[Dave Rice]

Weston Super Mare was expecting a deluge that didn’t happen. I think people realised that apart from a couple of ice cream parlours and fish & chips shops (queue outside for takeaway) it’s all shut. Car parks are closed and if you can still get a walk on the beach the toilets are closed so better be quick.

[Dave Rice]

I’ll keep it going. The small retainer I get from a customer is enough to pay the phone, insurance and accountant bills each month which means I can keep operating. They get 5 x the amount of work out of me of course!

[Dave Rice]

W10 Pro licences are cheap enough on E-Bay but make sure you get one that supports upgrading.

Sometimes even then the Activation servers don’t like it, but there is a workaround for that (it involves doing the first stage offline) which has always fixed the problem for me.

[Dave Rice]

Yep, that’s all any VPN is. There’s an article in this month’s computer shopper about making a home VPN server using a Pi – not difficult and basically what I’ve done in the cloud – but it has the code to route all outgoing traffic on to a commercial VPN, in this case Nord.

So the topology is that your device connects wirelessly to the PI via a VPN then onto another VPN between the Pi and a cloud VPN server. I just need to nick the code that does the forwarding. Whilst I have a good idea what it will entail I don’t have the knowledge to do it from scratch.

Adapting this approach may be the answer to linking devices to the internet en masse via a VPN without needing the router to do anything other than route. I have a spare Pi and can also create VMs of any o/s, it’s working out the IP end that I need to get my head around.

[Dave Rice]

I thought about DNS, but local or VPN Google is the resolver in either case, the OpenVPN is PiHole too. It’s all contradictory but the new 4G router has an IPSec client so I’m going to create an IPSec server sometime this weekend, if that works I’ll put PiHole on there too.

[Dave Rice]

The browser doesn’t make any real difference and neither does the bandwidth testing, it’s always more than adequate. Time of day makes the biggest difference so it must be traffic related in some way, which is reflected in the bandwidth speeds, but as I’ve said it’s never really slow.

The best way to explain is it a terrible lag to get onto a website then everything seems to be OK, for a while. The lag can be so bad that the browser errors with empty response. Let’s say you’re going to Ubuntu to get the latest ISO, time out getting connected to the website, which sorts itself out in a second or two, get to the download page and it soon gets up to the download speed you’d expect and generally stays there. Let it finish, connect to a different website and trouble again. Or may be not.

Sometimes Netflix is affected and if it is it’s unusable with continual buffering. iPlayer the same if not worse, but generally they’re both OK and the issues are always in the evening. Do a bandwidth test and there doesn’t seem to be a problem.

So traffic related for sure, but why then does a VPN help? If it was bandwidth shaping the VPN would be affected too. If it was level 7 sniffing then a network test on a different device at the time would be affected as well, it’s generally not. Even with a VPN I have to get all the way through the ISP’s networks to get to Docklands, unless it has it’s own feed somehow that bypasses some of the ISP network.

Three is worse than TalkTalk FTTC but both can be affected, so I think I can rule out my networks as each is air gapped and use totally different hardware. It’s a weird one.

[Dave Rice]

I’ve just had a look at my Digital Ocean usage and it’s trivial compared to the allowance. That’s only my laptop and one day but nevertheless I’m now going to have a look at how I can route all outgoing traffic to the VPN server(s).

A laptop, phone or PC can easily have the VPN client installed but the TV can’t!

[Dave Rice]

I will Bob. Frankenhudl, I like that.

[Dave Rice]

It’s not a commercial VPN service, I know someone who has NordVPN and he’s complaining that it’s almost unusable at the moment. It’s my own Linux server hosted by Digital Ocean in Docklands (so I assume Telehouse).

Telehouse is a group of buildings that as well as being huge Data Centres are also home to the London Internet Exchange which had a massive upgrade for the Olympics. Perhaps this is the key, where I’m exiting into the big wide world.

[Dave Rice]

If it was contention I would expect the VPN to be affected as well. The VPN tunnel has to got through all the same ISP infrastructure before it gets to Docklands. Or may be it doesn’t? Is there a faster more direct route to Telehouse?

[Dave Rice]

Yes I suppose I should pick the same Speedtest target each time, but that’s not really what I was on about.

Just had the issue right now, Forumite lagging, replying to the asus mobo post took ages to go through. Shut down Chrome, fire up the VPN and everything working as you’d expect.

I’m wondering if it’s DNS related, not at my end so much as in Three and TalkTalk land. But there is no doubt that the VPN speeds things up, which is pure bandwidth terms is contradictory as a VPN slows that down as encryption has an overhead (WireGuard is less than OpenVPN).

[Dave Rice]

I had a similar problem with the sister of a work colleague. When I probed a bit I found they went through TVs and white goods at a rate too.

[Dave Rice]

I’ve tried all the cheap ones on Amazon, like TCSunbow, Asenno, KingDian etc. and they’ve all been fine. I’ve also used the more mainstream Integral, Adata & PNY but if there’s only a couple of quid in it I will go for the WD Green, Kingston or SanDisk.

TBH its hard to tell the difference between all the 2.5″ SSDs (and their M2 equivalents), the difference comes when you move to an NVMe and again to the PCIe Gen3 x 4 versions. I’ve never seen the need to splash out on a Samsung Evo though.

[Dave Rice]

My Hudl finally ran out of steam, after the latest Hikconnect upgrade that app won’t work. I believe it’s related to Google Play services somehow. But after 6+ years and several times I thought it was dead, it’s finally time to go in the tech drawer.

I’ve replaced it with a £90 TECLAST P80X from Amazon, chosen because it had decent ratings and has a 4G sim slot. Build quality is nowhere near the Hudl but I don’t want to fork out for a Huawei or Samsung. That’s not to say it’s flimsy, just placticky, and it does have a screen protector already applied.

Type C USB and Android 9 , runs well, has all the things you’d expect and battery time OK. It’ll spend most of it’s time on a stand – Android tablets do make good CCTV monitors – so I think it’s going to last a good while.

I will be keeping the updates going though.

[Dave Rice]

All the Remote Desktop apps I know of are not suitable for fast graphics. Indeed most of the time they are trying to cut it to as low as possible.

 

[Dave Rice]

ED, I’m not at all worried about the mask stopping any virus as I know it won’t. As I said it’s more to stop me touching my face plus if I am asymptomatic sneezing all over others on public transport, there being no reason why we should be near each other on site.

[Dave Rice]

Cheers Nolan, looks good – I’ll give it a try.

Just trying to get back into “work” mode, it took me 3 hours to do the quote that would normally have taken 1.

[Dave Rice]

It’s public transport that concerns me as I will have to use it.

I have some work booked in for the end of May, 2 days that may (hopefully) turn into 6. The first 2 days are removing cameras and WiFi infrastructure from buildings the client has lost the contract for. The extra 4 are hopefully upgrading their existing site with that kit.

I’m considering “PPE” strategies and am coming down to thinking that face covering will be the key, some sort of stretchy bandanna for nose and mouth and my protective specs. This is primarily to stop me touching my mouth, nose and eyes with dirty hands, on which point I think gloves are a total waste of time. Access to washing facilities on both sites isn’t an issue.

Keeping 2 metres apart won’t be a problem, the work is such that having 2 people in the same spot is rarely needed. If the guys need advice on what should be plugged into where we’ll use Whatsapp video messaging on the phones. Having said that I think the key worker has a bloody iThing. Might have to find an old Android phone in the man drawer.

[Dave Rice]

It will be worth the wait Bob. My new Panasonic is an amazing device and as mentioned elsewhere reduced my remote controls to one.

However the Achilles heel of Smart TVs is keeping their inbuilt apps relevant and I’ve fallen foul of this with Panasonic not (yet, may be) supporting the Disney+ service so it’s back out with the Amazon TV box which does (and I can side load my own stuff on there too).

[Dave Rice]

Well 99.9% of people are being tracked by their phone anyway, this is a lot less. I understand that Apple and Google have been providing anonymized location data for Govt’s when asked (Asia I believe)? which I don’t have a great deal of worry about either.

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