Peace, Caffeine, Linux

DD-WRT plus a Linksys WRT54GL = QoS for VOIP

We've had Vonage for quite a while now, which has been a little bit of love (price) but too often hate (silence when we pick up a call, inability to call home, and other annoyances).

Worst was when our phone calls battled it out with other IP traffic bandwidth. Our broadband provider is Comcast. When I was syncing podcasts, or uploading pictures to Flickr, phone calls were getting hammered. There was no traffic cop present to make sure that phone call got priority. We needed some form of Quality of Service (QoS).

I recently decided to upgrade my aging 802.11b router with a Linksys WRT54GL. The "L" stands for Linux. The beauty of this unit is there are open source Linux-based packages you can "flash" onto it's bios, replacing the stock factory installed firmware. You risk "bricking" the router, but that's the price you play to have a little fun. I chose DD-WRT, which not only provides improved QoS features, but also lets you play with radio output power, over-clocking, and many other goodies. It even supports SSH access, sort of like a little miniature Linux server - Cool!

Following is the story of how I made VOIP calls get the priority they need at our house.

Step one: Power up Linksys and get to homepage:

Step two: download the appropriate version of DD-WRT for your router from here. In my case I used this one: DD-WRT.v23 SP2.

Step three: check the MD5 to make sure you got what you expected:

$ md5sum.exe dd-wrt.v23_generic.bin > dd-wrt.v23_generic.bin.md5

Step four: Upgrade the BIOS on the Linksys. My first attempt using IE7 choked:

My next attempt I used Firefox and all was well:

Looking good!

Step five: Bounce the router. Ooo! It wants me to login:

First try failed. Cute, check out the extension:

What to do? After resetting to factory defaults (holding reset for 30 seconds on power up) I tried again - noting the dialog now says "DD-WRT":

Woo-hoo! We're in!!!

Step six: Head over to the QoS tab and set it up:

"Start QoS" was disabled, so I enabled it.

Next up I did some tests to determine my upload bandwidth because in the end that is all you can really throttle. I used the SpeakEasy flash-based test here, hitting a bunch of endpoints multiple times, and looked at the averages:

It is important to get an accurate read on your upload speed, because you are going to tell the router how much it has to work with. If you underestimate your upload bandwidth, you may inadvertently throttle your upload speed - if you overestimate, the QoS will not be effective for the high-priority traffic. The DD-WRT Wiki recommends setting the uplink speed to 85% of your actual. This is to ensure latency stays tight - apparently if you go all in, you could saturate the line with so much traffic latency will suffer - and latency kills VOIP quality.

My average upload bandwidth is in the 768K/sec range. I ended up plugging in 668 for my uplink speed, and that seems to be working well. I ignored the Downlink field since Comcast controls the other end of the link and I have no control over it.

I also set the port to "WAN". I left the packet scheduler set to "HTB" - I am not quite sure what to do with that yet:

Finally, I plugged the Vonage router into an Ethernet port on the WRT54GL, and scrolling down on the QoS tab I set it's MAC address to the "Premium" priority level:

And that was it! We now enjoy clear calls at all times, even when the line is getting pounded by other traffic.

(Note - the DD-WRT Wiki has a note about prioritizing by Ethernet port not working on newer routers - I can concur that prioritizing the VOIP traffic by using the MAC address worked far better.)

I have barely begun to play with the many other interesting features and services that DD-WRT provides. One of the first things I tried was logging in via SSH (after enabling the SSH service):

Awesome!!!

My 15 Terabytes of Internet Fame

The last month was not a typical one for Yee Olde Blogge. One quiet Friday evening I noticed that 2 hours had brought over 2000 visitors to my humble doorstep. This was, well... unusual. And they were all going to my blog entry "The Birds".

Up until a month ago a busy day on this blog meant I had over 10 visitors. I get eye balls from all over the world, frequently coming in from Google searches. Usually people are looking for technical information and stumble across one of my tech related blog entries. Sometimes they are using birding related keywords in their searches.

Took me a while to figure out what was going on that night - the hits just kept coming in, faster and faster. Most everyone was clicking through to my blog from the Google Video hosted copy of my Starlings video.

Weird.

Suddenly it occurred to me...  hmm, maybe I got Dug? I jumped over to digg.com - holy smokes, there I was on the freaking home page!!!

This was almost as big... as... as... hmm, maybe that time I submitted a story to Slashdot back in '99? Or maybe as big as that time I played drums on the first Marcy Playground CD?

Things did not stop there... the craziness continued as more sites and blogs picked up my video.

I got Farked:

I got Ebaumed and "Scharfed" - Der Speigel's online TV show (imagine a Rocketboom in German, brunette instead of blonde) covered the video in their show. My favorite part -  hearing her say my name in the middle of a bunch of Germanic syllables..

I started getting visitors and links from all around the world! This was crazy!

Next I was Googled. In fact I was more than just Googled - the video jumped onto the Google Top 100, and for almost a week was in the top 4, peaking for a few days as number TWO:

Um, I guess it was a Paris/Fraser/Chakira sandwich. Or something.

Then even stranger things started to happen. My OTHER videos started showing up, some on the home page of Google Video. I visit Google one day, and there is my humming bird video, right next to "Girl Caught Cheating" and Farting Preacher!

And finally, the pent-ultimate honor - I got RocketBoomed!!!  Yea!!!

Wow, that means my video is on Tivo too!

Numerous other aggregators, many of them in countries far away from humble Collegeville, were linking to Yee Olde Blogge. Many way too weird and/or not family-friendly for me to link to from this here island of puritanical values.

What could top this all of? What could be bigger?

Just when I thought things had settled down... My video is on the freaking home page of Yahoo.com!!!

In one day the video was viewed over 300,000 times on yahoo.com alone...  soon to pass half a million!

So what's the final damage? At the least, the video has been viewed well over a MILLION times in the last month for sure. Unfortunately I don't know how many times it was viewed through channels and sites that "syndicated" it, or out and out "re-purposed" it. (Never thought I would need to slap a copyright on my videos!) For example, I have no idea how many folks viewed it via rocketboom.com directly.

Think about The Long Tail, consumer generated content, and how the heck traditional media companies are going to survive in this crazy new world.

NOW who's your mainstream media daddy?  WE ARE!

Portico, Podvertising, eBay and TechNation

Exciting changes are rocking advertising, media syndication, journalism, and their ecosystem. Blogging and podcasting are suddenly a force to be reckoned with. Mainstream media (whatever that means now) is getting mashed-up hardcore at all levels, and nobody knows where its headed.

Recently Portico chose to support the fabulous Public Radio show TechNation. We have a long history of funding charitable causes, events, and other worthy endeavors. I have been enjoying TechNation for years via standard terrestrial radio, but more recently via podcast from IT Conversations.

Public Radio "over the air" used to dominate my car time. But then it happened - two years ago this August I got an iPod. My "live radio" listening quickly plunged to almost zero. I now consume podcasts almost 100% of my commuting time, and whenever possible at home. Instead of hearing TechNation on 91FM WHYY (my favorite local public radio stations), I now listen to it on my iPod.

But back to the story - Portico, not the type of company that does traditional advertising, wants to get our name "out there" for recruitment purposes. We are growing fast, and need to employee highly skilled and intelligent IT professionals. 5 years ago, maybe some job ads in the local newspapers and online would suffice. But that was the glacial ice age days!

Here is how it works in the new world - we hop online, bid, and finally win an auction on eBay to sponsor TechNation. And this is not yo mamma's "shave and a haircut" print ad.  This is PODVERTISING. We are sponsoring a PODCAST!

How completely surreal and weird to be driving to work last week, and here Dr. Moira Gunn announcing Portico as a sponsor of TechNation. Goosebumps. Not just because her smooth familiar voice was talking about Portico, but also because the food chain leading to this moment was totally and completely NEW:

• We sponsor by bidding for the privilege on eBay
• Arrangements are finalized via email
• I subscribe to TechNation on my Mac at home
• iTunes leverages RSS and XML to make the magic happen
• Audio flows to my home computer over broadband as an MP3 file
• I pop my iPod in its cradle and the show magically syncs over Firewire
• I hear Dr. Gunn announce our sponsorsip while driving to work
• My spine gets all tingly

Exciting changes - turbulent forces are pushing, pulling and refactoring the way people and businesses publish ideas, subscribe to information, and do what we all do as entities driven to share thoughts and consume those of others. These changes are stimulated by the same decentralized power that brings life to the blogosphere, energy that is now virally infecting mainstream media and advertising. Where will this lead?

--------------

Links to some recent TechNation shows Portico has sponsored - give the audio a listen and you will hear the announcement in the first minute:

Dr. Mahendra Rao: Vice President for Research - Invitrogen

Apostolos Gerasoulis: Vice President for Search Technologies, Ask.com

Robert "Al" Beardsley: President and CEO of Kereos

Dr. Katrina Firlik: Author, "Another Day in the Frontal Lobe"

Kelly Tyler-Lewis: The Lost Men ... The Harrowing Saga of Shackleton's Ross Sea Party

Mary Del Brady: Diagnosing Pancreatic Cancer

Dr. Robert Mann: Forensic Anthropologist

Darrel Rhea: Author, "Making Meaning"

By the way - if you work in IT, do check out IT Conversations - they are an incredible resource. Imagine a smorgasbord of IT specific audio content. If you partake, please consider becoming a member.

Roller (and the World Series of Birding)

Oh yeah, I am bringing it ALL home in this post...  Open-source Java based blogging software and the infamous (at least in some circles) "World Series of Birding".  "What Up Dawg?" you say?  Read on...

Some of my coworkers find my blog to be a little, um, "disjointed" - first a post about spiders, then one about the Linux kernel, "nanoseconds", and Java 5, and so on...  Last time I talked to Portico's COO, he said he had looked at my blog and it gave him a headache!   :-)  I think he expected to see some stuff about technology, but was suddenly and unexpectedly exposed to videos of flocking birds.

What can I say?  I get bored of computers from time to time!  Wait a minute. That's totally false. Actually, the deal is...  I have interests other than computers! Sacré Bleu!

Ok dawg, so What Up with the "World Series of Birding?" This is my yearly excuse to get away from the computers for a while, squinting in pain as my eyes are suddenly exposed to "natural outdoor radiation", and enjoy meatspace! It's a fund raiser for New Jersey Audubon. And rather than rant on regarding the event here, I have started ANOTHER blog, expressly for the event. (Please check it out if you want to learn more.)

And, pray tell, what is this OTHER blog built on?  Why Roller, of course!  So here's the deal - I needed to set up a blog server.  I wanted it to be Java based.  I didn't want to use a commercial service. And it needed to be easy to use for non-techies, because I was going to be sharing the server with such types.  I did a lot of research, and finally settled on Roller.

My first experience was via installation on my OS X desktop at home.  I chose MySQL as the backend.  Could of used just about anything else, but they point out in the Roller documentation that MySQL is the preferred.  We have used MySQL at Portico Systems for many years now - in fact our first major online presence for an HMO was built on a "LAMP" stack, but back in 1997/1998.  We also use MySQL as the backend for many of our internal systems, including tracking the millions of version control checkins that have been made over the years to our CVS servers (using ViewCVS).

For the app server I used Apache Tomcat 5.5.16 (running under Java 1.4.2_09).

Long story short - I got Roller up and running fairly easily.  The only tricky part was getting the MySQL server to start up using the UTF-8 character set, which Roller depends on for internationalization (I18N):

/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysqld_safe --character-set-server=utf8

You also need to make sure the Catalina connector defined in server.xml is using UTF-8 for its URIEncoding, otherwise diacritical characters like 'ç' in a blog post title would break:       

        <Connector port="8080" maxHttpHeaderSize="8192"
               maxThreads="150" minSpareThreads="25" maxSpareThreads="75"
               enableLookups="false" redirectPort="8443" acceptCount="100"
               connectionTimeout="20000" disableUploadTimeout="true"
           URIEncoding="UTF-8"/>

So after playing with it a little bit on my desktop, I customized one of the themes that comes with the base distribution (Roller uses Velocity internally as its template language), and then migrated the entire server to a Linux server. How easy was this migration? A snap! Here is what I had to do:

1. Backup the MySQL database: /usr/local/mysql/bin/mysqldump --opt roller -u sfraser -p > roller_backup.sql
2. Copy the entire tomcat tree including the Roller webapp from my Mac to the Linux server
3. Installed Java/MySQL on Linux
4. Created the MySQL Roller database and user
5. Assigned appropriate MySQL permissions to user
6. Restore the MySQL database
7. Edited the roller.xml as appropriate to connect to the new MySQL backend
8. Startup Tomcat!

It is an amazing thing when you can migrate an application like Roller, that is a mix of native (MySQL), and "managed" (Java) code, from OS X to Linux with no problems whatsoever.

So that about brings it all home - biology and software - worlds collide!  That's just how I roll people.  Goodbye for now.

Google Earth on Mac OS X

For those of you who haven't tried Google Earth out, do so now! It was recently released for Mac OS X , so I finally got to download it and play with it for hours educate my children about the "hole wide wurld".

You need a broadband connection, and a decently fast computer. My dual G4 w/1.25 Gigs RAM and a cable modem runs it fairly smoothly. If you can get familiar with navigating via the keyboard (experienced first person shooters shouldn't have any trouble), flying around over your neighborhood is an amazing experience. Try sinking down to almost ground level and tilting the earth flat so you can see the topology. Here's our house:

Another fun thing to try - make sure you have "3D Building" checked off, and go visit some big cities. Check out these shots of Philly:

 

Next stop, Turin Italy!

Time-Lapse Footage of my Commute to Portico Systems

See coffee. 
Drink Scott, drink.
See car.
Drive Scott, drive.
See more coffee.
Drink Scott, drink.
See computers.
Work Scott, work.

 

Watch movie, watch. (3.4 meg Quicktime)

F.A.Q.

    Q. What kind of camera did you use?
    A. Nikon Coolpix S4

    Q. How often did it take a shot?
    A. Every 30 seconds.

    Q. Is that an AMD Opteron sticker on your dashboard?
    A. Yes.

    Q. If you had chosen a sound track, what would it have been?
    A. As if you had to ask...  Truckin'!

Meta-diligence

I had already started hacking on my iTunes -> RSS parser when I realized I had not taken the time to fully look around and see if this has been done before.  I had done a little googling but had not dug through the ugly but sacred SourceForge repository.  So I entered Yee Olde Forge to seek similar projects.  Here is what I found:

• BlogTunes
• iScrobbler
• Kung-Tunes

So do I continue?  Yes...  The three projects are not quite what I want, and all of them appear to have gone stale in terms of activity.

BlogTunes is Java, but it does trackbacks to your blog.  So real close to what I want, but not quite there.  I want RSS.  BlogTunes is also more than I want - its a GUI app that sits there and runs while you are listening, uploading the list live.  I don't want real-time.

iScrobbler is tied to a proprietary service, Last.fm (an interesting concept BTW!).  Written in Objective-C/Cocoa and Apple Script (and thus restricted to the Mac), the project appears to have little activity in years.

Kung-Tunes is a very neat idea, but has officially been "retired" by the author and is not Java.  It also will only run on OS X.  You could probably use it to generate RSS - the screenshots appear to allow fairly flexible templating of the output.  But it actually does more than I want.  I want a simple building block - think Unix command line simplicity.  Pipe in the iTunes XML, out pops the RSS.  Configuration would be limited to what is in the RSS.

So that being said...  I plan to continue hacking on this idea.

Meta-ttention

One of my first ideas for the name of this blog was "Metattention", or Meta-ttention, or MetAttention, or... well, something like that.  Blogs are about things you devote attention to, so the name made sense.

Second only to my desktops PC's (older Dell running Jubuntu, eMac, and Dual G4 at home) and laptop, the device that drives most of my attention is my iPod.  I got it last year on my birthday, and it has been the most significant gadget purchase since PalmOS devices extruded into the negative space of my pockets.

My big thing is podcasting...  I love it.  With that, and the music playback, my iPod is a constant companion - in the car, in the office, even while shopping (yes, sometimes I am one of THEM).  At home I stream music from the iTunes library throughout the house.  My commute time is now dominated by mostly IT related shows.  Once in the office I usually have some music playing in the background by plugging the iPod into some speakers.

So as you can see, there is a lot of audio coming out of this device and the library it synchronizes with.  Every day.  For the last year.  Music and podcasts.

So here is what I want:  Audio "attention data" fed automagically via RSS to my blog.  Imagine an "iPodRoll" that lists the last 10 things I listened to.  Maybe even with links (album cover?  show home page?) if the metadata in iTunes is rich enough.  This may be somewhat orthogonal to efforts like Attention.XML, but I am not going to worry about that for now.  This is just a fun little hack to work on one evening while bored.

I don't know RSS.  I don't know how iTunes stores its info.  But I am dumb enough to try and pull this off - stay tuned!