The Tech Random Crap Thread

jwhouk

jwhouk

So - that minor victory I had about getting the 'rents wi-fi going.

Turns out upload speed is like, nil. I mean, literally nil. Speedtest has been giving me upload speeds of 0.13 mbps. This has been making watching Youtube and other videos rather... difficult.

I checked out the modem/router, and it doesn't need a firmware update, so it's not that. Of course, this is a MH park, so it's possible the line coming in is crappy.

Any ideas as to reasons why it's so damn slow?[DOUBLEPOST=1514047304,1514047067][/DOUBLEPOST]
Cog said:
I thought this only happens on the internet. Somebody mailed me her user and password. Anyone has an enemy and would like him to have pending taxes here?
Click to expand...
...Nah.
 
GasBandit

GasBandit

Staff member
Just out of curiosity, what's the download speed? If it's less than 20mbit, 1mbit up wouldn't be too far out of the norm for up (but not 0.13, of course).

Do you get the bad upload speed from just your laptop on the wifi, or also from a computer connected directly to the router via ethernet cable?
 
jwhouk

jwhouk

The upload speed is a crappy 12 Mbps. I have not had the opportunity to refresh the router, as all four of us are using it. I may do so after everyone's gone to bed.
 
strawman

strawman

If you’re using WiFi, tried a wired connection. If the modem is separate from the router, disable the router and connect directly to the modem and test.
Disconnect all pther devices (change the WiFi network name) and test.

Between these three you should be able to determine the weak link.
 
PatrThom

PatrThom

jwhouk said:
The upload speed is a crappy 12 Mbps. I have not had the opportunity to refresh the router, as all four of us are using it. I may do so after everyone's gone to bed.
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12Mb/s is actually a really nice upload speed here in the USA. Most (asymmetric) home connections don't get more than 6 or so.
...so I assume 12Mb/s is actually your download speed.
And yes, troubleshooting with a wire will help narrow down if one of your devices is the culprit, or if it's actually a config/wireless issue (if the wired option works perfectly otherwise).

--Patrick
 
Dei

Dei

PatrThom said:
12Mb/s is actually a really nice upload speed here in the USA. Most (asymmetric) home connections don't get more than 6 or so.
...so I assume 12Mb/s is actually your download speed.
And yes, troubleshooting with a wire will help narrow down if one of your devices is the culprit, or if it's actually a config/wireless issue (if the wired option works perfectly otherwise).

--Patrick
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I assumed he was talking about download speed when he was talking about lag while watching YouTube.
 
GasBandit

GasBandit

Staff member
That would make a lot more sense, if he meant DOWNLOAD but was saying upload.

That said, even 12Mbps should have no trouble at all with a 1080p youtube video.
 
jwhouk

jwhouk

It is CenturyLink, so I'm betting it actually may be DSL.

In which case it will definitely be off my list when I move down here next month.
 
PatrThom

PatrThom

If that's legit, then it's probably a 15M/768k connection.
<checks centurylink.com>
Ok so it's probably either 12/768 and you're getting better than average download speed, or else it's the 20/1 service and you're underperforming on both.

--Patrick
 
jwhouk

jwhouk

Best result I got on my tablet when I was out in AZ with my dad's CenturyLink DSL: 10.08 down, 0.03 up, 79 ping.

First result I got when I got home to my own Wi-Fi: 18.65 down, 6.06 up, 11 ping. :confused:
 
Bubble181

Bubble181

Man, the USA really is a backwards country in broadband. Belgium's considered an expensive country, but for my $120 (including 2 cellphones, fixed phone, digital tv with extra channels), I get:

20171229speedtest.png

Get some actual competition going, or get a competent government to lay down some lines :p
 
strawman

strawman

Bubble181 said:
Get some actual competition going, or get a competent government to lay down some lines :p
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30,278 square kilometers
9,833,517 square kilometers

If you figure out a way to wire it up at the same cost per person you guys have, you'll be set for generations.
 
GasBandit

GasBandit

Staff member
Bubble181 said:
Man, the USA really is a backwards country in broadband. Belgium's considered an expensive country, but for my $120 (including 2 cellphones, fixed phone, digital tv with extra channels), I get:

View attachment 26415

Get some actual competition going, or get a competent government to lay down some lines :p
Click to expand...
That's because you guys have no room so they stack you 30 high. That's a lot easier to provision network infrastructure for.

Meanwhile, Rango is just grateful there's any internet at all in the desert :p
 
Bubble181

Bubble181

GasBandit said:
That's because you guys have no room so they stack you 30 high. That's a lot easier to provision network infrastructure for.

Meanwhile, Rango is just grateful there's any internet at all in the desert :p
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My 4G was faster in the middle of the Serengeti than what you guys consider "broadband" - literally 50 miles from the nearest town. :p ("the desert" is easy - it's "hills and trees and crap" that's difficult :p)
 
Eriol

Eriol

If you don't know what RowHammer, ASLR, and a Hypervisor are, ignore the rest of this. Sorry to say, it's above your head right now. Wait for the "big headlines" in the next week or so about a crippling security bug in virtually ALL Intel processors. Or maybe they'll keep it quiet. We'll see I guess.

This guy has a post up on his Tumblr that lays out pretty clearly IMO that some "bad shit" is happening behind the scenes with regards to how Kernels (both Linux and Windows) are implementing ASLR, and how RowHammer is making it ineffective on Intel processors. AMD seems unaffected by this. His conclusion is that there's probably a demonstrable attack on VM hypervisors, which is causing Amazon, Google, and Microsoft (the only 3 of any significance in Cloud Hosting) to freak the fuck out. The mysterious case of the Linux Page Table Isolation patches and update post Quiet in the peanut gallery

Thoughts from other security-minded people? His conclusions seem at the least plausible, if not outright correct. According to the update post, embargo ends on Jan 4th. Or the Kernel updates could be blown out-of-proportion. We'll see I hope.
 
strawman

strawman

Well certainly the speed of the patch combined with the other elements suggests a significant issue. Two more days until we find out how bad it is.

He describes an extraordinarily complex attack, though, which would only be useful against particularly profitable targets. If his description is correct this is not something home users or even small website owners will have to worry about. It's an attack against governments and large businesses.

That said, as long as the attack can be automated I guess target size doesn't matter, and at that point I'm concerned not because I could be a target, but because the article strongly suggests a significant performance penalty for the fix. Imagine all the cloud computing websites suddenly slowing down - not a lot, but measurably.

If the AMD processors are truly unaffected, their prices are going to skyrocket as cloud companies order all the production capacity over the next year since it'll take Intel another year to implement a hardware fix.

So if you're looking at getting an AMD processor, buy before the embargo lifts in two days. I'd have expected prices to go up once that tidbit was noted on the kernel mailing list, but so far the price of AMD processors isn't showing any blips. However, the CPU difference was only confirmed December 26th, during the US holidays when a lot of people are taking end of year vacation, and prices take some time to react to market changes, so we could still be in the honeymoon where large businesses are ordering them at a furious pace, but the sellers haven't reacted by increasing prices yet. Further the fix is implemented so it can be turned on and off at the command line, with at least one person on the kernel list asking in case they do discover one or more AMD cpus is affected.

I've been looking to build a virtual server for a home server (mostly media, but also file, etc) for awhile now, but my laptop purchase put that on hold, probably for another year. Hopefully things will settled back down by then, and as it is, hard drives and processor only get cheaper over time anyway...
 
fade

fade

Staff member
Anybody have any luck with Monoprice's lifetime cable warranty? Do you need to return the old one?

Thing is, I just found out they have the lifetime warranty. I have bought several 3.5mm audio cables, and I may have thrown away a couple of the old ones. They all fail the same way. Thing is, they're like 1.50 each, so it wouldn't be super economical to return them anyway (unless they're paying the postage).
 
PatrThom

PatrThom

stienman said:
I've been looking to build a virtual server for a home server (mostly media, but also file, etc) for awhile now, but my laptop purchase put that on hold, probably for another year. Hopefully things will settled back down by then, and as it is, hard drives and processor only get cheaper over time anyway...
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Yeah. A machine with a Nehalem-based quad-core Xeon processor with dual gigabit NIC, room for 3 SATA HDDs, and 12GB ECC DDR3 that sold for $3700 in 2009 can be had these days for under $200. You know...if you want to start getting something set up on the cheap. :)

Better hurry, though...they only have 6 3 2 left.

--Patrick
 
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fade

fade

Staff member
The thing that bugs the crap out of me about Meltdown in particular is that there is no way Intel didn't know about it. There's just no way the engineers could design those speculative systems without realizing they were creating (and relying on) this hole.
 
strawman

strawman

Having been part of a group designing an out of order processor with address translation lookahead and caching I absolutely believe that they could have designed the processor without knowing about this loophole. University level, though, nothing real or fancy.

This is a fantastically strange exploit, and honestly since it affects processors a decade old and required pretty high powered research teams to uncover only after uncovering a number of other flaws and combining aspects of each - I’m not sure you could make the claim that they knew this was a risk and chose to ignore it.

That said, maybe we will have a whistleblower and internal secrets worthy of Enron shenanigans.

But the complexity of today’s processors is mind boggling, requiring huge teams working independently to each find a 1-2% improvement that hopefully together bumps the processor up enough to keep intel on top of the pile.
 
fade

fade

Staff member
I mean, I'm no microprocessor engineer, but reading how this vulnerability works (not perhaps the exploit required to activate it), it seems like the system in question relied on the vulnerability of making these psuedo-pages available to all processes. I find it hard to believe someone(s) weren't saying "If someone finds their way in here, we're in deep poo".

EDIT: I'm not talking about guys walking around in Nazi caps laughing evilly. I'm talking about a bunch of guys sweating and going, "we got 1% more out, but boy this could go wrong". For my anecdote, I've seen plenty of that happen.
 
PatrThom

PatrThom

fade said:
EDIT: I'm not talking about guys walking around in Nazi caps laughing evilly. I'm talking about a bunch of guys sweating and going, "we got 1% more out, but boy this could go wrong". For my anecdote, I've seen plenty of that happen.
Click to expand...
I think what you are really discussing is “security through obscurity,” which anyone in IT should realize is not viable...but which many more are just like, “eh, good enough. Nobody should find out until after I’m out of here” which gets justified under “acceptable risk.”

—Patrick
 
fade

fade

Staff member
To be honest, I'm not properly armed to debate about this. Perhaps I should've phrased it less absolutely as, "It seems like something Intel would've noticed".
 
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