Posts by eugene

Just got unifi-ed

Don't Panik Featured Life

When Telekom Malaysia (TM) announced their Fiber to the home broadband initiative, I was rather excited as broadband speeds in Malaysia have stagnated over the past couple of years. Initially when I jumped on to the DSL bandwagon in 2001 with a paltry (by today’s standard) speed of 384kbps down and 128kbps up. It was a big improvement over any 33.6 or even 56kbps modems of the day. Fast forward 10 years and internet speeds have doubled or tripled many times in neighboring countries and all we’re stuck with is 2mbps DSL. 4mbps is available but few areas could even qualify with the poor quality of cabling or exchange equipment. My home couldn’t even get past 1.8mbps due to the distance from the exchange.

It took TM about a year plus to reach my backwater housing area. The good thing is many others have sacrificed their effort and time to enable TM to iron out the kinks in the system and to improve the roll-out, delivery and implementation service. After all, there are thousands and hundreds of thousands of homes to install.

The good is that they no longer need eight guys to install like for my parents home, a year back. The bad is that they still are not coordinated with their contact center and appointment scheduling system. It still takes an entire day but most of it will be spent waiting and waiting or cleaning up. If you’re lucky, everything goes well after install otherwise, you’ll end up waiting for new modems, BTUs, and more technicians.

For me, the install was a breeze. Minus the five hours waiting for the installers to show up. When the appointment time said 9:30am to 2:30pm, I assumed the install will complete within that window rather than start at 2:45pm! Anyway, my install was through the ceiling so all was needed was a hole drilled through the outside wall to get into the ceiling, pull the fiber and drop it into my central cable drop. My home, fortunately for the TM installers, had a central cable drop where all ethernet, phone, cable TV, etc are laid down so drilling through the wall took the longest time. The Brits build houses to last in the 60s.

Fortunately for the installers, I also provided the ceiling light and ladder otherwise they would have come to grief with such a miserable ladder of theirs. Also to their benefit, my entire house is wired with CAT5e (long story why it’s not CAT6) so again, the rest of the setup was a breeze. Plug the Fiber BTU here, LAN to WAN port, IP TV out to Port 2 (next to my TV), Phone out to Phone Distribution panel and viola, IP TV works, we got internet and the rooms have phone lines! Hallelujah!

Since I had a Cisco VPN Router & SPI firewall going, I wanted to junk the crappy DLINK DIR615 that came with the package. The router has caused grief to many users due to it running custom firmware, lack of security (all wide open settings), poor wireless and network performance, and more. The problem with using your own router is that the incoming network has three VLANs and if you didn’t care about the IP-TV, you can go ahead. I paid for all services so I damn well want the access.

Solution was simply replace the DIR615 with a VLAN bridge. I used a MikroTik RB250 for this purpose. If anyone wants a pre-configured RB250, drop me an email. I have the RouterBoard Rb750GS as well but for the moment, I wanted to continue using my Cisco router.

Here’s the TM Fiber Broadband Termination unit (BTU)

The crappy D-Link DIR615 which was quickly replaced…

My Cisco VPN and IPS/IDS Firewall

The Huawei IP TV Set-top box (STB). Still a bit laggy when watching internet streaming content

The awesome MikroTik RB250 VLAN Bridge.

I really need to fix my cabling mess! For now, Yellow is WAN link, white is Internal network, Blue is POE, green is for Voice and now Red for IPTV.

 So how does it perform? The good is that it works pretty much as it is advertised. No complaints until the service starts going down or becomes unreliable but overall, my satisfaction is high. Minus the setup, installation part of course. Your mileage may vary and depending on your home and where you want certain components, i.e. IPTV, Wireless, phone, etc, the process might cost you a fair bit and be more trouble than in my case.

Testing 1-2-3…

Don't Panik Photography

This is just a test.

More coming soon and the theme will be slowly worked on this week. Apologies for the mess. Renovation in progress!

Mid-year ramblings

Don't Panik

Well, it’s June already! June you say! Omigod what happened to Jan, Feb, March, April and May? Oh crap, it’s halfway through 2006 already!

It takes a while for the excitment from a great trip to fade. The memories however, will remain forever. With the photo album done, there’s more time now to focus on other things. While I’ve been at this new work place for about four months now, things are only starting to ramp up. That said, other things are also going to ramp at the same time and well, it’s going to be an interesting second half I would say.

I keep getting this strange urge to get a 5D but I suppose I’ll wait till 2007 to see what it holds. My 20D will be 2.5 years old by then. An old camera in today’s digital camera world — quite unlike the film days where a film SLR still has value after five to six years. Speaking of ancient, my PC which has been providing stellar service, is probably prehistoric by now and the upgrade is in the works as we still need to wait for the back-to-school sales (July/August) and the upcoming price war between AMD and Intel. Speaking of technology convergence, I REALLY need to do something about the 225Gb of digital photos and scans I have. I suspect a nice little NAS (Networked Attach Storage) will be the answer but it’s just hard to plunk down four big ones for something like that. Then again, you’ll need to be realistic — if I generated that equivalent in negative strips and mounted slide boxes, I’ll need a small room by now. Tough decisions but good, safe and protected digital storage is something a lot of people don’t want to spend money on but yet, it’s going to get more critical. While we don’t look back at photos taken 2 or 3 years ago, they are still important, and WILL be more important as time goes by. CD and DVD longevity is still suspect so disk storage (considered Near-Line storage — google it if you don’t know what I mean cos I ain’t gonna explain it here) is important and I think it’ll be money well spent. The returns are not really tangible I think but imagine 15 years down the road, you get to see photos of now. Especially friends and family who are no longer with us. What’s the price of that?

You’ll notice less garden stuff during the past month or so because I’ve actually not much time to focus on it but I do have about a dozen sunflowers which are expected to bloom within a month or two. BTW, if you have time, do check out w/blog (webaperture blog), the next big feature for WA… and the showcase blog right here.

Oh, by the way, the 2007 Honda CR-V spy pix can be seen here.

A weekend that zipped by

Don't Panik

Actually, almost all weekends zip by so quickly that you usually end up wondering what happened? Good food, good time and most of all, great people to hang out with. Looking forward to another weekend. I think I’ll extend some weekends considering that I’ve found that I’ve something like 31 days of leave… think I should take a day off now and then.

Ready for Nuang? (Aug 7-8)

Travel

Gunung Nuang Climb – August 7-8, 2004.
Depart KL 8:00pm, climb starts 9:30pm.
Please make sure you have:
-2x 1.5L bottles of water, one empty to be filled at Pacat paradise camp river
-Headlamp or flashlight (spare batteries please!)
-Fork, spoon and steel/aluminum cup
-Foam bedroll and sleeping bag
-Sweater, long pants and towel. Rain jacket is advisable.
-Snacks.
Groundsheet, flysheet and tent will be provided along with dinner. Food items will be distributed evenly at base camp. Current group size is 8.