Perching Planes

Found this interesting article.

Looks like some smart people at MIT have been studying the aerodynamics of birds and planes, and have designed a Glider that can perch on a wire (like a bird).

Read on to watch a video of it in action.

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Seacom problems

Or the alternate title of “Why your inability to access international content is your ISP’s fault, and not Seacom’s”
Or “Why your cheap-as-chips residential ADSL Broadband account is broken, and why I don’t care”

I could go on with all the complaints that I’ve heard over the last 24 hours, and all the stupid reasoning behind those complaints. But I won’t. I’ll try and be helpfully informative.

So we’ll start with the facts:

• Seacom is one of the Submarine fiber cables that connect South Africa to Europe.
• There are other ways out of South Africa to Europe, that do not rely on Seacom.
• Residential ADSL users are quite far down the list of priorities for most ISP’s.
• Business users on leased lines account for significantly more income than ADSL users.
• You get what you pay for.

Your choice of ISP should take all of these facts into account:

• Does your ISP have multiple international circuits?
• Are these circuits physically diverse (ie: not the same cable).
• Are you actually paying for a service that will make use of the backup circuits in the event of a failure?

Chances are, unless you have a leased line service, and you pay something in the region of R20000 a month for it, you will be affected by the Seacom problems.

It would be incredibly naive of any ISP to expect that a single upstream provider will be up 100% of the time. Seacom do not promise a 100% uptime, so how can you expect that level of service if you rely solely on them?

The solution for the ISPs? Use one of those other forms of international connectivity. Such as the SAT3-SAFE cable. Sure, thats expensive, so only use that for your “premium” customers. Like those guys paying R20000+ a month for their leased lines. They’ll get what they pay for.

And that there, is the difference between the R900 you pay a month for 4mbit ADSL, and R20000 per month for 4mbit leased line.

You get what you pay for.

Izzy broke her toe

Not much to say really. Izzy broke her toe on Tuesday, so we took her to the vet. And this is what came back.

mini-guide: Basic OpenVPN Server

This post is especially for Rommel. He saw my last mini-guides on OpenVPN on RouterOS, and wanted to know how to set up an OpenVPN Server on Linux that operates the same as the OpenVPN Server in RouterOS.

So, this one will be short and simple, as there are a thousand different ways to do an OpenVPN Server on linux, but this way will make it work the same way its configured in my mini-guide.

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OpenVPN mini-guides: Mikrotik RouterOS VPN Client

In the last article I showed how to configure a Mikrotik RouterOS router as an OpenVPN Server.

In this mini-guide, I’ll show how to configure a Mikrotik RouterOS router as an OpenVPN Client, and connect it to the server. Read the rest of this entry »

Jawug on the ZA Tech Show

So, I was on the ZA Tech show today!

A little nerve wrecking, since it was live and I hadn’t really prepared very much. So much more that I should have said.

I spoke about Jawug, and Wug.za.net and the growing popularity of the Wireless User Groups.

Show recording is embedded after the jump…

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OpenVPN mini-guides: Mikrotik RouterOS VPN Server

In the first mini-guide of this series, I showed how to generate SSL Certificates for use with an OpenVPN setup.

This next mini-guide will show how to configure a Mikrotik RouterOS router for use as an OpenVPN Server. This is where your various devices will “dial-in” to.

Obviously, everyone’s network is different. So I’ll try and make this as generic as possible, but without straying from my policy of being as straight forward as I need to be.
So, hopefully, you already have a configured RouterOS router, thats already part of your network.

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OpenVPN mini-guides: Certificates

In this mini-howto, I’m going to show how to generate Certificates for use with OpenVPN.

Its part of a series of posts that will hopefully include:
Configuring a Mikrotik RouterOS router as a Server
Configuring a Mikrotik RouterOS router as a Client
Configuring a Linux machine as a Client
Configuring a DD-WRT router as a Client

And Tomtom will be working with me to produce instructions on connecting to the server from an iPod Touch, iPhone and Nokia N900.

So, lets begin… Read the rest of this entry »

News: HOWTO

BBC, Sky, RTE. They all seem to have the same News story format.

So, here’s the template that they all use. (Caution, contains a few naughty words)

Please, be good

Please Mr Movie making Man. Don’t destroy the memories of my childhood. Please be a good movie.

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