Useful I.T. & VoIP Ramblings
With more premises becoming Gigabit enabled, many opt for a 3rd party router over whats supplied from the provider to open up advanced routing and capability. So when maximum speeds aren’t what they’d expect it becomes it’s a choice of hardware or provider to point the blame at.
Draytek’ s current portfolio offers 950Mps NAT throughput on Ethernet WAN ports, let’s see if that is theoretical or expected.
Unexpectedly and to much excitement, my home internet is now provided via FTTP.
For background, I was previously in a FTTC environment getting average speeds due to my distance from the cab, however good enough to assumably be overlooked for the next phase of the Openreach Ultrafast rollout. Not that I’m complaining, 2020 is the year my speed gets a much-needed boost.
2020 also turns out to be the inaugural international work from home year, so had the opportunity to have a front seat view from my home office on the activity and timeline that brought FTTP home.
I’d like to share my observations and timeline as an example of what you can expect should you get the inkling of fibre coming to your street soon.
Before we get started, as my expectations rose, I found this post by Andy’s World invaluable for identifying activity and helping me confirm that FTTP was on its way.
Continue reading “My FTTP Journey”When running a website from a home server, viewing it locally will make it seem that the site is responding lightning fast and there are no issues. But what about the outsiders wanting a look at your content, are they getting the same performance? Chances are they are not, as a visitor’s machine needs to negotiate the internet and its equivalent of back streets and country roads to get to the home server’s location.
Where a home server can differentiate greatly from hosted solutions is the speed and relative location on the net. Visitors who view a website relies on the upstream connection at the server end to receive the content, and when this is via domestic internet connection the upstream can much smaller than the heavily advertised downstream connection. So it’s worth checking the theoretical upload speed to establish what kind of service and content can be served.
In terms of location, hosting companies are as close to the internet backbone as feasibly possible to get the best speeds and lower latency. The backbone of the net is handled by major operation companies that handle the bulk of all internet traffic between countries and continents, these in turn have datacentres where the traffic from countries are trunked to the different internet providers and down to the end user. As data makes its way from the backbone to the end user, it can hop between different servers as it meanders towards the final destination. For each hop the networking equipment has to read where to send it on, and route it on the right path. This all takes time, even though it is measured in milliseconds, an extended number of hops and the volume of data packets needed may produce a noticeable wait for a user to see the desired page.
All home user’s computers need deal with negotiating its way through the service providers’ local infrastructure to get to most sites, but when visiting a site hosted on a home server, data may need to navigate another service providers’ network to reach the site. This is where visitors may experience slower loading times compared to mainstream sites.
So how to tell if your home hosted website will be speedy when out in the wild? There’s a few different ways to check:
In my last post I was a confussled mess, failing to get my head around how a network device (The Raspberry Pi) could cripple an exclusive function of my router.
I decided to troubleshoot the issue further, I set up a basic ping to help me pinpoint when the internet was going down
After performing some basic troubleshooting, it transpired that the fault was happening whenever the HDMI cable was connected to the Pi and my Television (Sony Bravia EX4-32).
Thinking it was a bad HDMI cable, I bought another, but to no avail. My next brainwave was that the Pi was emitting EMI (or RFI) which drove me to buy a 10 metre HDMI cable to get the Pi as far away from my router and other networking equipment, alas this didn’t work either.
Troubleshooting further, it turned out that the HDMI cable didn’t need to be properly connected, mealy touching the Pi on any metallic part will cause the internet to cease.
So in essence I am still no closer to solving my Pi/Internet mystery, if you can help me please comment!
All other HDMI works fine as I am now using the 10m HDMI cable as a screen extender on my laptop.
Bootnote:
In my previous post I signed off by stating that that the Pi and my internet were working in harmony. However it turned out that my modem had dialled back my downstream internet speed to 1.5Mbps instead of the usual 3Mbps, normally a result of the modem trying to obtain a more stable internet connection due to, lets say, interference on the line!
It was all going so well, got my Raspberry Pi and after the initial fiddle with Debian Squeeze I got another SD card and put Raspbmc on it, things were great!
Only niggle in my head was that the card I put Raspbmc on was 8GB, and that bigger card would be put to better use in my camera that was using a 4GB card. I thought it would be no problem to reformat cards and swap them over?
Wrong!
The 8GB in the camera was fine, and I used the Raspbmc installer as before to load it on the new SD card. The trouble was that when first booted up the Pi, it seemed to freeze on the
Sending HTTP request to server
No problem I thought, hop on my laptop and find out if other users experienced the same. But low and behold the internet on my laptop ceased to to work, with strange requests for proxy passwords to sites like Facebook and even the Weather gadget on Win 7!
First thoughts were that I cooked my router, as I been downloading a lot and on a warm day to (yes there was a warm day … I think!). But after it was off for as long as I could stand, powered it back on and normal service was resumed.
After rebooting all network equipment it finally dawned that the internet would go down for everything connected to my network when the Pi was powered up! I had never experienced this before and could not for the life of me fathom it out. I thought that it had a defect in the Pi meant that some sort of power surge was knocking out the system? This was quickly dismissed as local traffic was unaffected, meaning the network hardware was operating normally.
A quick glance at my Sky broadband supplied Sagem F@ST 2504 modem showed the internet connection had failed, with the internet indicator glowing orange with a red pulse every second. Stranger still, upon unplugging the Raspberry Pi, connection to the net restored within seconds!
So how can a network device have the ability to target and destroy an internet connection? Its my understanding that a Pi has no ability to retain settings other than whats stored on a SD card, but this issue continued when using two different memory cards.
Drilling down to an extreme form of troubleshooting, all network devices, including my second switch/access point was disconnected from the Sagem router. leaving just the Pi connected. Then from Midori on Debian Squeeze (remembering that the internal network was unaffected) rebooted the router using the web interface.
Suddenly the Pi could connect, attaching my whole network back together I found that everything was back to normal,
Laptop, Pi, iPhone, everything!
And this is the worst thing, I don’t know what caused this, and what I specifically did in the reboot process that solved it?
So I would love to hear if this has happened to you, and if there was something you can pinpoint as the issue? This one has got me completely stumped!
