Pain with Routers. Meet Cisco

A couple of years ago I bought a router Cisco 851W at Buy.com. It is an expensive piece, but has a lot of great features. After I set it up, I decided to upgrade firmware, but I got very quickly disappointed. Yes, you can go and register your router (by the way, it is only for organizations, Cisco does not care if you use it at home), but it does not give ability to download upgrades unless you bought a router directly from Cisco or purchased a support contract from them. The problem is its firmware if not bug free. That means if you do not have a support contract, well, do not just assume your network is secure. If you did not get yet what I am talking about, here is an example. You bought a Toyota Camry. A few months later Toyota finds that it has faulty parts and need to do a recall. Instead of cleaning up its mess, if Toyota were Cisco, it would say, if you want to get our faulty parts replaced or fixed, you as a customer have to buy $10K maintenance contract [to fix bugs we created], and by the way, it is not covered by warranty.

I am not really sure whether this is a good business model. I bet it is successful for Cisco, but I really hope not for long. It is bad for resellers, because they need to realize they sell unsupported junk.

So why am I complaining now? I gave Cisco a good chance and just checked again whether Cisco has changed its mind. Yes! The support site got much slower and buggier, but the support model has not changed a bit. Pathetic state of the company whose primary business is network hardware. This is too much disrespect to customers. I am switching to another brand. Not Linksys. Linksys was great until it was acquired by Cisco.

And not Netgear. I got burned on them as well, when the product did not meet its description. The product description stated that the router supports logging of Internet activities. I thought, this means you can get a log of probes from the Internet. I was wrong, that log is a list of sites I was visiting.  Very “useful” feature, if you do not have memory.

If you have any suggestions, you are more than welcome to comment. I do not have very sophisticated requirements besides basic requirements. Wireless, supported (free firmware upgrades), VPN passthrough, port forwarding, support instant messaging, SNMP/logging (IP/port source/destination). Nice to have: package inspection,  be able to use Snort.

Finding My Way on Mac, SyncToy

I have not been posting anything recently as I was going through a change. After working 8+ years at one company, I joined today another company to continue to create great things. But the change did not end there. At the new place I got a Mac. I have been a “die hard” Windows user and developer since early 1995 knowing many Windows internals and was exposed to a Mac (v 8.6 or so) in 2001 briefly to test my application. This particular change I guess is long overdue since many of my former colleagues jumped on the Apple bandwagon. I was one of long standing skeptics. Nonetheless, I am embracing the challenge and want to make my environment as much productive as I used to have it on Windows. It includes so many different things – getting fingers hitting right buttons and combinations, getting used to the trackpad (I used a mouse even with a laptop – I just find it more efficient!), and tools. Thanks to a former colleague of mine, who happens to be my opposite in terms of OS preferences and is a “die hard” Mac fan, recommended me a link and another link.

But I still want to do things I used to do where shortcuts do not quite help. I’m talking about tools. For example, I use FAR Manager to copy and move files around, view files, FTP and so on. I know Mac OS is not designed with this kind of freedom, but still this tool is more productive to do many things.

The next tool is Entourage. I do not get it why Microsoft does not allow to run a rule in Entourage against already received messages and in Outlook does. Am I missing something?

The next tool is Remote Desktop Connection. I know there is an option to have a VNC session. Need to explore more.

The next tool is SyncToy. This is a kind of my first Mac gotchas. It does work, in some cases.  If you need to synchronize files between Windows and Mac, you can follow these steps.

1. Open “System Preferences”.
2. Open “Sharing”.
3. Turn on “File Sharing”.
4. In options select “Share files and folders using SMB (Windows).
5. Pick shared folders.
6. Pick and account you plan to use. (Mac may need to store your password, which poses some security risks, even the password is encrypted).
7. Select users and their access permissions (You cannot get rid of ‘Everyone’, but you can give them ‘No access’).
8. On your Windows computer in the Explorer type something like \\ipaddress\shared-folder-name. When asked to enter credentials, enter ipaddress\username and the password you specified as the password.
9. Now you can map that folder as a network drive and you should be ready to use the SyncToy.

I did find a problem that SyncToy fails to synchronize an Entourage script if you chose to synchronize your home directory. I do not have an explanation for that yet.

Noteworthy news, Nov 20, 2009

Intel: Chips in brains will control computers by 2020

While I like the idea to gain additional brain power, I wonder what’s going to happen if you get a computer virus or, say, your brain get DDoSed.

My Box. Shipment. Pictures

I am late with pictures. But finally I’m starting to put some images of what I have been talking for so long. These are pictures for this post. I took them on Sept. 9.

I got a bit impatient and opened the box	The box was very thoroughly packaged
One more layer	Front looks sleek
Back. Notice it allows to use up to 4 monitors	General view
Top. Notice the power button. Very handy

I’ll try to put more pictures soon.

Problems with Cables

I was trying to improve connectivity between my devices at home over the weekend.

New desktop and Printer.  My new desktop does not have a parallel port. But my printer is old and does not support USB. So it was very straightforward to think that a USB-to-parallel port cable would solve everything. Yes, this is true, but at what price? It appears that this kind of cable costs around $40 at Best Buy. It’s just enough to think to upgrade a printer. It wasn’t in the list of my planned upgrades as the printer has been working pretty well, but the price of the cable, makes the upgrade an attractive alternative. I think I’m more interested in a scanner than in a printer to make my home office as much paper-free as possible. Features I’m looking for are: auto duplex scanning with a feeder with an option to scan from a glass, OCR, Ethernet connection, affordable, reasonable size for a home office.

TV and Keyboard. Getting to content in the Internet on my Sony XBR9 proved to be very cumbersome. The menu is more or less user-friendly. But entering text using a remote is really painful. So this weekend I bought a USB-to-PS/2 cable hoping that I can use a keyboard with my TV. Nope. XBR9 does not support a keyboard. I’m wondering if Sony could upgrade its firmware to support an external keyboard.

TV Upgrade

After long waiting time I got my 52″ Sony XBR9 TV delivered past Saturday. It’s hard to call it a TV since the line between TVs and other devices is getting blurry and Sony XBR9 exemplifies this transition. Unlike it’s predecessors, this TV has a built-in network jack opening a whole new world of possibilities. For example, while connected to the Internet you can upgrade its firmware. That is, your TV functions are no longer hardcoded. You may get new feature without buying a new TV. The Internet connection allows to watch content from a whole bunch of sources (YouTube, CBS, Amazon on demand, …). Netflix is coming in fall 2009. It offers some Yahoo widgets (like you can check the stock market or see a 5-day forecast). Twitter also provides a widget so you could read tweets on TV while watching other things (although I’m not a big fan of this). In general, I got a very good impression. The only thing disappointed me is absence of PIP in a way I was expected it. But may be I’ll figure out how can I get it working later.

With getting more devices connected to the network (the Blu-ray player is another one), now I need to look how to expand my home network.

Old Desktop Recovered

Finally I was able to recover my old desktop on Sunday. The problem was quite obvious, a faulty memory stick. The box still can be used for tasks that do not require a lot of memory. I’m moving data from it.

Finally! The New Box

Finally, I got things together – the box, cables, batteries, monitors, furniture, and time. Not all is finished yet, but I have reached a milestone – started the new box with all monitors. While I’m still in process of setting things up, there are some wow-things. This is one of them.

While it’s still idling, it won’t be for long.

Blu-ray Disk Player

Bought s Sony Blu-ray disk player yesterday (BDP-S360). Surprised by the software licensing section in the user’s manual. Not by its presence, but rather by items in it:

• Linux Kernel
• GCC, and other things.
• OpenSSL
• SSLeay (I guess it came with OpenSSL)
• FreeType
• NetBSD
• PuTTY
• Nano-XML
• cURL
• expat

It’s Java powered and has has a network jack (for BD-Live and firmware updates).

The Monitor

It’s time to reveal The Monitor. This is what I bought – Zenview Trio Elite. Yesterday I made an attempt to asseble it. First of all, it is heavy, but assembly itself is very easy and straightforward. I put together the base, pole, bow, and one screen. And I will stop there until I get furniture.  The whole thing is very heavy and it makes more sense to assemle it on the desk (as the manual recommends). I got only one minor disappointment so far - the bow is a bow, it does not bend. This means you practically cannot change the angle between screens. But on the other hand it allows to make a gap between screens, adjust them, and even rotate. The Monitor arrived very well packaged and with a pile of cables. Speaking of cables, cable management is thought through very well. Each screen is an HP LP2475w. This means that I can have resolution up to 5760 x 1200.