Author Archives: lkeyes70

Comcast Service Agreement – BEWARE

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I received an updated version of the Comcast Service Agreement for end-users. This is for our residential cable broadband service. This currently costs $67.00 per month, which includes the rental of a modem, and the applicable taxes. Speeds are 6 megs down and either 384 or 768 up…depending on who you are talking to. Comcast makes it clear that this is residential, i.e. consumer service as opposed to business service. So, you are really expected to consume.

Prohibited Users of HSI. You agree not to use HSI for operation as an Internet service provider, a server site for ftp, telnet, rlogin, e-mail hosting, “Web hosting” or other similar applications for any business enterprise, or as an end-point on a non-Comcast local area network or wide area network.
You agree to indemnify, defend and hold harmless Comcast and its affiliates, supplies, and agents against all claims and expenses (including reasonable attorney fees) arising out of any breach of this Section including, but not limited to, any claims based on or arising out of any material violation of any applicable law.

Ports are blocked for the above-named services. But now at the end, it gets more interesting…

ADDITIONAL PROVISIONS APPLICABLE TO HIGH-SPEED INTERNET SERVICE
Comcast will provide you with dynamic Internet protocol (“IP”) address(es) as a component of HSI, and these IP address(es) can and do change over time. You will not alter, modify or tamper with dynamic IP address(es) assigned to you or any other customer. You agree not to use a dynamic domain name server or DNS to associate a host name with the dynamic IP address(es) for any commercial purpose.

So, this would seem to preclude business or commercial use of applications for typical home-based businesses, i.e. VoIP telephone, Videoconferencing applications, and Virtual Private Network connections.

This sucks. Imagine if you had a telephone system that not only changed your phone number on a random basis, but prohibited you from discovering the changed number and letting people know what the changes are. This is essentially the service provided by DYNDns and similar services. Even though there is no technical reason that Comcast couldn’t provide permanent fixed public IP addresses in the first place, Comcast specifically states that they won’t provide them, and they specifically prevent you from applying any technological means to compensate.

For my own home office, I’ve decided to try the Comcast commercial offering. For another ten dollars or so per month, I’m supposed to get 6 megs/768kb, 4 Exchange accounts on their servers, web server account, and of course a fixed IP address. I’m assuming this comes with an improved service level agreement.

When I asked about what was available for bandwidth, they mentioned that in towns where they are competing with Verizon FIOS (fiber to the home), they offer 16 megabits down. But only when they are competing. 🙂

Tech Friday: Programming the Logitech Orbit AV webcam

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Logitech provides a site for programmers who are interfacing the Logitech webcams to their own applications. There is support for both Windows and Linux, and there are forums to ask questions. Very nicely done using Plone, the open source CMS system.

I’m hoping to spend a lot of time here, after we finish installing about 12 end-user sites using Vista.

ITunes and Quicktime are pigs

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A host of minor irritations:
1. Why does it take almost 15 minutes for iTunes to download and install an update?
2. Why does iTunes autoamatically install Quicktime?
3. Why are there Quicktime icons installed in the systray and on the desktop even though I never want them? Why does this happen every bloody time it updates?
4. Why does iTunes automatically use up about 80% of my processor capacity when playing a tune from the hard drive, thereby practically rendering my workstation useless if I want to listen to music at the same time I’m programming?

Just asking.

Setting up remote premise VoIP or Videoconferencing

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The Trixbox Wiki has a number of digestible pages of advice on how to successfully deploy a VoIP application. Here are recommendations for remote sites.

Formula for the best remote telecommuter Experience

  1. Use T1 internet access at the main location, not DSL or Cable.It’s worth the additional expense in order to ensure good, steady performance at your main location.
  2. If your routers and/or firewalls support QoS features, activate them. Give priority to the SIP and RTP protocols. Consider replacing equipment that lacks VoIP-aware QoS features. See Also: How do I use QoS on my network?
  3. Consider using one of our Suggested Routers with QoS on both ends of your connection.
  4. If your QoS solution allows you to limit total bandwidth, set the limit to slightly less than the line speed of your internet connection. Use a DSL line speed test to determine where you should set your limits. Setting it about 5-10 Kb below your maximum speed will keep the packet buffers from filling up on your DSL/Cable modem. This will yield better overall performance.
  5. Consider having two internet connections… one for your existing data application, and one for your VOIP phone and trixbox Pro servers. You can use this approach in your main location, as well as your remote locations. If you use this approach, you may not need any QoS capable equipment.
  6. If possible, connect your main office and your remote office using the same internet provider. Usually performance on the same provider’s network is superior to the performance when traffic needs to traverse multiple internet backbone networks.
  7. If possible, remove NAT devices between the trixbox Pro system, and the remote telecommuters.
  8. If you must use a NAT configuration, consider using a “DMZ Host/Server” configuration rather than port forwarding. This uses less CPU power in the router/firewall and yields optimal performance.
    1. At the main location, the setting will forward all unknown packets to your trixbox Pro server.
    2. At the remote locations, the setting will forward all unknown incoming packets to the IP Phone.
    3. Reserve the phone’s IP address in DHCP or give the phone a static IP Address on your private network in the remote location so the IP Address does not change. If you use a static IP Address, pick one outside of your dynamic DHCP IP Address range.
  9. For mission critical remote employees, consider using a fractional T1 internet service at the remote office instead of a Cable/DSL connection.

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David Brooks on Social Entrepreneurship:

The older do-gooders had a certain policy model: government identifies a problem. Really smart people design a program. A cabinet department in a big building administers it.

But the new do-gooders have absorbed the disappointments of the past decades. They have a much more decentralized worldview. They don’t believe government on its own can be innovative. A thousand different private groups have to try new things. Then we measure to see what works.

Photos of a Intel "Mini-ITX" type system

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Wanted to show some photos of the little systems picked up from Logic Supply. Here’s a look at the exterior of the fanless one. The top and sides are perforated to let the heat out. Click on the photos to see a larger image.

Here’s a look with the covers off. You can see the massive heat-sink that sits over the processor, to the right…the smaller, shiny heat sink sits above the hard drive.

A look right down on the top…

And, a view with both heatsinks removed. You can see the mini hard drive to left. It is mounted into a carrier that has the hard drive heat sink already attached.

System specs:

Intel Celeron M440 (Yonah) 1.86Ghz
1 meg of Ram
2.5″ Samsung hard drive SATA 80 GB

Tech Friday: Putting Vista Business on a Diet

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Last week’s Tech Friday discussed how to remove several enhancements of the Vista interface using Vista business. Today, I’m at it again…and now have supplied the details. Links go to sites where I found a source of the information. This is all basic stuff, but it is hard to find it all at once; and I’m in a situation where I may need to install ten machines with Vista in the next couple of days.

• Turn off Welcome Center
Uncheck on Welcome Center, lower left-hand corner of window

• Turn off Sidebar
Right click Sidebar icon in the system tray and then select exit

• Turn off User Account Control
Control Panel | User Accounts | Turn User Account Control On or Off
(requires a restart)

• Turn off Balloon Help (requires a registry tweak)

Click Start, Run and type Regedit.exe
Navigate to the following subkey:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER \ Software \ Microsoft \ Windows \ CurrentVersion \ Explorer \ Advanced
Create a new REG_DWORD (32 bit) value named EnableBalloonTips
Double-click EnableBalloonTips, and then assign a value data of 0
Exit the Registry Editor
Log off Windows, and then log back on.

• Turn off Vista automatic searching
This requires stopping the Windows Search Service
1. Type “Services” in the start search box.
2. If User Account Control asks for permission, click Continue. (but turn it off, see above)
3. Locate an service named Windows Search. Right click on Windows Search, and then select Properties on contextual menu.
4. Click on Stop button to stop the indexing service immediately.
5. On the Startup Type dropdown box, select Disabled.
6. Click on OK button.

• Set for automatic login – (eliminate the log-in screen)
1. Type netplwiz in the Windows Search box
2. You’ll see the user account window. Make sure your account is highlighted
3. Uncheck “User must enter name and password”
Upon a reboot, the machine will not ask for a name and password. Note, this only works if your machine is not part of a Windows domain or an active directory

• Set Window resolution to 800×600
We’ll use 800×600 because ultimately, we’re sending the output to a tv screen.

• Turn off the enhanced graphics and Aero
Rightclick on the desktop and choose Personalize
Windows Color and Appearance| Color Scheme choose “Windows Vista Basic”

• Turn off Windows firewall.
Click on the start “orb”
Select the Control Panel
Select Security
Select the Firewall | Turn Windwos Firewall on or off

NTEN’s Staffing and Salary Surveys for IT Staff

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NTEN has published its most recent survey on IT for non-profits. A couple excerpts:

• The highest average salary reported was $71,494.57 for a Chief Technology Officer/Chief InformationOfficer.
• The lowest reported average salary was $37,445.65 for a PC Technician/IT Support Staff.
• Reported salaries for most positions were lower this year than last year. The largest drops were for management positions. CIO/CTOs reported salaries 25.44% lower than last year and IT Directors reported salaries 18.42% lower than last year.
• The exceptions to the trend toward lower salaries were Systems/Network Administrator and Webmaster/developer, which were 4.00% and 8.84% higher, respectively.

Myths & Realities of Philanthrocapitalism

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I’ve never been much of a fan of eMail newsletters put out using tools like ConstantContact. I prefer to pull information using RSS. But of the couple of newsletters I do receive each month, the one from NonProfit Quarterly is always more than welcome. Recently they have published a report Just Another Emperor: The Myths and Realities of Philanthrocapitalism which discusses new trends in philanthropy, the role of social networks and the notion of injecting for-profit business ethics and methods into non-profit mangement.

There is no doubt that this is an important phenomenon. Very large sums of money have been generated for philanthropy, particularly in the finance and IT industries. But despite its great potential, this movement is flawed in both its proposed means and its promised ends. It sees business methods as the answer to social problems, but offers little rigorous evidence or analysis to support this claim, and ignores strong evidence pointing in the opposite direction. Business will continue to be an inescapable part of the solution to global problems, and some methods drawn from business certainly have much to offer. But business will also be a cause of social problems, and as Jim Collins, author of “Good to Great,” concluded in a recent pamphlet, “we must reject the idea—well intentioned, but dead wrong—that the primary path to greatness in the social sectors is to become more like a business.”
Links to the report a 110 page PDF, are located here.