Archived Entries

Limiting bandwidth hogs in SWS

I sat down at my desk one morning to perform my usual morning rituals — reading email and usenet news, and checking whether any new web site members were or were not on SPAM lists — while enjoying a first cup of coffee. I had noticed that my network seemed rather slower than usual, and I noted that the status LEDs on the Cisco router and other network equipment were near steady on. Something or someone was consuming a large amount of my network bandwidth. I checked the Cisco router syslog and looked for several other typically suspect reasons for the high utilization. I finally found it. A client in Canada was downloading files from one of my servers. Not typically a problem or I wouldn't have made these files available. However, this particular client had started numerous downloads of some rather large .ZIP files. (read all 1435 words.)

Configuring EVDO GPS under Ubuntu

For Christmas, Santa brought an ASUS EeePC 1005HA for my 10 year old son. Santa, being a staunch anti-Micro$oft zealot just like myself, had the common decency to remove the WEENDOZE installed on this netbook and install Ubuntu 9.10 on it before his midnight romp through my living room to leave it under the Christmas tree. My kid just loves it. Unfortunately, he also loves the internet.

While we were on the road during the holidays, my son complained constantly about not having internet access. So, I did a little research and I purchased the Cradlepoint CTR500 cellular-ready travel router. I will blog about this interesting little device at some later time; however, while configuring this device, I happened to click on a configuration page labeled GPS and I learned that my Sprint/Sierra Wireless AC597E EVDO modem had GPS capabilities! Having been lost on some of the back roads near Penn State where my 19 year old son is attending school, knowing precisely where we were would have helped immensely to plot our way with mapquest.com or maps.google.com. Thus, I was hell bent on getting this GPS capability accessible on either my Ubuntu laptop and or my MacBookPro.
(read all 1488 words.)
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