Ubuntu Karmic

After having looked at Ubuntu 2 years ago and finding it wasn't flexible enough back then (old habbits don't die) recent problems with the Debian kernel made me have a look at it again.

The Debian problems I'm facing:
* fingerprint scanner on my Thinkpad X60 tablet didn't work anymore.
* laptop wouldn't boot randomly, but getting stuck during boot process.
* fluxbox randomly hangs in combination with wine.
* upgrade of X.org screwed the tablet screen rotation.
* Neither NetworkManager or wicd in Debian support 3G dial-up without configuring it manually and then it's half arsed.
* New atheros drivers are acting up very badly.

and many many more.

So I installed Ubuntu Karmic (9.10) and I'm certainly impressed.

* Touchscreen and tablet-pen work out of the box (had to be configured manually in Debian).
* Fingerprint scanner works flawlessly after installing the applications. After a few manual changes, even for gnome-screensaver
* NetworkManager works right out of the box, including internal 3G datacard.
* Atheros card works right out of the box.
* Suspend works flawlessly right out of the box.
* The boot time is amazing. It only takes a few seconds to boot the laptop.

All in all, I'm impressed. We'll see how long it'll survive on the laptop.

Mikrotik Queues broken AGAIN !! (3/3)

Just received an email, that of the next version, use-ip-firewall will also have an effect on IPv6 packets.

Hopefully that solves that issues.

Mikrotik Queues broken AGAIN !! (2/3)

Enlightenment.

I cracked the issue. Finally i found some time to sit down and test, when this is happening, because I only saw it when testing against our own speedtest.net server, but the queues were properly working against other speedtest servers.

So what is different between our network and others ? *PLING* IPv6 !!!!!!

And yes, correctly. Once I disabled IPv6 on my laptop and did the speedtest, the queues will work. Once I enabled IPv6, do the speedtest, the queues won't work.

Basically it means, that Mikrotik is not shaping the whole interface, but only the IPv4 traffic inside it. Should a customer get the brilliant idea to run IPX, Appletalk or whatnot .. well .. or IPv6, like we do, he's got full throttle no limit and the license to bust our network. Fortunatly this only applies to enterprise customers on our layer2 MPLS network right now, but what a bummer.

155 mbit/s link from Ballybaan to Abbeyknockmoy

The traffic volumes from Abbeyknockmoy are getting every day more difficult to cope with, without killing the latency. We're backhauling on 3 links into town now, to cope with the volume.

The fiber that is being installed by Smart will enable us with access to our own leased dark fiber from e-net, which will link Mervue to Ballybaan.

From there a licensed 7 GHz link at 30+ m on the old tower should enable us to get to Abbeyknockmoy and solve all of the bandwidth issues for a good while.

I've also got to figure out, what kind of kit we're going to use for the dark fiber. Initially our idea was CWDM gear, but that's way out of the budget currently. I've got a few other things that I'm looking at for the interim.

Mikrotik Queues broken AGAIN !! (1/3)

I discovered, that the queues in RouterOS can be escaped again. The particular setup, where I'm seeing this is a VPLS circuit, bridged to a lan-port. Queuing is established in the manner, as they suggest, by enabling firewalling for bridging and create the queue on the bridge.

So I send them a mail on the 22nd (4 days ago) about that and raised a ticket. Answer today is, they can't reproduce the problem. Guess I've got to figure that one out myself.

Power issues continue

Most of the power got restored last night, but it seems that today, the south of the county is on. I've seen brief power cuts north of the bay, but anything near of Clare is gone for a while now.

Galway International Rally, wireless and gale force storms

The Rally is on again. They haven't been fortunate with the weather.

A shed-roof was blown onto the street and delayed one of the stages. In Moylough a tree fell into the powerlines and onto the street covering half of it. Around Monivea a couple of trees fell into the telephone wires and onto the street. The weather is quite inconsitant with dry spells, lashing rain and hail taking each their turn.

On top of all of that from mid day and on most of Moycullen and Menlo had no power. Roscommon seems to have random power issues, too. Our network has been keeping up so far, with only one base known to be damaged for sure, but looking at what's to come over the weekend, we might be unfortunate to see more down the road.

Ballindereen basestation rebuild

On wednesday evening the omni in our Ballindereen basestation failed, cause yet unknown, but the board did just not respond anymore. Unfortunatly it's been lashing down since then and until today. The roads on the Galway - Roscommon road were flooded this morning.

You'd say, what has that to do with it? Well, this is a 100ft castle tower with a 20ft pole on the roof and the board we need to replace is at the top of the pole (see left, plastic box on top of the pole). It isn't an easy job to do so and the roof is impossible to climb in wet conditions, let alone dangerous.

The majority of the customers were moved to other basestations in the meanwhile.



Some time after midnight today it stopped raining. We used the nice day to basically rip the whole base apart. It's 2 1/2 years old and needed a overhaul. A upgrade was also planned for some time, so that's what we've been at today.

The (not final) result is the picture on the right. Obviously missing the panels for the inter-base links, yet.






Also the boards aren't mounted on the pole anymore, but reside in the box on the wall with coax to the antennas. That way, we'll be able to maintain them in bad weather. This is something we changed about a year ago, but some of the older bases haven't had the rework done yet. Once finished, a battery and trickle charger move into the empty slot and that'll be it then. This base consists of 1 legacy omni, 3 sectors, and 4 point-to-point links, 4 embedded routers in total. And with the upgrades, it'll be fully MPLS capable.

Uplink in Kilcash

We stuck a pole up temporarily last night to facilitate for the downloads, that are needed to bring the Midlans game server up to scratch just before the event. Part of the organiser team has "invaded" my home, as I'm near to the event and we can't get into the hall before this evening. The 3G connection was entirely unusable and this gives me a 4 mbit symmetric feed into Newbridge base. Mind ya, it'll blow over on the first windblow. It's going to move to a bracket on the garage later today.