Dave's Workshop - Workbench July 15th

Workbench

Week of July 15^th - 21^st 2001

Sunday

Four posts last week. I'm moving in the right direction. I've had a busy weekend. A friend of mine came into town from Atlanta. That meant a weekend of gaming. He's an avid board gamer; in fact he's the Word champion of Acquire three of the last four years. Obviously we didn't play that. A few years ago he introduced me to a German game called Die Siedler Von Catan, or Die Siedler for short. Mayflower games put out an American version called The Settlers of Catan, but I prefer the original German version. We only played twice, but in one of the games we used the Stadte & Ritter (Cities and Knights) expansion. That made it equivalent to at least two regular games and maybe three in length. We played Stadte & Ritter with four players, which maybe too many and the regular Die Siedler with three. As luck would have it I won both, so a successful weekend it was. Die Siedler, and gaming in general, is definately something I need to get up in the Hobby area. We also went to see the movie Shrek. If you haven't seen it, do. It was very good. Briefly, it's an animated film about an Ogre, Shrek, who has to rescue a princes to get his home back. It's very funny, and would make a good choice for young and old alike.

I also got to mess with a new 1.2 GHz Athlon system this weekend. My friend from Atlanta brought it down with him. He assembled it last week, but when he tried to install Windows 2000 on it he ran into problems. Booting from the CD, the install would start, format the drive, copy over some files, reboot, come up to the start up splash screen for a minute or two, then blue screen with an error about the boot drive. First thing I did was to check the connections, but everything seemed ok. I decided to swap hard drives sense that's what the error message dealt with. Using a spare drive it worked fine. Using his drive again, I installed again specifying a small partition. His drive was 40 GB, while the one swapped it with that worked was 3.6 GB. Same result. Still not sure if it was a hardware or software problem, I installed Windows 98 on it. No problem, even using the whole drive. At this point I thought I knew what was wrong. His hard drive, an IBM Deskstar 60GXP,is an ATA100 drive. The older hard drive I swapped it with is much older and at best supports ATA33. The motherboard, an Epox, supports ATA66/100 drives and maintains compatibility with older drives. I figured Windows 2000 was detecting the higher performance ATA100 interface and trying to load drivers for it, but they were incompatible with the VIA chipset. When you first set up 2000, you can add drivers by pressing F6. I tried repeatedly to get the "correct" drivers to load using files from the motherboards install CD, Epox's website, and VIA's website without success. Then my friend mentioned Epox had some updated BIOS files out. Checking them out they mentioned nothing about IDE or hard drive fixes. I went ahead and ran the latest update anyway. Voila, it worked. Lesson learned, if you're having trouble, make sure you have the latest BIOS and firmware updates for all your hardware. I knew that, I just needed to be reminded.

Monday

Tuesday

Wednesday

Thursday

I now have a cable modem... and it is good. I was told to expect installation Wednesday between 9:00am and 1:00pm. Quite a window, but they would call a half-hour before so I didn't have to sit around the house all morning. Around 10:00am I got the call. When would they be there I asked. They're probably already there was the reply. I walked out the door. I didn't want to take a chance on them moving on. Luckily I work only a few minutes from home. When I arrived they were in fact already there, but weren't upset about the wait. It was a three-man crew to hook me up. One was in charge of getting my computer ready. Another started looking for a good place for the drop in the computer room. The third was checking where the cable runs into the house.

I had found a cable outlet in the computer room, but having never used it, I didn't know if it was hooked up. Alas, it was not. Where the cable enters the house it splits. One feed goes to the TV in the living room. Another to the bedroom is live but not in use. The last, well, we didn't know. They tock a peek in the attic and found the line to the computer room as well as another drop to the living room. That one was hooked up, but covered up with a plastic faceplate. It was also behind the china cabinet. Carefully moving the china cabinet, they found the cable just ended there, and didn't go back up and over to where my computer was. About the same time up in the attic they found the line running to the computer room wasn't connected to anything. What's more, they could disconnect the second drop in the living room which was unused and hook in the drop in the computer room. Hurray, the drop in the computer room was ready to go.

Setting up the computer was simple. Unlike the DSL I've seen, no extra software is necessary. All you have to do is set the computers host name to what is assigned to you and make sure the Ethernet card is configured for DHCP. One reboot and you're ready.

I fired up Opera and the web appeared before my eyes. It's fast. The big sites like yahoo only take a second or two and they're ready to go. Downloads are fast too. I went to FreeBSD and grabbed the disk image for release 4.3. It's something like 650 MB, so I figured it would be a good test. And 60 KB a second later it had downloaded. I haven't tried downloads from big sites like Microsoft and HP, but the 60-70 KB/sec I've gotten so far are terrific. The service is rated at 1.5-3Mb per second so well see. Even at the speeds I've seen so far a 1 MB download only takes around 15 seconds. I can live with that.

Friday

178... that's the magic number. I downloaded Eudora today and got 178 KB per second transfer rate. That's faster then a T1. I also tested out Microsoft by grabbing Windows 2000 sp1 but only got around 80 KB/sec. Needless to say so far I'm very impressed with the cable modem. I read up a little bit about PicoBSD today. I really don't know how hard it's going to be to use it to make a router to go between the cable modem and the network here. I downloaded release 4.3 of FreeBSD that you use to build the PicoBSD disk, so I'll give it a go. I may not have the time to invest right now though, so one of those $100 cable/DSL routers might be in my future yet. Unfortunately I just don't see much free in the next few weeks. I'm also signed up to take a Windows 2000 class the beginning of August and I want to get a little experience with that first. We'll see.

I went to see Jurassic Park 3 tonight. It's not a great movie, but I didn't expect it to be. It's definitely better then the second one. In fact, for the most part I found myself enjoying it. I guess it all depends on your expectations...

Saturday

I got up early, for a Saturday at least, to go canoeing. It was nice. A little humid, but overcast most of the time so it didn't get too hot. Afterwards I spent a good bit of time straitening up the computer room. To prepare for the cable modem installation I had moved all the junk on the desk and piled it up on the table. Unfortunately, that is where we game. So with the guys coming over tonight it was time to clean up a little. Now the table is clear, the desk is still pretty clean and I've got a bag of trash to throw out.

I downloaded ZoneAlarm last weekend in anticipation of the cable modem. I had read having "always on" Internet access was dangerous enough to warrant some security precautions and by all accounts ZoneAlarm seemed a good choice. ZoneAlarm, as I understand it, attempts to "mask" your presence on the Internet. The idea is if someone tries to communicate with your PC, ZoneAlarm intercepts it and no response is given. This works for inbound as well as outbound communications. The first time I fired up Opera, ZoneAlarm informed me of what the program was doing and I had to allowed it access. Running a program like this may seem like overkill, I mean with all the computers on the net now days what's the likelihood mine will get scanned or attacked. Quite high actually, depending on what you consider intrusive. Even when I was still using my dial-up, ZoneAlarm blocked several requests to my computer. Most of the time they are harmless. Once my machines NetBIOS name was queried. A web site I was visiting probably did that. In fact, without some layer of insulation like ZoneAlarm or a firewall, your computer will probably give out all sorts of information. Mostly harmless maybe, but sometimes not. Those Denial of Service attacks that make the news every so often when Yahoo or someone big like that gets hit usually involve computers like yours and mine who've been compromised in some way. Steve Gibson's site has more info and will test your system, telling you what your computer is telling the world. It's definately worth a look. Don't get me wrong, I don't want to be an alarmist. I do think it's good idea to take reasonable precautions though.

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Week of July 15^th - 21^st 2001

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Week of July 15th - 21st 2001

Sunday

Monday

Tuesday

Wednesday

Thursday

Friday

Saturday

Week of July 15^th - 21^st 2001