Mobile Tech Review has posted a very very nice review of the Pepper Pad. They give it 4 stars out of five, while the lackluster Nokia 770 gets 3.5 stars.
Month: February 2006
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Won’t someone please think of the packets!!!
Picked up a Linksys WRT54G v5 router last night. Best Buy had them for $79 with a $20 mail in rebate, and yesterday was the last day of the sale, so good timing. It was a helluva good deal.
Got it setup and now things are good. Read a lot of threads about people setting up QoS and decided to use MAC address priority to give the Vonage PAP2 box the highest priority. So far things are great! Doing some semi-heavy downloading and had a few phone calls that were 100% clear, no noticable latency, no fuzz, no echo, no dropped packets!
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Guess what? The router is crap.
So apparently, the Linksys BEFSR81 router that I scored isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Two major drawbacks are going to force me to get rid of it, possibly with extreme prejudice:
The QoS features of this router are useless. You can do port-based QoS, but that only deals with transfers WITHIN THE LAN. Useless. You can also do ‘application-based’ QoS, but that just marks the outgoing packets with a ToS priority flag, so if your ISP doesn’t respect the flags, it’s useless. Also you have to enter one port at a time, and with Vonage the voice packets could use any UDP port from 10000-20000. ARGH. So no traffic prioritization has actually been happening for the past week, which explains a lot: we’ve been getting occasional echoing and stuttering on Vonage calls. This article at PracticallyNetworked has the skinny on the QoS.
This router seems to have a problem with either UDP streaming or something else, because every so often it just goes batshit crazy and drops ALL LAN TRAFFIC for periods of time – anywhere from 5-15 seconds to minutes. The WAN side stays up, but the LAN just drops 100% of packets. It sometimes comes back, and after resetting the router it’s OK for a while, but this is purely unacceptable. Once when it did this it took 2-3 minutes for Vonage to reconnect and during that time Sandy was trying to get the voicemail. FFS! She was pissed and now I’m pissed. I did a bit of research and found lots of other people having the same issues.
Particularly this guy’s page was informative.
So it looks like I’ll have to either get a new router or use my Linux box. I didn’t want to spend any more money but a Linksys WRT54G or WRT54GS should do the trick with a minimum of fuss. I really don’t want to have to rely on my Linux box for routing because it’ll suck a ton of juice out of the UPS if the power goes out. With just the DSL modem, router, and VoIP box on the UPS it’ll last for hours and hours.
Update my friend Jon writes below that he’s been using the same router, with the same issues. Bleah. I’m going out and getting a WRT54G tonight ðŸ™
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Home networking is done.
Well it seems like Bell finally transfered my number over to Vonage today. I noticed because the Vonage phone was ringing more than it ever has, and there’s suddenly no voltage on the Bell line 😛
If you’re an incredible geek or just interested, this is what my home network/phone wiring looks like now.
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Yes, Donald Rumsfeld scares the everloving crap out of me.
In this news story about some diplomatic retribution between the US and Venezuela, Donald Rumsfeld says some things that make my jaw drop.
Asked during a National Press Club appearance about indications of a generally deteriorating relationship between Washington and parts of Latin America, Rumsfeld said he believes such a characterization “misses the mark.”
“We saw dictatorships there. And then we saw most of those countries, with the exception of Cuba, for the most part move towards democracies,” he said. “We also saw corruption in that part of the world. And corruption is something that is corrosive of democracy.”
Umm… yeah, you might say they moved towards democracy because of the public actions (invasion of Grenada) and not-so-public actions (funding Central American rebel groups) of the US during the 1980s? Is Rumsfeld getting Alzheimers, or just more Republican selective memory?
The secretary acknowledged that “we’ve seen some populist leadership appealing to masses of people in those countries. And elections like Evo Morales in Bolivia take place that clearly are worrisome.”
“I mean, we’ve got Chavez in Venezuela with a lot of oil money,” Rumsfeld added. “He’s a person who was elected legally — just as Adolf Hitler was elected legally — and then consolidated power and now is, of course, working closely with Fidel Castro and Mr. Morales and others.”
NATIONS, TAKE NOTE: The US does not like it when you elect people who are popular. I mean, look at their president.
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Home network re-wire project
I drew four network diagrams before finally figuring out how I was going to hook things up at home. I really wanted something to provide QoS to the VoIP phone adapter, and ended up borrowing a Linksys wired router (BEFSR81) that does port-based QoS. Doing QoS in Linux is really, really scary, and I wasn’t prepared to spend the time to wrap my head completely around it. On this router I just say “port 1 has high priority over everything else” and that should work just fine.
So last night I spent an hour installing the new router, reconfiguring my old Microsoft wireless router to be a bridge (but also a wireless access point at the same time), running an Ethernet cable in the ceiling to connect one router to the other, moving the UPS over to the wiring cabinet, and then re-wiring everything and tidying up. But now the networking part of this project is… done!
The final part will be wiring the security system up to the VoIP connection, testing it, and then when our Bell phone line is gone, hooking up the house phone jacks to VoIP.