[Dave Rice]

IIRC guests had to pay £4 an hour (to BT) for internet access if they weren’t members of something. You have to go into the router and specifically change it to “Guest Wi-Fi” and even then BT controls it.

The thing with the Smart Hub is you have to run your network how BT decide as opposed to a proper router like the Vigor which is a tool to allow you to run your network how you want.

I guess for most small businesses this isn’t an issue, all they do is access the internet with 1 or 2 PCs with attached printers and no network devices. Options are minimal and diagnostics are virtually non existent.

The £125 Vigor 2762N is amazing for the money. VDSL2, ADSL, 3G/4G and Ethernet-based Broadband, Four Gigabit LAN, 2 x SSL VPN dialins, Dial-out VPN (Two tunnels), 3G/4G failover, 2 Private LAN Subnets (use the second for guest access), VLANs (Port, 802.1q & Wireless) ,USB file or printer sharing. And it’s rock solid reliability.

[Dave Rice]

I’ve just got rid of a Smart Hub in a small business I look after. It was flaky as hell. It decided to randomly stop the wired PCs from accessing the wireless printers. The “guest” wireless network defaulted to a paid for BT product. Changed that to find it was a totally open wireless network with a maximum of 13 clients.

It does what it does in it’s own way with very little control on your part. Replaced with a Vigor 2762N and now their network works how they want it to work and they have a secure VPN and a secure guest network. £125 well spent.

Good luck working out what the “Smart” Hub can do and just hope it continues doing it.

[Dave Rice]

The whole premise takes so many steps I think it’s in Occam’s razor territory. There are more plausible ways to achieve a similar result i.e. the disruption of a critical system.

[Dave Rice]

Bob, probably more accurately described as a British Black Hole. The British banking industry is notorious for just adding functions and not redesigning the system. The Lloyds back end is probably based on 70’s mainframes with subsequent bodges and add ons. The people who knew how it all worked are my age and long made redundant and their jobs passed to India.

I suspect all the testing in the world wouldn’t have stopped this happening. When you have to deal with combining old and new it’s always a problem.

[Dave Rice]

“Every time a malicious program—say, a script on a website you visit—runs a certain, obscure command, that capacitor cell “steals” a tiny amount of electric charge and stores it in the cell’s wires without otherwise affecting the chip’s functions. With every repetition of that command, the capacitor gains a little more charge. Only after the “trigger” command is sent many thousands of times does that charge hit a threshold where the cell switches on a logical function in the processor to give a malicious program the full operating system access it wasn’t intended to have. “It takes an attacker doing these strange, infrequent events in high frequency for a duration of time,” says Austin. “And then finally the system shifts into a privileged state that lets the attacker do whatever they want.”

I cannot see how that would work attacking a warship. Where is the malicious script running from? The whole premise of someone knobbling the CPU die seems a bit far fetched for this scenario too. They are careful of the provenance of what goes into critical systems, they don’t buy a job lot of CPUs from Alibaba.

From what little I know it seems like NASA, you don’t use anything that is even vaguely cutting edge. Indeed it probably wasn’t even cutting edge a decade ago. It’s proven tried and trusted kit that’s been tested over and over and is thoroughly understood technology.

[Dave Rice]

The local beer in Ghent is called Strop and it’s freely available in Bruges cafes. I’m going to try and engineer a photo of sister-in-law next to a bottle because she’s permanently in one. Will have to stay a private family in joke as if I post it on FB I’ll be dead.

[Dave Rice]

Hard to see how this will work in the field and especially on the Queen Elizabeth. The command and control systems won’t have an internet connected web browser for starters!

[Dave Rice]

We were at the Mall this afternoon and popped into M & S. I was amazed to see this on the shelf

Zot!

Tesco have been stocking the Duvel Moortgatt brewery group and Leffe beers for a while but De Halve Maan is a small local family brewey in the middle of Bruges.

[Dave Rice]

Wheat beer is for when it’s hot and the beer is cold. Hoegaarden of course, La Trappe Witte (the Dutch Trappist brewery), Blanche de Bruxelles etc. and of course Edelweiss but you don’t see that here.

Making me thirsty. I have some cans of Dead Pony Club in the fridge…

[Dave Rice]

We intend visiting Bratislava for the day, I’ll remember the warning. It’ll be mid July so should be hot (well what I call hot, I’m sure Ed and Richard would scoff).

My mate went to Belgium for Armistice Day and when he came back he said that he and his lad had been drinking “that beer that you like” and had got horrendously pissed on 6 pints. It was Leffe, 6.6%. Only an Englishman would drink Leffe in pints. Heathen.

[Dave Rice]

That Kingston is also on Prime for  £29.92.

The last build was for the home PC of a small accountancy business I’ve been helping. So impressed with the speed of the new PC, he’s thinking about upgrading the 4 office PCs ? Now I know they have very little data on them as we’ve spent the last 18 months getting them all working from server shares.

[Dave Rice]

It was a stinking hot day and that beer was cold – perfect. It’s miles away from your Blue Moon wheat beer which is more Belgian in style. Never seen the Belgians put a slice of anything in their beer though. I suspect you’d be shot.

Back in Vienna it was usually Gosser Spezial in the bars near the hotel, your standard south German type lager but again perfect in the summer weather. Austrian but now owned by Heineken who thankfully have left it alone.

We’re going to Bruges for the day (part of a 3 night taster cruise) in 3 weeks time and I’m determined to visit the Halve Maan Brewery, home of me and the Mrs favourite Zot blonde. We’ve been to Bruges twice before so have seen the tourist traps bits to death. Gentse Strop (blonde) is nice on a hot day, problem is all the Belgian stuff is 6% + and doesn’t taste like it so you have to remember to stop before it’s too late ?

 

[Dave Rice]

[Dave Rice]

I’d suspect the motherboard. CPU failure is so rare I can’t recall ever seeing it.

[Dave Rice]

I’m 8 miles out of the centre of Bristol and there’s farmland next to our estate. However we are right by Bristol Parkway station. The Three mast just pokes over the top of the other side of the railway embankment and isn’t line of sight of most of the house (slight hill in the way).

My phone and Huawei portable MiFi work best in the window on the 2nd or 3rd floor but sat here now on the 2nd floor behind an outside wall I’m still getting 36.9 down and 7.11 up. That’s only a smidgen less than my TT FTTC connection.

5G is going to be more about infrastructure for the IoT – and IoT includes big things like cars not just kettles. For what most people use their phones for 4G is more than enough and the rest is hype look at this Bristol to trial superfast 5G networks.

It’s a fundamentally different technology and the headline very fast speeds at very low latency is at very high frequency so will have small coverage and will be worse penetrating buildings. Here’s the reality of the “public trial” of 5G in Bristol:

“In March 2018 we are taking the challenge to deliver an end-to-end 5G network in Bristol’s Millennium Square and to demonstrate for the first time 5G services to the general public.

“We have worked closely with our strategic technology partners BT, CCS, Nokia and Zeetta Networks in order to deliver a truly unique 5G Test Network and we are very excited to create the world’s first public 5G experience.”

Event attendees will also have the opportunity of viewing a real time transmission sent from a connected autonomous vehicle (CAV), parked in Millennium Square for the duration of the weekend.

The public are involved but not participating. Not what you were expecting from the hype?

[Dave Rice]

Been getting those speeds for a while. Quite often now I’ll just turn WiFi off when leaving the house as I’m sick of networks like the bus and train hijacking my connection plus they’re slower any way!

[Dave Rice]

Yes I realised that was the case, but I just thought it was cheeky of Google to totally refuse the connection because you couldn’t see the ads they want to peddle.

I will demand back all the money I’ve paid Google over the years ? but nothing could persuade me to knowingly use Bing.

[Dave Rice]

In another thread I was looking for the Milestone CCTV site. Google it and clicked the link to get your free software. Computer says NO.

This site can’t be reached
http://www.googleadservices.com refused to connect.

Feck you Google! so typed milestonesys.com in the address bar and away we go.

[Dave Rice]

It’s a fully fledged commercial product aimed at businesses but I think you’ll find it reasonably straight forward. Not played with it for ages.

I’m a bit tied up this morning and probably early afternoon. I’ll have another look at it as soon as I can. IIRC it’s in 2 or 3 modules, the idea is the recording server is on another box in your server room. You will need to install all the modules on the same machine. For a handful of cameras it really won’t make any difference.

At the back of my mind you may have to record to a separate hard drive, but it’s installed on my laptop which only has one. May have set up a NAS drive for storage. I forget. We decided that whilst it was very good it didn’t offer as much as our Hikvision products. However it’s massive in the CCTV world and the day may come when we have to deal with an existing installation.

Have a tinker, you can’t do any harm to anything.

EDIT waiting for a crappy HP laptop to reboot after some Windows updates so I’m downloading it to the workshop PC. I see they now have an option for single computer installation, that’ll make it easier.

Recommended you record to a separate drive but not compulsory.

Well that was dead easy. Once I’d knocked back the external camera to H264 it got the feed OK. You set up recordings and other camera settings in the management client.

[Dave Rice]

On Windows you can actually run the big boy Milestone for free for up to 8 cameras.

It’s still H264 though, we have moved onto H265.

Off to a cattery tomorrow, they want general surveillance at the moment but have already said to quote for an over sized NVR as they anticipate putting cameras into the “cottages”. Pens to you and me, but they advertise themselves as the Dorchester for Cats and very nice it is too. Our cats never wanted to come home.

Just waiting for the day they ask to have them available to customers, they’re own Cat Cam so they can see their loved ones when they’re away. Don’t know how I’ll sort that one securely.

I’ve just thought of a way… but it’s messy. Enable Hik Connect on the camera to allow it to be available over the internet (the feed is encrypted). Create a Hik Connect account for the customer and share the camera with them so they can view it on Android or iOS. After the duration unshare it.

[Author]

Posts