Category: general

BT infinity/fibre /FTTC broadband 1 year on review

I\’m on BT infinity for bit more than a year now. 18 months contract so I have a few months to go. the BT cabinet is just out side my house, so I get full speed. On average I get around 20mbit/s upload and 68mbit/sec download. It\’s not bad for normal website you tube etc

only complaint I have aprt from their crappy home hub (see the review below) is their routing with big tv services like BBC iplayer and Sky player. it\’s rubbish it\’s buffer like crazy. I know it\’s an BT issue as If I vpn to another ISP it\’s works fine and When i was with BE/O2 even though the speed is slower never had a buffering on this services.

I knew BT isn\’t great on routing even before I joined but at the time only BT did the BT infinity in my area.

BT should fire their network operations team and hire a good ones like other ISP. BE/O2 had a good team.

obviously I\’ll be canceling BT and moving to a better ISP might be sky not sure yet. all though BT adverts claiming they don\’t limit the usages are bullshit as it wont work correctly in the 1st place.

I don\’t use p2p so BT blocking that is not an issue for me but They should work on fixing iplayer and sky player.

You can only expect this kind of network issues on a 3rd world county isps not from UK\’s largest ISP

Mobile phones and the future

I\’m think now with Firefox OS and Ubuntu mobile trying to get in to the  mobile market not sure who will be the winner will be. I think Ubuntu has a good chance with their one interface for phone and another interface for big screen, when it\’s docked is amazing. It\’s not new but looks promising on video.  And they are saying easy to import android apps is a plus for them too.

Firefox os I\’m not so sure about html 5 apps I think apple tried that 1st didn\’t work well. not sure where windows will be though i\’m sure some big companies might use it for the control.

Will see this interesting development. sadly only one can win though

HP ProLiant Turion II N40L MicroServer Review

I was surprised how good it is only £139.99 after cashback. Installed  home server 2011 using the USB key which was pain free took a while to install though. that might be to do with windows server software. very quite. I like the build quality. Drives are hot swappable and their is an internal usb port you can run the OS from a 64 GB usb key and use the drives bay for the storage. I didn\’t do it that was but if you after some fast boot time you can. All screws and even the screw driver is came with a server. Only thing I cant find is the SATA cable for CD rom but using usb disk to install is pain free.

This server has very low power consumption as well thanks to AMD low power processor only 15watt . If any one with under 10 user then this server is highly recommended. it does the mac back up as well as all windows computer from xp.

usefull tip about apple servers go blank screen

http://www.remotemacserver.com/?p=41

 

On your client open up Terminal (OS X or Linux) or use PuTTy (Windows), login to your server and perform the following commands:

ps auxwww|grep loginwindow

This should give you an an output like this:

root 925 0.0 0.1 2503556 5580 ?? Us 3:05AM 0:00.08 /System/Library/CoreServices/loginwindow.app/Contents/MacOS/loginwindow console
jc 953 0.0 0.0 2425708 276 s000 R+ 3:05AM 0:00.00 grep loginwindow

You may have a few different lines, but essentially you’re looking for the root line, the process id in my case is 925. Now that we have the process ID we will want to issue the kill -9 command and it would look like this:

sudo kill -9 953

Google Apps for Business and Apple Macs

what ever google says It\’s pretty rubbish, Nothing but trouble. If your company using macs and thinking about google apps don\’t. If all your users are happy to use webmail then fine but if they are going to use Entourage, mac mail or outlook 2011 then It\’s nothing but trouble, It will work fine as a pop account but who uses pop now days.

Google should bring a sync tool macs too like they have it on Pcs