Everything In Between

Dear NETGEAR technical support department:

Several features of my (very new, purchased in the last month and a half) NETGEAR WGR614 v7 home wireless router appear to be either quite simply non-responsive to any configuration changes that I make in the web-based configuration screens or so flaky that they are all but useless. Specifically, the following list of issues are presenting themselves.

• Ports that are configured to be forwarded via the router are not actually being forwarded, despite appearing in the WGR614v7’s list of “services” and appear in port scans as closed or filtered ports.
• Changing the WAN-side ping response configuration option does not alter the device’s WAN-side ping behavior. That is, if it is originally set to respond to WAN-side pings and then switched so that it will not respond to the same, the router will continue to respond to WAN-side pings despite the setting’s appearance in the configuration screens.
• Setting a default DMZ host does not actually allow that host to see all WAN-side traffic, evidenced by a simple traffic capture log.

I’ve only tried the above features, but the theme is consistent: making a configuration change does not change the behavior of the router. Neither power cycling the device nor any amount of hitting the “save” buttons commit changes.

What’s most furstrating, however, is that at some seemingly arbitrary point, the configuration changes finally do stick and the router’s behavior aligns to the display of its configuration screens, at which point port forwarding, WAN-side ping, and the DMZ host all behave as expected. However, this can take anywhere from an hour to several days, and then, again at some seemingly arbitrary point, the router’s behavior reverts to whatever it was before causing port forwarded routes to time out and WAN-side ping to be re-enabled, etc.

I’ve run through the usual troubleshooting steps that I know are common to all devices: checking for new firmware (the device claims it is up to date while using firmware version V2.020_1.0.20NA), power cycling the device, and reverting back to factory default settings. None of these actions have improved the situation any.

Your prompt assistance increasing the reliability of my WGR614v7 NETGEAR router is much appreciated.

Sincerely,
-Meitar Moscovitz

No one in the room could help but crack a smile when my Windows HP Pavillion ze4800 laptop crashed the moment I booted it up at Wednesday’s Mac Meetup group. I had brought it in to demo the capability of network remote access technologies such as VNC and SSH to be interoperable between operating systems. Unfortunately, when my PC attempted to wake from hibernation, it froze and I had to forcefully shut it off.

When it was next booted, it displayed a Windows no-boot error that read something like, “Windows could not load because it could not find the file C:\WINDOWS\system32\Drivers\Ntfs.sys.” Thankfully I was at a Mac group, so everyone gave a hearty chuckle.

Of course, this leaves me with a broken computer. What’s very frustrating is that no matter what I do, Windows gives me a stop error. A stop error is an unrecoverable problem, more commonly known as the Blue Screen of Death (or BSOD, for short). What’s even more frustrating is that this has happened all over the place, with video distortion increasingly common and even when booted from the Windows recovery console.

I’ve removed the RAM I added from the machine and the issue still occurs, and I’ve removed the RAM it shipped with and only used the RAM I added, and the issue still occurs. It’s probably not caused by bad RAM, which means this issue is probably caused by the machine’s logic board (or other such integrated hardware component).

What’s interesting to me about this whole experience is that it turned me into an HP Total Care customer, and I’m now waiting for them to ship me a box so that they can take a look at the hardware. This puts me 300+ dollars in the hole. And what about the warranty, you ask? Why, it’s 1-year, of course, just like every other computer maker. What about buying a new machin, you ask? I got lucky because apparently HP has a limited time offer to fix anything wrong with the machine for a flat-rate, which is what I’m paying.

So far, while annoying, this isn’t really that surprising. My only real gripe is that throughout the tech support call I had to decipher the extremely difficult to understand Indian accent of some representative who called himself “Gautam.”

When I went shopping the other day, I stepped into CompUSA looking to buy a few computer components. One of these was a hard drive. When I approached the rack, a salesperson came up to me and asked me how much space I thought I needed for my computer. I answered that I didn’t need much; I just wanted to get the cheapest hard drive on the shelf.

It turns out that the cheapest hard drive on the shelf was a 250 GB, 7200 RPM Maxtor drive with a 16 MB cache. It retailed at $159.99, was on sale for $139.99, and had an $80 mail-in-rebate to top it off. That’s a pretty great deal (and here’s another if you’re jealous).

The prices of storage media are continuing to decline, and it’s getting to the point where it’s practically impossible to use all of the space you can buy. Let’s take a moment and add it up. Say I didn’t buy one hard drive, but two. That would have been 500 gigabytes at a price tag of $120. Doubling that (if I bought four hard drives), I’d have 1,000 gigabytes or roughly one terabyte for a mere $240. Heck, I could buy myself two terabytes for under $500.

But just how big is a terabyte? According to A.P. Lawrence:

If you can read 1,000 words per minute, and did nothing but read 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, it would take you around 2,000 years to read a single terabyte of data. Your computer can’t read a terabyte all that quickly either. If it could sustain 100 megabytes per second, you need ten million seconds. Don’t hold your breath while you wait.

Right now, I have a 40 GB drive on this machine that’s getting close to full. If I backed it up to a terabyte drive, I could make 25 copies of it before I ran out of space.

[…]

The hairs on your head might number around a quarter million, so you’d need four million people to get a terabyte of hair strands. Limit the eligibility to middle aged men and you might need a few more.

Fine sand seems to represent large numbers in fairly small volumes, sometimes estimated at 10,000 grains per cubic centimeter. We’d need 100 million cubic centimeters to get a terabyte, which is bigger than I want to store in my back yard.

The point is that even a terabyte of data is a tremendous amount. It seems we really are getting awful close to “big enough” for personal storage, though “fast enough” is still a long way off.

So it seems that the limiting factor in the amount of information our technology can handle is how fast we can access and process this data, not how much data we can keep. I just think it’s humbling that something like computers, often believed to exist in a realm of their own (“cyberspace”) are still subject to the same immutable laws as the rest of the physical world.

I’ve been told that not updating this blog is an unacceptable use of my time, so here’s an obligatory “Here’s-what’s-going-on-with-me” update. The short answer: a lot! The long answer is the rest of this entry.

Necessity Necessitates Invention

Shortly after returning the apartment to a liveable state, I met with a man I had first been introduced to at an NYPC Web Design meeting I attended some months before my road trip. We met to finally put into action a plan we’d been working on before I left for the summer. I was to provide a kind of special consulting and tutoring service on all things technical and help him and his business grow with the use of technology. Put simply, it’s rather like an elaborate friendship which is centerd around teaching him how to better use technology in the whole of his life, including his photography business.

So needless to say, I’ve been spending some of my time with him discussing technical things, showing how to use computers in various ways, and advising on what I think the best course of action is for him in regards to his technology requirements. In the mean time, I’ve also been doing some research on digital printing and scanning and looking for ways to improve my own photo manipulation and creative skills with programs like PhotoShop.

One of the things I needed to create for myself after starting this tutoring/consulting work is an easy way to keep track of and calculate how many billable hours I’ve worked with him. It occured to me that the simplest way of doing this might be to use iCal, Mac OS X’s built-in calendaring program, since I already use it to keep track of the appointments I have with him. After some brainstorming, I came up with a very simple PHP script that parses an exported iCal calendar (that is, a vCalendar 2.0 [aka iCalendar] formatted file), grabs all the appointments with a certain special note in them and adds up all the billable hours at whatever rate was set. I’m still adding to it piece-meal style, but eventually I hope to use it as a primary means of keeping track of per-hour billing appointments.

At the moment, I’m imagining some sort of AppleScript-based automation to keep the whole system glued together (at least on Macs), though I’m not sure if that’s what will end up happening. Either way, it’ll give me an opportunity to learn some AppleScript. I’ve been wanting to learn more about it ever since I discovered Terminal’s osascript command.

Hard-Up for Hardware

Another major thing going on for me right now is that I’m intensively studying about computer hardware and looking for as much hands-on practice replacing, repairing, and troubleshooting hardware issues as I can. The recent abysmal string of computer failures that I’ve experienced has left me feeling rather helpless and to combat that feeling I’m trying to fill in all the weak spots in my computing knowledge. That means I’m boning up on my hardware skillz, since they were pretty weak.

I’ve purchased a replacement logic board for my iMac DV (that’s what the folks at Tekserve told me was wrong with mine when I brought it in), and intend on attempting to replace it myself. In the mean time, I’m going to grab the hard drive from the iMac and put it in an enclosure to use as an external hard drive for one of my other PowerMac G3 towers. (Hey, why not?)

In a funny way, all of this couldn’t have come at a better time. At around the time when the dust in my apartment was settling, I had a phone interview with an Apple retail staffer looking to hire people to work as Mac Geniuses at their new Apple Store’s Genius Bar in midtown Manhattan. I think the interview went pretty well; he seemed excited to be talking with me and invited me to the initial group interview sometime in the middle of December. The only points to be made was that the Mac Genius position had very little to do with software or web development (the thing I’m most comfortable doing) and a lot to do with hardware and software troubleshooting.

Studying more about Apple hardware would be required learning for the Mac Genius position. This gave me yet another reason to dive right in and get a hold of some AppleCare Technician Training. My dad was generous enough to give me this as an early Christmas present. I’m expecting it to arrive sometime tomorrow or the next day.

Backups for Everything

Even if I don’t do well enough to be hired by Apple, I’m really excited to be studying about Apple hardware and taking the AppleCare Technician Training course. It’s a prepatory course for taking the ACDT tests, which I intend to eventually take whether or not I’m employed by Apple. One reason for that is because I want to prepare myself for the possibility of making money with this newfound hardware knowledge. Something that’s been on my mind for quite a while in various forms is the idea of a tech support side business. Over the summer, I finally chose a name for that: Mayday Tech Support. I’ve already gone ahead and got the domain name (maydaytechsupport.com) and hopefully sooner rather than later I’m going to merge it under the Maymay Media umbrella. Naturally, a web site is forthcoming.

Anyway, all this hardware training can now be put to two good uses. If I get hired by Apple as a Mac Genius, great! If not, I’ll still have the AppleCare Technician Training and will take the ACDT tests, which I’m sure will come in handy for Mayday Tech Support.

Backburners On High

Most everything else is on the backburner right now, but the range is still turned up high. I’m working on programming the back-end to a site my father’s gotten a contract for, I have a meeting with another client who needs help with their ASP.NET web site, I’m still pursuing a Doing-Business-As certificate for Maymay Media, there are countless chores around the house that are slowly being done, the web site for Deux Amis Designs is in the works, I’m reading two new excellent books (The Pragmatic Programmer and The Art of Deception by Kevin Mitnick), and still found enough time to spend a good chunk of the weekend with family.

So, yeah, that’s what’s going on with me.

This road trip is coming to an end. Sara and I are in New York City for a few days before heading on to drop the car off in Maine. We’ve amassed what must be some hundred over a thousand pictures from the trip, but I’m afraid only a handful will last.

I’ve spent today troubleshooting my HP Pavillion laptop computer after it and Windows XP crashed last night. It died in a sudden death shutdown (a symptom of overheating, which I had noticed getting worse for a while) and wouldn’t start up—not even in safe mode. It hung (froze) on atisgkaf.sys and wouldn’t load any more drivers during the boot process.

I’ve been using the MicroSoft Recovery Console™ from the original installation CD to attempt to recover a previous restore point as described in the linked article. At first things seemed hopeful. After deleting the appropriate files in c:\windows\system32\config, the computer booted into Windows. But only for a few minutes before experiencing sudden death shutdown again.

Unfortunately, a few more attemps yielded no further success until finally running chkdsk from the Recovery Console yielded this depressing message.

The volume appears to contain one or more unrecoverable problems.

This message usually appears when there is a hardware problem such as, I’m afraid, a (physical) hard drive failure. Ultimately, this means that all those pictures from the road trip I’ve just been on for the past two and a half months might be lost for good. And that is depressing.

However, after yet another reboot into the Recovery Console, chkdsk /r is reporting the following hope-inspiring message:

[…]
CHKDSK is checking the volume...
[…]
29% completed.

So, I guess we’ll see.

Danica’s iPod was the one Christmas gift she bought herself this year. She really deserves more, but times are tight right now. Anyway, after a week of getting her music library slowly transffered onto the thing, it quit mounting properly on her Sony Vaio laptop. (If it matters, it stopped working right after she ran Windows Update. She is now officially scared stiff of ever running Windows Update again. Ever. Things just keep breaking when she does it.)

Some digging resulted in the discovery of the advice to go out and get a FireWire PCMCIA card (aka, a CardBus card) for the laptop. Plugging the iPod into a USB controller is apparently finicky at best, impossible at worst.

So I went out and bought her an Adaptec DuoConnect card, which has two USB 2.0 ports, one traditional FireWire (aka, IEEE 1394) port and another “mini” FireWire port. At first I thought it wouldn’t work because I hadn’t noticed the part about not buying a combo-device.

Fortunately, it worked without a hitch and Danica has her iPod back. Which is great for me because I get to listen to more of her great music selections. So rule of thumb for iPods: they love FireWire, they hate USB.

Yesterday was much better than the past couple of days, and today is turning out to be truly awesome.

• I was still angry with Danica when she came home, so few words were exchanged at first. Some time later, she went to the kitchen (omg, we have a kitchen) and ate some leftover Thai for food for dinner. That’s when I stopped fiddling with my computers and came to join her.

  We spoke a little, hugged, played Race (an Israeli card game), and generally felt better. I’m not really sure if we’ve resolved to “not fight” anymore, but there is certainly less emotional pollution in the air right now. That, if nothing else, makes my day.

• I didn’t go to sleep last night. Instead, I finished inspecting the other PC I have. This is the lower-end machine, so instead of merely look at the data, I actually took the whole thing apart and took out the CD-ROM drive, the floppy disk drive, some PCI cards, and disconnected the power supply. Yes, I was like a kid in a candy store.

  This may sound odd to some of you (it sure does to me), but I’ve rarely ever seen the inside of a computer before. So this was really a lot of fun to do. I had my trusty power tool so screwing and unscrewing various parts was a snap. If I could, I would have literally opened up the CD-ROM drive to see what it looks like in there, but I didn’t have the right tools.

  I went out to Radio Shack, the hardware store, and various other locales around my neighborhood when it turned to morning and after I had fetched Danica her morning pastries and latè, but no store had the right sort of screwdrivers. I tried my best to open the small CD-ROM screws with one of those eyeglass repair kits with the little screwdriver but I only succeeded in hurting my hands.

  I did, however, buy myself a Linksys Fast Ethernet NIC for the PC which didn’t have an RJ-45 port. I installed it on the PCI slot in the motherboard myself, screwed it in place and am currently sitting next to the open computer. I spent a good deal of time cleaning the innards with a can of compressed air and rubbing the casing down with paper towels. Hopefully that’ll do some good.

• I’m finally installing Fedora Core 3, the Linux distro that was most often suggested to me to try first. I’m actually paging through the installer as I write this, which is incredibly exciting. I didn’t even finish setting up my workspace, but it’s really just about damn time I had a Linux box. I plan on installing one other Linux distro one of my two remaining PCs, and probably FreeBSD on the other because it’s what Mac OS X was “based on,” or so they say.

  Oh yeah. And Danica’s excellent music collection is playing off of her computer on my speakers. It’s awesome stuff. Really it is.