Posts tagged internet

Webcasting

Featured Life Photography

One thing I’ve observed in many local churches is the minimal use of internet technologies available.

Websites and email aside as those are to be expected of any entity or organization today. I think it’s time they embrace more tools to enable better and greater reach.

Recently, our cell group scheduled a session with the esteemed Reverend Lim Kar Yong of STM to teach us on a series of Parables. Well, we decided to enlarge his audience by combining with Kinrara cell group via web-cast. Of course other members who could not make it could also attend the webcast session. Slides, audio and video were broadcast at standard definition. It was evident however that our regular Malaysian home ADSL service (Streamyx) would not cut it even though the webcast only required a downlink of about 350kbps. On a 1mbps line, the video would be choppy and occasionally drop out.

It was an interesting experiment though and one we would continue for the next three weeks. For those who couldn’t attend the webcast, we have audio recordings and if you want to watch, we have a HD video recording of the session as well!

I’ll blog about the tools we used in a separate post later this week.

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.

Site & Blog migration planned

Don't Panik

The current hardware and platform running Don’t Panik has been around for two years now. It’s getting a bit overdue for a refresh. New stuff is planned and an upgrade is in the works. Unbelievably, Don’t Panik has been around since 2004. That’s 7 years of non-stop blogging and availability. Migration and upgrade is scheduled for mid-September.

We’re also moving off the Serendipity platform that runs this blog since 2004 to WordPress. No big reason why other than a couple of new projects coming up will be based on WordPress and as a result, I might as well put everything on a common platform.

A week at the Marina Bay Sands

Travel

The first week of June saw me going down to the little island called Singapore for the week. I had the opportunity to stay at the new Marina Bay Sands for the week. My room package came with breakfast and internet access. Everyone was raving about the sky park and infinity pool so obviously I was going to check it out.

My five nights there was a pleasant experience. Room service dinner was great and quick. I love it when you tell them that you have to leave at 10pm and your dinner has to arrive by nine and it’s now 8:45pm and they actually do it. My room was pretty spacious with a nice recliner that a friend of mine who popped in promptly fell asleep within a couple of minutes.

My second night was spent at the Club at the Skypark and I must say few bars ever have such an atmosphere and view. Breakfast and suppers spent at the Rise was also awesome. I must say a couple of things about the Rise at the Lobby of the MBS… it has awesome ice-cream to wrap up your night. I think I must have had like four jars of it. Yes, it comes with a jar and I kept forgetting to take a picture before digging in! The morning coffee is also pretty good. It’s tough to match specialized coffee places that really “love” coffee such as Highlander
 which I also visited but the Barista’s at the Rise were able to pull decent shots of espresso for me. No more simple poured coffee that taste stale… breakfast at the Rise in MBS got me started on a couple of espresso shots.

The sky park and infinity pool was also an awesome experience. The somewhat hazy weather was the only dampener. Being the school holidays, it was also a bit more packed but it’s always a good end to a long day with a soak on the roof top pool. Reminded me somewhat of a quaint little hotel I was at in Spain that also had a little roof top pool.

The internet access was also pretty good. The wireless could do with some improvements but I was able to connect all my devices — and yes, I travel with lots of gear. I could viber my lovely wife back home on my iPhone, check email and get some work on via the wired network, catch up on Facebook with my iPad on the bed and video call home on Skype with my MacBook Pro… The wireless access extends to the convention center, shopping mall and the lobby areas so it’s pretty good overall. Speed needs some improvements though. Being Singapore, I expected much faster speeds than Malaysia but it was a bit disappointing to get what I get at home — speeds here averaged about 1mbps.

All in all, there are hotels with better “star” ratings with more luxury but the Marina Bay Sands is a comfortable place to stay with all the lovely amenities and facilities to keep me productive, entertained and relaxed. I think those are hard to match. The Ritz might be glitzier but I love starting my mornings with the iPad and an espresso shot in the sun basked Rise, get work done, and finally ending the day on the sky park pool with the Singapore skyline and a couple of drinks. It’s a pity it was only a week. — I’ll be back, soon.



Unfortunately I didn’t get the city view but it can be considered the “sea view” room!











Home Wiring

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24 Cat 5e cables and more…

Wanted to post this much earlier but didn’t have the time to. When it was time to replace all the old wiring in my new home, it made sense to lay enough cable drops to various rooms and areas in the house. I used Cat 5e cabling because I had a box of it lying around. Cat 6 would be better but no point throwing a thousand feet of good cable away. A few hiccups happened for the wiring contractor conveniently forgot to add a drop near the kitchen and dining so those areas will need to be wireless now and means they can’t get Satellite TV either via Cat 5. All cables were home-run (star topology) into my “home office” room. I didn’t want a standard Rack occupying the space so I turned Ikea-hacker. An Ikea PS cabinet was modified with my dremel tool to mount a 24-port patch panel and patch block to distribute phone lines. Since I had a DSL link, I patched all phones behind the DSL splitter which makes things cleaner.

Ikea PS. Just what is needed!

Data-links were patched to a Linksys (Cisco Small Business) SRW2008 managed gigabit switch which in turn is fed off my dual-WAN Linksys RV042 VPN router. Also connected is a DLink DIR-655 wireless router and a Netgear 10/100 8-port POE switch to power my IP cameras distributed around the house. It all fit somewhat nicely into the Ikea PS cabinet with space for two Belkin power strips fed off an APC UPS with extended run battery. That’ll give an approximate three hour runtime for my cameras, broadband and network during a power outage.

Improvements? I’ll need to add a few more cable drops for IP cameras sometime this year and since my NAS will be coming soon, I’ll probably need another patch panel. I’ve three data ports in each room, that makes 9 plus my “home office” has 4 ports so I’ve already used 13. My living room and common area has another four ports so that goes to 17. I’ve 3 POE ports outside the home (to be increased to 5) so that’s 20. My phone line distribution ends up take another three so I’m effectively out of ports! The picture below is not the latest one as I’ve added a modified shelf to hold my router to make space for a 16-port 10/100/1000 switch below and will be color coding the patch cables for easier maintenance soon.

Cabled up and running!

BTW for those interested in laying their own Cat 5 or 6 cables to connect to Telekom Malaysia’s demarcation point such as a telephone pole, here’s a quick guide depending if your cables are new or not. Newer cables are usually color coded. Mine are blue/white and white/blue and typically, you’ll use the same matching blue/white & white/blue center pair in the Cat 5 cable. The good thing about Cat 5 is that you can carry more phone lines on the same cable using another pair (up to 4) so your one single Cat 5 cable can then be split internally (hence my patch block & patch panel) to multiple incoming phone lines and devices (fax, line 1, line 2, etc). Typically, white/blue (white cable with blue stripes) is the positive cable but do verify with a voltmeter to be sure. In older areas sometimes the color is red and green where green is positive. If you have all black cable, a ridge (feel for it) marks the side of the twin cable that’s the positive wire.

p.s. Sorry for the photo quality — all taken with my iPhone 🙂

On the Grid

Don't Panik

The Casa Damansara infrastructure is up and running! Of course, right now, the only thing that is missing is the wireless HSDPA bridge/modem but everything, including local 802g and local LAN is up and running! Full firewall and packet inspector is also live! All we need to do is move my storage servers and other PCs!