ross' blog

Gave my home network some TLC, that’s what. During my “upgrade”, I noticed that Comcast upgraded my account. Nice. Uploading at a steady 300Kb/s vs. the 90Kb/s I was getting previously. And that’s after upgrading my account to the highest residential level possible, I was getting a measly 50Kb/s upload before that. Check out the new dd-wrt bandwidth monitor which monitors your LAN, WAN, and Wireless network traffic, the WAN being the best part, monitoring your entire network’s incoming and outgoing traffic is not easy to do. Luckily, with dd-wrt, my $60 router has been “turned into a $600 router”.

Next step? Well, have you ever let Bittorrent have it’s way with your bandwidth? If you have, then you would have lost the ability to get to any website, even google, because it would eat up all available bandwidth. Solution? Limit your upload to some stupid low number so that you don’t get close to your max upload and cripple your internet connection. New solution? QoS (Quality of Service). This lets your router handle bandwidth distribution. You can tell it to allow bittorrent to use up as much bandwidth as it wants…unless any other program wants to do anything. See below:

My rules are simple. Bittorrent is at the bottom of the totem pole. It can go crazy, but if anything else asks for a connection, it has higher priority. The 4 express rules are at the top of the pole, sharing 1^st priority, while all other traffic (internet etc) still gets priority over bittorent but not higher than the other 4 services.

What else? Well, my Tivo has always limited my wireless security. If you’ve ever come to my house, you’ve either had to connect to a hidden ssid, type in a long ass wep key, or I would drop the security all together until you left because my Tivo could only do crappy WEP security. Well now I can do both. With dd-wrt I set up a virtual wireless connection. My main wireless has a nice wpa2 key while my Tivo connects to a hidden ssid with a crappy wep key. I could have even unbridged the virtual wireless as to separate it from my private LAN and just give it internet access for downloaded guide info, but I needed it to have access to my server for transferring shows.

Gotta say. It’s all running like a well oiled machine. Very happy. Thanks dd-wrt and linux based Linksys routers J Yeah Celts, nice work.

 Probably the most fun I’ve had with my computer in a long time. It’s a lot of eye candy, which usually I try to avoid because it would slow down any computer without enough return, but Beryl runs so smoothly it’s just awesome. And VMWare running Windows at the same time with no delay is tits. It drops my RAM down to 512MB for each OS, but they can both run with ease on that. Bump my RAM up to 2GB (1GB each), and I’d probably never shut VMWare down. Check out some pics:

http://picasaweb.google.com/rossco23/Ubuntu