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#341172 - 15/01/2011 07:06 Re: Your favorite secondary gadget of 2010 [Re: andy]
sn00p addict Registered: 24/07/2002 Posts: 618 Loc: South London	I have the comtrend ones, because apart from the recent "brittle plastic" problems they've had, they got decent enough reviews. They're also used by BT for the vision boxes, so new boxed sets pop up on eBay a lot and can be bought real cheap if you're willing to wait and pick up the right set. The Comtrend ones are notorious for RF interference (particularly noted by radio hams as Andy points out) and I have noticed this with my old peavey bandit 112 guitar amp, in my old flat when I wanted to use it I had to power off the Comtrends otherwise I'd get a constant stream of beeps coming out of the amp. I'm a big fan of them though, they work perfectly here for us - which cannot be said of our "broadband".
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#341176 - 15/01/2011 12:29 Re: Your favorite secondary gadget of 2010 [Re: andy]
Dignan carpal tunnel Registered: 08/03/2000 Posts: 12338 Loc: Sterling, VA	Originally Posted By: andy Originally Posted By: andym I mean anything that used radio frequency communications: wifi, video senders, FM, DAB, the works. Other people appear to have had the same problems as well. Luckily I don't need it anymore. That is odd. I have five power line ethernet adapters around the house. They cause no problems with FM, DAB or wifi for me. Yeah, I don't have these problems either. Then again, FM isn't used in this household _________________________ Matt
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#341181 - 15/01/2011 15:48 Re: Your favorite secondary gadget of 2010 [Re: Dignan]
drakino carpal tunnel Registered: 08/06/1999 Posts: 7868	Best secondary gadget for me in 2010 would be the iSpot. The 4G service was ok, but what was really nice was the hackability of the device. Out of the box, I had to hack it just to get my iPad to work, due to their MAC filters not being quite right with the initial release. While nowhere near as convenient as having WAN service built into a device, having a $25 data plan along with no contract was nice. It's not seeing any use for me in 2011 though, as the 4G WiMax network Clear built for LA isn't reaching me here in south Orange County.
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#341190 - 15/01/2011 20:17 Re: Your favorite secondary gadget of 2010 [Re: tman]
Shonky pooh-bah Registered: 12/01/2002 Posts: 2009 Loc: Brisbane, Australia	Originally Posted By: tman Originally Posted By: Shonky So based on those numbers if wireless worked you'd see about the same thing throughput wise. Huh? Whats wireless got to do with it? Was just saying that my powerline runs at about one quarter of the rated speed and wireless about one half. i.e. 85Mb/s powerline is roughly equal to 54Mb/s wireless. Originally Posted By: tman Originally Posted By: Shonky What you're saying about throughput I doubt though. The signals are going at what about 1/3 the speed of light? Distance mainly affects latency not throughput. Do a ping test. On a LAN you should get ~1ms (or better) pings if working well enough. Maybe that's not what you mean but that's how I read it. Maybe you did mean that the longer length would cause more signal loss/slower speeds. I'm not talking about the actual distance. What affected me is that it was going through the breaker panel. The signal strength was affected when it had to go through circuit breakers. If I plugged the two units into the same circuit then I'd get significantly better throughput. One unit downstairs and one unit upstairs would have the same issues as having one unit in the garage. I never really looked into it that much but the only explanation I could come up with was that it didn't like the circuit breakers for some reason. Houses in the UK are all single phase so I didn't have the issues that houses in NA would experience where the house can be fed with 2 phases. Just how I read it - you were saying it had to "travel all the way to the breaker panel". Any sort of extra impedance (i.e. switches/breakers) in the lines will most definitely affect signal quality and thus throughput. I'm not in the US and yes we have similar single phase systems. Edited by Shonky (15/01/2011 20:18) _________________________ Christian #40104192 120Gb (no longer in my E36 M3, won't fit the E46 M3)
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#341198 - 16/01/2011 01:14 Re: Your favorite secondary gadget of 2010 [Re: Shonky]
tman carpal tunnel Registered: 24/12/2001 Posts: 5528	Originally Posted By: Shonky Was just saying that my powerline runs at about one quarter of the rated speed and wireless about one half. i.e. 85Mb/s powerline is roughly equal to 54Mb/s wireless. Ah okay. I was getting ~16Mbps through the powerline kit from inside the house to the garage. Side by side, I was getting about 30Mbps but that was right on the same mains extension strip. I'm using 802.11g to bridge it at the moment. I tried 802.11a but whatever is in the walls really attenuates the signal. I really should just drill a little hole somewhere and feed a wire through then not need to worry about it. Originally Posted By: Shonky Just how I read it - you were saying it had to "travel all the way to the breaker panel". Any sort of extra impedance (i.e. switches/breakers) in the lines will most definitely affect signal quality and thus throughput. I'm not in the US and yes we have similar single phase systems. Eh. Poorly worded. My bad.
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#341203 - 16/01/2011 03:27 Re: Your favorite secondary gadget of 2010 [Re: tman]
Dignan carpal tunnel Registered: 08/03/2000 Posts: 12338 Loc: Sterling, VA	How are you guys checking these speeds? The non-scientific test I ran was to simply copy a file over the connection using TeraCopy and keep an eye on the bitrate to get a rough average. Do you have a specific tool for this purpose? _________________________ Matt
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#341217 - 16/01/2011 14:12

Re: Your favorite secondary gadget of 2010 [Re: Dignan]

tman
carpal tunnel

Registered: 24/12/2001
Posts: 5528

Originally Posted By: Dignan

Do you have a specific tool for this purpose?

I used iperf.

One side runs a server:

Code:

[tman@ideal ~]$ iperf -s
------------------------------------------------------------
Server listening on TCP port 5001
TCP window size: 85.3 KByte (default)
------------------------------------------------------------

The other side runs the client:

Code:

[tman@storage ~]$ iperf -c ideal
------------------------------------------------------------
Client connecting to ideal, TCP port 5001
TCP window size: 16.0 KByte (default)
------------------------------------------------------------
[  3] local 192.168.1.20 port 44971 connected with 192.168.1.50 port 5001
[ ID] Interval       Transfer     Bandwidth
[  3]  0.0-10.0 sec  1.08 GBytes   928 Mbits/sec

Two machines which are connected via GigE to the same switch. It doesn't hit the disk at all for anything so it should be fairly close to the theoretical maximum for that link with those parameters assuming nothing else is using the network.

One side is using conventional PCI with only a single link so if I run a dual ended test where it tests speed in both directions at the same time, I get limited to 430Mbps + 638Mbps which is 1068Mbps and for some reason it uses 1000 instead of 1024 when calculating bps so its actually 1018Mbps which is just under the 1064Mbps (133MBps) that a 32 bit 33MHz conventional PCI card can do.

Code:

[tman@storage ~]$ iperf -c ideal -d
------------------------------------------------------------
Server listening on TCP port 5001
TCP window size: 85.3 KByte (default)
------------------------------------------------------------
------------------------------------------------------------
Client connecting to ideal, TCP port 5001
TCP window size:  487 KByte (default)
------------------------------------------------------------
[  5] local 192.168.1.20 port 55051 connected with 192.168.1.50 port 5001
[  4] local 192.168.1.20 port 5001 connected with 192.168.1.50 port 47713
[ ID] Interval       Transfer     Bandwidth
[  5]  0.0-10.0 sec   513 MBytes   430 Mbits/sec
[  4]  0.0-10.0 sec   762 MBytes   638 Mbits/sec

The other side is 4 lane PCI-e but the only other machines I've got which are PCI-e all run ESX so I'd need to run it on the service console.

Edited by tman (16/01/2011 23:47)
Edit Reason: 1000 > 1024 for iperf mbps

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#341222 - 16/01/2011 15:30 Re: Your favorite secondary gadget of 2010 [Re: andy]
andym carpal tunnel Registered: 17/01/2002 Posts: 3996 Loc: Manchester UK	Originally Posted By: andy Originally Posted By: andym I mean anything that used radio frequency communications: wifi, video senders, FM, DAB, the works. Other people appear to have had the same problems as well. Luckily I don't need it anymore. That is odd. I have five power line ethernet adapters around the house. They cause no problems with FM, DAB or wifi for me. I presume it depends upon the manufacturer. The ones I got were on the 'Today Only' section of the Scan website, can't remember who made them. _________________________ Cheers, Andy M
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#341224 - 16/01/2011 15:32 Re: Your favorite secondary gadget of 2010 [Re: tman]
Phoenix42 veteran Registered: 21/03/2002 Posts: 1424 Loc: MA but Irish born	Originally Posted By: tman ...all run ESX so I'd need to run it on the service console. Are you ready for the move to ESXi?
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#341227 - 16/01/2011 16:31 Re: Your favorite secondary gadget of 2010 [Re: Phoenix42]
tman carpal tunnel Registered: 24/12/2001 Posts: 5528	Originally Posted By: Phoenix42 Are you ready for the move to ESXi? Yeah. I don't run anything in the service console anyway so losing it isn't a big deal.
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#341234 - 16/01/2011 23:51 Re: Your favorite secondary gadget of 2010 [Re: andym]
tman carpal tunnel Registered: 24/12/2001 Posts: 5528	Originally Posted By: andym I presume it depends upon the manufacturer. The ones I got were on the 'Today Only' section of the Scan website, can't remember who made them. All the ones I've seen have used an Intellon chip inside. You can query it for statistics and also set the passwords etc... There is a Linux tool as well if you don't/can't use the Windows one.
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#341235 - 16/01/2011 23:55 Re: Your favorite secondary gadget of 2010 [Re: mlord]
tman carpal tunnel Registered: 24/12/2001 Posts: 5528	Originally Posted By: mlord Okay, tell more, tell more! Use PM if you prefer! I am frequently in Toronto (family), especially around June. Biz or Pleasure? Pleasure. Just visiting some friends from university. Some of them were at my university for a year exchange program and a few others emigrated to Canada. I'll be in Toronto from 2nd to 22nd June and some weekend during that I'll be "cottaging" i.e. in a cottage somewhere. You really should come up with a better or different name for that as that means something completely different in the UK! Probably not something you should search for whilst at work if you're trying to work out what the UK meaning is...
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#341254 - 17/01/2011 15:47 Re: Your favorite secondary gadget of 2010 [Re: tman]
canuckInOR carpal tunnel Registered: 13/02/2002 Posts: 3212 Loc: Portland, OR	Originally Posted By: tman I'll be in Toronto from 2nd to 22nd June and some weekend during that I'll be "cottaging" i.e. in a cottage somewhere. You really should come up with a better or different name for that as that means something completely different in the UK! I lived in Toronto for 5 years, and had several friends with cottages. I've never heard the term before -- it was always "going up to the cottage."
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#341256 - 17/01/2011 17:07 Re: Your favorite secondary gadget of 2010 [Re: canuckInOR]
tman carpal tunnel Registered: 24/12/2001 Posts: 5528	Originally Posted By: canuckInOR I lived in Toronto for 5 years, and had several friends with cottages. I've never heard the term before -- it was always "going up to the cottage." Yeah. I think I'll adopt your phrase instead.
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