Account Control permission If you are prompted for an administrator password or confirmation, type the password, or click Continue.

3. On the Networking tab, click Configure.
4. On the Advanced tab, click the flow control property that is in the Property box.
5. In the Value box, click the value that enables flow control in the receive (Rx) direction, and then click OK.

Well – that didn’t solve my problem. (However, it was the second option in the KB article – let’s try the first one!)

Method 1: Change the link speed to 100 Mbps Full Duplex

Yeah – I didn’t want to do that since, hey… I’m on a gig network and I need that speed! But what do you know… It worked. It worked perfectly. I almost cried a tear of joy… But 100 Mbps? I think I’d cry more if I had to go back to that speed! But it did get me thinking… “Hmm… Network related… Flow Control… I wonder…”

So all of my network cards supported Flow Control and they were all set. Let’s go look at the router!

I picked up a really nice Dell PowerConnect 2716 router about 6 months ago to replace my (POS) 8-port SMC SMCGS8 Gigabit router that was failing on some ports. Needless to say, I’ve had zero problems with it and it’s been one of the best pieces of computer gear I’ve purchased (and it’s on sale right now for less than $190!!).

Thinking that I had everything setup perfectly, I figured I probably needed to investigate a bit further on this whole flow control thing. Sure enough, opening up in the admin console and checking out the settings… What do I see? Flow Control set to Disabled. (Click image for full size…)

So with a quick switch to Auto-negotiation and flipping back my hard set 100 Mbps on the network card to Auto-negotiate (to get my lovely speed back in place… You can’t hard set gigabit connections…)

I was enjoying HDTV via Vista & my XBOX 360 without a hiccup. Since this discovery happened around midnight, I think I probably Rocky Balboa’d my hands in the air before heading upstairs and going to bed.

Mission Accomplished.

Now if somebody could just help out with my Vista to Vista odd network behavior! (I hoped that some of these fixes might help – but they didn’t… And yes – I know that it’s a different symptom all together!)

After running into some problems using P2P software with the Linksys WRT54G (a known issue it seems) I decided to search around to see what else was available. I’ve been using DD-WRT for probably the last year or so as a pretty nice replacement… But yesterday came across Tomato. It’s quick, not much over head, works and looks pretty… I miss the fact that it doesn’t have SNMP built-in since the internal bandwidth graphs only show the last 5 hours in detail. The rest of the time is summed. Let’s hope it’s in a later release…

If you’re into trying out new firmware – head on over and try it out…